(December 12, 2012 at 2:06 pm)median Wrote: To the first point, it seems you are mixing definitions. We do not have "knowledge of prophets". We have people (whose standards of evidence are very low, and who practice credulity, gullibility, and intellectual hypocrisy) who read these texts (and since they already WANTED to believe the supernatural) they ASSUMED it was "a true prophet". But that is an unwarranted assumption/assertion. You have not provided extraordinary evidence of any true prophets, b/c "prophet" assumes your theology (and no, the bible is not extraordinary evidence). The bible is THE CLAIM, upon which you must now provide the extraordinary evidence (just like the other religious texts). So claiming "more manuscripts", or "confirmed archeology", etc are not sufficient (anymore than New York confirms Spiderman or Egypt confirms Horus/Isis). Textual accounts of the supernatural (just like all the other texts through history) are not sufficient to establish a miracle. You need far more than this (even as your bible alludes! Mark16). Unexplained phenomena are not evidence either, because there are hundreds of examples of unexplained phenomena that are later found to be perfectly natural in their origin (i.e. - explained!). Fact is, you can literally call ANY strange occurrence a "miracle" when you don't have more information. This is exactly what the Astrologers and New Agers do. It doesn't work.

That's a common misunderstanding of the extraordinary evidence concept. In this case:

1. The extraordinary claim is that the person is speaking for god
2. The extraordinary evidence is a miracle
3. The text is the ordinary means of perceiving the extraordinary evidence

Many people do as you do and confuse 2&3 for 1&2. Doing that excludes the possibility of extraordinary evidence by definition. By what extraordinary means do you think you can perceive a miracle? Seeing it? Sight is our most ordinary means of obtaining information.

In gJohn, Jesus invoked the principal, saying that people should believe him on the merits of what he was saying, but if not, then for the sake of the miracles he performed.

Muhammed said people should believe him on the merits of what he was saying, but when challenged to produce a miraculous sign, admitted he could not do so.

You can reject Jesus' miracles based on 3 above, i.e. you do not find the ordinary evidence compelling. However, note that this question is asked of theists, who do not rule out the miraculous as atheists do. It's a common and annoying practice on this forum for one atheist to ask a question from a theist perspective, then other atheists ignore that fact. I mean, yeah, we get it, you don;t believe this stuff happened, but if you're going to ask us about the details, we're going to answer from our perspective. /rant

Quote:Second, the bible's claims to the supernatural (just like other religious texts) does not fit either of your definitions.

Incorrect. They fit the first definition. Most people take on the beliefs they were raised with, but some switch based on such texts, so they are by definition evidence. They're just not conclusive evidence.

Quote:Textual accounts of the supernatural are NOT grounds for belief. That is why you have "FAITH", remember?

Actually we have faith because the miracles, even if accepted, are not full proof of the claims they support. They're necessary, but not adequate.

(December 12, 2012 at 2:26 pm)John V Wrote: That's a common misunderstanding of the extraordinary evidence concept. In this case:

1. The extraordinary claim is that the person is speaking for god
2. The extraordinary evidence is a miracle
3. The text is the ordinary means of perceiving the extraordinary evidence

Many people do as you do and confuse 2&3 for 1&2. Doing that excludes the possibility of extraordinary evidence by definition. By what extraordinary means do you think you can perceive a miracle? Seeing it? Sight is our most ordinary means of obtaining information.

In gJohn, Jesus invoked the principal, saying that people should believe him on the merits of what he was saying, but if not, then for the sake of the miracles he performed.

Muhammed said people should believe him on the merits of what he was saying, but when challenged to produce a miraculous sign, admitted he could not do so.

You can reject Jesus' miracles based on 3 above, i.e. you do not find the ordinary evidence compelling. However, note that this question is asked of theists, who do not rule out the miraculous as atheists do. It's a common and annoying practice on this forum for one atheist to ask a question from a theist perspective, then other atheists ignore that fact. I mean, yeah, we get it, you don;t believe this stuff happened, but if you're going to ask us about the details, we're going to answer from our perspective. /rant

Your "perspective" (which is really your ASSUMPTION) is exactly what is in question. So just repeating what your bible says (and trying to call it "evidence") is no more evidence than a person claiming they were abducted by aliens.

Second, regarding #2, the "extraordinary evidence" is NOT a "miracle" - because you have YET to demonstrate such a thing actually occurs. All you have pointed to (just like the other religions) are uncommon/unexplained phenomena (i.e. - Argument from Ignorance). You haven't demonstrated a miracle. So you cannot call "miracles" as synonymous with extraordinary evidence.

Third, "the text" is NOT the ordinary means of "perceiving the extraordinary evidence". The ordinary means of presenting extraordinary evidence is DEMONSTRATION (just like all other extraordinary claims in the world - such as "I can fly!").

(December 12, 2012 at 2:26 pm)John V Wrote: Incorrect. They fit the first definition. Most people take on the beliefs they were raised with, but some switch based on such texts, so they are by definition evidence. They're just not conclusive evidence.

Actually we have faith because the miracles, even if accepted, are not full proof of the claims they support. They're necessary, but not adequate.

NO, they do NOT fit the definition. Just because someone accepts what an ancient book says (i.e. hear-say) does not (in any way) make such texts "evidence", anymore than space alien books are evidence. You need far more than this to actually have evidence and you have an extremely low standard of evidence. This is why you want to smuggle in your bible while kicking out the rest.

Second, your "faith" indicates (precisely) a point I made earlier. Faith is not a pathway to truth. It is a pathway to gullibility and credulity. You are "having faith" in hear-say. And you are in direct contradiction with your own religious texts (Mark 16), which clearly indicate that you WILL be DEMONSTRATING the supernatural ("greater things than these") if you believe.

Where is your moved mountain? Where is your verbal 'killing' of an olive tree? Where is your drinking poison and not getting sick? Where is your raising the dead? Where is your healing an amputee, born blind, or down-syndrome (no medical care)?

Making excuses/rationalizing why you are unable to do these things (consistently) doesn't help your case. It just puts you in the same category as all the other superstitious folk who make claims to the supernatural and can't demonstrate them.

(December 12, 2012 at 2:54 pm)median Wrote: Your "perspective" (which is really your ASSUMPTION) is exactly what is in question. So just repeating what your bible says (and trying to call it "evidence") is no more evidence than a person claiming they were abducted by aliens.

A person claiming they were abducted by aliens is indeed evidence. You may reject the claim as insufficiently supported if you like. We commonly take claims as evidence. Some people claimed that Abraham Lincoln said certain words on a certain day in a place called Gettysburg. Those claims are evidence that he gave the Gettysburg address. You can certainly hold religious or alien claims to higher standards. I do too. As atheists sometimes note, they only reject one more god than Christians do.

Quote:Second, regarding #2, the "extraordinary evidence" is NOT a "miracle" - because you have YET to demonstrate such a thing actually occurs. All you have pointed to (just like the other religions) are uncommon/unexplained phenomena (i.e. - Argument from Ignorance). You haven't demonstrated a miracle. So you cannot call "miracles" as synonymous with extraordinary evidence.

If they’re just unexplained phenomena and nothing extraordinary, then why do you hold them to higher standards of evidence than other unexplained phenomena? You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Quote:Third, "the text" is NOT the ordinary means of "perceiving the extraordinary evidence". The ordinary means of presenting extraordinary evidence is DEMONSTRATION (just like all other extraordinary claims in the world - such as "I can fly!").

We can’t DEMONSTRATE the Gettysburg address, yet reasonable people believe it happened.

If someone demonstrates that he can fly to a number of people, then later dies, that doesn’t mean he didn’t fly.

Quote:NO, they do NOT fit the definition. Just because someone accepts what an ancient book says (i.e. hear-say) does not (in any way) make such texts "evidence", anymore than space alien books are evidence.

Actually, yes, according to the definition, that makes it evidence. Doesn’t make it conclusive, and you’re free not to accept it.

Quote:You need far more than this to actually have evidence and you have an extremely low standard of evidence. This is why you want to smuggle in your bible while kicking out the rest.

Now you’re getting it a little bit. Different people have different standards of evidence. These can be influenced by, among other things, their philosophic stances. As a theist, I have a lower standard of evidence regarding certain things. As presumably a materialist, you probably have lower standards of evidence regarding other things, such as abiogenesis.

Quote:Second, your "faith" indicates (precisely) a point I made earlier. Faith is not a pathway to truth. It is a pathway to gullibility and credulity. You are "having faith" in hear-say.

And? Everyone does. I find abiogenesis to be an extraordinary claim. Has anyone DEMONSTRATED it to you? No. You have faith that someone someday will figure it out, despite literally billions of observations showing that life comes from life and inert matter doesn’t come alive.

Quote:And you are in direct contradiction with your own religious texts (Mark 16), which clearly indicate that you WILL be DEMONSTRATING the supernatural ("greater things than these") if you believe.

Where is your moved mountain? Where is your verbal 'killing' of an olive tree? Where is your drinking poison and not getting sick? Where is your raising the dead? Where is your healing an amputee, born blind, or down-syndrome (no medical care)?

Making excuses/rationalizing why you are unable to do these things (consistently) doesn't help your case. It just puts you in the same category as all the other superstitious folk who make claims to the supernatural and can't demonstrate them.

I haven’t made a claim to have supernatural powers. You’re setting up a straw man from a passage which is generally thought to be a later addition and not authentic.

(December 10, 2012 at 8:16 pm)median Wrote: A POST FOR CHRISTIANS:

Most of us realize that there have been countless man-made (yet fake) gods created (and worshiped) throughout history (Zeus, Horus, Isis, Apollonius of Tyana, Mithra, etc).

So my question is simple, why do you believe in Yahweh, and reject the rest?

Please present your best ("A Game") evidence/arguments and withhold from long winded preaching, proselytizing, or provoking.

That is a tall order. Its like asking a zebra to change from stripes to plad.

(December 13, 2012 at 2:30 pm)Brian37 Wrote: That is a tall order. Its like asking a zebra to change from stripes to plad.

I generally don't care about punctuation and spelling, but when you're ridiculing others, you probably ought to check it.

Quote:I haven’t made a claim to have supernatural powers.

But what about your godboy? Without his magic tricks he is just another schlepper.

Getting back to the OP, the question was not what makes your evidence (*) compelling, but what makes it compelling in a way that the accounts of other gods are not compelling.

Are you suggesting that the prophets are better attested than those in any other religion, as prophets (having miraculous prophecy), or as men? The latter gets you nothing.

Moreover, it seems that you are redefining the grounds for belief to be those specifically suited to Christianity, thereby simply defining Christianity as more believable in a rhetorical slight of hand. If you consider these evidences more compelling than say the stories in the Edda or the Vedas, replete with their own miraculous things, you need to show how this evidence is categorically superior. If it rests on the testimony of the prophets having been shown to be prophetic, that's likely topic for another thread; to summarize though, most who aren't already blinkered into believing them prophetic do not find the accounts of the prophets as credible evidence of miraculous prophecy, at least not without accepting a whole slew of other claims which validate those claims in the bible as genuine. (Seems Min was right, we're getting back to, "Because the bible says so.")

ETA: Oh, and my understanding of the "extraordinary evidence" complaint is that it comes out of statistics, namely the question of setting the boundaries for Type I and Type II errors. Type I errors being mistaking an example of the null hypothesis as a positive result due to chance; Type II is similar, but for negative results. I don't know the specifics of the statistical reasoning, but I've read that "where the hypothesized mechanism is either unknown or implausible" it is acceptable to increase the statistical threshold upwards so that a chance result is not likely to yield a false positive. I think many theist conceptions founder though, long before extraordinary evidence, by ruling out confounding explanations (like, people make shit up, and lying, two things for which we have considerable evidence, and which occur at a much higher rate than miracles; they just assume a priori that these factors do not apply). Victor Stenger points out that different scientific fields may use different bounds for Type I and Type II errors, with a result in medicine often using a rho of 0.05 for example, whereas an experiment in the physical sciences may use a much more stringent bound. The reasoning behind this is not known to me, but likely has to do with the practical uses of the results, and the consequences of getting it wrong (and it being corrected later). If the consequences of getting it wrong are the issue, that would seem to suggest we set the bounds for religious claims very, very high.

(December 13, 2012 at 2:50 pm)apophenia Wrote: Getting back to the OP, the question was not what makes your evidence (*) compelling, but what makes it compelling in a way that the accounts of other gods are not compelling.

Yep, as I noted previously, the atheist tag-team game gets annoying.

Quote:Are you suggesting that the prophets are better attested than those in any other religion, as prophets (having miraculous prophecy), or as men? The latter gets you nothing.

The latter gets me something. Knowledge of them men helps to assess their purposes and motivations, which are common factors in assessment of testimony. Also note that this is a totality of the evidence assessment. You guys like to think in all black or white. My goal is not to prove that Christianity is the best supported so much as it is to just show some of the ways religious claims can be examined. Different people can assign different weights to different factors and come up with a different conclusion. It's silly, though, to just say all religious beliefs have equal support.

Quote:Moreover, it seems that you are redefining the grounds for belief to be those specifically suited to Christianity, thereby simply defining Christianity as more believable in a rhetorical slight of hand.

It seems to me that my opponents are redefining the grounds for belief to be those specifically suited to atheism. Go figure. At least I'm working within standard definitions of common words.

Quote:If you consider these evidences more compelling than say the stories in the Edda or the Vedas, replete with their own miraculous things, you need to show how this evidence is categorically superior. If it rests on the testimony of the prophets having been shown to be prophetic, that's likely topic for another thread; to summarize though, most who aren't already blinkered into believing them prophetic do not find the accounts of the prophets as credible evidence of miraculous prophecy, at least not without accepting a whole slew of other claims which validate those claims in the bible as genuine. (Seems Min was right, we're getting back to, "Because the bible says so.")

Who wrote them? Why? What did they stand to gain or lose?

(December 13, 2012 at 2:40 pm)John V Wrote:

(December 13, 2012 at 2:30 pm)Brian37 Wrote: That is a tall order. Its like asking a zebra to change from stripes to plad.

I generally don't care about punctuation and spelling, but when you're ridiculing others, you probably ought to check it.

Thank you for your patronizing. Sorry it irritates you but since this is not a paying job nor does anyone's life depend on it, I'd suggest you move on.

(December 13, 2012 at 2:14 pm)John V Wrote: A person claiming they were abducted by aliens is indeed evidence. You may reject the claim as insufficiently supported if you like. We commonly take claims as evidence. Some people claimed that Abraham Lincoln said certain words on a certain day in a place called Gettysburg. Those claims are evidence that he gave the Gettysburg address. You can certainly hold religious or alien claims to higher standards. I do too. As atheists sometimes note, they only reject one more god than Christians do.

A person's word (claim) alone is not evidence, and just because you can CALL it evidence (because you want to open the door for your Yahweh) doesn't make it so. Just because some people try to SAY that "saying" or "claiming" is evidence, doesn't make it evidence.

Do you believe every claim you hear? If a salesman tells you he wants to sell you a magic potion, would you accept his claim as "evidence"? How gullible are you?

(December 13, 2012 at 2:14 pm)John V Wrote: If they’re just unexplained phenomena and nothing extraordinary, then why do you hold them to higher standards of evidence than other unexplained phenomena? You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

WOW. How inaccurate and reductionist of you. Could you be any more dishonest? Those terms are NOT exclusive. And YOUR claims are BOTH extraordinary AND unexplained. Where exactly have we "held to a higher standard" your supernatural claims?? We are holding your supernatural claims to the exact same standards as EVERY OTHER supernatural claim.

Wake up. You're in the competitive flea market of religions, magic sellers, sorcerers, alien seekers, and new agers. And you're all making supernatural claims that can't be consistently demonstrated. Should we just lower our standards of evidence because you say so?

(December 13, 2012 at 2:14 pm)John V Wrote: We can’t DEMONSTRATE the Gettysburg address, yet reasonable people believe it happened.
If someone demonstrates that he can fly to a number of people, then later dies, that doesn’t mean he didn’t fly.

WOW. You ARE gullible. Flying is DEMONSTRABLE!!! The Gettysburg address is NOT extraordinary!! You are drawing false comparisons to try and smuggle in your bible (which you assumed from the outset).

(December 13, 2012 at 2:14 pm)John V Wrote: Now you’re getting it a little bit. Different people have different standards of evidence. These can be influenced by, among other things, their philosophic stances. As a theist, I have a lower standard of evidence regarding certain things. As presumably a materialist, you probably have lower standards of evidence regarding other things, such as abiogenesis.

NO actually. This is 100% false. Unlike you, I do not practice hypocrisy with standards of evidence. When something is not known, it is accepted as "I don't know." But thanks for admitting that you are a hypocrite with your standards of evidence (willing to apply them unequally because of the assumptions you made from the outset).

So, I guess it's OK when anyone else does that too, eh? Great way to separate fact from fiction!

(December 13, 2012 at 2:14 pm)John V Wrote:

Quote:[median] Second, your "faith" indicates (precisely) a point I made earlier. Faith is not a pathway to truth. It is a pathway to gullibility and credulity. You are "having faith" in hear-say.

And? Everyone does. I find abiogenesis to be an extraordinary claim. Has anyone DEMONSTRATED it to you? No. You have faith that someone someday will figure it out, despite literally billions of observations showing that life comes from life and inert matter doesn’t come alive.

Everyone "does" what? Has "faith" in hear-say? NOPE! That is, yet again, another one of your blind assumptions (based upon your assumption of Christian theology which you accepted uncritically from the beginning). No, not all people staunchly hold to supernatural claims on hear-say. Some of us have actually decided not to practice credulity, deciding rather to hold things tentatively. But religious faith is NOT tentative. It is firm and unwavering. This is why YOU, and other apologists, are trying to "defend the faith".

If you are talking about "having faith" in demonstrable, ordinary, common occurrences the equivocation is yours - because that is NOT faith. Faith is believing when you don't have good reason or evidence, and there is a BIG difference between THAT and tentatively trusting in a previously established common or ordinary occurrence.

Thanks for admitting that you are willing to trust in hear-say about supernatural claims. How about being consistent with that willingness now.

(December 13, 2012 at 2:14 pm)John V Wrote: I haven’t made a claim to have supernatural powers. You’re setting up a straw man from a passage which is generally thought to be a later addition and not authentic.

HAHAHA! WOW. This is a perfect and classic example of Christian apologist SPIN and rationalizing. You're going to play the Pickin n Choosin game now? Have you even read your bible? Open it sometime (John 14, 1 Cor 2, Matt 10). Your bible clearly states that if you are a believer/follower of Jesus you WILL do these things. Nice try at throwing out passages that you don't like though.

Of course, since you have already demonstrated that you practice hypocrisy with your standards of evidence (lowering them only for YOUR interpretation of YOUR religion), there is no reason to think you will actually be honest enough to admit what your bible actually says (because the house of cards comes falling down if you do), but it's pretty entertaining to watch.

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(December 13, 2012 at 3:25 pm)John V Wrote: My goal is not to prove that Christianity is the best supported so much as it is to just show some of the ways religious claims can be examined.

WOW. So you've just admitted that you don't care about the OP of this thread (i.e. - the actual subject) and only about "how religious claims can be examined". That wasn't the question!

I asked you to bring your A Game. Provide the strongest evidence and reasons for why you believe what you believe. Why post here if you're going to dodge it? That just makes you a troll.