RE: Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach
July 7, 2015 at 9:33 am
(This post was last modified: July 7, 2015 at 9:37 am by Randy Carson.)
(July 6, 2015 at 7:03 pm)Pizza Wrote: The point at issue is the whether there was a resurrection of the dead body of Jesus. This is a claim about biology. Dead bodies don't normally resurrect. Something as unlikely to me as ghosts existing and the apostles seeing a ghost, not a resurrected body, would be more likely than a body resurrecting. People report ghost sightings more than bodily resurrections, this is all common sense.
Give me evidence like biologists resurrecting dead people after days of being dead, and I'd likely change my mind or at the very least be more sympathetic to Christianity. It doesn't matter how reliable the gospels are. They are not enough. Claiming a dead man walks again is a claim about biology of the human body. You can't ignore biology and the evidence on this. Assuming theism is not enough, because again the question at issue would be whether god causes dead men to walk. According to the common sense evidence, dead bodies don't get up after days, so god likely doesn't resurrect the dead. That's a natural theology argument against the resurrection of Jesus for you. Resurrections aren't a dime-a-dozen and if they are that would undermine the theological importance of Jesus's resurrection.
You can't just assume god did in fact resurrect Jesus, because that assumes Christian views of god are true which begs the question because the goal for the arguing for the resurrection is to argue for the truth of the Christian view of god.
Please stop dancing around these problems.
You're right. They don't NORMALLY resurrect. Here's what we know:
Jesus died by crucifixion.
The women who went to the tomb found it empty.
The disciples believed that they saw Jesus alive after the crucifixion and were willing to suffer rather than recant.
Paul, an sworn enemy of the Church, was suddenly converted.
James, the skeptical brother of Jesus, was suddently converted.
What theory do you have that account for these facts BETTER than the resurrection of Jesus?