Believing without direct verification

[inocente]

EC:
This is all well and good support for belief in the historical elements of Christianity, but it’s not proof that will satisfy fundamentalist rationalism.

When I was in college many years ago a young fundamentalist Christian lived next door who did not believe man had landed on the moon.
We talked about the evidence all day long but his battle cry was “prove it”.
That was even in the face of video evidence, which he believed was fabricated.

One who is stuck in fundamentalist rationalism will never accept your evidence.
It is not scientifically verifiable, and we all know that only science expresses the sum total of reality.

Really the only answer to the thread question is “no”, there is no evidence for the fundamentalist rationalist. “direct verificiation” can only satisfy the realm of science, it says absolutely nothing about the concepts that really matter:

Who am I
Where did I come from
Where am I going
What is the meaning of my life
What is the purpose of my life

Science, as good a thing as it is, can only provide juvenile minimalist answers to these questions.

A fundamentalist is someone who believes in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture in a religion.

Rationalism is the practice or principle of basing opinions and actions on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response.

So fundamentalists and rationalists oppose each other, and you seem to be the first person ever known to google who has tried to join them in matrimony with the term fundamentalist rationalist. The word skeptic is a lot easier to say.

But agreed that verification is dead:

*"Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine that only statements that are empirically verifiable (ie. verifiable through the senses) are cognitively meaningful.

… and] by the 1960s, was deemed to be irreparably untenable."

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism*

 

[goout]

A fundamentalist is someone who believes in the strict, literal interpretation of scripture in a religion.

That’s scriptural fundamentalism, not fundamentalism in it’s essence. Fundamentalism insists on rigid individualist interpretations of whatever the information is. Might be scripture, might be doctrine, might be science. Fundamentalism limits the world to the individual’s brain. At it’s heart, fundamentalism is impersonal and dead in it’s own rigidity.

Rationalism is the practice or principle of basing opinions and actions on reason and knowledge rather than on religious belief or emotional response.

Fundamentalist rationalism is what I am talking about, not reason properly integrated. It’s rational**ism **unhinged from reason. (Yes, there is such a thing.)
ie the worship of rationalism as the answer to all questions. AKA the pagan superstitious worship of science and reason. Rationalists cannot conceive of themselves as religious or superstitious, but there they are, off the ranch worshiping science as the answer to all questions. (or if not, they must admit they are actually agnostic about religion)

So fundamentalists and rationalists oppose each other, and you seem to be the first person ever known to google who has tried to join them in matrimony with the term fundamentalist rationalist.

No they don’t necessarily oppose each other, unless you restrict the meanings as above. I am not near the first to observe this. It has been well noted that rationalists and fundamentalists are flip sides of the same coin.
Bp Robert Barron has a good talk on rationalism, which he calls “scientism”.
wordonfire.org/resources/video/scientism-and-gods-existence/255/
This guy is NO friend of religion, but notes the same issue:
amazon.com/When-Atheism-Becomes-Religion-Fundamentalists/dp/1416570780
“When Atheism Becomes Religion: America’s New Fundamentalists”

But agreed that verification is dead:
*"Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine that only statements that are empirically verifiable (ie. verifiable through the senses) are cognitively meaningful.

… and] by the 1960s, was deemed to be irreparably untenable."

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verificationism*

Agreed. I haven’t heard the body hit the floor yet unfortunately.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

Remember that these texts were written at a time when one could actually go to the places mentioned and ask at least some of the people involved. Sometimes, names are even given. As for “authors,” yes, they are all in Scripture, as I already mentioned.

You mean as opposed to today, when planes, trains, and automobiles would make it impossible to go to the places mentioned and ask at least some of the people involved? I’ve not heard the list of authors, simply saying “duh, scripture” isn’t a list of authors.

I don’t know why the criteria for verification is that it must be written. The sillier one is that it must not be in Scripture, as has been implied elsewhere. Also, the “explicitly claim” criterion is bizarre. Why can’t it be an implicit claim, especially since Jude and James and Luke and Mark are writing to people who have already begun to believe by some other way and don’t necessarily need the recap?

If you’ll review our very short conversation, you will find that we were talking about the difference between actual eye-witness testimony, and second-hand accounts of eye-witness testimony. You claimed that the testimony in scripture “and other sources” was on par with 500 first hand accounts. I was merely asking you to back that claim up; I have to take your sudden distaste for “written” evidence to mean that you’ve failed to find the kind of first-hand corroboration you thought existed.

The distinction between written and not is crucial, because non-written sources are inherently second-hand. The demand for explicit claims is equally important. If the resurrection story was a later invention, then “implicit” claims of mere “belief in Jesus” may not say what we expect. Moreover, if the author just implicitly claims to “believe” the resurrection, all that proves is that he was convinced by someone; the issue at hand is whether or not the resurrection actually happened, not whether or not early Christians were persuasive.

Again, why must it be that these people have actually written something down? There was no twitter. Paper was not something people had just laying around. You are applying a standard which is unfair for the ancient world, and one which if applied to other events in the same time period would come up with basically no history at all, just one guy saying some stuff. Why doesn’t Livy have to be “corroborated”? The fact that there are multiple people writing anything down about the same event, and from different parts of the world (Matthew in Ethiopia, John in Turkey, etc.) is a pretty big deal. Again, I invite you to try applying the same rigor to other ancient texts. Writing things down was not nearly as normal of a thing to do as it is today.

I mean, people definitely do try to get corroboration of Livy. The fact that people don’t argue about it in their day-to-day life is because Livy isn’t telling them they have a moral obligation to spend their Sunday mornings a certain way. I.e. Livy’s accuracy doesn’t matter to them; they don’t need to know.

Either travel is easy in the ancient world, or it isn’t. If you think it’s incredible that the eye-witnesses to the resurrection would end up in different parts of the world, then you’ve got to retract your “it was easy to talk to the people involved” line of reasoning.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

Psst… you, yourself, are posting on one…

Only if people in here are a lot older than I expect.

One of the assertions that Bradski makes, in an attempt to disprove the veracity of Scriptural accounts, is “widespread illiteracy.” Let’s take that at face value: if that’s the case, then the requirement to find any arbitrary number of authors of written accounts for a particular event is poorly-formed at best, and deliberately disingenuous at worst.

Instead, it would seem, we would expect an age of illiteracy to produce accounts from scribes who are reporting on the first-hand accounts of others. That would seem to be the reasonable standard for such a period in time.

I mean, why can’t it be very-hard-to-impossible to reliably establish the claims of ancient religious texts? The answer can ultimately be “We just don’t have enough information to know for sure one way or the other.” Your claim is tantamount to assuming that the “we just don’t know” conclusion is unacceptable.

Now you might make a “but what about Livy” objection, so I invite you to read my response to e_c. I will also add that historical claims of battles are different than historical claims of resurrections. We know that there were lots of battles fought. There are lots of kinds of corroborations for wars. So when an ancient writer comes along and says “So and so defeated Such and such in the battle of OverYonder” during a time when we know that So and so was at war with Such and such, we don’t have much reason to doubt the writer. However, when a religious group claims their leader rose from the dead, we have all kinds of reasons to doubt this claim, and demanding a high evidentiary bar is a reasonable thing to do.

 

[e_c]

You mean as opposed to today, when planes, trains, and automobiles would make it impossible to go to the places mentioned and ask at least some of the people involved? I’ve not heard the list of authors, simply saying “duh, scripture” isn’t a list of authors.

You have confused my statement’s purpose. I mean to say that the texts were written when those who first received them could actually go talk to the people who had actually seen these things. Like Luke says he did, for instance. I don’t mean to compare travel capabilities.

If you’ll review our very short conversation, you will find that we were talking about the difference between actual eye-witness testimony, and second-hand accounts of eye-witness testimony. You claimed that the testimony in scripture “and other sources” was on par with 500 first hand accounts. I was merely asking you to back that claim up; I have to take your sudden distaste for “written” evidence to mean that you’ve failed to find the kind of first-hand corroboration you thought existed.

No, there are only John and Peter, if by “witness the Resurrection” you mean “saw Jesus after the Crucifixion and before the Ascension.” If you open up other possibilities, Paul is included, and then we enter into the very long list of credible apparitions through 20 centuries. But we need not get into that.

Let me draw out the implication here… It is unreasonable to think anything supernatural happened in the ancient world without “at least 5” or “at least 10” written accounts by eye witnesses directly claiming to be eye witnesses in those texts, even though texts that don’t fully meet the criteria were clearly written by people who were seriously close to those events for people who were able to go talk to others who were close to them or actually were close to them themselves, with one text even saying there are hundreds of such people. And all this in a time and place where oral traditions are extremely strong (so why bother writing so much? find a pious 13 year old boy, he will recite the whole Torah to you from memory), and the price for believing the things proposed - let alone actually proposing them - is extremely high, and also you can’t go to Kinko’s to buy paper. Curiouser and curiouser.

The distinction between written and not is crucial, because non-written sources are inherently second-hand. The demand for explicit claims is equally important. If the resurrection story was a later invention, then “implicit” claims of mere “belief in Jesus” may not say what we expect. Moreover, if the author just implicitly claims to “believe” the resurrection, all that proves is that he was convinced by someone; the issue at hand is whether or not the resurrection actually happened, not whether or not early Christians were persuasive.

Non-written sources are inherently second hand? Are you SURE about that? Think carefully… Next time someone tells you he saw something happen, are you going to insist that this is not as good as some text you read in the paper the next day about the same thing? And how do you know the text has not been tampered with? Oral sources are inherently second hand once they pass through another person. They are not second hand in themselves… People BACK THEN had first hand oral accounts given to them. That’s part of why the doctrine spread so quickly - so many people had actually seen something miraculous!

The explicit/implicit distinction is not important at all. Why would anyone bother joining some rebellious Jews, especially if they are Greek or Roman, unless they are saying Jesus rose from the dead? EVERYONE KNEW THAT THE RESURRECTION WAS THE CENTRAL DOCTRINE. It is the main force of the entire thing.

I mean, people definitely do try to get corroboration of Livy. The fact that people don’t argue about it in their day-to-day life is because Livy isn’t telling them they have a moral obligation to spend their Sunday mornings a certain way. I.e. Livy’s accuracy doesn’t matter to them; they don’t need to know.

Yeah battles shmattles. Not like those are important! Anyway, I pulled Livy as an example out of my you-know-where. My point is that the entirety of ancient history relies on relatively few written sources. To insist on more than a handful of written accounts of the life of one man in the 1st century, let alone a carpenter from Nazareth, is an insane standard. We have more written material about the life of Jesus than anyone else of the time, except maybe the Emperor, who had his dedicated biographers.

Either travel is easy in the ancient world, or it isn’t. If you think it’s incredible that the eye-witnesses to the resurrection would end up in different parts of the world, then you’ve got to retract your “it was easy to talk to the people involved” line of reasoning.

The point is not that travel is difficult or not, it is that the message itself is so important that it is going international, and huge texts are being produced on the life of a man from backwater Judea.

Also, remember that these folks are claimed to have been working miracles themselves… If one of your 500 ISIS guys started healing people with his shadow, that would certainly at least make me listen quite closely to what he had to say!

In sum, your standards are totally unreasonable for the ancient world. The written and non-written testimony (which is what occasioned the written testimony, in multiple ways, by the way… again, see Luke 1 for an example) for Jesus’ life sticks out like a sore thumb in the ancient world.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

No, there are only John and Peter, if by “witness the Resurrection” you mean “saw Jesus after the Crucifixion and before the Ascension.” If you open up other possibilities, Paul is included, and then we enter into the very long list of credible apparitions through 20 centuries. But we need not get into that.

I mean, while we’re opening our minds to extreme possibilities, why not include the testimony of people who witnessed Ahn Sahng-hong and Sun Myung Moon, the second comings of Jesus? Why not accept Roman accounts of lights in the sky a bit before Jesus’ time as evidence that the whole thing was done by aliens?

The point is, we’re trying to establish the veracity of the resurrection. That is why we need evidence specifically for the resurrection.

Let me draw out the implication here… It is unreasonable to think anything supernatural happened in the ancient world without “at least 5” or “at least 10” written accounts by eye witnesses directly claiming to be eye witnesses in those texts, even though texts that don’t fully meet the criteria were clearly written by people who were seriously close to those events for people who were able to go talk to others who were close to them or actually were close to them themselves, with one text even saying there are hundreds of such people. And all this in a time and place where oral traditions are extremely strong (so why bother writing so much? find a pious 13 year old boy, he will recite the whole Torah to you from memory), and the price for believing the things proposed - let alone actually proposing them - is extremely high, and also you can’t go to Kinko’s to buy paper. Curiouser and curiouser.

If some traceless magic happens in the forest, and no one was around to witness it, did it actually happen? Of course, we just wouldn’t have any reason to believe that it did. You were the one who was making wild claims about the number of first hand witnesses, I laid out my criteria for agreeing with your language, not my criteria for believing the magic in the forest.

Non-written sources are inherently second hand? Are you SURE about that? Think carefully… Next time someone tells you he saw something happen, are you going to insist that this is not as good as some text you read in the paper the next day about the same thing? And how do you know the text has not been tampered with? Oral sources are inherently second hand once they pass through another person. They are not second hand in themselves… People BACK THEN had first hand oral accounts given to them. That’s part of why the doctrine spread so quickly - so many people had actually seen something miraculous!

I mean, I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you were smart enough to realize that no one from 2000 years ago is going to come up to me and tell me he saw something happen. Evidently I should not have been so magnanimous. Therefore, to cover my bases, I will also inform you that video- photo- and phono-graphic evidence are all non-written evidence that could be first hand; but that no one in the year 0 BC had the means to create such evidence.

Sure, of course the papers could have been tampered with.

Yeah battles shmattles. Not like those are important! Anyway, I pulled Livy as an example out of my you-know-where. My point is that the entirety of ancient history relies on relatively few written sources. To insist on more than a handful of written accounts of the life of one man in the 1st century, let alone a carpenter from Nazareth, is an insane standard. We have more written material about the life of Jesus than anyone else of the time, except maybe the Emperor, who had his dedicated biographers.

Again, the standards I was insisting on were merely those standards I would require to agree with your description of the state of the evidence as “all kinds of other first hand claims from other authors.”

I’d also argue that if you think the implications of a resurrection are on par with the implications of a battle, then you don’t really understand your religion. The point that you seemed to ignore is that people do actually try to corroborate written accounts of battles and sometimes find historical writers invented them.

In sum, your standards are totally unreasonable for the ancient world. The written and non-written testimony (which is what occasioned the written testimony, in multiple ways, by the way… again, see Luke 1 for an example) for Jesus’ life sticks out like a sore thumb in the ancient world.

But this is the wedge I am trying to drive. The standards of evidence we require to believe in a resurrection should be independent of how long ago that resurrection happened. You yourself have denied that 500 eye-witness testimonials would be sufficient (you would also require sudden change in belief among the witnesses, evidence for miracles.)

If a dozen normal modern people personally came and told me that they had witnessed a resurrection, I would not consider that sufficient evidence to believe an actual resurrection had occurred, regardless of how fervently or self-destructively they believed it. If 500 poorly-educated and strongly religious people put out first-hand accounts of witnessing a resurrection, I would not consider that sufficient evidence to believe a resurrection had occurred, even if those people had suddenly changed their religious views.

And since we have both pointed out ways in which the biblical accounts of a resurrection are weaker than the above scenarios (possibility of tampering with accounts, small number of actual 1st hand accounts, lack of knowledge about background of the authors of the 1st hand accounts) I don’t know how you can seriously argue that someone ought to believe the biblical accounts of a resurrection.

 

[e_c]

I mean, while we’re opening our minds to extreme possibilities, why not include the testimony of people who witnessed Ahn Sahng-hong and Sun Myung Moon, the second comings of Jesus? Why not accept Roman accounts of lights in the sky a bit before Jesus’ time as evidence that the whole thing was done by aliens?

Ahn Sahng-hong was a Buddhist, then a failed apocalyptic preacher who died and was deified by his followers, so how is that relevant? Sun Myung Moon lied about his taxes and lied about being the Messiah, died, and that was that, so how is that relevant? I see lights in the sky today, are they aliens? Compare this with atheist newspapers reporting on Fatima: “It really happened, we don’t know what to say.”

The point is, we’re trying to establish the veracity of the resurrection. That is why we need evidence specifically for the resurrection.If some traceless magic happens in the forest, and no one was around to witness it, did it actually happen? Of course, we just wouldn’t have any reason to believe that it did. You were the one who was making wild claims about the number of first hand witnesses, I laid out my criteria for agreeing with your language, not my criteria for believing the magic in the forest.I mean, I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you were smart enough to realize that no one from 2000 years ago is going to come up to me and tell me he saw something happen. Evidently I should not have been so magnanimous. Therefore, to cover my bases, I will also inform you that video- photo- and phono-graphic evidence are all non-written evidence that could be first hand; but that no one in the year 0 BC had the means to create such evidence.

Actually, Paul is making the claim about 500+ eye witnesses. I trust that it is a well preserved document from a trustworthy author.

I’ll return to the bold. There is some dissonance shown by it.

Sure, of course the papers could have been tampered with. Again, the standards I was insisting on were merely those standards I would require to agree with your description of the state of the evidence as “all kinds of other first hand claims from other authors.”

It is an unfair standard. It is flatly bogus to say that Matthew, for instance, is not a firsthand account BECAUSE the author doesn’t say “I am Matthew, I saw it happen.” One has to consider the actual context of the composition of the text, namely, why is it being written and for whom is it being written? If you randomly found the Gospel of Matthew in a clay pot in a cave, and knew nothing about any of it, the natural reaction would be to be intrigued but not to be convinced. But if you are already living around Matthew? Well, you receive a detailed account of what has already been preached to you for decades which you can use for reference.

 

[e_c]

I’d also argue that if you think the implications of a resurrection are on par with the implications of a battle, then you don’t really understand your religion. The point that you seemed to ignore is that people do actually try to corroborate written accounts of battles and sometimes find historical writers invented them.But this is the wedge I am trying to drive. **The standards of evidence we require to believe in a resurrection should be independent of how long ago that resurrection happened. ** You yourself have denied that 500 eye-witness testimonials would be sufficient (you would also require sudden change in belief among the witnesses, evidence for miracles.)

I made no such claim. I claimed that battles are really important. Say we have maybe one account of some major battle by a firsthand eye witness who claims to be such in writing, but we have more than that for the life of Jesus. We are beginning to converge on my final point… I will return to the bold.

If a dozen normal modern people personally came and told me that they had witnessed a resurrection, I would not consider that sufficient evidence to believe an actual resurrection had occurred, regardless of how fervently or self-destructively they believed it. If 500 poorly-educated and strongly religious people put out first-hand accounts of witnessing a resurrection, I would not consider that sufficient evidence to believe a resurrection had occurred, even if those people had suddenly changed their religious views.

Back to the myth about ancient peoples being stupid. Anyway, what you believe is your own. I will return to the bold.

And since we have both pointed out ways in which the biblical accounts of a resurrection are weaker than the above scenarios (possibility of tampering with accounts, small number of actual 1st hand accounts, lack of knowledge about background of the authors of the 1st hand accounts) I don’t know how you can seriously argue that someone ought to believe the biblical accounts of a resurrection.

I have marked several quotes in bold. They betray you. In addition the final quote above, you say:

**[V]ideo- photo- and phono-graphic evidence are all non-written evidence that could be first hand; but that no one in the year 0 BC had the means to create such evidence.

The standards of evidence we require to believe in a resurrection should be independent of how long ago that resurrection happened.

If a dozen normal modern people personally came and told me that they had witnessed a resurrection, I would not consider that sufficient evidence to believe an actual resurrection had occurred, regardless of how fervently or self-destructively they believed it.**

Notice that at one moment you apply one standard, the next you apply a different one. At one moment we are acknowledging that the standards ought to be different, since there were different means of preserving history. Then, we are claiming that there is no difference between investigating our own age and investigating the ancient world. Then we single out “modern people,” which indeed you ought, since they ought to be able to produce better evidence. Finally, we are back to saying the two eras ought to be examined in the same way.

My conclusion is that you are willing to move your standards of evidence as it suits your case - one admits of the massive difference between our age and another, and the other does not.

I don’t know what the point in continuing is unless you can admit this. So unless you do, I will not be commenting further in this thread with you.

 

[e_c]

Also… and this is huge… People believed the accounts BACK THEN. We are in a different position entirely and we have to acknowledge the fact that this was actually convincing to many contemporaries, sometimes due in no small part to miraculous proofs in testimony to their authority. There are accounts of this both in Scripture and outside.

Finally - for real - there is no document, as far as we know, from the same time as the NT texts that CONTRADICTS them. Why? It seems warranted if they are just fairy tales being pushed as contemporary truth, and it would be quite possible to publish such a document. But no, nothing. Not even records of disagreement with firsthand accounts by other eyewitnesses. Wouldn’t someone, somewhere, at some point make such a statement, write such a letter, and stand up for truth, especially given that this would be in their temporal favor?

But no. Nothing.

That’s the argument in a nutshell. Interpret based on the text AND the context. I suggest that that is not being done in the critiques.

 

[tonyrey]

…B: But you still trust without direct evidence, just like I do.
S: If you think that the two cases are even remotely similar, then there is nothing to talk about.for it, it is because this particular believer is irrational. Is there a rational one out there, who can provide evidence for the miracles allegedly performed by Jesus?

The only direct evidence we have for anything is our mental activity. Everything else is **inferred **from what we perceive. To doubt the existence of our mind is to doubt our power of reason without which we wouldn’t even know the universe exists. Materialists who reject the possibility of the resurrection fail to realise that reality doesn’t consist primarily of physical objects incapable of thought but spiritual beings capable of insight and self-control. A greater miracle than the Resurrection would be for everything to emerge from nothing for no reason or purpose whatsoever - and produce reasonable, purposeful beings into the bargain!

 

[JapaneseKappa]

I have marked several quotes in bold. They betray you. In addition the final quote above, you say:

**[V]ideo- photo- and phono-graphic evidence are all non-written evidence that could be first hand; but that no one in the year 0 BC had the means to create such evidence.

The standards of evidence we require to believe in a resurrection should be independent of how long ago that resurrection happened.

If a dozen normal modern people personally came and told me that they had witnessed a resurrection, I would not consider that sufficient evidence to believe an actual resurrection had occurred, regardless** of how fervently or self-destructively they believed it.

Notice that at one moment you apply one standard, the next you apply a different one. At one moment we are acknowledging that the standards ought to be different, since there were different means of preserving history. Then, we are claiming that there is no difference between investigating our own age and investigating the ancient world. Then we single out “modern people,” which indeed you ought, since they ought to be able to produce better evidence. Finally, we are back to saying the two eras ought to be examined in the same way.

My conclusion is that you are willing to move your standards of evidence as it suits your case - one admits of the massive difference between our age and another, and the other does not.

You’re grasping at straws and repeating the same mistake you made earlier. Indeed, I’m hearing echos of the last time I proposed this thought experiment in your confusion about what standards of evidence are.

You are baldly conflating two ideas: How high quality some bit of evidence is, and what evidenciary standards we hold a claim to. We ought to hold any resurrection claim to a very high evidentiary bar because of the “size” of the implications. That is to say, in order to explain a resurrection, we need to invoke somewhat extreme possibilities: from “large scale violation of the second law of thermodynamics” to “divine intervention” to “alien intervention” to “our understanding of medicine has major oversights.” And because all of those explanations are unlikely, we need very high quality evidence before we would invoke them. On the other hand, all the other things we’ve been talking about (unreliability of texts, lack of first hand accounts, etc) **are **good reasons for believing that ancient evidence is lower quality than a similar quantity of contemporary accounts. The fact that this makes it incredibly difficult to prove an ancient resurrection is not my problem, in fact it is exactly the point I’m making. What you’ve done here sounds an awful lot like “But if you do that I can’t defend my belief in the resurrection!” which has been my whole point, so your attempt at a “gotcha” actually sounds more like a childish “Its not fair!” because your rhetorical device was designed to force me to increase my estimation of ancient evidence, or lower my evidentiary bar with no justification besides an equivocation.

 

[e_c]

You’re grasping at straws and repeating the same mistake you made earlier. Indeed, I’m hearing echos of the last time I proposed this thought experiment in your confusion about what standards of evidence are.

You are baldly conflating two ideas: How high quality some bit of evidence is, and what evidenciary standards we hold a claim to. We ought to hold any resurrection claim to a very high evidentiary bar because of the “size” of the implications. That is to say, in order to explain a resurrection, we need to invoke somewhat extreme possibilities: from “large scale violation of the second law of thermodynamics” to “divine intervention” to “alien intervention” to “our understanding of medicine has major oversights.” And because all of those explanations are unlikely, we need very high quality evidence before we would invoke them. On the other hand, all the other things we’ve been talking about (unreliability of texts, lack of first hand accounts, etc) **are **good reasons for believing that ancient evidence is lower quality than a similar quantity of contemporary accounts. The fact that this makes it incredibly difficult to prove an ancient resurrection is not my problem, in fact it is exactly the point I’m making. What you’ve done here sounds an awful lot like “But if you do that I can’t defend my belief in the resurrection!” which has been my whole point, so your attempt at a “gotcha” actually sounds more like a childish “Its not fair!” because your rhetorical device was designed to force me to increase my estimation of ancient evidence, or lower my evidentiary bar with no justification besides an equivocation.

I submit that the Gospels, the oral tradition which preceded, occasioned, and succeeded them, the epistles which confirm both of these things, and the line of miracles reported in confirmation of all this independent of it, and the willingness of eyewitnesses to be put in extreme danger and even die in testimony to it all, are extraordinarily strong evidence for the truth of anything of the time, especially for the ancient world insofar as texts are concerned, and are certainly of high enough quality to meet the proportional need occasioned by the extraordinary character of the events in question. Indeed, it seems that every other possibility is far more complex and less plausible by far.

There is no life better testified to in the ancient world in text than the life of Christ, apart from - perhaps - the Emperor. And there is no contemporary text challenging it.

Another way to approach the problem is to flip it: were it actually true, what would the recording of it actually be like? This is something to think about. And to think about it, you would have to have familiarity with the context of the world in which it would have happened… A world which was not one heavy on writing things down, for a variety of reasons which have been examined already.

I will not be continuing this conversation with you here.

Peace,
-e_c

 

[JapaneseKappa]

Also… and this is huge… People believed the accounts BACK THEN. We are in a different position entirely and we have to acknowledge the fact that this was actually convincing to many contemporaries, sometimes due in no small part to miraculous proofs in testimony to their authority. There are accounts of this both in Scripture and outside.

I mean, nearly 2 million people were and are convinced by Ahn Sahng-hong, but you dismissed this on the grounds that he was born to a Buddhist family and that he made a failed prophecy of an apocalypse (like Jesus’ failed prediction that he would return before all his followers died.) Sun Myung Moon convinced another million-odd people. They are relevant because if they are actually Jesus as they claim, then we have modern evidence of a resurrected person!

So now you’ll say something like “well they don’t claim to do miracles now do they?” But they clearly do. Very clearly they do.

Finally - for real - there is no document, as far as we know, from the same time as the NT texts that CONTRADICTS them. Why? It seems warranted if they are just fairy tales being pushed as contemporary truth, and it would be quite possible to publish such a document. But no, nothing. Not even records of disagreement with firsthand accounts by other eyewitnesses. Wouldn’t someone, somewhere, at some point make such a statement, write such a letter, and stand up for truth, especially given that this would be in their temporal favor?

But no. Nothing.

That’s the argument in a nutshell. Interpret based on the text AND the context. I suggest that that is not being done in the critiques.

Sure, but look at what you did when I proposed my thought experiment. Immediately you assumed all sorts of disqualifying features about the scenario. Why? Because you recognize that the probability of unreliable witness is much higher than an actual resurrection. So why don’t you assume all sorts of disqualifying features about people in the New Testament scenario? I am not deaf, you have offered a few reasons: specifically, you’ve provided some evidence that the followers did really believe in Jesus; but as in the case of our Korean claimants, the earnestness of the followers does not make their testimony automatically credible. So it’s true there is no evidence that the early Christians were tax evaders, or that they were pursuing their own agenda before the Jesus-idea came along as a way to legitimize that agenda, or any number of other scenarios that call their credibility into question. But why are we giving them the benefit of the doubt and asserting that such things are not the case, when the right thing to do is to say that we don’t know for sure?

 

[JapaneseKappa]

I submit that the Gospels, the oral tradition which preceded, occasioned, and succeeded them, the epistles which confirm both of these things, and the line of miracles reported in confirmation of all this independent of it, and the willingness of eyewitnesses to be put in extreme danger and even die in testimony to it all, are extraordinarily strong evidence for the truth of anything of the time, especially for the ancient world insofar as texts are concerned, and are certainly of high enough quality to meet the proportional need occasioned by the extraordinary character of the events in question. Indeed, it seems that every other possibility is far more complex and less plausible by far.

Do you think the Korean people who claimed to be Jesus would have gotten as many followers if no one had heard of Jesus, or expected his second coming?

Of course messianic prophecies were popular at the time, both the Zoroastrians and the Jewish religions had them, with some people thinking that the Jews borrowed them from Zoroastrianism. That’s precisely why the ground was fertile for messianic claimants. People at the time were predisposed to believe one was coming, so it would not be hard for such a belief to snowball.

There is no life better testified to in the ancient world in text than the life of Christ, apart from - perhaps - the Emperor. And there is no contemporary text challenging it.

At no point have I challenged the existence of a Jesus-person.

 

[tonyrey]

That is to say, in order to explain a resurrection, we need to invoke somewhat extreme possibilities: from “large scale violation of the second law of thermodynamics” to “divine intervention” to “alien intervention” to “our understanding of medicine has major oversights.” And because all of those explanations are unlikely, we need very high quality evidence before we would invoke them.

Those explanations are only unlikely to materialists who reduce every form of existence to permutations of atomic particles and ignore the impotence of mindless entities lacking insight, knowledge and self-control without which this forum wouldn’t even exist…

On the other hand, all the other things we’ve been talking about (unreliability of texts, lack of first hand accounts, etc) **are **good reasons for believing that ancient evidence is lower quality than a similar quantity of contemporary accounts. The fact that this makes it incredibly difficult to prove an ancient resurrection is not my problem, in fact it is exactly the point I’m making. What you’ve done here sounds an awful lot like “But if you do that I can’t defend my belief in the resurrection!” which has been my whole point, so your attempt at a “gotcha” actually sounds more like a childish “Its not fair!” because your rhetorical device was designed to force me to increase my estimation of ancient evidence, or lower my evidentiary bar with no justification besides an equivocation.

The most powerful evidence exists right now in our capacity to reach conclusions about the nature of reality. The most obvious fact of all is overlooked by those who belittle the significance of Christ’s teaching which is the sole foundation of human rights and the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. We can doubt everything that has happened in the past but not our intellectual power at this very moment. The more we minimise the significance of the mind the more we weaken our confidence in our own conclusions! In other words we are fighting a losing battle against ourselves instead of accepting the primacy of intangible, rational activity** which transcends every other aspect of reality**. Resurrection is the least of our problems in any mature analysis of historical events because it is based on direct verification of our astonishing insight into the nature of not only of the physical universe but also of the success of science and the metascientific principles without which science wouldn’t even exist… The maxim “Know thyself” is as true now as it was in the time of the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. Independent personal existence is undoubtedly the supreme factor in any balanced interpretation of reality.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

Those explanations are only unlikely to materialists who reduce every form of existence to permutations of atomic particles and ignore the impotence of mindless entities lacking insight, knowledge and self-control without which this forum wouldn’t even exist…

Unless you go around believing that every account of a resurrection you hear about is “probably real”, you will also agree that these explanations are unlikely. But maybe you do! Maybe you believe the dozen-or-so resurrections in the Bhagavata Purana probably happened. Maybe you think that its pretty likely that the 89 year old buddhist monk did recently come back to life. Or maybe you only think that Jesus’ is the only likely resurrection, because of how much you’ve staked in that idea.

 

[JapaneseKappa]

Another way to approach the problem is to flip it: were it actually true, what would the recording of it actually be like? This is something to think about. And to think about it, you would have to have familiarity with the context of the world in which it would have happened… A world which was not one heavy on writing things down, for a variety of reasons which have been examined already.

So if things really did happen as described in the Gospels, I would very much expect Matthew 27:51-54 to have been recorded by several 3rd parties, and that the news of this event would have made it to the Roman historians of the time. Moreover, I would expect that these widespread public signs would have immediately ended all persecution of Christians in the area.

And behold the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top even to the bottom, and the earth quaked, and the rocks were rent. And the graves were opened: and many bodies of the saints that had slept arose, And coming out of the tombs after his resurrection, came into the holy city, and appeared to many. Now the centurion and they that were with him watching Jesus, having seen the earthquake, and the things that were done, were sore afraid, saying: Indeed this was the Son of God.

 

[goout]

So if things really did happen as described in the Gospels, I would very much expect Matthew 27:51-54 to have been recorded by several 3rd parties, and that the news of this event would have made it to the Roman historians of the time. Moreover, I would expect that these widespread public signs would have immediately ended all persecution of Christians in the area.

Right, because that’s the way of modern journalism and scientific discovery.
These are good things, but are not worthy of worship as idols of superstition, as they are when used as the arbiter of all being and meaning.

Science and history are pretty much helpless in this area. Why a human being would want to be helpless in matters of being, meaning, identity, and purpose is beyond me.

 

[Gorgias]

So if things really did happen as described in the Gospels, I would very much expect Matthew 27:51-54 to have been recorded by several 3rd parties, and that the news of this event would have made it to the Roman historians of the time.

Please take a moment and think about the assumptions in that statement. What you’ve done is assumed one particular interpretation of that passage, and then imposed an expectation of a set of behaviors based on that interpretation of Scripture. What if your interpretation is wrong? What if you’ve misunderstood what the author is attempting to say? If so, then your expectations, too, would be way off base.

That passage in Matthew is one of the more hotly debated among Scriptural scholars. What, exactly, was the author attempting to tell us? Your interpretation is generally rejected, for exactly the reasons you have problems with it: if that interpretation were correct, then we might expect the reaction you’ve posited! Therefore, scholars look for an interpretation that’s more consonant with the reaction of the Christian community and of the wider world.

Moreover, I would expect that these widespread public signs would have immediately ended all persecution of Christians in the area.

On what do you base that expectation? We’ve seen reports of miracles in contemporary times… and no one’s jumping to avoid persecuting Christians and their beliefs…

 

[JapaneseKappa]

Right, because that’s the way of modern journalism and scientific discovery.
These are good things, but are not worthy of worship as idols of superstition, as they are when used as the arbiter of all being and meaning.

Science and history are pretty much helpless in this area. Why a human being would want to be helpless in matters of being, meaning, identity, and purpose is beyond me.

Surely someone who would think that they have enough information to opine on this subject would have done enough homework to know about the kinds of things Roman historians wrote about. Surely you know about Josephus’ accounts of chariots in the skies over Jerusalem, and various Roman reports of lights in the sky from a little before Jesus’ time, and so are aware that Roman historians regularly recorded information about “supernatural” phenomenon.

Now, the rest of your post is troubling. What do you think an engineer does when he sets out to build a Big Important Bridge using some New Theories? He’s not just going to take the scientist’s word for it that the New Theories apply, he’s going to make some scale models and computer models to test it out. Not only to make sure that the scientists were right, but also to make sure that he fully understands the New Theories and their limitations.

That is to say: as the stakes go up, how careful we are should also go up. But what you’re saying is tantamount to “being, meaning, identity and purpose are too important to be intellectually cautious about!” An engineer would rather build no bridge than get it wrong and kill people. But you’re saying “It’s better to build the bridge of being/meaning/identity/purpose wrong than to have intellectual standards high enough that you have to admit you don’t know how to build the bridge.”