Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach

[Jenny A]

We don't "struggle" to accept his existence.  We struggle to keep straight faces when other adults resort to such empty and transparently stupid arguments in lieu of actual evidence.

^This^

[Minimalist]

Welcome to another day in Randy's World.... where god is everywhere but evidence of him is nowhere. Amazing that such people are even capable of wiping their own asses.

[Pizza]

"Christian beliefs are true and have good reasons for them, therefor Christian beliefs count as knowledge."

Swiiiiing and a miss. One down in the bottom of the ninth.

Another high quality reply from Randy. How are Heaven's Gate cult members not like the apostles? Simply claiming one group has knowledge and the other doesn't is just hand waving.

[Redbeard The Pink]

As I noted in the OP, "this discussion will not consider whether the New Testament is reliable nor attempt to prove that it is. The conclusion that Jesus did rise from the dead will not depend upon that argument."

If you have any opposing arguments you wish to make regarding any of the material I have presented, please make your case in response to the appropriate post(s):

Post 1 - My OP
Post 65 - Fact 1: Jesus died by crucifixion
Post 148 - Fact 2: Jesus' disciples believed that He rose and appeared to them
Post 283 - Fact 3: Paul, the enemy of the Church, was suddenly converted
Post 460 - Fact 4: James, the skeptical brother of Jesus, was suddenly converted.
Coming Soon - Fact 5: Jesus' tomb was found to be empty

Thanks.

I'll gladly destroy all these points. Again. Pay attention this time. Take notes maybe.


It only takes one argument, really. You contradict yourself at the outset, and you have to fix that somehow before moving on.


You claim that your argument doesn't rely on the veracity of the New Testament in an underhanded attempt at discouraging debate on that matter, and then you go on to build your argument on facts that are asserted by the New Testament and supported by little (if any) other evidence.


Furthermore, even if we granted a hypothetical where the five dubious "facts" you named could be justly assumed, you have still failed to demonstrate how a human rising from clinical death is the most likely explanation for any or all of them.


Paul, James and the disciples might have been hallucinating, for one thing. Jesus could have been a gifted con man who fooled even his core followers. The tomb might have been empty because the body was moved. It might not have been empty, but the story still got written that way. The whole story could even be fictional.


Every one of those explanations is at least as plausible as yours, if not more so, and you couldn't disprove those explanations any more easily than we could disprove yours.


Your point, then, comes down to argument from ignorance. It boils down thusly:


"You guys can't prove that your explanations are right, nor that mine is wrong. We don't actually know for sure what happened back then. My magical, unreasonable explanation, however, seems more plausible to me than your mundane, reasonable one, therefore it has to be true."


The truth is that no, your crazy explanation is not the only conceivable one, and nothing says that it HAS to be true, even if all your presuppositions could be granted. You're just picking the answer you like and trying to bend the rules of what evidence is so you can support your asinine claims.

[Minimalist]

But, but, but, "jesus," Red.  Randy...and others of his ilk  ( i.e. shitheads ) think that is the magical answer to everything.

[Pizza]

No, Jenny. The Romans were professional soldiers with LOTS of experience crucifying people. Jesus died on the cross, and hanging your coat on this peg looks like mere denial - not rational evaluation of the evidence.

Hang my hat on it?  Read the part in bold.  But the possibility is far from mere denial.  Modern doctors mistakenly pronounce the living dead with some regularity (I see you deleted my link about this  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree...kolkiewicz) what could possibly make the average Roman soldier better identifying death?

This is the heart of the other disagreement: initial plausibility of irregularities. Freethinkers (atheists, agnostics, deists) want the more economical irregularities since we are starting with occam's razor; for example, someone surviving a crucifixion, people lying and dying for a lie, mass hallucinations, myths mixing with facts in short periods (which isn't even an irregularity to be honest). He just wants the conclusion, "Christian god caused a resurrection" so he will only entertain that view and give no other view naturalistic or supernaturalistic a day in court.

[KevinM1]

Just a general comment: I know that Jenny can take care of herself, but if Randy continues to try to mansplain things to her with his condescending, "No, <blah blah blah>, Jenny" responses, I might just have to kick some real ass out of principle.

[Minimalist]

No, Jenny. The Romans were professional soldiers with LOTS of experience crucifying people.

With this stupid comment we see Randy at his 'special pleading' best (or worst.)  Yes, the Romans were professional soldiers and experienced with crucifixion BUT in this particular case they deviated from their standard practices by allowing the body to be removed for burial and then had to undertake the added burden of posting guards at the fucking tomb.

The Roman "experience" was to hang the fucker up until he died and then leave the body there until it rotted away and the birds got at it.  When the body fell off it would be tossed on the local trash heap.  That, however, doesn't work so well for the son of 'god' so they invented all this other happy horseshit.  It is simply the deus ex machina they needed to explain their bullshit beliefs.

[Jenny A]

Randy,

Some general probabilities:

Chances of someone being resurrected (not just raised from the dead but raised eternally):  about zero, but there's about 6.5 billion people on earth at present none of whom has been raised from the dead or seen someone raised from the dead, so we'll call it 6.5 billion just to have a number that isn't zero. 

Chances of a person being misdiagnoses as dead:  well a quick google search came up with about 30 cases in the first five pages and that's just the ones that hit the news. 

Writing in 1895, the physician J.C. Ouseley claimed that as many as 2,700 people were buried prematurely each year in England and Wales, although others estimated the figure to be closer to 800.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death#Misdiagnosed There were over 27 million people in England and Wales in 1891 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_England.  Assuming that medicine of the 1st Century was about the same as the 19th (which is generous) the mortality rate was about a 1000 so a year giving us about 27,000 deaths per year in England.  So we're looking at the chances of being misdiagnosed as dead at about 4 in 135 or about 3%.

I don't know how to determine the probability of people having elaborate visions of things that aren't real.  But the number of people who think they've been abducted by aliens is well over 800 in the U.S. and most of them test as otherwise psychologically normal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_abdu...ite_note-9  And that's just in the U.S. and just one kind of complex vision.  There are about 35 million people in the U.S. today and study covered a number of years so lets be very generous and say the chances of any of them thinking they were abducted by aliens is about  8 to 500,000 or .000016%.  And keep in mind that that's just one type of vision.

And then there's the chance that some people who claimed to see Jesus just plain lied, or made up other witnesses.  Whatever the chances are, I'm sure they are much better than .000016%

Any guesses about the chances of a body being taken from a tomb?  I'm pretty sure they don't look much like one to 6.5 billion either.

I don't see that Bayesian analysis is going to get you over that 6.5 billion to one hurdle anytime soon.

[Jenny A]

Just a general comment: I know that Jenny can take care of herself, but if Randy continues to try to mansplain things to her with his condescending, "No, <blah blah blah>, Jenny" responses, I might just have to kick some real ass out of principle.

Thank you Kevin, but I'm just fine.  It is my politeness, more than my gender that he presumes upon, though he certainly has some sexist qualities.