The Tension of Faith

You appear to be missing the context here of Jesus' showing His wounds to Thomas, and then telling him that it would have been better for him to believe the disciples who had told him about the resurrection. There is still evidence but it's witness evidence he should have believed instead of insisting on seeing for himself.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Sorry about that then, but it sure reads like a typical response to claims of miracles anyway, so as a response to that it's quite apt.But I guess your normal intelligent people aren’t bright enough to manage that.

But there again, you are just making stuff up.The Bible itself says that demons and false prophets can perform miracles and even if what you said was true it is not evidence that what happened was a miracle rather than just unexplained.And read your second sentence.John is definitely saying that Jesus' miracles were simply advertising Jesus' divinity according to you.The author of John was simply marketing the Christianity the author of John was trying to create.

Why? How do you know it isn't true? It sounds like you are weighing the evidence here. On the one hand we have a written testimony. But it conflicts with evidence of science. So you favour the latter. But you are still weighing the evidence. Because John is evidence, its just not good enough to overcome the objections. Yes. If Jesus asked the servants to fill the jars, someone writing that Jesus asked the servants of jars is consistent with that. If Anne Frank wrote that her father asked her mother to fill jars this too would be evidence of this event. So? That doesn't prevent it from be evidence. It just makes it unverifiable evidence. Uncorroborated evidence, you might say. It's actually spelt 𒄩𒄠𒈬𒊏𒁉 Yes.

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When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land, assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak; so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash, and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.

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How you decide to weigh this evidence may differ from say, an ancient Babylonian. You can see more of such text in the Code discussed in Message 530. Exactly. But that doesn't make a single strand not a strand. It just means it isn't interwoven. To some extent, but other considerations weaken the corroboration - such as the disagreements between John and the Synoptics, and the evidence of a shared source of the synoptics means using them to corroborate one another is questionable. Just because something is evidence, it doesn't mean one has to accept it as true. Sorry to repeat myself.In law, two parties present evidence - the jury decides the facts. I don't accept something as true just because there is some evidence. There are conflicting pieces of evidence, there are pieces of evidence which call into question certain types of other evidence. We are both skeptical of eyewitness evidence, and one reason you have already cited is DNA evidence. The Bible is real world evidence. It exists right here in the real world. Most of history as we know it is derived from studying writing. Yes, the written word isn't scientific evidence. It's historical evidence. It certainly is less persuasive than direct experiential observation. Not really. You are using a definition of faith that means 'without evidence'. That is: 'blind faith'. But that's trying to win the argument by defining yourself right. Faith simply means 'trust'. Trust in certain authors, trust in God - trust where they might not be the kind of justification for that trust that we might have in other areas. But not trust without any justification at all. Also from that page:

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Faith is a belief that what is said in the Bible is true based on the eyewitness accounts

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From wikipedia:

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Faith is confidence or trust in a particular system of religious belief, in which faith may equate to confidence based on some perceived degree of warrant.

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Or

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hus faith is the outgoing of the wholenature to what it believes to be true, or rather, to Him Who is held to be the Truth. It isthis that Hooker meant when he spoke of faith as including (1) the certainty of evidence,and (2) the certainty of adherence. Faith is not blind, but intelligent
- The Principles of Theology, Griffith-Thomas

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from the same source;

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One witness in the Apostolic Church calls for special attention, the ApostlePaul. He possessed the three essentials of a true witness: intelligence, candour, anddisinterestedness. His conversion and work stand out clearly in regard to his evidence for the Resurrection.

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He affirms that within five years
of the crucifixion of Jesus he was taught that
‘Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again thethird day according to the Scriptures’
That within a very few years of
thetime of the crucifixion of Jesus, the evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus was, in the mind of at least one
man of education, absolutely irrefutable

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In view, therefore, of St. Paul’s personal testimony to his own conversion, and to his interviews with those whohad seen Christ on earth, with the prominence given to the Resurrection in his teaching,we may rightly argue that he stands out beyond all question as a witness to the Resurrection.

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What does your belief have to do with whether it is evidence? The only evidence we have for many things is written. You either trust the author, or you do not. Not trusting the author does not make it 'not evidence' it makes it evidence you believe is incredulous or unreliable.

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Sorry about that then, but it sure reads like a typical response to claims of miracles anyway, so as a response to that it's quite apt.

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Not really, but we can’t expect you to know that. Most explanations don’t make the witnesses stupid or accuse the reporter of lying - unless there is evidence. There are many ways miracle stories can get started.

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But I guess your normal intelligent people aren’t bright enough to manage that.

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Echoing my words is a more effective response when it is appropriate. When it isn’t - I wasn’t the one making claims about normal intelligent people - it just looks silly.

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I have no idea what you are trying to say. Some idea there should have been independent testimony to these things? Why? I'd expect the Christian community to be very aware of all of it, but even so isn't there only the Book of Acts as written evidence among them? Histories weren't written all the time in those days the way they are now, it was a big project to write things down and then have them copied to be distributed, it would have been enough for the news to be passed word of mouth. In any case the Book of Acts itself is good evidence. It certainly has been for two thousand years for those who became Christians. Looks to me like God wasn't bending over backwards to convert skeptics, but made sure people who could recognize sufficient evidence got the message.

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The Samaritans existed long after Acts (they still exist to this day)They were very much a part of history during the Byzantine Empire.Samaritan revolts - WikipediaThe history does not show mass conversion to Christianity in the early 1st century.Perhaps you should look into search engine terms like this:SAMARITANS CHRISTIAN CONVERTS ACTS 7I just don't see how Acts can be considered accurate history (at least the bulk of the material before the later ministry of Paul).The miracles aren't supported even indirectly (which is my point when I notice that important background details - 1st century Samaritans being Christian - aren't supported)

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Samaritans fared badly under the Roman Empire, when Samaria was a part of the Roman-ruled province of Judaea. Though not directly targeted, Samaritans also suffered the severe consequences of Jewish—Roman wars in the area, during and after 66—135 CE.

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Following the period of Jewish—Roman wars, the previously dominating Jewish community went almost extinct across Judaea and the shore of Southern Levant, remaining a majority only in Southern Judea, Galilee and Bashan (Golan). Samaritans and Byzantine Christians filled this vacuum in the central regions of Southern Levant, whereas Nabataeans and Christian Ghassanid Arabs settled the periphery.

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This period is considered a golden age for the Samaritan community. The Temple of Gerizim was rebuilt after the Bar Kochba revolt in Judaea, around 135 CE. With the withdrawal of Roman legions, Samaria enjoyed a limited kind of independence during the 3rd and 4th centuries. Baba Rabba, the leader of the Samaritans, divided Samaritan territories into districts, and established local rulers out of aristocratic Samaritan families. He also executed a series of reforms and installed state institutions. Much of Samaritan liturgy was set by Baba Rabba during this time. This period of semi-independence was brief, however, as Byzantine forces overran Samaria and took Baba Rabba captive to Constantinople, where he died in prison several years later around 362 CE.[3]

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Do you have any evidence of Samaritans becoming Christians?Where was this massive Christian presence in Samaria?Any textual evidence (Josephus?)?Any?

Good. An account that proclaims events actually happened is evidence those events actually happened. It's not proof, of course. It's assessed, but not totally. The jury still hears conflicting evidence and has to decide between them.Historians don't have a filter like in the court analogy - they are the lawyers and the judges and the jury of history. They assess the evidence using various methods - sometimes conflicting methods, sometimes weighing different methods as having different weights, to reach their conclusions. Historians don't just ignore written documents as 'not evidence'. And I, and historians, agree. There's a difference between something intended to be understood as fiction, and something intended to be understood as history. The approach one takes when dealing with them are different. There's no need to assess the historical reliability of Aesop's fables, but the historical reliability of Al-sīra is a different question.

You apparently can't even describe the context, let alone understand the rather simple exchange quoted at the top of Message 676. Sure I did. I guess your memory is failing you, too. This is from Message 676: If you were truly looking back at previous messages then you wouldn't be so confused, and you would be quoting from them to support your position. The reality is that you're making all the mistakes, and I'm the only one quoting from old messages illustrating your mistakes. Chronologies of what? There you are expressing yourself poorly again. What is "i5"? Right, you want a pissing contest. Noted. They certainly didn't happen, either, except in your imagination. Only in your warped little world would continual efforts to find common ground with you be misinterpreted as shifting views and misstatements. So I'll stop trying to find common ground with you. You mean a written document like a technical paper? No, they're not evidence. Only the results of the experiment or investigation constitute evidence. The technical paper is not itself evidence. However it describes the evidence and how to reproduce it. Right, not evidence at all. All science is tentative. You appear to be reading at random rather than in context. You know, it's extremely easy to provide a link to a message. Where is this coming from? Or is this just your latest version of what you really meant, an ungrammatical one at that. I'll assume that where you said "work" you really meant "work out". So your question becomes, "Why is it necessary to work out which part of a largely false account is true?" You follow your question with this clarification: Did you think you just said something coherent?When you can express yourself clearly enough to articulate something rational please try again. You have a vivid imagination. If a point only makes sense to you and no one else, guess what... Well now you've finally said something comprehensible, partly true and useful. Yes, what I've proposed isn't normal usage. I haven't been hiding that, in fact I've said several times that I was trying to look at what qualifies as evidence in a new way. And yes, invariably such proposals can cause misunderstandings. I disagree that it doesn't contribute anything useful. Nah, I can't buy that nonsense, which says that science fiction is evidence of humans piloting extra-galactic spacecraft and traveling through time, and fantasy is evidence of hobbits and trolls and magical rings, and fiction is evidence of fictional people and events, and false testimony is evidence of events that never happened. No, real evidence comes from the real world, and information that cannot demonstrate that it originated in the real world is not evidence. It shouldn't have been necessary. It was clear if you read from context. Yeah, it is disappointing that I can't work out all the details in just a couple days. Yes, I confess to not understanding your incoherent argument. Yes, that's true, I still don't understand your incoherent argument. Anyone want to tell me what this means? Anyone? A little help here, somebody. You're arguing for the plausibility that the likelihood of explanations whose nature you do not and cannot know explain the interpretation as miracles of events that you don't know and cannot know what they were. The mere description of what you're postulating is sufficient to indicate a complete lack of plausibility.As to the plausibility of invention of the miracles, I've already done that. Miracles, the suspension of physical laws, are impossible. If you want to argue for the plausibility of miracles, that's your job.And that's a pissing contest. You wanted it, you fought for it, you got it. Anytime you'd like to return to constructive discussion I'm ready and rarin' to go.--Percy

Even more millions of normal intelligent people, and even some very very educated intelligent people as well, have regarded the evidence of non-Christian religions as sufficient to utterly commit their lives to those religions over many thousands of years, and in so doing made the world a better place, particularly the Buddhists in comparison to the Christians. Truly remarkable that silly Christians today judge those of other religions so cynically and arrogantly.--Percy

My entire point is that that statement is erroneous. It is, at best, an allegation. Evidence is what supports or denies the claim.Otherwise Philip Pullman writing that people have personal daemons is evidence of personal daemons. It is not. It is not assessed by the jury, it is dismissed by the court as inadmissable (because it is not safe, ie not evidence.) Well it was your analogy and I'm pointing out why some form of 'evidence' should not have the accreditation that the word holds. Worthless is the word that springs to mind. Right so we DO have methods of working out what is real evidence and what is not. Good.

Yeah, I know the association with Thomas, and sometimes you mention him, sometimes you don't. See Message 681 - no mention of Thomas. And as you expressed it - "Blessed are those who did not see and yet believed." - it's a pretty good way of expressing true religious faith. You might have noticed the other quote I found that is well expressed, "Faith is acceptance of what we cannot see but feel deep within our hearts."Faith that requires evidence isn't really faith. The endeavor that actually requires evidence is science. If you make religion into something that requires evidence then what you end up with, given the lack of consistency of many religious beliefs with reality, is people fooling themselves about the evidence.--Percy

And my point is that it is not. It is indeed. The claim is 'Jesus performed miracles'. The support is that several people testified that Jesus performed miracles.If the Gospels didn't exist, there would be no evidence that Jesus performed miracles. If Pullman testified that he sees those daemons, and/or reports what witnesses to those who have are saying about them - then it would be evidence. Crap evidence, but evidence. He does not do this. No, you've missed the mark here. Some evidence does not get regarded as legally admissable for reasons. Sometimes because it has no relevance to the crime in question but may prejudice a jury, for instance.The jury, I assure you, still does assess evidence. That is the point of them. They don't assess evidence that does not get admitted, obviously. But they still hear conflicting evidence. This witness says this, this fibre suggests the other, this CCTV supports this notion, this evidence questions the integrity of the time stamp on the CCTV.... The analogy was to point out that evidence can be conflicting and it needs to be assessed. As a jury does:

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A trier of fact, or finder of fact, is a person, or group of persons, who determines facts in a legal proceeding, usually a trial. To determine a fact is to decide, from the evidence, whether something existed or some event occurred

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Maybe you should stop elevating the word evidence, instead? It is just data that is interpreted by someone. Interpretative methods vary, and thus the conclusions about what the interpreted data (evidence) supports and to what degree also differ.

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You apparently can't even describe the context, let alone understand the rather simple exchange quoted at the top of Message 676.

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Except that the problem is yours. You - at best - forgot the context of the discussion and tried to claim that you hadn’t said things attributed to you in one message - by attacking a statement made in another. That’s hardly my mistake.

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Sure I did. I guess your memory is failing you, too.

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No, I knew all about that false claim of yours.

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If you were truly looking back at previous messages then you wouldn't be so confused, and you would be quoting from them to support your position. The reality is that you're making all the mistakes, and I'm the only one quoting from old messages illustrating your mistakes.

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Except that you aren’t proving any mistakes. But if you want to convince me that you are engaging in intentional misrepresentation this is a good way to go about it.

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Chronologies of what?

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The Chronology of the Ancient Near East would be an example although it’s often broken down into separate entries (e,g, Assyrian Chronology)

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There you are expressing yourself poorly again. What is "i5"?

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Trust you to pick on a typo. Which, if you must know is due to changes in the iOS keyboard with iOS 11, of course reading in context could tell you that the word should be it

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Only in your warped little world would continual efforts to find common ground with you be misinterpreted as shifting views and misstatements. So I'll stop trying to find common ground with you.

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Since i’m not referring to your attempts to find common ground it seems that you have just made her another mistake,

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You mean a written document like a technical paper? No, they're not evidence. Only the results of the experiment or investigation constitute evidence. The technical paper is not itself evidence. However it describes the evidence and how to reproduce it.

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I mean any written document at all since that is what you seem to be talking about. But this leaves all the examples where written documents are useful evidence unaddressed.

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You know, it's extremely easy to provide a link to a message. Where is this coming from? Or is this just your latest version of what you really meant, an ungrammatical one at that. I'll assume that where you said "work" you really meant "work out". So your question becomes, "Why is it necessary to work out which part of a largely false account is true?" You follow your question with this clarification:

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It comes from the context you left out - before your full quote. Message 678

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Did you think you just said something coherent?

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I know I did. As I have pointed out 1 Corinthians is useful evidence for Early Christian belief whether it is true or not. False documents can be useful evidence - for some things.

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Well now you've finally said something comprehensible, partly true and useful. Yes, what I've proposed isn't normal usage. I haven't been hiding that, in fact I've said several times that I was trying to look at what qualifies as evidence in a new way. And yes, invariably such proposals can cause misunderstandings. I disagree that it doesn't contribute anything useful.

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It certainly isn’t a good way to convince people of anything, let alone Faith who can’t even accept that the Biblical accounts are of low quality as evidence. And yet you said that you were trying to convince her. Redefinition don’t bring anything new to the table. It seems more like an attempt to delegitimise genuine (if weak) evidence by playing a definition game.

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Yeah, it is disappointing that I can't work out all the details in just a couple days.

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You haven’t even got the basics worked out.

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You're arguing for the plausibility that the likelihood of explanations whose nature you do not and cannot know explain the interpretation as miracles of events that you don't know and cannot know what they were. The mere description of what you're postulating is sufficient to indicate a complete lack of plausibility.

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The mere fact that I listed likely explanations in Message 579 and I am concerned only with explaining the claims made in the cited verses. Which I note do not explicitly interpret the events as miraculous.. Thus I know the nature of the explanations, and all I need know about the miracles.

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As to the plausibility of invention of the miracles, I've already done that. Miracles, the suspension of physical laws, are impossible. If you want to argue for the plausibility of miracles, that's your job

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But the plausibility of miracles is not in question. The question is the plausibility of my explanation versus your idea that the whole account is fiction. Assuming that the account contains explicit miracles is simply wrong, and yet another of your mistakes.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

For a good amount of that history there were incentives for many people to say they found the Bible persuasive, and punishments for saying they didn't. Even now - there are many places where professing broad scepticism in the Bible may harm your career.

Can you give me a bit more to go on? In what I wrote that immediately preceded the part you quoted I gave examples of what seemed appropriate about considering the Gospel of John as evidence, and I offered those to show how different they were from the supposed evidence of miracles to make clear why that doesn't seem like real evidence. I don't know what more you're looking for. Because it's a miracle.I just got back from Mars. I wrote it, so in your book that's evidence. How do you know it isn't true?I think the problem may be that we just throw around the word evidence willy-nilly oftentimes with insufficient justification. One dictionary's definition of evidence is "that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof." Nothing in John tends to prove miracles or be grounds for belief in miracles. John isn't evidence for miracles. John is an origin story for Christianity. I don't see it as evidence. Tangle used the word allegation, and the word statement also seems to fit well, sort of like many Trump tweets, also not evidence, by the way. Well, The Diary of Anne Frank and the Gospel of John are completely different beasts. The likelihood of finding accurate information in a diary is far, far greater than finding it in a religion's origin story full of the supernatural. This again makes me feel like we throw around the word evidence indiscriminately. Everything written or asserted isn't evidence. A lot of it just is - I don't know what to call it, but evidence is the wrong word. Is certainly isn't anything that proves or disproves anything. It's just an unverifiable statement. Displays as boxes in Chrome, but Safari displays it. Neat that there's Cuneiform. Sure, but is it really a possible strand of true history, say a possible part of a document signed by William the Conqueror at Old Sarum? Or is it line from a script from The Man in the High Castle? Calling one possible historical evidence and the other fictional historical evidence just seems, well, wrongheaded. One might be historical evidence, while the other is without question not historical evidence. But John being non-Synoptical is just an excuse to evade the question. There are miracles that appear in all three Synoptics, so choose one of those. Isn't that, for you, evidential corroboration? If not why not? If there's no reason to accept it as true, maybe it shouldn't be considered evidence. But you didn't repeat yourself, at least not in this message. I was apologizing for repeating what I'd just said in the previous paragraph. I only realized it after I wrote it, so I added the apology. Well, like I said, I think the word evidence is overused. Information is presented to the jury. Some of it is evidence. And juries aren't that good at deciding facts. I offer expert witnesses as Exhibiit 1. But my question was about the Bible. For you the Bible contains multiple corroborative accounts of evidence. How do you reject their reality? The Bible exists in the real world, and it is evidence of some things, but it wasn't what I mean by real world evidence. I mean evidence as the results of events in the real world, as opposed to the written word that is a product of people and that has passed through our perceptual/cognitive system.But you also mentioned history, so I would answer in the same way as I addressed the comparison between The Diary of Anne Frank and the Gospel of John. The likelihood of finding accurate information in a genuine history (say, The Histories) is far, far greater than finding it in a religious book full of the supernatural. To paraphrase Juliet, "Not by Faith, inconstant Faith." When she was talking to me (as opposed to berating me) in this thread she kept describing a process whereby faith developed from evidence, and from that faith developed a faith in things unseen. Since the entire chain of faith depended upon evidence at the outset I never could see the distinction between the two types of faith, except as an excuse for believing in the unevidenced, and I still haven't been able to reconcile these claims with her statements something like, "Blessed are those who believe in things unseen." So I'd prefer to not use Faith as an example because I'm never sure what she really thinks. Half the time when I think I'm only echoing her statements back to her I'm called an idiot or some such. So, please, no Faith.Whether adherents wish to acknowledge it or not, all faith is blind faith. They might believe in their hearts that they have evidence, but there are many religions. Their adherents can't all be right about their supposed evidence, and undoubtedly all are wrong. Faith is belief without evidence. Yeah, I wasn't sure what to think about that because it contradicts the other quote. But besides that, it doesn't mention evidence. Again, nothing about evidence. Good stuff, but we already know that evangelicals believe their religion is based upon evidence. You're not going to have any trouble finding stuff on the Internet attesting to that view. Yeah, I understand what you're saying, but I still see it as dissonant to view all occurrences of the written word as evidence of the real world, particularly that which is already known to be fantastical.--Percy