I’d call it impossible.
Especially if you happen to be born into a religion that says all who leave it must die.
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I’m not sure, but it sounds as if perhaps you think I’m not interested in scientific evidence and need to be persuaded?
I was just trying to make the point that human beings like to argue and like to be right about their claims, regardless of where the evidence may point.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t keep trying to dig into the layers and see what they can teach us. I’m just saying we have to be realistic about the human patterns of thinking and learning, patterns that have a lot of inertia.
That’s not the case at all. It was more in response to deciding what is the “best” evidence. I think it is worth pointing out that there are many independent lines of evidence that all meet at the same place.
I agree with you 100%. I have caught myself being stubborn about the stupidest of things. Human psychology plays a major role in many of these discussions.
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So you wouldn’t think that is a fair (if minimal) way to describe Jesus within the Christian mythos?
- Given Robert Alter’s Hebrew Bible Translation and Jacob Wright’s book on “Why The Bible Began?”, I can’t imagine why anyone except us dwindling-in-numbers of believers in Judaism’s Ha-Shem or Christianity’s Jesus and dilettantes would bother continuing to cling on to “The Idea of Israel” or Jesus. Both are just so passée belle.
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Thanks for clarifying. I agree completely about independent lines of evidence. The more reference points we have (even when talking about religion and faith!), the smaller the gaps that can be filled up with the “junk” of outright lies and speculation.
why bother…you arent interested enough to do anything other than insult ellaboration.
that is agnostic…not atheist!
Agnostic atheist would probably be the best title for my view on knowledge and belief.
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but there is evidence…you just say its wrong!
That is the entire problem here, your side simply argue that the opposing side are dimwits and as such their evidence is wrong.
The problem is, if the opposing side also have historical writings that correlate with their scientific evidence, and given that this is about Christianity, your side is denying its own philosophical belief in the gospel. You do not agree with the biblical narrative.
If the bible isnt literal, its fiction.
If the bible is fiction, then you believe a mythical fairytale!
Given its scientifically impossible without artificial medical procedure, and given you claim early mankind wasnt as smart as we are today, do you really believe that a virgin gave birth to a child?
My point above is to highlight that faith is a leap. It goes against naturalism in almost every way.
I suspect that you are confusing evidence with opinions and interpretation.
For example, the evidence is a measured half life for uranium, the observation that zircons exclude lead when they form, and a specific ratio of uranium and lead in zircons. We stick with all of this evidence and measure the age of zircons as having great ages.
YEC’s, on the other hand, invent accelerated nuclear decay from whole cloth in order to make these observations go away. We have never seen YEC’s present evidence for accelerated nuclear decay, nor do we see any evidence that would nullify the massive amount of heat that accelerated nuclear decay would produce. I think we would have plenty of evidence if the Earth was a white hot ball of plasma a few thousand years ago.
We don’t agree with your interpretation of the biblical narrative.
Myths have been a valid method for revealing theological concepts for as long as there has been theology.
I don’t believe that the virgin birth happened, but I am also humble enough to acknowledge that I can’t disprove it either.
I don’t subscribe to naturalism either, so that’s not an issue. I am also humble enough to realize that there is no way I can prove that everything in the universe is following natural laws at all times. However, when we have mountains of evidence for something being the product of natural processes I favor parsimony, hence the natural explanation. This is the case for the history of life and the history of geology on Earth.
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Adam, you are racking up fouls here.
- @T_aquaticus does not present himself as the representative of a group or “a side.”
- I’ve read a lot of his posts. I’ve not noticed him calling anyone, or implying that anyone is a dimwit.
- I’ve not read any posts where T_aquaticus claims that dimwittedess is the cause of wrong evidence.
Do you have evidence for these claims?
If not, you can do better.
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It’s exactly backwards. The Jews were right that no man could become God; they failed to take into account whether God might become man.
Um, what???
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Oh, rubbish – those are hardly the total set of possibilities.
Exactly. And until Adam can show where the scriptures state an intent to be scientifically accurate, plus present evidence that historical narrative really was a genre in OT times, there’s no reason to give any credence to his interpretation.
Adam, you claim to have a biblical worldview, but you have yet to show us the above items, and if you can’t then you do not have a biblical worldview.
Including mythologized history.
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I had a feeling that’s what it was but wouldn’t both have to be true? Didn’t Jesus start out the son of a man and a woman before he was recognized as God?
This passage from Philippians has always been a favorite of mine …
5 In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!
And yet it only just occured to me in a recent reading of it how a couple of English word choices there, if taken in isolation invite one toward a dangerous heresy. Is Jesus really human? Or is he merely the appearance or the likeness of human? We all know the creeds well enough to give a resounding answer that he is 100% human. Period. Full stop. And he’s 100% divine too. Also period. Full stop. And while I suspect most Christians would sign on with this creed and find it defensible enough from sciptures as a whole, we nonetheless still effectively fall into this heresy today in subtle ways … such as entertaining the word “…but…” after admitting he is fully human. Yeah - he was human … but … he was special, so we don’t really need to think of his literal life as any sort of pattern we need trouble ourselves to follow too closely. We’d rather keep him on a pedestal than let him fully into our hearts. We’d rather find excuses to sideline his teachings - in a very nice and respectful glass case, to be sure, where we can look at them with obligatory fondness once in a while - but we’re told now that his teachings don’t really work for daily life and politics, and that really it’s the weapons of the world that are the ones that really count. And thus we consign Jesus safely away into the heavens - his divinity intact, and his humanity denied. And for all the huffing and puffing about our alleged ascent to “correct doctrine” with our heads, our political lives reveal that we’ve fallen hook, line, and sinker for this very heresy in its most dreadful and subte form. How many evangelical leaders in the U.S. right now trip over their own feet trying to explain why the Sermon on the Mount doesn’t really apply to them and go through whatever theological gymnastics are needed to make it so? Forgetting, then, that if you turn your back on what Jesus commanded of us, then it’s no longer God’s kingdom that you’re fighting for, but someone else’s. Jesus wasn’t just “like a human”. He is human, and his teachings remain solidly embedded in our enduringly human context.
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I think the phrase (which can be attributed to Marcello Truzzi, who in my view was a great thinker, though many incorrectly attribute it to Carl Sagan; Sagan was close with Truzzi so perhaps this isn’t too surprising) really comes from David Hume’s ideas. With that said Hume was basically a frequentist when it came to both statistics and epistemology, and it is the latter which creates all sorts of issues, many of which Hume realized and wrote about himself.
As a result, in my experience, the claim “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is primarily used as an emotive or manipulate term rather than anything cognitively meaningful. It usually tacitly assumes that induction is unproblematic (hence the usage of the words ordinary and extraordinary) by trying to link these to epistemology.
The field of Bayesian statistics and Bayesian epistemology (which was actually developed in part in response to Hume) does a good job pointing out the role of priors when it comes to evaluating what is truly extraordinary. Hume’s maxim of “a wise man apportions his belief to the evidence” is a solid principle, but when applied to questions around faith, often ends up begging the question. For instance, the resurrection of Jesus may be an extraordinary event, but whether such an event is truly “surprising” (warranting extreme incredulity and skepticism) depends on one’s background knowledge.
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Evidence is evidence regardless of the claim. Extraordinary has nothing to do with it except casts an element of subjectivity as to extraordinariness.
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Is evidence for a particular claim that conflicts with evidence for existing and well supported ideas, as opposed to a claim which is compatible with the general understanding, to be accepted on the same basis? What makes an extraordinary claim extraordinary is that accepting it entails rejecting existing claims which were thought to be true.
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