Quote:4. It is your claim they were not eyewitnesses! They claimed they were. Competing claims...I go with them.

Of course.  That's what fucking idiots do. 

This:



is nothing to be proud of.

Quote:4. It is your claim they were not eyewitnesses! They claimed they were. Competing claims...I go with them.

Nope the facts say they were not .

And the bible is the claim

Steve, I'm curious. What's your take on the miracle of the sun in Fatima? And the Mandela effect? Both phenomena involve large numbers of people claiming to witness/experience a singular, supernatural event or occurrence. (We have many different examples of the Mandela Effect of course, but the supernatural cause people attribute to it is more or less the same)

Why are you so hung up on the Bible as evidence anyway? You seem to be saying you're okay with people categorizing it as lousy and unconvincing, just so long as we consider it evidence. What's the practical difference between lousy evidence and no evidence at all? A rational person will come to the same conclusion either way. Or, is it because you need the Bible to be evidence in order for the Bayesian scenario presented in your OP to work out in favor of your beliefs? Atheism isn't a claim in any case, but even if you were to use "there is no god" in your little equation, logical arguments still aren't evidence. So, what does that leave you with?

An extraordinary claim with lousy evidence to support it.

(August 2, 2017 at 4:00 pm)SteveII Wrote: 4. It is your claim they were not eyewitnesses! They claimed they were. Competing claims...I go with them.

Most scholars believe that Mark was written by a second-generation Christian, around or shortly after the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in year 70.

Luke admits, fairly directly that he wasn't an eyewitness.

Matthew used Mark as a source. Why would an eyewitness not use his own account?

There is no consensus about John, but the majority of scholars believe it was unlikely the anonymous author was an eyewitness.

(August 2, 2017 at 4:00 pm)SteveII Wrote:

Quote:Yes.... but people here are disagreeing with you because you mangle the ordinary claim that a historical Jesus existed - clearly evidenced by the existence of the gospels and the legions of followers that his presence originated, as you've been telling us all along - with the extraordinary claim that Jesus was as described in those gospels.... that Jesus was the son of God.... that this God exists in the first place. And these claims must be evidenced in reverse order:
1. God exists.... don't forget to define what this "god" thing is... and teach everyone how mankind ever came to possess that information... as far as I can tell, there is no available mechanism for it, so you will have to also supply the mechanism by which we acquired that information.
2. Jesus is the son of God. So says Jesus in the story, huh? Quite self-serving...
3. Jesus was as described in the gospels.

I accept that there are varying levels of claims about Jesus. I have never been shy about arguing for the most extraordinary version. While I do not think is the only evidence, why wouldn't Jesus' life as described in the gospels be evidence for all three? He didn't just claim to be God, he backed it up with miracles, wisdom in everyday living, knowledge of God, knowledge of Man's condition, explained the need to atonement, provided that atonement, and then rose again. 

I'll admit to not being knowledgeable on the particulars of the Bible, but I do recall that the several books were not written at the same time.
The chronological order by which they were written, at least, so far as can be ascertained today, does present a growing "mythification" of the Jesus person. I think it was Min who already presented some of that here on this thread (maybe even today).
At first we have the historical Jesus, the one who is not the son of any god nor performs miracles, but teaches the scriptures.
At the end, we have a Jesus born of a virgin, son of a god, and who performs all sort of miracles...

A clear evolution of the myth is present there, hinting at a distinction between the historical Jesus and the "extraordinary version", as you call it.


But are those books bound in the Bible in their real chronological order? Or in some special order that diminishes the odds of you finding such an evolution?

(August 2, 2017 at 4:00 pm)SteveII Wrote: Regarding 1 specifically, Romans 1:19-21 applies. 

Quote:19For what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse. 21For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking and darkened in their foolish hearts.…

This means information that can be gleaned from Natural Theology of which we can derive quite a few formal arguments from and from those, we can infer a decent amount of information about God (timeless, powerful, omniscient, a personal orderly mind, etc.).

I've heard of that Natural Theology... championed by Aquinas, right?... it is essentially a series of arguments from ignorance... mostly ignorance of physics (some of it, we are still today ignorant of).

But we can try to philosophize about some of those godly attributes...
- timeless - what does this mean?! not bound by time? not present in time? Existing in the absence of time? How does that work? All our verbs imply the existence of time. Any action implies the passage of time, the existence of time. I cannot think of what it may mean to not be present in time... and I'm a physicist with a decent notion of how time flows in some exotic conditions.... but it's always there. No time, means no action, no action means nothing happens.... ever, never.... damn, these words imply time, too. No time means that any action is impossible. Meaning that a creative action is also impossible. Meaning that a conscious thought is impossible. At least, impossible according to the way we consider these actions. If there is another way, I'd like to know about it.... but not by believing it to exist... by actually knowing about it.

- powerful - if such an entity exists that can generate a Universe, yes, I'd agree it to be quite powerful... But this is working things through the wrong way... you were proposing that from Nature, we arrive at these features... and at the very existence.

- omniscient - all knowing? That's a stretch, in my view... how do you get there?

- an orderly mind - As orderly as quantum physics, I suppose...

Do we really need to get into a conversation about the quality of witnesses? The difference between those with a martyr to mythologize and those that are merely unbiased 3rd parties?

The gospel accounts aren't a police report... there's a very clear intent behind them that's not just a simple reporting of the facts. If you're unable or unwilling to accept that, well, that's not our problem.

(August 2, 2017 at 6:11 pm)KevinM1 Wrote: Do we really need to get into a conversation about the quality of witnesses?  The difference between those with a martyr to mythologize and those that are merely unbiased 3rd parties?

The gospel accounts aren't a police report... there's a very clear intent behind them that's not just a simple reporting of the facts.  If you're unable or unwilling to accept that, well, that's not our problem.

And, to add, how many police reports are taken seriously, that contain any supernatural 'evidence'?

Having a police report that includes miracle claims, would detract, not enhance the credibility of the report. And SteveII knows it.

But just move the report back 2000 years, and magically it supposed to become even more credible?

They will keep screaming . Were begging the question .Even thou not accepting miracle claims on hersay is no such thing .

In this thread, what we see is nothing less than a three pronged attack upon traditional reasoning, posed in order to make the Christian hypothesis more plausible. First is an attack upon the oft repeated maxim that implausible claims require greater evidence to be believed than do more probable events. This is nothing more than an attempt to lower the bar for their pet theory. The second is an attempt to confuse the issue of the plausibility of miracles with a quick two step and dismissal. The third is in the attempt to put forward belief in the supernatural as a "properly basic belief." Most won't recognize the origins of that phrase, but it is a shibboleth for those who believe in a Christian backed fringe theory in epistemology known as reformed epistemology. It is a cloaked appeal to a theory which undermines traditional thinking about justification. It's yet another attempt to lower or erase the bar so as to make Christian beliefs more plausible.

The first of these prongs is an attempt to make events having a low probability only require the same degree of justification as beliefs about events that are relatively probable. And what is the basis of this attack? Nothing more than a semantic argument about what the word extraordinary means in the phrase "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." It's nothing more than an attempt to undermine this common sense intuition with word play. We don't accept implausible claims on the basis of run-of-the-mill evidence. If we did, there is no end to the number of things we would believe based upon such evidence. In that case, the implausible would become common in our beliefs, which would represent the improbable as being rather quite probable. There is a mismatch there. Believing the improbable to be probable. As a practical matter, unless we wish our thinking to be infected with such a ludicrous situation, we demand more from improbable claims than that somebody wrote about them in ancient times. That's not only poor evidence, it's piss poor.

But more than an attack upon pragmatic considerations, it is a direct attack upon Bayesian reasoning about the probabilities. In Bayesian inference, the prior probability of an event occurring has a predictable effect on the ultimate probability that the event occurred given the evidence we have. An example from Wikipedia is illustrative of this fact.



In particular, note how a low base rate results in a low posterior probability, in spite of our intuitions about the drug test's accuracy. In this case the base rate is analogous to the prior probability in the case of miracles. The theist in this case wants to eliminate this effect any way they can because it argues directly against the probability of miracles being higher on the basis of mundane evidence. Note that two attacks are made upon the acknowledgement of this fact, first the semantic bullshit about the word extraordinary, and then an attempt to justify the plausibility of miracles by more wordy nonsense about the acceptability of the supernatural. Rather than face the fact that their evidence simply doesn't measure up, they attack traditional reasoning.

The second attack is to confuse and obfuscate the natural intuition that miracles are improbable events. This includes a couple of jabs at the Bayesian reasoning, which I'm not going to go into. And of course, accompanied by more semantic arguments about miracles, including the last resort of referring to reformed epistemology by declaring belief in the supernatural to be a "properly basic belief." This is, like the attack on Bayesian inference, made plausible only by the fact that most people are unfamiliar with it and thus don't understand what is being claimed. Reformed epistemology is nothing but a fringe epistemological theory, advocated by Christian philosophers primarily because it is more 'friendly' to the Christian's pet beliefs.

In all three cases we see the typical apologist's tactic, if they can't win the game on the merits of their evidence, they attempt to change the rules. It's nothing but an illegitimate attempt to undermine traditional reasoning so they can refashion it to make it more amenable to their pet beliefs. It's nothing but bullshit.

(August 2, 2017 at 7:23 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: In this thread, what we see is nothing less than a three pronged attack upon traditional reasoning, posed in order to make the Christian hypothesis more plausible.  First is an attack upon the oft repeated maxim that implausible claims require greater evidence to be believed than do more probable events.  This is nothing more than an attempt to lower the bar for their pet theory.  The second is an attempt to confuse the issue of the plausibility of miracles with a quick two step and dismissal.  The third is in the attempt to put forward belief in the supernatural as a "properly basic belief."  Most won't recognize the origins of that phrase, but it is a shibboleth for those who believe in a Christian backed fringe theory in epistemology known as reformed epistemology.  It is a cloaked appeal to a theory which undermines traditional thinking about justification.  It's yet another attempt to lower or erase the bar so as to make Christian beliefs more plausible.

The first of these prongs is an attempt to make events having a low probability only require the same degree of justification as beliefs about events that are relatively probable.  And what is the basis of this attack?  Nothing more than a semantic argument about what the word extraordinary means in the phrase "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."  It's nothing more than an attempt to undermine this common sense intuition with word play.  We don't accept implausible claims on the basis of run-of-the-mill evidence.  If we did, there is no end to the number of things we would believe based upon such evidence.  In that case, the implausible would become common in our beliefs, which would represent the improbable as being rather quite probable.  There is a mismatch there.  Believing the improbable to be probable.  As a practical matter, unless we wish our thinking to be infected with such a ludicrous situation, we demand more from improbable claims than that somebody wrote about them in ancient times.  That's not only poor evidence, it's piss poor.

But more than an attack upon pragmatic considerations, it is a direct attack upon Bayesian reasoning about the probabilities.  In Bayesian inference, the prior probability of an event occurring has a predictable effect on the ultimate probability that the event occurred given the evidence we have.  An example from Wikipedia is illustrative of this fact.



In particular, note how a low base rate results in a low posterior probability, in spite of our intuitions about the drug test's accuracy.  In this case the base rate is analogous to the prior probability in the case of miracles.  The theist in this case wants to eliminate this effect any way they can because it argues directly against the probability of miracles being higher on the basis of mundane evidence.  Note that two attacks are made upon the acknowledgement of this fact, first the semantic bullshit about the word extraordinary, and then an attempt to justify the plausibility of miracles by more wordy nonsense about the acceptability of the supernatural.  Rather than face the fact that their evidence simply doesn't measure up, they attack traditional reasoning.

The second attack is to confuse and obfuscate the natural intuition that miracles are improbable events.  This includes a couple of jabs at the Bayesian reasoning, which I'm not going to go into.  And of course, accompanied by more semantic arguments about miracles, including the last resort of referring to reformed epistemology by declaring belief in the supernatural to be a "properly basic belief."  This is, like the attack on Bayesian inference, made plausible only by the fact that most people are unfamiliar with it and thus don't understand what is being claimed.  Reformed epistemology is nothing but a fringe epistemological theory, advocated by Christian philosophers primarily because it is more 'friendly' to the Christian's pet beliefs.

In all three cases we see the typical apologist's tactic, if they can't win the game on the merits of their evidence, they attempt to change the rules.  It's nothing but an illegitimate attempt to undermine traditional reasoning so they can refashion it to make it more amenable to their pet beliefs.  It's nothing but bullshit.

Indeed they will always insist extraordinary is too subjective . When it's anything but under Bayesian reasoning .