Does God Really Exist???

Thrown out, because all their testimony would be hearsay.Otherwise you could confirm the legal existence of Santa Claus based on the testimony of children. But I don't see anyone booking flights to the North Pole.

Right, but unfortunately, nobody saw them, either. They penned no historical record. The Bible was written entirely by people who could not have been eyewitnesses to the events chronicled.Hence, hearsay. It would, if we had their testimony. But we don't. We have testimony about them, not from them.

Actually, no. The authors of Matthew and Luke are unknown - the names of those two gospels are simply 2nd-century guesses. They're referred to as Luke and Matthew because it's traditional, not because we have reason to believe those figures wrote them.As for Mark and John, Mark is the earliest gospel - Matthew and Luke copy it heavily, including some of the mistakes - and the earliest it could have been written was 70 CE. Popular myth holds that the writer Mark is also the apostle Mark, but internal evidence dispels this misapprehension.As for John it was written well after the other three, also anonymously. The account of Jesus's life that it gives contradicts the other three chronologically.So, what do we have? Four gospels, all second- or third-hand accounts, and they contradict each other. That doesn't stand up in court. Nope. You need to do a little research on this. No scholar believes the gospels to be eyewitness accounts.

Yes, but you haven't. It doesn't contradict the Big Bang. Therefore we know that whatever you think the law is, you're wrong.

Oh, I'm sorry. I assumed you knew,having read the Bible and all. Maybe you haven't read it? Here's some examples:

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The gospel of John differs from the synoptics in many substantial ways. It recounts stories about Jesus that do not appear in the other three. Its whole framework of Jesus' ministry also differs substantially from the synoptics. In the synoptics, Jesus ministry begins only after John the Baptist was imprisoned (Mark 1:14; Matthew 4:12), John showed the two prophets preaching together (John 3:24). While the synoptics timetable of Jesus' ministry can be fitted into a single year, John makes the ministry last for three years (for John said Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples thrice: John 2:13; 6:4; 11:55). The main location of Jesus' ministry is given in the synoptics as Galilee. John placed Jerusalem as the principal location. According to John Jesus went to Jerusalem five times (John 2:13; 5:1; 7:10; 10:22; 12:1), while the synoptics only recorded one such trip of Jesus to Jerusalem...

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For some of the episodes in the synoptics that do appear in John, the chronological order in John is irreconcilable with that given in the synoptics. One example is an incident that is given in all four gospels: the Cleansing of the Temple (Mark 11:12-19; Matthew 21:12-13; Luke 19:45-48; John 2:12-22)...

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This event must have caused quite a commotion and could not have failed to produce unpleasant consequences for the Galilean prophet. In the synoptics, Jesus was dead within a week of the incident. John incomprehensibly placed this event in the beginning of Jesus' ministry; and made him preach for another three years with impunity! Thus where all the synoptics placed the incident near the end of Jesus ministry, John placed it at the beginning.

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From No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/john.htmlThat, or they're misinformed. Can you provide the evidence that they're using to substantiate that claim? I'm not impressed that your source was writing in the 1800's. Why don't you try a more modern source?

Heh. I can send you a picture of me with an eyepatch, but that doesn't make me a pirate.Why don'y you send us a copy of the peer-reviewed papers you've published? If you're a biologist, then you should have some...

Your inability to refute them is noted. Right, and if you had a group of people, and some of them told you that it happened before the second quarter, and then other people told you that it happened after the game, and then some other people told you that it happened at halftime, but before Kid Rock performed, and they couldn't seem to reach any kind of agreement, wouldn't you conclude that none of these people were actually eyewitnesses? Right. Exactly like the gospel authors. Which would make both your testimony about Janet and their testimony about Jesus hearsay, and therefore inadmissible in court.

Yes. But we don't have their testimony. Even if the gospel authors directly interviewed the apostles, second-hand accounts of their testimony is still hearsay.This isn't hard to understand. You can't admit second-hand testimony into court.[This message has been edited by CreationMan, 02-18-2004]

The gospels are unsigned. There's no evidence that they were written by the folks whose names they bear because those names were added in the 2nd century.And here's the thing - since there's no reason to believe that the gospels were written by who they say they were, I don't have to prove that they weren't - just like I don't have to prove that they weren't written by Elvis.If you think that the gospels are eyewitness accounts, then you need to substantiate that with evidence. Feel free to do so at this topic: EvC Forum: Eyewitness To Jesus? The Gospel Authors No. But given that scholars are in a business where they have to substantiate their beliefs with evidence, it's fruitful to ask "why do they believe such a thing?"

Based on what evidence? Just because you have the Holy Spirit, that doesn't mean you can abandon scholarly reliance on evidence for just making things up.

Well, now, wait a minute. That's not what we're talking about. Whether or not the Bible was inspired (or even dictated) by God is not a question you can address with physical evidence. Moreover it's not the question we were talking about.What we were talking about, and what you gave an opinion on, was the question of who the authors of the Gospel were. There's no evidence that they were apostles, or even eyewitnesses to the events they wrote about. There's every reason to believe that the gospels weren't written until almost a century after the events in question were supposed to occur.Divine inspiration isn't what we were talking about. What we were talking about was the identity of the Bible authors. That's a question that can be substantiated with evidence that is irrelevant to the belief of the scholar. For instance if the question is "who wrote the book Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them?" then the validity of evidence pointing to Al Franken has nothing to do with whether you or I voted for Bush.Don't try to change the subject. What evidence do you have that the gospels are eyewitness accounts by apostles?

Here's JonF, from another thread:

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angular momentum is conserved. That means that, if you add up all the individual angular momenta1 of the components of a system, the result is always the same. (Note that if something external reaches into the system it's a little more complicated).

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So, to see if the Big Bang theory violates conservation of angular momentum, here's what your source should do:

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1. Calculate the initial angular momentum of the universe. Zero sounds reasonable to me, but what we need is a mathematical derivation from first principles, not a reasonable guess.

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2. Measure the motion of everything in the entire universe, calculate the angular momentum of each thing, and add them all up.

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3. Is the answer to #1 the same as the answer to #2?

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Of course, since it seems likely that we can't even see everything in the universe, your source did not carry out step 2; and I'll bet they didn't carry out step 1, either.

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Like I said, if you find this argument compelling it's because you misunderstand both conservation of angular momentum and the cosmological models.

The Big Bang isn't an explosion, by the way. So your position about explosions is kind of a strawman, isn't it?

This is off-topic but: Stars don't combust. They produce energy through the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. This is a process that generates intense energy and requires no oxygen, because it's a nuclear reaction, not a chemical one.If you have more questions about stars you should take them to the astronomy topics.

Did you know that there's a group of Tibetian monks that has perfected the art of making the throat produce multiple notes at the same time? I don't think there's anything supernatural about that.I once saw a guy on a beach stacking jagged, almond-shaped rocks (about breadbox size), end-to-end (the tall way) in piles taller than himself. Most people couldn't believe he was doing it without some kind of adhesive or binder but he wasn't - he was just that good at balancing.Plenty of things are normally possible - ludicrous feats of balance or multiple sounds from one throat - it's just that they're either so hard or so rare that people usually never see them done. So when they do, it's altogether too easy to ascribe it to some kind of supernatural force.I guess what I'm saying is that there's more than enough weirdness in the normal, natural world to account for the "supernatural" experiences of you and basically everybody else.