The work of Josh McDowell, while mocked and challenged halfheartedly on the net, is quite concise and provable.
If provable it also must be falsifiable. Can you prove it? It appears to me to have been falsified. What seems well established historically is that after Constantine Christianity was the dominant religious system in Europe. The books that it based it's religion on are of uncertain origin. The claim of Jesus's resurrection that is at the core of the religion effects history through the church. There is no other evidence of it that anyone has brought forth.
McDowell seems incapable of reasoning. He claims that there are 14,000 or 26,000 manuscripts of the New Testament. So what? What we need is not thousands of manuscripts from the Middle Ages (which is when most of these were written), but two or three from the exact time that Jesus supposedly lived and died. We have none until at least 40-60 years later (that is none was written down until then, but things remained in an oral tradition form), and we have no copies of any Gospel until the Codex Sianaticus of 350 A.D., more than 300 years later.
Gordon Stein Charade » Internet Infidels
The cultural history of religion is a fact. The propositions that religions put forth are not facts unless and until they are supported by evidence.
Religious beliefs can have significant effects on behaviour and feelings but that is evidence of the power of imagination and belief not evidence of the truth of the propositions that are believed in. I understand the profound appeal and comfort traditional cultural religious traditions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, Hinduism, etc. These are world views that are taken as "real" by believers in them. The human imagination has created many religions. With science and inductive reasoning arose a new approach to knowledge. It would be comforting to believers in traditional religions if science could confirm as fact the things they imagine to be true. Unfortunately it doesn't. Still each of us has the freedom to imagine the world we live in as we have come to believe it to be.
lfen
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