Hi, I'm a Christian. Help Me Disprove My Religion!

[Randy Carson]

As has been pointed out to you by others, if I found a letter saying you had a friend named Trevor who died at age 17 in 2000, I would tentatively accept that as genuine because I had no reason to argue with it, and I would believe in Trevor's existence only to the degree that I had evidence for it. It's a low claim, so not much proof is required, nor is much belief required. It comes down to a "why not?"

If you were not already aware of this, I have posted thoughts by Prof. Richard Swinburne in another thread of this forum saying the same thing. We believe what others tell us in the absence of good reasons to reject their statements.

For this reason, it is not unreasonable to accept the accounts of the gospels as historically reliable in the absence of trustworthy evidence to the contrary. And this contradictory evidence does not exist, does it? Consequently, we give the gospel writers the benefit of the doubt regarding what they claim to have seen and heard.

But if that letter said that Trevor was a miracle worker sent by God, killed in Birmingham after a public trial for treason against the Crown, and that angry mobs had demanded his death, I would probably look for additional proofs of this much higher level of claim. If I then saw no news articles about a trial of that sort in Birmingham, and found that despite it being "public", only you and your circle of friends ever seem to have written about it... I'd probably be pretty skeptical of your claims about Trevor. Might I believe you had a friend named Trevor? Sure, why not. Miracle worker and executed in public for treason? Mmmm, no. Evidence is weak, and unconfirmed.

I see that you slipped in the bit about "your circle of friends"...and that's the problem. Once you have multiple, independent eyewitnesses for the claims that Aractus is making about Trevor, then the evidence for his story becomes stronger...not weaker.

"In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence. A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence." - David Hume

“To say that uniform experience is against miracles is to implicitly assume already that miracles have never occurred. It seems almost embarrassing to refute so sophisticated an objection by such a simple consideration, but this answer nevertheless seems to me to be entirely correct.” - William Lane Craig