It dos not. The cosmological argument–and not the KCA version which is all pop-apologists on the internet seem to know-- says they all depend on a prime mover/unmoved mover/first cause in the hierarchical, vertical, or sustaining sense (causation per se). This the most fundamental deduction of God’s existence there is and all our classical beliefs about God naturally arise and stem from this act/potency distinction. If you want to defend God’s existence, for me, the is the money ball and the best place to focus on. Fine-tuning is supplementary and defensive. That it is subject to scientific change alone makes this the case.
It most certainly is deniable. See above. Also creation declares the glory of God and shows the work of His hands. An infinite number of universes is hardly inconsistent with God’s glory. One might argue it still underestimates it. Heck, I’ve read some arguments by theists that claimed the opposite, that God didn’t exist if the multiverse was not real. Then some claim our universe is too big or old which is easily answerable.
This shows they have bad metaphysics. A multiverse doesn’t indicate reality is meaningless or that humans are not special. We may not even be uniquely special in our own universe. Instead of doubling down on their bad metaphysics based on a mechanistic image of God and scientism, I find it better to try to discuss the source of the problem. Why is there something rather than nothing is a great question. So is why does everything continue to exist.
Engaging in scientific proofs for God is only serving to reinforce their adherence to scientism. The materialist worldview is the problem, not the multiverse. It may turn out that a multiverse is true and necessary from models like inflation. I agree people falsely latch onto it because they think it solves the fine-tuning problem (from their perspective) but that does not mean the underlying scientific data will or will not come to be seen as correct.
A theist willingly conceding God’s existence depends on a multiverse not existing is absurd to me. You have lost the debate before it even begins if you concede this.
The skeptic will say you have a report from one guy claiming 500 people saw Jesus possibly a decade or two removed from the potential event(s) itself. This is not the same as 500 people saying this. Claiming Paul was wrong/lying/exaggerating is probably not a reasonable skeptics first choice in the matter but I’d guess its more reasonable (since people do do those things all the time) than someone rising from the dead (since people don’t do such things ever). You have just used a similar argument. “Hallucinations don’t happen like that.” Well, all those irreversible chemical/biological/physical changes in death just don’t reverse like that. How is the atheist/skeptic not permitted to believe in an odd occurrence of mass hallucination but you are permitted to believe something science would have immense difficulty with occurred based on the same type of thinking?
For me, historical apologetics can get us to just before the finish line. They don’t get us across. I think what @Christy said here is quite acute:
It is a methodological difficulty. How do you use probability based arguments (history) to convince someone the most improbable of events (a supernatural miracle) actually happened in some specific instance? You do so by starting with the Cosmological argument and show that every object in existence is a miraculous creation from nothing each instant. Arguing from the perspective of materialism or giving skeptics this home field advantage is conceding the debate before it starts.
That is true. These skeptics are inconsistent. But it doesn’t follow that a multiverse is or is not real, or that a miracle did or did not occur. You can point out the inconsistency which hopefully softens them up to the alternative view but the work still remains to be done. For me, clearly someone entrenched at that level of skepticism may need to be shown that their underlying conception of the world is false. I doubt second or third-hand reports from individuals 2000 years ago are going to be very convincing to staunch skeptics (we can’t cross examine Paul or any of the alleged 500).
Heck, many Christians deny modern mass miracles. Do you think modern Protestants accept any appearances of the Virgin Mary? I would say they dismiss them armed with sola scripture, their own preconceived modern Anti-Mary bias and the same materialistic logic and skepticism employed by modern atheists and skeptics to deny the Resurrection. This is a problem that even plagues Christians.As I said, ABEs tend to follow for a lot people from what we already believe and they are harmonized into those categories. It is difficult to see how the evidence for Fatima is not monumentally better than for the Resurrection. Thought I would claim Fatima–an appearance of the Virgin Mary-- lends support to central claims of Christianity itself. Atheist skeptic Alex O’Connor has called Protestants out on this point:
So before you can convince atheists the 500 of Paul is good evidence, maybe you need to convince a billion Christians the much better miraculous evidence for Mary appearing is real. The truth is, Protestants have no business appealing to historical apologetics for the resurrection. They cannot do so consistently.
Well, that is the major problem that needs fixing. Playing the game on their own terms only reinforced their underlying problem. Cut the head off the snake.
That may point…a gap in scientific knowledge may point to a miracle as well. That track record has not turned out well. I agree that the fine-tuning problem should open people up to the possibility of God that are staunchly against it based on science. It really should push them to agnosticism or weak atheism which I consider the same thing. It’s a good seed to plant.
The historical arguments for the Resurrection don’t do for me what they do for you. They don’t cross (no pun intended) the finish line using pure historical methodology. If you dig into the weeds of critical scholarship, it’s difficult to even establish the existence of an empty tomb for many interpreters. And even if you do establish this as more probable than not, once you start stacking probability arguments that depend on one another, all of them being correct and your overall thesis do down. You don’t get to say it is more probable than not Jesus was buried in a large empty tomb (80/20) and so Jesus was in a tomb. To add to this: now it is probable the disciples knew where it was (90/10) and went there to see his body or perform certain ceremonial rights (80/20)…but in the historical argument is based on a number of these and when you stack a bunch of probabilities where if only one of them is wrong the outcome is false, the argument is much weaker.
The point is, when you start adding probability arguments all based on questionable assumptions, the total conclusion of the whole argumentative chain becomes weaker.
All the historical evidence strongly lines up and coheres with our essential belief about Jesus’s death and resurrection. Whether or not you can prove “God acted here” (a theological statement not a historical one) or that a supernatural miracle occurred (methodological difficulty) s another matter.
I don’t think of myself as needing to exhaustively prove the Gospel using historical methodology which is inherently based on methodological naturalism for many scholars.
I can make Christianity 10000% palatable. It’s up to the sheep to read the words of Jesus. If they are His, they will hear His voice and know Him. I am also not convinced intellectual problems are the deepest reason why people reject God but they are a problem and the ends of the intellect is to seek truth so that is what we do.
26 From one ancestor[e] he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27 so that they would search for God[f] and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28 For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’;
Jeremiah 29:13: You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
In Jesus and Divine Christology, Brant Pitre wrote: “. . . the best explanation for why the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus believed he was divine shortly after his death is because Jesus himself spoke and acted as if he were divine during his lifetime. Indeed, when we interpret the words and deeds attributed to Jesus in a first-century Jewish context, a strong case can be made that the historical Jesus claimed to be divine, but he did so in a very Jewish way—using riddles, question, and allusions to Jewish Scripture to both reveal and conceal the apocalyptic secret of his divinity. As we will see, it is precisely the riddle-like and scripturally allusive nature of Jesus’s divine claims that gave birth to an early Christology that as simultaneously both very “high” (i.e., divine) and very “low) (i.e., human).” Jesus and Divine Christology.
Why did Jesus speak in parables? Why did he reveal his divinity using riddles and allusions? It’s about active seeking, not passive finding through facts.
In my experience, many Christians so bent on proving Jesus through historical arguments are really trying to prove it to themselves. Its therapy. I think they are often mixing things up and trapped in a materialistic framework (as you said: “even the very author of the discussion consider the strongest argument for God”).
The Cross and Resurrection is the strongest statement in Creation of God saying I love you, I forgive you, I have you, come home. It is the strongest example of gratuitous love overflowing. But Paul says it is thoroughly foolishness to those who are perishing. Do you and the author of this thread disagree with him on this point?
Vinnie