Can you give an example of what you mean here and how it connects with the “Extraordinary/extraordinary” retort.
Although creation science and popular ID market themselves as opposing naturalism, they often endorse it by promoting a false dichotomy between “natural” and “God did it”. God can work through “natural” events (e.g., Caesar deciding that he can get more taxes if he counts everybody) as well as through miraculous ones. Just because someone believes that God does work miraculously when He chooses to does not mean that they should believe every claim that something happened miraculously.
I have seen the claim that it gives more glory to God to claim that something happened miraculously. There are two answers to that claim. One is “Nah.” Imagine a contest to make the best sculpture. Contestant 1, a magician, waves his wand and presto, there’s a perfectly carved likeness of a horse. Contestant 2 takes a chunk of marble and painstakingly carves it, and there is a perfectly carved model of a horse. While we are impressed by the magic wand because we can’t do that ourselves, we might be more impressed by the labor and skill that went into the sculptor’s work. But the more important answer is BY NO MEANS!!! I Cor 15 has Paul expressing alarm at the prospect of being a false witness for God. We must be faithful witnesses of what we know, not PR agents trying to come up with the glitziest spin possible.
In the case of the virgin conception of Jesus, the Bible specifically identifies it as an exception to the normal way things happen. Although we can’t run genetic tests on Jesus and his family, there is plenty of reason to believe that Jesus was exceptional, to put it mildly. In contrast, creation science claims do not honestly represent the evidence in the first place; the miracles invoked are excuses about why reality doesn’t match what it should if their claims were true.
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Son of a woman, assumed to be son of a man.
And the recognizing wasn’t that hard for a second-Temple Jew; they already recognized that there was a Yahweh who came in human form; fitting that to Messianic prophecies wasn’t too hard a leap. We have no such advantage these days.
The Docetists liked this passage; the Greek words used are broad enough in meaning to be taken that way. On the other hand, if the hymn Paul is quoting was using philosophical meanings for important words, or if Paul intended them that way, the very first line settles the issue: Jesus by nature was God, that was His μορφή (mor-PHAY), His underlying substance. The next verse indicates that He was equal with God but didn’t consider that something to cling to.
“Being made in human likeness” is an explanation of the “nature of a servant”; a servant of God could have been an angel or archangel so the writer is specifying which kind of servant Jesus became.
Verse 8 hinges on the word σχῆμα (SKAY-mah), which really shouldn’t be rendered “appearance” since it carries the sense of “shape” – think of σχῆμα as a schematic (derived from σχῆμα), the plan and specifications of something, so it isn’t just an appearance as in a costume, but the definition of His structure, i.e. the structure of a man.
I’m not positive, but I think that this is definitely linking to the second Temple concept of the “Yahweh Who walks on the Earth as a man”; if that’s the case, the Docetist view is up a creek with only a paddle.
All too common, and the topic of a recent Christianity Today article.
Ouch – but true. We’re not even that good at letting Him into our minds.
Not so much denied, but definitely sidelined. This is often accompanied by a vague Nestorianism where things are done by the divine nature or by the human nature, not both.
Trivia: an odd thing about the issue with Nestorius is that he was trying to emphasize that Jesus really was God and really was man by showing that “Here He is a man” and “Here He is God”. We, on the other hand, tend to assign to one nature or the other according to whether it is convenient to support our beliefs.
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Or on one’s ontology.
We see that reasoning here regularly, though in the more general form of “God used X sometimes, so He always used X”.
I’d only be truly impressed if he also left the not-horse part of the marble intact with the horse form removed from its midst.
Yep – this is not a “Well, MY dad is ” sort of contest, which is what a lot of ‘apologetics’ sounds like.
And the “God works in mysterious ways” meme tends to be a handy excuse.
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I got that one myself the other day. “God’s ways are higher than our ways.” My response was simple: that may be so, but we still need to make sure we’re getting our facts straight. God may move in mysterious ways but that’s not a licence to make things up.
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The one realm where it is legitimate (and necessary) to differentiate between Jesus and everyone else is in the one aspect of humanity that he did not take part in (our sin) and in his divinity.
My favorite example of this comes from Bertrand Russell. Imagine a turkey living on a farm. They’ve spent months living peacefully on the farm. To claim that tomorrow, they would end up on the dinner table (under a frequentist perspective) would be an “extraordinary claim.”
Yet from the farmer’s perspective, tomorrow is thanksgiving, and he wants to have a turkey dinner with his family. From his view, the fact that the turkey will end up as dinner is not extraordinary at all.
I think this example shows the importance of background knowledge (hence Rev Bayes’ famous theorem), and why “extraordinary” evidence under one view may actually be quite ordinary or expected on another 
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I would take that in this sense:
If Jesus was God incarnate there is nothing extraordinary about His miracles or Resurrection. God can do things man cannot.
The problem is with using such a claim to prove Jesus is God. How does one appeal to an extraordinary claim without assuming the correct background knowledge to make that claim intelligible. Which is why I find historical apologetics do not do what apologists want them to.
@Paulm12 , I forgot to say, it’s good to see you back. It’s been a while. Hope RL is going well.
Thanks for your reply. I like your example.
I think I wasn’t entirely clear what I type of response I hoped to elicit from you with “give an example of what you mean here.”
Can you give an example of what you mean here and how it connects with the “Extraordinary/extraordinary” retort.
Perhaps this expresses more clearly what I intended to ask:
Specifically in regard to your example, the resurrection of Jesus, what background knowledge (or maybe rather “types of background knowledge”) you are referring to. What background knowledge would make the resurrection of Jesus ordinary rather than extraordinary?
[Edit: I see @Vinnie and I have been cross-posting in the same thread this evening.]
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