However, the fact remains. I asked for evidence, and got nothing. Not interested in some “final” verification, since by that time it will be too late - or so the teaching goes. Verification, whatever form it takes, is only useful if one can learn from the result, and change accordingly.
Clearly, you misunderstand the nature of evidence.
The question to be asked is “Evidence for what?”
You might rephrase to: “Evidence for an afterlife.”
The clarifying question would then become “Afterlife of what?”
Will you insist on “biological body” as the “what” and restrict whatever evidence to be evidence of the afterlife of a particular biological body? Of course you will. So you have stacked the deck in your favour by refusing to entertain any possibility of an afterlife since you have defined what must live in order for you to find any evidence acceptable whatsoever: the current and temporal physical body. Clearly, that has died.
Christianity doesn’t claim your existing physical body will immediately be revived and live after it dies, yet that is the “afterlife” that you are restricting all evidence to. Again, you have stacked the deck.
To be clear, Christianity does not claim that every molecule of your current physical body will be revived immediately after you die. That would be YOUR insistence.
What Christianity claims is that those who so merit will receive a glorified body at some point – when, precisely, would depend upon a number of factors. Whether that body will be observable to flesh and blood witnesses is not the determining factor of whether having been endowed with a glorified body has occurred or not.
Jesus body was glorified three days after his death. There is evidence for that. The empty tomb. The witness of the Apostles and women. The responses of the Sanhedrin and Roman officials. The growth of Christianity. Heck, even the Shroud of Turin is evidence.
The real problem is your crippled understanding of what constitutes “evidence” to begin with.
Take it from a hardened LA detective who has worked with evidence all of his professional life…
Many people simply don’t understand the basic categories of evidence and mistakenly think prosecutors need a particular kind of evidence to be successful. As it turns out, evidence falls into one of two categories: direct and indirect. Direct evidence is simply eyewitness testimony. Indirect evidence (also known as circumstantial evidence) is everything else. When I say “everything else” I mean precisely that: everything has the potential to be considered as evidence. In the many years I’ve been making criminal cases in the State of California, I’ve presented physical objects, statements, behaviors and much more to make my case. Take a look at the variety of evidences typically presented in criminal jury trials:
Forensic physical evidence
Non-forensic physical evidence
Where the victim was attacked
Where the victim wasn’t attacked
Items discovered at the crime scene
Items missing from the crime scene
Words the suspect said
Words the suspect failed to say
Something the suspect did
Something the suspect failed to do
I could go on and on, but are you starting to see the pattern? Everything has the potential to be part of an evidential case, depending on the nature of the case under consideration. Sometimes the simplest detail (something you might not typically think of as evidence) can make the case. I’ve successfully investigated cases prosecuted with nothing more than statements. These cases didn’t possess a single piece of physical evidence, yet the juries came back with a guilty verdict in less than 4 hours.
When skeptics say the case for Christianity is weak because it can’t be built with scientific, testable, physical, forensic evidence, they simply don’t know how criminal cases are tried every day in America. Everything counts as evidence, including the behavior of the original witnesses, the testimony of those who listened to the statements of these witnesses, the touch-point corroborative evidence of archaeology, the internal confirmation of geography, politics and proper nouns, and the deficiency of alternative explanations. These forms of evidence (or something very similar) are used in criminal trials every day. If convictions were dependent on physical, forensic evidence, very few cases would ever be prosecuted. My cold-cases, for example, are entirely circumstantial and typically employ little or no forensic evidence. I’ve yet to lose one of these cases, because I’ve learned the answer to an important question: What qualifies as evidence? Everything.
