The Tension of Faith

The evidence is sufficient for many Christians? Do you really think many Christians have looked into the evidence for who wrote John? Also, I wasn't sure if by Christians you meant all Christians, or only those Faith considers Christians.Anyway, the reason who wrote John came up is because Faith said that the Gospel author's account of Jesus' ministry can be trusted because he was an eyewitness.I've always had reservations about the Apostles being real people. Twelve Apostles, twelve Tribes of Israel? Too coincidental for me.--Percy

Yes. Not 'most'. But many, for sure. It's not a hyper-obscure theological point held by some edge case of Christians. I expect most Christians actually think the Gospel of John is called that because that is what it calls itself right at the top! But I expect it's something that gets covered in plenty of seminaries and schools of divinity and that kind of thing. I don't think the distinction makes a difference to my point. Indeed: the Gospel of John claims at least some of its contents were provided by an eye witness who it is at least implied, is John, but certainly a disciple. If you have faith that this is eye witness testimony, one can understand treating its claims with more credibility than someone who has faith that it is some person(s) unconnected writing a Gospel for financial reasons. Either way, I don't think its coincidence. Either it is a deliberately piece of symbolism constructed by its authors, or it was symbolism constructed by Jesus.A better example might be Jesus' journey to Egypt. Kind of reeks of a tortured narrative to squeeze a "...and out of Egypt I called My son" reference. There's no reason to suppose that if the story is remotely true, this was constructed by Jesus for symbolism. So either it's a coincidence, an author's conceit, or God's hand (which if all the Gospels are totally true would, I suppose, be Jesus' construction....). If we dismiss coincidence, then it's a matter of faith (or lack thereof) in the author as to which way to turn.

Read the entire Bible then, it's chock full of evidence for miracles, in both the Old and New Testaments. You aren't going to get any better kind of evidence for miracles than eyewitness reports, and secondhand reports are just as believable in the context of the Bible. Miracles are one-time events, and in many cases thousands upon thousands witnessed them as reported in the OT and NT. We have the benefit of all that witness testimony, our cup runneth over and you act like you're dying of thirst for a miracle or a genuine Bible author. God's gone to great lengths to give you everything you could possibly need for belief, so sad to see it distrusted and rejected.I guess you want to see a miracle for yourself? That's the only thing that will convince you? The God who said "Blessed are those who did not see and yet beleived" already did that for Thomas as an extra aid to skeptics such as yourself, and isn't too likely to do that for you personally. So do without miracles then, you have opportunities galore to believe in them and if you don't it's your loss. And your own fault.You doubt the number of the apostles? But we know these things were done consciously, they are part of the whole fabric of God's redemptive plan. Twelve patriarchs, twelve apostles. It all works together. You choose to disbelieve some of the most interestingly believable parts of the revelation.Yes i believe the traditions, I believe they come from honest people. I do not believe the modern scholars. I do not believe anyone who talks about the Bible in terms like "Well the evidence is a bit thin for this but on the other hand..."God says "believe." "Repent and believe." That's what He tells you. Try it sometime.

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I agree that my position as you've expressed it has issues, but that's not my position. Evidence is the result of events in the real world. The written word is a method of recording evidence, an imperfect one, but isn't evidence itself. I've been calling it information whose accuracy and correspondence to reality may be good, bad or absent, or anywhere along that spectrum. Evidence always corresponds to reality

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And yet you have said all the things I attributed to you. If you disagree with yourself you certainly don’t have a coherent position. Written documents are, of course, the result of events in the real world. Just - usually - not direct results of the events recorded in them (but often indirect results)

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You've misremembered what I said about astronomical records. I used the example of Tycho Brahe, saying that meticulous as he was, even he made recording errors. I didn't even mention the scribal errors that crept into his records.

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If you want to say I misremembered you could at least produce a relevant error. Instead of introducing something I didn’t even mention.

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I'm afraid it's all we have,

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We’ve got to use a useless criterion because it’s all we have? Given the fact that nobody else uses it it seems entirely possible to do without it.

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It is the unreliability of the written and spoken word and it's disconnection from reality by it's passage through the human perception system that defines a true distinction between our positions, so I myself don't see what you say as proving your point.

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You actually think I have been arguing that written records are not subject to that unreliability ? Really ?While I won’t quote here, you did say that my explanations of the appearances in 1 Corinthians were both unlikely events and inadequate to explain the appearances in 1 Corinthians. Message 626With zero evidence to support either claim.

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I said in an earlier message that I was discussing the entire NT, not just 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 except where I hopefully made it clear that's what I was talking about.

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By which you mean that the discussion had to lump,all the NT stories about the appearances together as one thing, despite there being multiple contradictory accounts by different authors. Which is a silly thing for you to do, and it is certainly not sensible to insist that I must be doing it to. You don’t get to change what I am talking about by unilaterally deciding that the topic is broader.

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Sorry I seem to be making such a hash of this for you. I wish I could do a better job, but I'm doing the best I can.

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See above for many things you shouldn’t be doing.

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Gee, that's so strange, because I don't recall ever saying anything like that.

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And yet you say that a criterion that would cause us to reject all potential evidence must be used because it’s all we have.

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Read the entire Bible then, it's chock full of evidence for miracles, in both the Old and New Testaments

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Claims of miracles - especially in ancient documents, which tend to be credulous - are hardly adequate evidence that a miracle occurred.

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You aren't going to get any better kind of evidence for miracles than eyewitness reports...

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For some ancient miracles there can never be adequate evidence. But for large scale miracles there could be more than there is.

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...and secondhand reports are just as believable in the context of the Bible

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Because appearing in a collection of unreliable documents makes implausible claims more believable ?

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God's gone to great lengths to give you everything you could possibly need for belief, so sad to see it distrusted and rejected.

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Essentially then you are claiming that God got things stupidly wrong so we should pretend that he got it right. I guess that’s what Biblical inerrancy is all about, but it hardly seems to fit with Christian belief.Miracles are such unlikely events and miracle stories so common in ancient literature that the natural conclusion is that the stories are generally false. Providing miracles that will only appear as stories, then, is not doing anything to encourage belief in any rational person. Especially when the sources are often unreliable in other ways.

Well yes, obviously the bible contains stories about a real time and a place. No one doubts that, say, Jerusalem existed. Having it mentioned in the stories isn't remarkable and adds nothing.Philip Pullman writes his fantasy stories based around Oxford. Oxford exists roughly as he speaks of it but the fantastical stories he creates there do not. Jesus may well have gone to Jerusalem, no one would care, but as soon as he does it in triumph - the people laid down their cloaks and branches in front of his donkey singing to him and all the city was moved - this is a claim of a prophecy being fulfilled and a great leader returning. For this we real evidence, not a story in a book.In 2,000 years time scholars will read Pullman's book and note that it mentions the Bodleian library, is that evidence that Oxford existed? I suppose it is, but it's trivial evidence and it wholly unnecessary as there are mountains of other sources that can corroborate it beyond all doubt. But the remarkable claim that people there had daemons needs more than his story to support it. In of itself, is it evidence of the existence of daemons in Oxford? I didn't dismiss it, foolishly or otherwise. I accepted your point that the flood story may refer to an actual flood. But like a mention of Jerusalem or Oxford, so what?The point of the flood story in the bible is not that there were floods - that's utterly unremarkable - but that there was a global flood caused by a god that killed all life on earth, save that in Noah's boat. This is a critical part of a religious belief for which there needs to be real evidence, the story of it is not evidence.The point I'm making is that sure, the bible contains stuff that is historical, but that's of no consequence because the evidence we need is that which supports the major claims - that god was at work there causing genocide, raising the dead and turning water into wine and so on. But all we have are unsupported stories.What is it that distinguishes the Bible stories from Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' stories such that we can call one evidential and the other not?Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

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Well yes, obviously the bible contains stories about a real time and a place. No one doubts that, say, Jerusalem existed. Having it mentioned in the stories isn't remarkable and adds nothing.

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There is far more than that. King Omri, for instance was a real person, and the founder of a dynasty that ruled Israel for some generations.

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I didn't dismiss it, foolishly or otherwise. I accepted your point that the flood story may refer to an actual flood

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That is rather odd since I never made any such claim. The point which you managed to ignore for the third time in a row is that the text contains evidence of the spread of a story. (It also contains evidence that the writer of those chapters of Genesis mashed two versions of the story together)

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The point I'm making is that sure, the bible contains stuff that is historical, but that's of no consequence because the evidence we need is that which supports the main claim - that god was at work there causing genocide, raising the dead and turning water into wine and so on. But all we have are unsupported stories.

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And I say that your focus on that is blinding you to the other uses of the Biblical text of evidence. As you have quite clearly demonstrated.

It's none of the above, or all of them. What we name the discipline is irrelevant, what matters are the facts and whether they're supported by anything credible. The discussion about whether something is evidence or not is spurious, we could claim almost anything to be evidence of something. The issue is whether the stories about specific key events amount to anything more than just stories about them?To evaluate that we would normally apply evidential standards that we trust and the fact that we can't apply those standards tells us that the claims can not be supported. Finding something written down is evidence that someone wrote something down. If that's your point, well ok, I agree. But it's a trivial declaration; at most it's a start of a process to look for real evidence.

Not really. Some random girl put my name down as the father of her child on a birth certicate because she thought I was rich, even though I've never even met her in my life. Paternity tests showed that it was highly improbable for me to be the father of the child.I've only have had sex with one person in my life. My wife. That's it.Go science. Forget people writing stuff down. People tend to lie and hallucinate.Edited by Pressie, : No reason given.

We're on the same page, then, though about this part: For me "many" would have to be a rather small percentage of Christians. In talking religion with Christian friends I've never found anyone who comes close to what you might call knowledgable. I always turn out to be the most knowledgeable person about the Bible, and I don't know much. I would expect that in less religious Britain that this would be even more true. Maybe not. I only said that because different religions place different emphases on knowing your Bible. You're forcing me to guess which passage you're talking about, so I'll guess that you're referring to this passage:

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John 21:24 This is the disciple who testifies about these things and has written these things, and we know that his testimony is true.

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Sorry if I guessed wrong, but at least here there doesn't seem to be any implication of an eyewitness, and the assumption that the author is the disciple whom Jesus loved, mentioned in the previous paragraph, isn't implied anywhere either - I think it's more just part of Christian tradition. The Gospel certainly says it was a disciple, and a very particular (though never identified) disciple, but the whole Gospel is a story filled with so much hooey that it's difficult to associate credibility with any of it. The key part of this passage is "If you have faith..." I think what people accept on faith is a personal matter and it raises no complaint from me. But I could never agree that John *is* true (in the sense of literally inerrant) and *does* contain direct eyewitness testimony. Yeah, you're right, that's a better example. A couple of times now you've referred to the possibility of Jesus as an active player in the construction of his story, so I should make you aware that I don't believe Jesus was a real person.--Percy

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the Bible is "chock full of stories of miracles"? Wouldn't it be more accurate to call them stories about people seeing miracles?If someone approached you tomorrow with a tale of yesterday seeing the Virgin Mary glowing bright on a hilltop, a direct eyewitness report, would you believe them? Whatever your answer, the problem is obvious. People can say anything, true or not, and if someone were to write her account into an article in the weekly Church gazette, that doesn't turn it into eyewitness evidence of a miracle. They are Biblical stories authored by believers, not reports by reliable and objective reporters. I have no interest in seeking evidence of miracles because I don't believe they exist. They're a common element of many religions, that's all. We don't know the authors of most of the books of the Bible. I think you read much more into the Bible than is really there. Well, no, I don't want to see a miracle for myself. I don't believe they exist, so why would I want to see one, any more than I would want to see a unicorn. But you must think my views would change were I to witness an actual miracle. What kind of miracle are we talking about? Someone beats cancer? Or Mount Wheeler moves overnight from Nevada to New Hampshire? I presume that you consider me a skeptic when I reject the supposed evidence of Christianity, but a realist when I reject the supposed evidence for Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and so forth. This reads like a straightforward rejection of evidence in favor of faith. As religion it's commendable.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Punctuation.

First, how would someone identify some event as a miracle?Second, why call something a miracle rather than calling it unexplained?

Good question. I'm going to take this line of discussion here.

Which means that the discussion becomes scientific rather than faith-based. If you choose to explore the science behind miracles, go here. So one may ask you if you have any interest in seeking evidence of God or...rather...have you already formed a belief that God does not exist? If so, the ball is in topic starter faiths court to attempt to encourage you to believe. Unless of course, she wishes to discuss evidence rather than faith and belief.