The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[Randy Carson]

There are reasons to dispute all of your premises,

Well, that's true, Jenny. And to be honest, one of the reasons to dispute my premises is because you don't like the conclusion they point to.

Pre-marital sex? That's out? Contraception? No good according to the true Church. Etc, etc. People have lots of reasons for disputing information that is presented to them, and not all of it is based upon the strength of counter arguments.

especially that the Gospels were eyewitness accounts or that they were attributed to the Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John early.

I have ARGUED my case. You have merely asserted yours.

Nor is there much corroboration of the Gospels elsewhere in the historic record.

Jesus was a carpenter from a backwater outpost of the Roman Empire. One wonders that he got a mention at all. But he did, didn't he? And today, the Catholic Church sits in the heart of an empire that vanished long ago. But, yes, the external corroboration is significant.

The Gospels contradict each other.

So did the eyewitnesses of the sinking of the Titanic.

And what historical records we do have contradict the Gospels.

Bring it.

I don't have time for a point by by analysis, but you have yet to do that either.

Nor will I be allowed to in a comprehensive manner. This is a "discussion" forum, I'm told. So, we're discussing BIG things in very small chunks.

My major point is that you simply cannot prove god, or miracles, or a resurrection via eyewitness testimony, even if it were modern day eyewitness who you could cross-examine.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof in order to make them more likely than not.  For example, if I claimed my dog flies, my say so, even in a court of law under oath would be unlikely to convince anyone because the chances that I would be lying or disillusion would be much greater than the chances of a wingless flying dog.  So too if I and my whole family claimed my great grandmother rose from the dead last Friday.  That would be so even if our disinterested neighbors agreed.  To prove her resurrection would need to provide solid physical evidence of her death, produce the great grand mother herself, and provide proof of her identity.  Even then, we'd have a hard time proving that she really had died and that she wasn't someone else. This is why skeptical people do not believe in ghosts, ESP, or UFO abductions despite tons of eyewitnesses.

So, how would you go about proving to those skeptics that your dog had flown or that your grandmother had been raised from the dead? What would or could you do that the Apostles did not do? And how would you feel when EVERYONE IN TOWN began to mock you, call you a liar, and eventually turn on you even with threats against your life? Would you deny that your dog had flown even if you faced imprisonment, loss of employment, etc? Would you turn your back on what you knew to be true just because other people denied it?

So, I see your quest to prove the resurrection or that Jesus was god via the Bible as hopeless.  Regardless of whether the claims you make about it above are true, the Bible is not sufficient evidence on which to base supernatural claims.  No historical account is.

Sufficient for what? To be coercive?

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Nah.  That's not how burden of proof works.

The Scientific Burden of Proof

In the sciences, the burden of proof falls to the one proposing a hypothesis. It doesn’t matter what the hypothesis is:

If you want to propose that Particle X exists, the burden of proof falls to you.
If you want to propose that Particle X does not exist, the burden again falls to you.

Either way, in science the person proposing a hypothesis needs to provide evidence for it by using the scientific method (i.e., making a prediction based on the hypothesis and then seeing whether the prediction is fulfilled when a test is run).

Only by doing this can the hypothesis be scientifically established (to the extent that anything can ever be scientifically established).

The Philosophical Burden of Proof

Most discussions about the existence of God are not scientific ones. They may involve observations about the universe and things that science studies (e.g., order, design, etc.). However, they also involve premises that cannot be verified scientifically. Many of them involve premises of a philosophical nature, and so the discussion of God’s existence is often regarded as a philosophical matter rather than a scientific one.

Who holds the burden of proof in philosophy? As in science, it’s whoever is making a claim. It doesn’t matter whether you’re:

asserting the existence or non-existence of Plato’s Forms,
claiming the truth or falsity of a particular view of epistemology, or
asserting that moral judgments are just expressions of emotion or something else.

The principle remains the same: The burden is on you to argue for your own claims.

Philosophy may use a different method than science, but its assignation of the burden of proof is the same.

Taken from: Who Has the Burden of Proof When Discussing God? | Strange Notions

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It's never occurred to you that there is no reason to proselytize for atheism, or that some atheists might find that act to be fundamentally obnoxious?  Who would want you in their club, Randy....introspection -may- provide clarity here.

If religion is the source of all the problems claimed by atheists, then the elimination of religion is in your own best interest. 

And kinda like politics wherein Republicans and Democrats both try to sway the independent moderates, you better snatch up as many of us slow-minded Christians as you can before taking on the Muslims because you're gonna need all the manpower you can find at that point.

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Because no supernatural phenomena has ever stood up to scrutiny.

Outside of fiction there is no supernatural.

How many of them have you investigated personally?

Are you relying on the - OOPS! - testimony of others to tell you about them?

How do you know that outside of fiction there is no supernatural?

What tools would you use to measure the supernatural?