Is Accepting Christian Evidence Special Pleading?

[TheBeardedDude]

I fixed that for you.

A lot of atheists say the cosmological arguments of Aquinas are fallacious but none have yet revealed any flaws in his impeccable logic. Since I am feeling generous I'll just assume you mistakenly relied on the pronouncements of some authority or were swayed by the confident tone of some YouTube video.

But really the topic is essentially whether the claims of the Christian faith are categorically different than those of other faiths and it is pretty obvious that they are.

The cosmological arguments start with unproven assumptions. For instance, demonstrate that the universe requires a cause and that this cause must necessarily be something supernatural and that this supernatural thing must be a god and that it is specifically the god of the Bible. Step 1 is showing that the universe REQUIRES a cause, not that you assume it had one because you can't conceive of it not having a cause.

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It would be nice to have more evidence. However, there is no way to know what "third-party" evidence there was and was lost to history (what percentage of documents do you think survived the sacking of Jerusalem or even the normal hazards of the first couple of centuries?).

If that is supposed to be an argument in favor of your claims, it's an argument from ignorance. And you know what that's worth. 'Maybe there's evidence that would back me up but it's lost' is something I would never say, because, frankly, it's pitiful.

There is no rebuttal evidence.

What do you imagine rebuttal evidence would look like? Pliny saying 'I heard there were no dead people walking around Jerusalem the other day'? Without corroboration, all you've got are assertions and claims; and they're in the form of hearsay, to boot.

It becomes a matter of opinion as to the weight you put on the evidence we have and what is or is not compelling. There is no proof. Most Christians believe because of a variety of reasons and not just because the first century Christian docs are unassailable proof.

In the thread on testimony as evidence, I maintained that testimony alone is not evidence at all, but an assertion or claim. There may be elements within the testimony that make it more or less plausible, and there may be other testimony it can be compared to that allow us to evaluate the plausibility better. That analysis can be evidence, but the testimony in itself is exactly what you are trying to determine the truth of. For mundane claims of little consequence, we usually take people at their word, because it makes living with each other easier and usually doesn't matter. You're not making a mundane claim of little consequence though, are you?

 
However, germane to the subject, Christians do have way more to consider in their cumulative case for their beliefs than do other religions.

More is not necessarily better. One verifiable miracle that accomplishes the physically impossible would be worth more than the entire Bible plus the entire history of all Abrahamic religions in establishing the existence of the supernatural.

I agree wholeheartedly about testimony/anecdotes/observations NOT being evidence that they are true. They are evidence of what people believe (they are claims), but not evidence that their claims are true. 

I believe Christians when they tell me that they believe Jesus rose from the dead as it says in the Bible, but their sincere belief and the fact that it is claimed in the Bible, doesn't validate the truth of that claim.