(September 11, 2017 at 7:49 pm)SteveII Wrote:(September 11, 2017 at 4:39 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: Yes, all the supernatural claims of any religion can be examined in the same or similar way as Christianity's are. As far as I can tell, no religion has what could reasonably be described as a 'body of evidence' for their supernatural claims. Which are their most central and important claims, because their claim to authority depends on having a supernatural source for it.
I'm not aware that this is the sort of thing that serious scholars of religion debate...if they did, I'm sure they'd have announced a winner by now.
When Christians use special pleading, they use it the same way as every other theistic religion: 'My God is the exception. My God is different. My God is unique. My God is the only explanation. Their God isn't real, my God is.' [1]
Christianity, of course, exists. There is ample evidence of that. If you think Christianity has special evidence for its supernatural claims that other religions do not possess, I would be interested in seeing it. If your definition of what constitutes 'more evidence' is arbitrarily picking some criteria that conveniently and arbitrarily favors Christianity, that would be some sort of fallacy, but I'm not sure it would be special pleading. I'm sure other religions would find which religion is the oldest persuasive, or which religion has the lowest body count, or which religion has the highest percentage of people willing to pierce themselves to show their faith. Whatever evidence you have that Christianity in particular is true, it should be something relevant to whether its supernatural claims are true. [2]
Christianity is quite unique. As are all the other religions. Of course it's different from the other religions.
But if you've got actual evidence of the supernatural, I'd like to know what it is.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I don't have time to address every point. But here are a few comments.
1. It would only be special pleading if there was no justification for the Christian belief. I think that the significant amount of information available in the NT make a better case by far than most religions have. With this justification, there is no special pleading.
2. I am talking about the writings of 27 sources we combined into the NT as well as dozens of other surviving documents that at least attest to a part of the overall narrative. No special criteria--just the only evidence that we could ask for from that time period for the truth of the claims of Christ--people writing about things within the lifetime of witnesses and possible rebuttal witnesses.
The statements "Christianity is true" and "there is more evidence for Christianity than any other religion" are independent of each other (a belief on one does not have an impact on the other). This discussion is on the latter.
Lastly (and generally), the case for Christianity does not rest on one aspect (i.e. unassailable 1st century documentation). It is and always will be a cumulative case with many aspects (natural theology, message content, predisposed to the supernatural, historicity of Christ, morality, personal experience, influence of others). We are discussing one aspect and how it compares to other religions.
Of course those 27 citations in the NT weren't all reported independently at the same time. Some are virtual copies of the others. Also, as you point out, what was edited into the NT wasn't a fluke. Authoritative committees made those decisions in order to come up with unified, internally consistent document. How well they achieved that can be argued, that it was contrived with a purpose cannot.
