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RE: Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach
July 8, 2015 at 12:57 pm
Let's see how Randy reacts to this passage from Ehrman's "Lost Christianities." Here he discusses the many fuck-ups in the gospels...which, sadly for Randy, are indeed fuck-ups.
My guess? Not well.
Quote:Discrepancies like these (many of which seem minor, but which often end up being significant when examined closely) permeate the Gospel traditions. Some of the differences are much larger, involving the purpose of Jesus’ mission and the understanding of his character. What all the differences show, great and small, is that each Gospel writer has an agenda—a point of view he wants to get across, an understanding of Jesus he wants his readers to share. And he has told his stories in such a way as to convey that agenda.
But once we begin to suspect the historical accuracy of our Gospel sources,and find evidence that corroborates our suspicions, where does that lead us? With regard to our questions about the nature of orthodoxy and heresy in early Christianity, it leads us away from the classical notion that orthodoxy is rooted in the apostles’ teaching as accurately preserved in the New Testament Gospels and to the realization that the doctrines of orthodox Christianity must have developed at a time later than the historical Jesus and his apostles, later even
than our earliest Christian writings. These views are generally held by scholars today, based on in-depth analyses of the Gospel traditions since the days of Reimarus.
RE: Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach
July 8, 2015 at 4:00 pm
(July 8, 2015 at 11:40 am)KevinM1 Wrote: You also continue to prop up the claim - the biblical account of Jesus' resurrection - as evidence of itself. It also doesn't work that way. You need corroborating evidence. And there's very little. Most of it is in the form of, "This is what these people in the ancient middle east actually believed, and here's some actual history providing context for some of the oddities/events/whatever." There is nothing at all that suggests that the resurrection actually happened. Nothing at all to suggest divinity in action. Except in your bible.
All I want is corroborating evidence from sciences for dead people resurrecting. Ex. scientists recreating the circumstances and resurrecting people who have been dead for days. That or modern unbiased researchers seeing dead people resurrecting after days on a fairly regular basis. That would make a resurrection in ancient times more likely.
He says the Christian god did it, which is another way of saying a resurrection happened. It's not a matter of god or not god, it's resurrection happened or not (theistic example, a god didn't do it because it didn't get done in the first place).
It is very important not to mistake hemlock for parsley, but to believe or not believe in God is not important at all. - Denis Diderot
We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing. - Gore Vidal
RE: Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach
July 8, 2015 at 5:06 pm (This post was last modified: July 8, 2015 at 5:32 pm by Minimalist.)
Quote: All I want is corroborating evidence from sciences for dead people resurrecting.
I'm not even that bad. I'd settle for some garbled, half-assed, hearsay account from a contemporary writer who said that some people in Judaea even thought that a dead criminal came back to life after being executed by a Roman magistrate. Something like the Doctrina Jacobi is for early islam but xtians don't even have that.
All they have is pious blather from later writers and that ain't worth shit.
People believed all sorts of silly stuff in antiquity. Does not mean that any of it was true. Sadly, we still have morons who believe it today and that is unforgivable.
RE: Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach
July 8, 2015 at 5:34 pm
(July 7, 2015 at 8:23 pm)Jenny A Wrote:
(July 7, 2015 at 6:54 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: Jenny, I have read that article in the past, and I am quite comfortable with it. I encourage everyone in this forum to spend some time reading it.
Then you need to read it again. It does not make nearly the case you claim it does. It merely makes the case that most scholars (most of whom are theologians) believe early Christians thought they'd seen Jesus.
(July 7, 2015 at 6:54 pm)Randy Carson Wrote:
But is that what happened, Jenny? The Romans buried Jesus?
Mark 15
42 It was Preparation Day (that is, the day before the Sabbath). So as evening approached, 43 Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body. 44 Pilate was surprised to hear that he was already dead. Summoning the centurion, he asked him if Jesus had already died. 45 When he learned from the centurion that it was so, he gave the body to Joseph. 46 So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. 47 Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joseph saw where he was laid.
That would be the claim yes. But it's not proof of anything. It's an account written 70 years later by who knows who.
(July 7, 2015 at 6:54 pm)Randy Carson Wrote:
Why were the disciples transformed from cowering men in hiding for fear of the Jews to bold evangelists who turned the world upside down?
We have no evidence that they were except for a book written 70 years after the events by who knows who.
(July 7, 2015 at 2:41 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: This sounds so commonsensical, doesn’t it? But in fact it is demonstrably false.
Probability theorists studying what sort of evidence it would take to establish a highly improbable event came to realize that if you just weigh the improbability of the event against the reliability of the testimony, we’d have to be skeptical of many commonly accepted claims. Rather, what’s crucial is the probability that we should have the evidence we do if the extraordinary event had not occurred. This can easily offset any improbability of the event itself.
In the case of the resurrection of Jesus, for example, this means that we must also ask, “What is the probability of the facts of the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection, if the resurrection had not occurred?” It is highly, highly, highly improbable that we should have that evidence if the resurrection had not occurred (William Lane Craig, “Stephen Law on the Non-existence of Jesus of Nazareth”, http://www.reasonablefaith.org/stephen-l...f-nazareth.).
So, no, extraordinary claims require sufficient evidence...just like any other kind of claim.
Sufficient means sufficient to make the claim more probable than not.
Quote:While the idea that a sufficiently outlandish claim requires a lot more compelling evidence is quite intuitive, it can be quantified nicely with probability theory in a Bayesian framework. In short, sufficient evidence must be capable of raising a highly improbable claim to be highly probable - and the more improbable the evidence, the better. By application of Bayes' theorem, it's possible to show this in action mathematically.
Assume, for instance, someone claims to be able to predict what way a coin[1] will land almost perfectly. We know this is an extraordinary claim, so we'll say that just by guessing if the person is telling the truth or not that it's a million-to-one chance. In reality, the number would be even more improbable, but this can be used for illustration. So we ask them to demonstrate the skill. They're almost perfect, so let's assume they guess right about 90% of the time - this allows them the opportunity for their skill to mess up once in a while, but still prove to be pretty good. This gives us all the information we need to know to actually quantify how extraordinary the evidence must be.
Consider if they guessed a single coin toss correctly. The odds of guessing by chance is a mere 50%, or 50:50.
\frac{0.9 \cdot 0.000001}{0.5} = 0.0000018
A single coin toss doesn't improve our odds very dramatically. The evidence just isn't extraordinary enough - you can correctly guess a single coin toss correctly 50% of the time with no special skills involved. It all rests on how improbable our evidence, P(B), actually is and a 50:50 chance isn't particularly improbable. For two coin tosses P(B) becomes 0.25, and for 10 coin tosses it comes to roughly 0.00097. Plugging those numbers in Bayes' theorem gives us a probability of genuine skill (given P(A) of a million-to-one) of around 0.0009, which although still small is a considerable improvement on that original million-to-one chance. By 20 or so correctly guessed coin tosses, the skill is starting to look a lot more genuine.
This is the basic idea underpinning statistical significance; is it more likely that our evidence is random, or due to a real effect, and is the improbability of the evidence presented in proportion to the improbability of the claim being made.
But Sagan's quip about extraordinary evidence doesn't just mean that we can take someone's word for it if they managed to toss so many coins in a row. Derren Brown can pull off such a feat with some effort and misdirection as shown in his special on The System, so we always need to consider alternative hypotheses and compare how likely they are. Like with Derren Brown tossing a coin with 10 heads in a row, is it more likely that they're psychic, or are cheating? So tests such as James Randi's million-dollar challenge will control for this potential factor, making sure that the probability of foul play, fraud and cheating is far less than the probability of genuine psychic power.
Take the time time to read the hidden material. Sufficient evidence is far, far more than what you are offering here. Sufficient evidence is the evidence necessary to make the claim more probable than not. So far you are still light years from there.
Jenny-
Mark was not written 70 years later. If that were the case, it would have been after the turn of the century.
No one accepts that date. You shouldn't either. Mark was written very early as I have shown in another thread.
Maybe one reason why you are having a hard time finally coming to a faith position is that you are working with bad data.
RE: Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach
July 8, 2015 at 5:35 pm
(July 8, 2015 at 5:34 pm)Randy Carson Wrote:
(July 7, 2015 at 8:23 pm)Jenny A Wrote: Then you need to read it again. It does not make nearly the case you claim it does. It merely makes the case that most scholars (most of whom are theologians) believe early Christians thought they'd seen Jesus.
That would be the claim yes. But it's not proof of anything. It's an account written 70 years later by who knows who.
We have no evidence that they were except for a book written 70 years after the events by who knows who.
Sufficient means sufficient to make the claim more probable than not.
Take the time time to read the hidden material. Sufficient evidence is far, far more than what you are offering here. Sufficient evidence is the evidence necessary to make the claim more probable than not. So far you are still light years from there.
Jenny-
Mark was not written 70 years later. If that were the case, it would have been after the turn of the century.
No one accepts that date. You shouldn't either. Mark was written very early as I have shown in another thread.
Maybe one reason why you are having a hard time finally coming to a faith position is that you are working with bad data.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Assuming we've given you good data, what is stopping you from abandoning your 'faith' and taking a logical view?
RE: Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach
July 8, 2015 at 5:57 pm (This post was last modified: July 8, 2015 at 5:58 pm by Randy Carson.)
(July 7, 2015 at 8:56 pm)Pizza Wrote: Because ancient people know better than modern biologists. I agree science must be mute and historians can talk all they want. No limits for them because.....magic. Historians use magic all the time as explanations. Historians never appeal to science.
Modern biologists know more about biology, but they aren't any more capable of recognizing a dead body when they see one than Jesus' contemporaries were. In fact, come to think of it, there is one fact recorded in the gospel of John that your modern science can explain...and that proves John was actually telling the truth.
When the Roman soldier pierced Jesus' side, John records:
31 Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. 32 The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. 33 But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. 34 Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water. 35 The man who saw it has given testimony, and his testimony is true. He knows that he tells the truth, and he testifies so that you also may believe. 36 These things happened so that the scripture would be fulfilled: “Not one of his bones will be broken,” 37 and, as another scripture says, “They will look on the one they have pierced.”
It turns out, this little detail which would have made NO SENSE to John or his readers, is very factual. People in Jesus' day would not have been able to explain why "blood and water" flowed from Jesus' side, but modern medical experts can. Can you?
Quote:
Quote:"Additionally, the resurrection is not an isolated event; it occurred in the religious context that gives it meaning. This context includes such facts as Jesus’ personal claims to divinity, his deeds that appeared miraculous in nature, and possibly even his predictions concerning his resurrection. Within this context, Jesus’ resurrection is right at home."
We know Jesus performed miracles because ancient sources say so, fuck science, fuck common sense. Also fuck inductive reasoning and the principle of analogy. We needs them? I love Jesus.
Exactly. We can say that Jesus probably performed miracles because eye-witnesses say so. This is not an affront to science; science simply cannot account for things outside the natural realm.
As for inductive reasoning, are you sure of this? An inductive argument would be:
P1. In my entire life, I have never seen a person resurrected from the dead after two or three days of being dead.
Conclusion. Therefore, Jesus did not resurrect from the dead after two or three days of being dead.
However, if someone who has abilities beyond the ordinary human being's ability to give life chooses to raise that person from the dead, does the fact that we ordinarily wouldn't expect it (and, in fact, in the ordinary course without intervention by an outside power would find it to be impossible) mean that it can't happen?
When speaking of God -- who is outside of our physical universe, who created everything we see, and who gives and sustains life -- it is not unreasonable to note that His involvement can disrupt the strongest of inferences as to what should happen and would happen in 99.99999% of all cases.
Quote:
Quote:"On the other hand, if miracles are possible and if a God does exist, then the resurrection is far more plausible; in fact, in light of the testimony of the gospels, it is probable."
Because god is resurrecting people like all time. Just the other day I walked down the street and tripped over a resurrected person. It's a well known fact of biology these happen. Last Tuesday god turn me into a newt....I got better.
Not much better, apparently. You still think like a newb.
God doesn't need to resurrect people "all the time" to conquer death and free us from sin. Which WAS the whole point of the incarnation.
