(January 3, 2015 at 3:43 pm)Lek Wrote:(January 3, 2015 at 3:33 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: Because a lot of people wrote about him, we have dozens of his own works, and we witness philosophers writing down their ideas all the time. Is this hard?
No. I's not hard and I'm willing to accept most of that evidence. It shows that you also believe in the existence of persons based on that type of unscientific evidence. We have the same type of evidence for Jesus, except there's more and it's more recent.
Sure, but belief in historical figures is based on historical evidence and limited by the quality and quantity of that evidence. The evidence for Plato, and even his predecessor Socrates, is pretty good. It's multiple sourced and contemporary.
Jesus (despite my playing with H_M who thinks he can prove the resurrection) probably was a real man. But the evidence for him was written at best 30 years after his death, was written in a language not his own based upon oral tradition or worse yet visions, contradicts itself, contradicts things we know about the time period, includes many, many, highly improbable events. And we still can't say for sure when or where he was born, or when he died. Additionally, what we do have has been embellished and/or suppressed because of the theological interests of early Christians.
All of which is to say that what we know about Plato and what Plato thought is a lot more reliable than what we know about Jesus or what Jesus thought.
If there is a god, I want to believe that there is a god. If there is not a god, I want to believe that there is no god.
