The evolution of an atheist.

A lot of people say "on balance, there's some evidence for Jesus" but then they can never get specific about what that evidence actually is.This seems to me like another one of those issues where people take it on faith that there's a bunch of evidence for Jesus, because that's what they hear from everybody, but when you really go looking for it you find out that "evidence for Jesus" is basically an urban legend - everyone believes it, but for no good reason.It's not a dig or a slight; believe me, I was the same way for years. But after a year or two of challenging proponents to provide reliable evidence for Jesus - not just historical writers mentioning that people believed in Jesus, which a lot of people can't seem to understand is different - and having them not come up with anything, I really think the balance of the evidence is all on the "against" side. There's just no historical evidence for Jesus at all.

Well, right. That's what I mean - evidence of people who believed in Jesus isn't the same as evidence for Jesus. But that's just the argumentum ad populum - the belief is popular, therefore it is true. But that's a fallacy. The burden of evidence is on the positive, not the negative claim; the popularity of the belief is irrelevant. Thus the most logical conclusion is that there never was a historical Jesus.

"Contemporary" isn't exactly how I would describe thirty years of time between the supposed life and death of Jesus and the accounts we're using to support it. Imagine if everything we knew about World War II came from the movie "Saving Private Ryan" and the testimony of one or two veterans, thirty years after the fact. Couldn't we use that to "prove" that Kilroy was a real person?And then there's everything that is missing but shouldn't be. Rome was the world's most widespread bureaucracy. Shouldn't there be an enormous paper trail on the executed King of the Jews? Shouldn't there be truly contemporaneous mention of the revolutionary ministry of Jesus, by someone who was actually there?Given the distance of Rome to the Middle East there's no reason to expect that any of Rome's Christians would have ever seen Jesus, nor even expected to meet anyone who had ever seen them. They were following a leader who, even if he existed, they knew only from letters and stories. It's not difficult at all to imagine that every single one of them was following a notional Christ; Christ would have been notional to every single Roman Christian regardless of his existence, the same as Christ is for us, now.

Must there have been a Santa to account for the cherished belief of children?And, of course, there may have been a jolly fat man who loved to give toys to children. But if we're talking about an individual who didn't live at the North Pole, didn't make toys with a workshop full of elves, doesn't fly all around the world with a sleigh on Christmas night to pop down chimneys, aren't we not talking about Santa Claus?I mean, words mean things. I don't see how we can say that "Jesus Christ was real" if what was real was a man who wasn't named Jesus Christ, didn't perform miracles, wasn't king of the Jews, wasn't crucified by Rome, and didn't rise from the dead. It's possible to have vampires who drink blood but aren't killed by stakes and sunlight ("Twilight") and vampires who don't drink blood but are immortal and live off others ("Lifeforce") but if you have "vampires" who don't drink blood, don't live forever, and aren't killed by sunlight, aren't they just goths? I'd say he lived somewhere else where you couldn't get the records for, and tell everyone he was victimized by the same bad guys we all hated already, and create a life story that told people what they wanted to hear. And most importantly I'd have this guy say what a bad person you were if you needed evidence to believe instead of "faith", and that if this whole thing sounded like nonsense it was you who were the idiot, not me.Or in other words:

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27Then he said to Thomas, (D) "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side. Do not disbelieve, but believe." 28Thomas answered him,(E) "My Lord and my God!" 29Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me?(F) Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

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18Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a fool so that he may become wise. 19For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: He catches the wise in their craftinessa; 20and again, The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.

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...the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

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That just means they didn't see him, or that Kilroy was somewhere else, or even that "The Great Lord Kilroy walked amongst them, and was yet unseen." After all where did all this shit come from, eh, smart guy?

"God of the gaps" is a corny argument because of the direction of its trend - God is invoked to explain something science can't, science does, the gap is closed and God is crowded out. The scope of behavior God is required to personally administer becomes smaller and increasingly trivial, to the point where God's sole function in the universe is collapsing quantum superpositions humans haven't gotten around to personally observing yet.Science, on the other hand, can fairly reliably be assumed to eventually fill gaps in our knowledge because it has been, for 200 years or more. Scientific knowledge in most fields is doubling over a period of 3-4 years, at this point; it's absurd to think it won't increase in the future. Of course, there's little reason to wonder about how we're going to explain something. The useful thing to do is get to work finding the explanation.

Ok, so what's the evidence that a Jewish prophet called Jesus was crucified by the Romans? Exactly right, just as widespread Christian belief isn't evidence either.I'm not trying to bust your balls, and I think you've largely come over to my position, yes? I think we agree that there's just no real evidence for anyone who could be the "historical Jesus Christ."

Because those questions are intellectual masturbation with no material effect on life. Where they do have material effect, they become open to scientific investigation. Asking new questions doesn't mean you know less, it means you know more. The more we learn about cancer, for instance, the harder it seems to cure; but the answer to that isn't less hospitals, it's more schools. What do you think stops you? It's not your brains, for which you clearly don't lack.Unlike religious revelation, scientific knowledge is accessible and free to all. Even at this very forum there are scientific minds desperate to try to teach you something about science. Why not ask them some questions? Well, that's certainly true in my experience, but there are some prominent exceptions such as Francis Collins, who believes that scientists should not even attempt to scientifically address questions like the origin of moral behavior. For many Christianity is an obstacle to the full pursuit of scientific knowledge, and they pull back for fear of overturning a cherished dogma.Ultimately science and religion can no more be reconciled than marriage and infidelity. The fact that some married people manage to be unfaithful hardly obviates the inherent contradiction.

Well, again, we're back to how there's a difference between evidence that someone said something happened, and evidence that it did happen. Tacitus is referring to the claims of the Christians, not corroborating them.A newspaper reporting "Dick Cheney says 'Saddam has weapons of mass destruction'" isn't reporting the same thing as one that says "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction", and the one can't be used to support the other. Obviously early Christians believed Romans had killed Christ. What's the evidence that they did? So far the balance has nothing in the pans, as near as I can tell.

I'm not saying Tacitus made it up. But it's clear that he's merely reporting the claims of early Christians, not corroborating them.Repeating a claim doesn't corroborate it.

Evolution is a guided process, and the guide is environment. Species are guided to become adapted to their environment or become extinct. Yes. Do you think that's an opening or closing of "the gaps"? Awesome! Why not get to the real meat, then, and read a few textbooks? He thinks its impossible. Tell me - thinking that such research couldn't possibly produce knowledge, do you think he's likely to approve funding for such research in his role as director of the NIH? If you say, but I can't understand someone who thinks science is just something to do in the lab, between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm. I can't understand the mindset of someone who insists on a rigorous standard of evidence to arrive at conclusions at work, and then comes home and says "I'm going to insist on much less rigor in my knowledge, now."The idea of having a rigorous standard of evidence, in science, is to protect scientists against false ideas, spurious data, and even purposeful deceit and manipulation. Someone who is considering adopting a less rigorous standard for the evidence they're prepared to accept needs to think long and hard about what they're opening themselves up to.What could a scientist possibly have to gain by consciously deciding to become easier to fool outside of business hours?

I think it's still a gap even if we don't know we don't know it. Science is illuminating the gaps, and closing them; I don't think it's opening any new ones. Not so much in the biological sciences. And, you know, you can largely skip the math and get the general gist of it. Philosophy has no standard of evidence whatsoever, because philosophy isn't a process where explanatory models are generated from evidence. Are you aware of that? Philosophy is a process where certain premises are assumed, and then statements are derived from those assumed premises by a series of transformations that are known to preserve truth values. But ultimately all philosophical reasoning is circular - your conclusions are only true if you assume your premises are, as well. It's much like mathematics in this regard. But the result is that philosophy is a way to arrive at statements that are valid, not necessarily ones that are likely to be true.In philosophy there's no rigor. There's no way to determine a false proposition from a true one, there are only ways to distinguish valid propositions from invalid ones. (An invalid argument is one that can't actually be derived from its premises.) I believe that both philosophy and theology are fields with no rigor whatsoever, and therefore the conclusions made in the fields of philosophy and theology can't in any sense be said to be true. Ultimately they're nothing more than a form of text criticism, not a field that generates any reliable knowledge.

Really? I see it the exact opposite - it's clear from the context that Tacitus is merely explaining why Christians think they have cause to be antagonistic towards the government of Rome, he's not confirming that their grievance (the execution of Jesus) is actually legitimate.It's like saying "Muslims say they hate Israel because of the Jewish conspiracy that runs the world and keeps them poor." It's merely repeating the claim, not providing support for the notion of a world-spanning Jewish conspiracy.

Some philosophers do, yes. Some philosophers reject evidence-based reasoning altogether. Some demand rigorous symbolic syllogisms in support of arguments; some are content with informal explanations.The problem with philosophy as a field is that all these different means of practicing philosophy are on precisely equivalent ground. You can just pick whatever standard you want. The result is a field that, substantially, has not contributed to human knowledge in over two centuries (and, largely, has been responsible for an unjustified erosion of confidence in the notion of empiricism.) I guess what I'm getting at is that there's no way to know if a philosopher is wrong. Nothing in philosophy can be falsified except in so far as it isn't philosophy; it's some kind of empiric claim that can be subject to testing (and is therefore really more of a science.)Theology has the exact same problem. All the interesting questions are about the human phenomenon of religion, which is more properly a question of anthropology. The field of theology, proper, is a rigor-free form of text criticism; the study of a being theologists can't even prove exists (nor seem to want to.) As an academic field it's little more than a way to introduce religious affiliation to the academic setting. That's why there's Catholic theology, Evangelical theology, Islam theology, and so on.

Some of it does; the problem is that the philosophy with rigor is put on the same level as the philosophy without.You can demonstrate that a philosophical position is invalid, is ill-formed, and can't be derived from the premises used to support it, but you can't demonstrate that such a position is wrong. And that a position is ill-formed may simply not matter to a philosopher; they may insist that it is intuitively correct regardless of whether it can be derived from premises.The truth is that the world around us is what is real, our notions about it slightly less real, and our notions about notions the least real of all. For whatever reason many philosophers are keen to promote the fiction of the exact opposite.

If there is a god or gods, then proving that there is should be the first and only priority of theologians until that proof is completed. But no theologians are apparently even working on that. Indeed the theological position is that such proof is impossible.Isn't it nonsense to open an entire field of study on a subject and then just skip over the part where you prove your subject actually exists? Imagine how absurd it would be if I opened the School for Unicorn Science, devoted to the study of the ecology, behavior, and applications of equine monohorns, and then immediately declared the question of the actual existence of unicorns so beneath concern as to be off-limits to study.