(July 15, 2015 at 6:59 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: I'm simply asking if you think there was a man 2000ish years ago named Jesus who brought forth these new "ideas" that we now call Christianity.
I don't know if there was a man that Jesus and Christianity was based on, but it's plausible. But I chose "I don't think so" because of that last part. I don't think the ideas being put forth were new, and we don't know how many of those were brought forth by the man Jesus was based on, versus how much of it was created by those who came afterwards. Christianity may have been a whole lot of separate but slightly similar belief systems that gradually coalesced into something that a powerful enough authority was able to sculpt into a more-or-less final form.
"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