(February 2, 2012 at 6:08 pm)brotherlylove Wrote: If that is the case, I will remind you that personal testimony does count as evidence, especially when corroborated. Many of the things we know about history comes solely from personal testimony.
The problem is that we're supposed to take these things at face value, because there is usually no corroborating evidence. If I told you I walked down the street and found a snake which started talking to me, you'd think I was either lying, delusional, or both. But someone writes it in a book a few thousand years ago, and it becomes undeniable truth. Not only that, but there is the fact that even eyewitnesses get things wrong. It's not that they're deliberately lying, but they just don't remember things exactly as they happened. Take the biblical stories of Jesus which as pointed out above, are nothing more than hearsay about hearsay from oral reports which weren't recorded until 40-70 years after all the events supposedly took place.
Quote:Second, it is simply fallacious to say that because you do not see any miracles today, that they couldn't have happened in the past.
True, but applying Occam's Razor, which is more likely? That an unknowable, all-powerful deity produced events which contradict the known laws of science, or that they are simply stories which were made up? The fact that such events aren't occurring today points to the latter.
Quote:God could also have good reasons for not openly revealing His existence to the world.
Yeah, because the world is in perfect shape now and nobody ever argues or kills someone else over religion.
Christian apologetics is the art of rolling a dog turd in sugar and selling it as a donut.
