(December 14, 2016 at 6:21 pm)Drich Wrote: According to John 8 Jesus wrote enough in the sand to shut the pharisees up.The story doesn't say that he wrote anything to shut them up. It was when he said, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" that they gave up, after which he returned to writing on the ground with his finger. I've heard some people's ideas about what he was writing (an amusing one being that he was scribbling the specific sins of the Pharisees who were accusing the woman) but all that John 8 says is that he was writing, not what he wrote.
As for the rest, if Jesus was indeed God then nothing would have stopped him from writing notes or a journal or a whole book. He winked an entire universe into existence, why would he have to make time in his busy schedule to write one by hand? Or worry about gathering the necessary materials? Or about having the necessary authority to be taken seriously? Imagine that he hands his disciples a book that cannot be burned or torn or otherwise damaged and which miraculously reproduces itself whenever needed? That isn't beyond the capability of the being who formed a woman out of a man's rib, or fed a large gathering with a handful of food items and recovered much more than he'd started with, is it?
On the other hand, if he was just another rabble-rouser who pissed off a local Roman prefect and was executed for his troubles, then the lack of time and materials and authority would be understandable and make sense.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould