The Tension of Faith

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Why does there need to be evidence against either a physical or spiritual resurrection? Doesn't the burden lie in the other direction to produce evidence that one or the other took place?

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There doesn’t need to be, but the fact that the evidence is there, in their own scriptures really does undermine the Christian position.

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How is it evidence rather than just a story with no supporting evidence?

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There has to be some reason why they said it. That it is based on something that did happen seems to me more likely than that it was a complete fabrication. If they were going to make something up, I would have expected something a bit more detailed and more impressive than people thinking they saw Jesus.

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That's a significant detail I hadn't heard of before. If you're arguing that the Ascension is an invention, then why aren't you also arguing that the other events, like a resurrection and and appearances to individuals and to 500 or some number, are also inventions?

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Well, I’m hardly suggesting that there was a real resurrection. But the main reason for suspecting Luke/Acts to be full of invention and elaboration is that after Mark and Matthew go for a low key approach to the appearances in Galilee Luke/Acts follows on with more impressive and detailed stories which move the action to Jerusalem - with a story that seems to me to be aimed at denying the Galilee appearances - and the Luke/Acts Stories don’t agree that well with 1 Corinthians. Also consider that 1 Corinthians is notably earlier (and even then I think that the number 500 is an exaggeration, as I have already said)

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Why do there have to be any actual events forming a basis for such accounts? Why couldn't they just be invented?

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There don’t have to be, but it seems more likely to me that something happened to spark the belief in the resurrection (it wouldn’t take much). The lack of detail and the comparative neglect of the stories in the Gospels imply that they were unimpressive, and there are events that would plausibly - even probably - occur that would fit the bill for at least most of them. Granted, that is because of the vagueness of 1 Corinthians but that vagueness is likely because nothing much happened.

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In this you see evidence against a physical appearance of Jesus? If so, I'm not seeing it myself. I know you said earlier that Paul's version of the appearance was visionary, and that the scattered appearances were odd, but where is the evidence against a physical appearance?

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As I said, I see it as evidence against a physical resurrection. And that is because a physical resurrection raises the problem of where Jesus was when he wasn’t being seen, and because the evidence - such as it is - can be easily explained without one.

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Why? Some argued that even if Clinton wasn't actually running a pedophilia ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor, that it is based upon something true seems more likely than that it was a complete fabrication. Why?

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That’s because they hate Clinton. To the point of irrationality. There never was any real evidence - just a few emails with slightly odd phrasing - so we know that the rest was made up.On the other hand post mortem hallucinations, dreams about dead people, mistaken identifications are all things that happen quite commonly. And from there cognitive dissonance makes it quite likely that the disciples - some of them, at least - might come up with the idea of the resurrection. But if they wanted to manufacture evidence - as later Christians may well have done - then a vague list of disconnected appearances isn’t exactly a likely choice.

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Or it could have been based upon some existing religious mythology.

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Do you have any evidence it was ?

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I understand your argument, but others might have different opinions (Faith, for example), and this isn't evidence.

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An argument isn’t evidence but it explains why the text may be considered evidence, and I certainly don’t think that Faith would argue that Paul made it up.But really this is inference to the best explanation. If you accept that Jesus existed then I have a parsimonious explanation of why the belief in the resurrection started, why there is so little about the appearances prior to Matthew and why we find so much variance in the Gospel (plus Acts) accounts of the appearances. That’s pretty good going, for a question of history.

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Yeah, sorry, I'm still not seeing the evidence. I understand your arguments, but they're based on your preferred interpretations, not evidence. When faced with someone with other interpretations all you've got is argument against argument, not evidence. There's no evidence in the NT for anything, including the resurrection, neither physical nor spiritual.

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If you are going to ignore any written accounts you will lose a lot of history. While written accounts are not always good evidence for what they claim (something that needs to be established case by case) the fact that the thing has been written is evidence in itself. Just saying that it could be complete fiction and ignoring it is not really a sensible view.And if you don’t see inference to best explanation to be a valid argument - and that seems to be implicit in your claim not to see the evidence - you are losing even more.

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That they hate Clinton to the point of irrationality is your unevidenced argument, which is the same type of argument you started with when you said, "There had to be some reason why they said it." You don't have evidence but rather unevidenced arguments guided by your own opinions

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I don’t doubt that if you look at their other writings you will find plenty of evidence of their hate. It’s hardly uncommon. Trump even played on it during the election.
The fact remains that they constructed a grand conspiracy out of almost nothing, while I am pointing to a very mundane explanation of something widely believed to be extraordinary.

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That's the opinion you're arguing for, not evidence.

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The fact that the reported appearances can be explained by mundane and common occurrences is evidence and not opinion. The rest is argument. Why should we prefer the idea that it was all made up to the idea that it reports ordinary, even expected events ?

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No, of course not. I was only offering yet another possibility that has no evidence. And your own preferred scenario has no evidence. If you chose you could argue all day with someone about which of these possibilities is correct, but you'd never settle anything because no evidence exists

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On the contrary, I win on parsimony. You have to assume that the existing religious mythology existed and would be used. I don’t.

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Here's an example of a Bible-related claim that has evidence: the tale of Noah is not original but has its origins in an older tale. The evidence is the older Epic of Gilgamesh. The parallels are undeniable. Issue settled.

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And let me point out that writing is the only evidence you have for that. And someone taking a similarly sceptical viewpoint could argue that the story in the Bible (or the stories mashed together to make the Biblical version) was made up independently.

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The opinion I thought Faith would disagree with was yours, the one where you said that the accounts about the appearances of Jesus were insufficiently detailed and impressive.

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The lack of detail in 1 Corinthians is an obvious fact, and while it would hardly surprise me to see Faith disagree with the Bible it is not certain. Equally, just thinking that they saw Jesus isn’t that impressive and that is all you can rationally get from 1 Corinthians.

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Is there evidence that Jesus existed?

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There is but you've made it plain that you won’t accept it.

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A "parsimonious explanation" is not evidence

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Can you please stop this silly confusion over evidence. If I have the best explanation - and a parsimonious explanation with significant explanatory power is certainly good, and you haven’t come close to anything better - then the facts that are explained should be considered evidence for the explanation.

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It seems more a question of religious claims.

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The question of what actually happened, using no theological assumptions at all, preferring naturalistic explanations to miracles looks like historical investigation to me. Why call it religious ?Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

It’s worth pointing out that the Gospels lack many of the traits of the more reliable bioi and can be classed with the far less reliable novelistic form.

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In a Google search, "Graeco-Roman biography" is only ever mentioned in connection with the Gospels. Rather than "a historical, non-fiction genre," it seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of justifying the Gospels.

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That may be because low-grade apologists are drowning out the respectable voices.See this for a better view of the issues.

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I'm not ignoring written accounts. I'm arguing that written accounts are not evidence. The original claim that began this subdiscussion was that the Bible contains the evidence of its own truth and accuracy, and of course this isn't true. No writing contains the evidence of its own truth and accuracy. The point I'm arguing is not that written accounts should be ignored, but that they are not evidence.

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You are certainly ignoring written accounts as evidence and that is wrong. A written account may even have features that are - limited - evidence of reliability, although those are notably lacking in the Bible.It would be fairer to say that written accounts - without corroborating evidence - are often very poor evidence for the events that they recount.Consider, where can we find names but in written documents ? Records of astronomical events are used to establish chronologies. The Amarna letters tell us of the dealings of the Egyptians with their neighbours. Josephus gives us a good - if heavily biased account of the Jewish revolt.

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I'm not saying that anything in particular in the Bible is "complete fiction" and should be ignored.

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You are certainly suggesting that the appearances of 1 Corinthians could be complete fiction. And could be is the wording I used.

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Consider a couple newspaper articles as an example, one from Breitbart News, the other from The New York Times. The two articles disagree on some point. Neither article contains evidence, of course. The articles can be about and can describe evidence, but they cannot contain evidence or be evidence. To settle the disagreement between the two articles you must go back to the evidence. Resolution of the disagreement definitely does not reside in deeper analysis of the articles with arguments like "they wouldn't say it that way if it weren't true" and "this isn't convincing because it doesn't contain enough detail."

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That the articles do not contain sufficient evidence to resolve their dispute does not mean that they are not evidence at all. You may reject the considerations we use to determine reliability - I suppose you have to to maintain your position - but that does not mean you are right to do so. There may well be points of agreement, for instance that are likely true.

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I think making inferences from available information is a fine way to argue, but inferences are only as good as the information they're based upon, and if the information is not an accurate reflection of the original evidence then the inferences are, well, garbage-in/garbage out. That's what's wrong with the way you're arguing - you have no idea of the quality of the information you're working with.

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That might be a sensible argument if I was uncritically accepting the claims. However, simply dismissing my evaluation does not make it go away. I am not uncritically accepting the claims, I have reasons to think them largely reliable - in what little they actually say (in part because it is so little).

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I wasn't expressing doubt that they hate Clinton. I was merely echoing your own words when I said, "That they hate Clinton to the point of irrationality is your unevidenced argument.

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And you completely missed the point. The evidence is readily available - and well known enough that it hardly needs repeating when it is not even the subject of discussion. That is the point. Simply because - for the sake of time - I did not produce the evidence in my post doesn’t mean that it does not exist and I am sure that you know it exists.

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Your explanation is mundane, but that anything like it ever happened is unevidenced. Paraphrasing your line of argument, "We can accept the Biblical passages as correct because it is always possible to invent mundane explanations for anything fantastical." For all you know you're inventing mundane explanations for complete fictions.

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That is somewhat distorted. I am not inventing explanations - I am pointing to known phenomena that adequately fit the description given. And let us note that you ARE resorting to the could be fiction argument to disregard the text.

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That it's all made up is just one of the possibilities I added to your list, not my conclusion. What I actually think is that the claims are unevidenced and that there are many reasons for questioning their credibility (meaning the degree to which they conform with the original evidence, were it to still exist after all this time), such as internal and external contradictions and inconsistencies, as well as impossibilities. A story in which someone rises from the dead, makes a number of appearances, then ascends to heaven, isn't one that lends a lot of confidence in the truth or accuracy of the other details.

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Of course, 1 Corinthians doesn’t mention Jesus rising to heaven.However, isn’t it reasonable to say that 1 Corinthians 15 is evidence that early Christians believed that Jesus had died and been resurrected ? And that the appearances are cited as evidence of that resurrection ? And that the appearances - because they are so feeble as evidence of that - could easily be things that actually happened and explain why Jesus’ followers came to believe in a resurrection ?

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One more time, writing isn't evidence.

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The only evidence that lets you tell that the Flood story in the Bible is derive from the Flood story in the Epic of Gilgamesh is there in the writing. Just chanting writing isn’t evidence like a mantra doesn’t change that fact.

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But more importantly, parsimony isn't related to my argument about the relationship between writing and the extent to which it is based on evidence.

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Then that would be a clear mistake on your part. Parsimony is an important criterion - and departing from it is necessarily going beyond the evidence.

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But I don't feel confused about evidence. The confusion seems to lie on the other foot. You can have all the parsimony in the world, but parsimony based on unevidenced information of unknown credibility isn't worth much.

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But in fact it is clearly credible that the early Christians believed in the appearances. And - given that there are highly likely events that could be described as such - it is credible that something of the sort happened.

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Because you're trying to extract history from a religious book where one of the possibilities for some or all of the events is that nothing ever happened. For example, some or all of the miracles, rather than being naturalistic events that actually took place but that were misinterpreted as miracles, may never have happened at all, may simply have been invented because people found miracles convincing.

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If the naturalistic explanations were unlikely or inadequate I would tend to agree. But when they are likely and adequate and offer an explaination of why the resurrection belief came to be then - unless there are other factors that count against - it is entirely reasonable to take the account as evidence that events did work out that way. Not proof, but evidence can and often does fall far short of proof.

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My point wasn't about why the first Christians should hold the beliefs outlined in the Gospel accounts, but why we should consider them credible today.

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However, there must have been some good reason for them to believe and live as they did.

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I don’t think that they needed any better reasons than the people who followed Frank Taze Russell or Joseph Smith.

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It is more of a belief than an assumption

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What would be the distinction ?

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I would add that the leaders of those various groups can in general be shown to have a motive for what they instituted. As near as I can tell there is no discernible motive for the NT authors.

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We know very little about the NT authors, moreover they were not the ones that started Christianity (except, perhaps, Paul). So really that isn’t much of an argument. Even then, the Gospel authors rather obviously had a motivation to promote their religion for one thing.

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They kinda did. Early Christians had a lot of enemies and many died because of their faith.

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It’s actually not clear just how bad it was. But we do know that the Mormons faced some serious persecution.

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Of course we don't know who the authors were but here is an account of what happened to the twelve apostles from National Geographic.

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And even a cursory glance tells me that they are telling us what is supposed to have happened, according to stories which may or may not be true.

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It is one thing to promote the Gospels today but it was dangerous business then

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Allegedly. Some of the stories may well be fictional, and persecution seems to have been quite sporadic. The Biblical accounts don’t have records of many being killed at all.

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I'm sure you wouldn't feel free to give your utterly uneducated opinion on some authoritative scientific treatise, in fact you'd be very polite and deferential to those who have studied it more than you have, but for some reason ignorami feel quite free to slather the Bible with their ignorance.

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Indeed you do. Perhaps you should show proper deference to those who have studied it instead of lying about them and dismissing their work.

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And that includes the "scholars" who make it all up as they go along too instead of submitting to it as God's word.

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But, of course, you won’t.

Well, that is riddled with errors and falsehoods and unsupported assertions.But to deal with the central point, evidence does not have to be infallibly true. Only tautologies are infallibly true and they are useless as evidence. That something might be wrong or untrue is not a good reason to disregard it as evidence - because everything we use as evidence MIGHT be wrong or untrue.

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Gee, I had no idea discussion was so easy. Just skip all the arguments and get right to the smears.

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Maybe if you bothered to lay out a coherent position I’d feel more like putting in the work to answer it. But after losing one post it just wasn’t worth the effort to rewrite it.

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Reality is always infallibly true. Evidence that results from real events is reliable, dependable, true. The written word could be true, false, anywhere in between, or a combination.

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Unfortunately for you we do not have reality, only our perception of reality which could be true, false, anywhere in between, or a combination. And it is impossible to be absolutely certain which it is.

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There is a profound difference between evidence produced by real events versus what is produced by filtering reality through the meanderings of the human mind, or not even involving reality at all.

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Our perceptions of reality go through the same filtering. When the writer is being honest we are getting their perception of reality. That problems exist does not mean that they cannot be dealt with adequately.

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It feels like you're arguing this way only because you believe the NT is true on the general details except where they misinterpreted some natural phenomena as miracles

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Which is a fine example of your perception of reality being utterly wrong. If anyone should be accused of bias, surely it must be the person who is taking the clearly unreasonable land extreme position - which would be you.In reality I have no problem dismissing parts of the NT as fiction. Both Nativity stories are in my view fictional. The Empty Tomb story is more likely fiction than fact. If you cannot distinguish between unctprituczlly excepting a story as fact and carefully evaluating it to pull out the bits that are likely true then the problem is yours and it is quite a severe one.

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I'm also sorry you can't find anything coherent in the position I've layed out. The position itself can be expressed simply: The written word is not evidence. The rationale for that position is somewhat longer, and it become significantly longer as our discussion progressed.

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Except that you do accept written words as evidence for some things, and yet reject them in other cases that seem eminently reasonable - I’m thinking of the use of ancient astronomical records in dating. And your rationale - that the mere possibility of error or falsehood disqualifies a thing as evidence applies to everything we might consider evidence.So, no, you don’t have a coherent position.

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True, but that's a constant that applies to everything we view, whether the written word or true evidence.

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That’s my point. If it applies to true evidence then it cannot be the criterion that distinguishes between things that are evidence and things that are not.

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This is a clear statement of how you feel, but you include no justification. That what people say and write is frequently unreliable is hardly an "unreasonable and extreme position."

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Except that isn’t even a distinction between your position and mine. Which rather proves my point. If you really think that is all there is to your position you don’t understand what you are saying at all. And if you realise that you have gone a LOT further than that then you aren’t even being honest here.

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We're not so far apart as you think. We agree that some parts of the NT are true, some are false, some are unverifiable, some are internally or externally inconsistent or both, and some are impossible. Where we disagree is on our ability to accurately ferret out which category each passage falls into.

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If you wanted to argue specifically about that then you could fairly take in my arguments. Instead you assert that I am inventing implausible naturalistic explanations for supernatural events - and that my descriptions don’t even fit the events. Yet you never offered any support for either claim unless we count your sudden introduction of a claim made in a different book by a different author written decades later (Acts instead of 1 Corinthians).

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It's clear that the bible is not evidence that any of the things written in them are/were real, just that someone - we don't even know who - wrote them. Not if we're following any modern-day scientific or legal evidential standards anyway

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Percy has clearly rejected modern-day scientific and legal standards as inadequate. All allow things that could be wrong as evidence. The legal system even allows personal testimony.For my part it seems obvious that we should be applying the standards of history. Further it should be obvious that I am not uncritically accepting the Bible’s claims - in fact I am claiming that assertions made as evidence for the resurrection of Jesus are evidence against a physical resurrection and aren’t evidence of any sort of resurrection at all.And that is from a book of the Bible where we do know the author, for once,

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But to be properly evidential, the accounts really need to be written by eye witnesses contemporaneously - and even then you'd need to have other corroborating evidence to justify accepting the stories as anything but mythology similar to the Norse legends

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I don’t accept a simplistic binary distinction, nor do I think that using texts as evidence is limited to supporting the claims made in the text. The books of the Bible are often poor evidence. But we can certainly analyse the texts and learn some things from them - often things that people like Faith don’t want us to know.

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Scientific enquiry has evidential standards and the bible doesn't meet them by a country mile. What we're left with would be of only passing interest to a few niche historians if it wasn't for the whole edifice errected on it.

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Except where it intersects with histories of more important players like the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Seleucids and so on.But again, why insist in scientific standards instead of historical standards ? Surely history is the discipline that applies.

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But that's exactly all it can do. Without further corroberation, it's just another book of fables. The world is full of them.

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That’s just ridiculous. The Noah stories are evidence that the Flood story was quite widespread in the Middle East - by their obvious relationship to the story in the Gilgamesh Epic. That’s got nothing to do with the question of whether the story is true.

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Well of course, it's stuffed full of folk knowledge recycled from generations before.

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Including some true history - some claims in the Bible are supported by evidence from outside, both archaeological and documentary.

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And of course it's also riddled with inconsistencies and stuff that these days we call utterly immoral. But none of it meets any evidential standard whatsoever.

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That’s your opinion. But if you can come up with a sensible reason for ignoring the similarities in the Flood stories, I’m sure Faith will thank you for it.

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History is definately the discipline that applies, but only because there's nothing else. It's the best we have but it's still zip as far as evidence for the stories within them. We have some writings which we can all accept are historical and tell us something about a few people and their mythology at the time. But it's only evidence of somebody writing some stories at the time

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There is still stuff in there that can fill out the picture we have if that corner Of the world. It may be biased and it may have unhistorical stuff mixed with the history, but read with a properly critical eye there is useful stuff in there. Even Chronicles has - hidden away a little story that hints that the ancestors of the Israelites stayed in Canaan instead of heading off to Egypt - and archaeology agrees. (1 Chronicles 7:20-24). That’s evidence supporting the conclusions of archaeology.

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And that's cobblers. The flood story in the bible is just a story. And it's obviously preposterous with vast amounts of real evidence proving that there was never any such thing as a global flood which is it's entire meaning. It doesn't provide the evidence that the story it is meant to support.

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Of course I was using it as an example of how a Biblical story can be evidence for something OTHER than what the story says. Which you foolishly dismissed.