(March 17, 2017 at 1:29 pm)Stimbo Wrote: And that differs from children's letters to Santa how?
Using the definition discussed above: Evidence refers to pieces of information or facts that help us establish the truth of something.
Letters to Santa =/= evidence of Santa because the letters do not provide us any first-hand information or facts about Santa that the writer has access to.
Documents describing events that the author/editor personally saw or interviewed people who saw is first-hand information about those events and is therefore evidence for those events. The epistles support (corroborate) the information in the gospels by providing us with a large group of people (the churches through Asia Minor and Greece) that already believed the basics of the gospels before they even had the gospels.
Again, you might claim it is not compelling evidence to prove the existence of God, but proof is a subjective conclusion and not everyone has evaluated the evidence the same nor has the same threshold for proof. For example, if a person has no problem believing in the supernatural, they could take the same body of evidence that is available to you and arrive at a different conclusion (proof).
