Testimony is Evidence

[John V]

There is a third option - we each weight testimonial evidence according to multiple factors and find some weaker, some stronger.

What factors might those be?

There are a number of factors. I gave one example earlier - personal gain. For example, most people would tend to lower the value of testimony from a scientist that smoking isn't harmful if they discovered that the scientist was paid by a tobacco company. Why are you commenting on my posts without reading them?

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Again, false dichotomy. There is a third option - we each weight testimonial evidence according to multiple factors and find some weaker, some stronger.

No, I don't think so.  I believe it is your bias that makes you think your religious testimonial is more valid or valuable than the religious testimonials of Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and so on.  I'm pretty sure that a devout Hindu will value his own texts, history, word-of-mouth, and personal experiences as more valid and valuable than yours.  His respected community members will confirm his beliefs.  His excited temple members will talk of visions or of powerful feelings.  Whatever you say, he will mirror in kind.  He will be certain that his testimonial represents truth, whereas yours represents a misunderstanding of truth.

And I believe it is your bias that leads you to argue that religious testimony is all completely and equally worthless.

Since there is no physical evidence, then you will have to establish to my satisfaction not only that testimonial might be useful in establishing the truth of religious claims.

Your satisfaction? I've noted that people assess evidence differently and I'm OK with that, as I'm not the final arbiter of what constitutes evidence. What makes you think I'm trying to change your mind personally? I'm writing for the theoretical reasonable person. If you see your error that's great, but it's not my main intent.

You'll have to demonstrate that one faith's testimonial evidence due to "multiple factors" is in fact weaker or stronger.

I've already given one factor - a person who stands to gain from testimony is given less weight than someone who doesn't stand to gain, or may even suffer loss from their testimony. I've noted with the smoking example that this is a common criterion, and I've given the example in religion of Mohammed v. Paul.

Since the particular God ideas that all these people have held have been so varied, there are three ways of looking at this state:
1)  There's some underlying, non-mythological real God, humans sometimes have contact with this God, and the different religions are the struggle of minds in describing the indescribable.
2)  There's something about people that leads us to anthropomorphize that which is mysterious, so we have a genetic predisposition to put a human-like face to inhuman things.
3)  There really is a God, but we have no contact with such-- our God ideas are as (2) above: an artifact of the human brain's predispositions toward seeing things a certain way.

I believe these three options cover all the bases.  Note that none of these options allows you to put forward the Jesus man-as-God idea as viable if you consider the testimonials of non-Christian theists as credible.

I've already noted that I don't find Mohammed as credible as Paul and given one basis for that position, yet you continue to push this false dichotomy.