(August 19, 2014 at 2:23 pm)revivin Wrote: Can you think of what would be better evidence than what we have in the 27 books of the NT?The originals. Or original writings of Jesus himself. Or original writings from god. Any of these plus extensive corroboration from the people who witnessed them, preserved in seemingly supernatural ways instead of just copies of copies of letters whose writers cannot be identified. Or if god would just show up and make the whole thing moot.
The list of possibilities for better evidence is pretty extensive, it seems to me. If you believe that a cobbled-together set of unsourced copies is sufficient evidence for a claim, then you have to accept just about every other religious texts and the claims they contain. Heck, just about any ancient book that makes any sort of claims that we cannot independently verify. My guess: when it comes to those books, you judge using a very different set of criteria.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
