Quote:... Apollonius of Tyana, is often called the "pagan Christ," since he also lived during the first century, and performed a similar ministry of miracle-working, preaching his own brand of ascetic Pythagoreanism--he was also viewed as the son of a god, resurrected the dead, ascended to heaven, performed various miracles, and criticized the authorities with pithy wisdom much like Jesus did. . . . Even Eusebius, in his Treatise against Apollonius, does not question his existence, or the reality of many of his miracles--rather, he usually tries to attribute them to trickery or demons. This shows the credulity of the times, even among educated defenders of the Christian faith, but it also shows how easy it was to deceive. Since they readily believed in demons and magical powers, it should not surprise us that they believed in resurrections and transmutations of water to wine.
http://infidels.org/library/modern/richa...kooks.html
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Current time: December 23, 2024, 8:46 am
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Does a God exist?
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RE: Does a God exist?
July 5, 2016 at 6:24 pm
(This post was last modified: July 5, 2016 at 6:43 pm by Veritas_Vincit.)
(July 5, 2016 at 5:50 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:(July 5, 2016 at 4:15 pm)SteveII Wrote: I don't have any reason to think they are lying, so I believe they happened, therefore I believe there is evidence for the existence of God. Precisely! (July 5, 2016 at 4:15 pm)SteveII Wrote:(July 5, 2016 at 2:43 pm)Veritas_Vincit Wrote: Finally we've got right down to it! Steve, you are absolutely free to believe that, but I take this to be you conceding the argument. Jörmungandr already nailed it with Special Pleading. I would just reiterate about the burden of proof. If you make claim X you have the burden of proof to demonstrate that X is true. I don't have to prove that X is false, because until you demonstrate that it is true, I don't have enough evidence to accept that it is true to begin with. The claim X is false Is not equal to the claim X is not true. I don't have to say X is false, I say I do not have enough evidence to support the claim that X is true, therefore I do not believe it. I do not choose to believe that the early Church held false beliefs. I am simply not convinced that they ever held true beliefs. I find the evidence insufficient to support belief. I am not saying that the 8 authors of the NT did not have the knowledge they claimed, I am simply that there is insufficient evidence to think that everything they said was true - least of all the accounts of miracles. A miracle is the suspension of the laws of nature - no case of a miracle has ever been proven. It is an extraordinary claim to say that a miracle occurred, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. NT evidence is extraordinarily bad evidence. Therefore I do not believe that there is a God, or that Jesus performed miracles, or that the Bible is any kind of moral authority. I don't say I can prove its all false - I don't need to, because it doesn't meet the burden of proof to establish its truth in the first place. It's that simple. (July 5, 2016 at 5:50 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:(July 5, 2016 at 4:15 pm)SteveII Wrote: I don't have any reason to think they are lying, so I believe they happened, therefore I believe there is evidence for the existence of God. Sure, I was raised in a Christian home. My father was/is a pastor in fact. There was never really a time I did not believe what I was told. However, decades later, I see no reason to stop believing what I believed back then for other reasons. It is not special pleading because there are compelling reasons to reject Smith's and Mohammad's claims and they do not have to do with whether miracles happened or not. I treat the NT claims differently because they are different. BTW, I have read the Richard Carrier article previously. I looked up the 3 "major evidence" individuals and did not see more than a few similarities to Jesus or the foundations of Christianity. Looking those people up independently shows how Carrier was stretching to make a point.
"Does a God exist?"
You tell me (July 5, 2016 at 6:24 pm)Veritas_Vincit Wrote:(July 5, 2016 at 5:50 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: You have plenty of reason to doubt that the miracles in the NT happened, you just choose not to exercise those reasons with regard to the NT. You doubt that Joseph Smith talked to an angel. You doubt that Mohammed did likewise. You choose not to exercise those doubts with respect to the NT. That makes you guilty of special pleading and your conclusions are therefore not reliable. You treat the truth claims of the NT differently than you do other truth claims. That's simply being biased. Well, no. It is not special pleading. Since I clearly have no problem with the possibility of their being a God, it comes down to the facts, evidence, and content of various religions. I believe that Christianity has more compelling evidence for its truth claims than do other religions. I am confused. Do you believe the NT authors are lying or telling the truth?
I'm saying they could have been mistaken, they could have made it all up, they could have had other reasons for telling the story, there could have been a gradual shift of embellishing the facts. I've seen Derren Brown do shit I can't explain - humans can be fooled. It's also possible for them to lie, and to deliberately deceive each other. Memory is unreliable, and humans are fallible. Not the mention how comparatively ignorant and backward people were 2000 years ago, how superstitious belief in supposed magic was rife.
Were they lying? Who knows. Is what they wrote an accurate account of the facts? I don't believe it for a second. RE: Does a God exist?
July 5, 2016 at 7:46 pm
(This post was last modified: July 5, 2016 at 7:49 pm by Ignorant.)
(July 5, 2016 at 5:28 pm)pocaracas Wrote: Ok... with you so far... but I don't see how this relates to anything... Hi pocaracas, I appreciate your feedback. Like i said initially, I don't pretend that my own presentation of an argument will be very convincing to you because I am very sure you're just as familiar with the arguments as I am. So in regard to what follows, I hope you will understand it to be my attempt to clarify misunderstanding or my own poor expression of ideas (as opposed to my 'digging in' and trying to 'win' any point). Again thanks for your thoughts. Quote:You cannot say that something unobserved cannot exist. That's the whole point of there being agnostics. I'd say that, in general, you are quite right, but I think anyone can and should say that a square circle cannot exist. It is not because we don't observe a square circle that we say it cannot exist. We say it cannot exist because, in principle, its existence is [not] possible. No one needs to be agnostic on the existence of square circles. An actual infinity of things is not as existentially contradictory as a square circle, but it is close (at least by my account). To be clear, I did not put forth LA as deriving from EE(b). I proposed it because I hold it axiomatically. What is a finite aggregate of infinite elements? <= For me that is like asking what is a square circle. Quote:It seems to me that you're trying to mix up two different concepts of "existing". Well, if I made it seem that way, then I apologize. I meant to begin from the evident: some things exist "bound" (I chose the concept of conditional existence, but 'bound' works fine) by the existence of some other simultaneously existing thing (e.g. you proposed the physics of our universe). Logic only allows for two possibly true realities if that evidence is reliable: either ALL things are 'bound' in this way, or some things are not bound in this way. I don't pretend to fully know what it means to exist in a way that is not 'bound' by anything at all, but (I find) that the evidence points to the reality of this strange sort of existence, this meta-existing as you put it. This is why I thought defining god before the discussion seems backwards. Instead, the evidence of 'our' way of existing points to some 'thing' (if you can even call it a thing) which exists in a way radically different than everything else we observe. In addition, it seems that this 'meta-existing' 'thing' is actually more truly existing than empirically existing - it is just existence. Quote:Your premise EE(a) was implying the empirical kind of existing... You can thus not apply it to the meta-existing. Well I didn't apply it to meta-existing. The demonstration on goes so far as to show that the 'empirical kind' of existing (i.e. the kind of existing which simultaneously relies on some other distinct existence) cannot account for itself. As far as the 'demonstration' goes, empirical existence is not self-contained - it is conditional on the existence of some other sort of existence. This simultaneously conditional dependence cannot be an infinity of simultaneously conditionally dependencies. In order for any aggregate thing to exist at all, everything which forms the aggregate must begin upon something which is itself non-conditional (whatever that existence is actually like, meta or otherwise, is irrelevant... the question is whether or not it exists). Whatever that existence is like, all the demonstration allows us to say about such existence is simply and plainly: it is being. Or in other words: What is it? It is being. Not a being. Not the being. Just being. Quote:Most apologetics fail at this kind of level - confusing two concepts under the umbrella of the same word. Well you may be right, but I am not sure I see the equivocation yet. The empirical kind of being cannot, of itself, account for its own kind of being. It points us to something radically more fundamental than the empirical kind of being: just being. Being, itself. Subsistent being. A thing cannot "be" in the empirical way if it cannot "be" in the first place. Quote:Why an infinity? If ALL things exist on the condition the some other thing(s) simultaneously exists, then the existential chain is infinite. Can you explain how it could be otherwise? Quote:Yes it's consistent with EE(b)... but I fail to see why (i) cannot be true. Precisely. But if EE(a) is true, then every single thing exists as an aggregate 'whole' of an infinity of increasingly more fundamental simultaneously existeing elements and configurations of elements. The fact that it seems very likely to you that some things ARE NOT aggregates of infinite elements points more in the direction of some fundamental way of existing that does not have any conditional elements at all. Quote:I think you need to discover how not to mix up concepts that share the same word and how to use infinities properly. You are quite right, I can always do better with this. I don't think, however, that you have adequately shown where I have erred in these regards. (July 5, 2016 at 5:06 pm)pocaracas Wrote:(July 5, 2016 at 4:15 pm)SteveII Wrote: First, every belief you hold, you 'chose' to believe it.Steve, my boy... you are wrong: I'm not seeing how either one of those links support your conclusion. Do you "intuitively believe" or have an intuition based on your existing knowledge? If you have to intuitively believe everything prior to a proper belief, how would you ever learn something new? Believing the NT authors is certainly not circular. By that definition, everything that was ever written about would be circular. I won't see what Minimalist has to say on the subject but are you taking the position that the early church did not exist? Then you must believe in the vast conspiracy theory. On what basis do scholars think that to be the case? By what logic do you discount the truth of 27 different text because you can find stray texts that were not true in other times and other places? Each text has to stand up to scrutiny on its own merit. (July 5, 2016 at 7:33 pm)Veritas_Vincit Wrote: I'm saying they could have been mistaken, they could have made it all up, they could have had other reasons for telling the story, there could have been a gradual shift of embellishing the facts. I've seen Derren Brown do shit I can't explain - humans can be fooled. It's also possible for them to lie, and to deliberately deceive each other. Memory is unreliable, and humans are fallible. Not the mention how comparatively ignorant and backward people were 2000 years ago, how superstitious belief in supposed magic was rife. There was no gradual shift since we have early manuscripts from different sources that point to the sources agreeing with each other which gets us quite close to the originals. Why don't you believe they were telling the truth? Do you have a list of facts that lead us to believe they were lying? RE: Does a God exist?
July 5, 2016 at 8:12 pm
(This post was last modified: July 5, 2016 at 8:14 pm by Angrboda.)
(July 5, 2016 at 7:00 pm)SteveII Wrote:(July 5, 2016 at 5:50 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: You have plenty of reason to doubt that the miracles in the NT happened, you just choose not to exercise those reasons with regard to the NT. You doubt that Joseph Smith talked to an angel. You doubt that Mohammed did likewise. You choose not to exercise those doubts with respect to the NT. That makes you guilty of special pleading and your conclusions are therefore not reliable. You treat the truth claims of the NT differently than you do other truth claims. That's simply being biased. If you think his point was that these individuals resembled Christian narratives beyond the point that both involve incredible claims of miracles and other incredible acts, then I think you must have approached his article with a great deal of bias. It appears you missed his point completely. |
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