The Reasons to Believe in Yahweh

[John V]

Getting back to the OP, the question was not what makes your evidence (*) compelling, but what makes it compelling in a way that the accounts of other gods are not compelling.

Yep, as I noted previously, the atheist tag-team game gets annoying.

Are you suggesting that the prophets are better attested than those in any other religion, as prophets (having miraculous prophecy), or as men? The latter gets you nothing.

The latter gets me something. Knowledge of them men helps to assess their purposes and motivations, which are common factors in assessment of testimony. Also note that this is a totality of the evidence assessment. You guys like to think in all black or white. My goal is not to prove that Christianity is the best supported so much as it is to just show some of the ways religious claims can be examined. Different people can assign different weights to different factors and come up with a different conclusion. It's silly, though, to just say all religious beliefs have equal support.

Moreover, it seems that you are redefining the grounds for belief to be those specifically suited to Christianity, thereby simply defining Christianity as more believable in a rhetorical slight of hand.

It seems to me that my opponents are redefining the grounds for belief to be those specifically suited to atheism. Go figure. At least I'm working within standard definitions of common words.

If you consider these evidences more compelling than say the stories in the Edda or the Vedas, replete with their own miraculous things, you need to show how this evidence is categorically superior. If it rests on the testimony of the prophets having been shown to be prophetic, that's likely topic for another thread; to summarize though, most who aren't already blinkered into believing them prophetic do not find the accounts of the prophets as credible evidence of miraculous prophecy, at least not without accepting a whole slew of other claims which validate those claims in the bible as genuine. (Seems Min was right, we're getting back to, "Because the bible says so.")

Who wrote them? Why? What did they stand to gain or lose?