Why Would God Hide?

[StealthySkeptic]

An historical account, depending on a lot of different factors, can be considered hearsay if for instance it is a.) not a primary source and b.) the only account that claims that this an event happened. For supernatural claims, such as an itinerant Jewish rabbi rising bodily from the dead, the standard for secular historians is much stricter since that violates the laws of physics- and outside the written Bible and people's belief that it is infallible there is no evidence for the resurrection. We also do not have the accounts of these supposed eyewitnesses, and even then eyewitness testimony is often unreliable by itself in courts of law, especially when it describes physically impossible events.

As a contrast, the inhabitants of Constantinople, the then capital of the Byzantine Empire, claimed that a lunar eclipse would bring about the doom of the city. We can establish for a fact that people claimed to have seen an eclipse on May 22nd, 1453, that there was an eclipse at that point due to the position of the moon, Earth, and sun at that point, and that the city fell to the Ottoman Turks on May 29th, 1453 but we obviously can't establish that this was based on the prophecy or prediction without an almost impossible to find larger amount of evidence.

As for your comparison of multiple different theories of religion with multiple different theories of time (or other scientific theories)- consider that scientific theories can be tested directly. For instance, we know that time is part of a four-dimensional space in conjunction with the three dimensions we can see thanks to Einstein's theory of general relativity (I can barely wrap my head around the basics lol). If someone were to challenge the evidence for this, they would be able to test Einstein's theories using the scientific method and propose their own evidence.

Religious claims, due to the fact that God (or Vishnu, or what have you) uses a series of philosophical escape hatches such as "being outside of time and space" to become conveniently invisible to all instruments and out of the reach of scientific inquiry are unfalsifiable (which really means untestable), therefore the evidence presented for religion has to come in the form of prophecies, revelation, or holy books that are somehow free from error. My opinion is that all of these things can be easily explained as coming from subjective human interpretation of (and attempt to explain) the world around us, in the same way that lightning was the wrath of Zeus way back when. Since according to Occam's razor the simplest explanations for a claim are the best ones in the absence of contravening evidence, it makes sense for me to say "I need a LOT more proof, buddy."