Choosing a faith

I'm surprised you thought this worth mentioning. Yes, there's the obvious insertion, and there's a reference to "Jesus, who was called Christ" in a passage about the death of James. What writings do you mean? Look at the evidence. The Jesus of the Bible travels all over Judea drawing crowds in the thousands and performing miracle after miracle and then experiences an absolutely stunning death and subsequent resurrection but gets no historical mention. But John the Baptist and even James get mentions of their deaths, but not Jesus. Makes sense to you?Also, the story of Jesus follows the familiar pattern of mythology, with details increasing rather than diminishing with time. The real world always presents difficulties for people trying to maintain belief in fantasies. This is an absurd argument.--Percy

The evidence of this thread says otherwise. Here's you doing it again right in this message you just posted: This is not an accurate characterization. You repeatedly claim that your "evidence" is on an equal footing with scientific evidence ("We both have evidence"), and when challenged how this is so have no answer. You haven't even answered the simple question, "What is philosophical evidence?" The first time I asked you replied that, "It is conclusions that are inferred by observing the world around." I replied in Message 384: What was your response? Nothing.Then there's all the times you've conceded you have no evidence, but balanced by all the times you say you do have evidence. You're equivocating all over the place. Answer the damn question honestly and forthrightly with no gobbledygook about philosophical evidence being "observations of the world around", because that's just plain old evidence.--Percy

All evidence is subjective because it's gathered by people. That's why replication by others is so important, because the subjective biases average out over many people.--Percy

Oh, those guys. This just reinforces what I said earlier about myths, that their details increase with the passage of time. To repeat, Jesus travels around Judea performing miracles right and left and preaching to thousands at a time and was executed at the height of his popularity, but no one bothers to record any mention of this at the time. The fantastical stories only emerge later. Much later. Long after Paul had created the infant Christian church.The Tacitus passage you quoted was written in the first or second decade of the second century. His information could only have come indirectly from the supposed Christ believers of Nero who were only scapegoats and not even definitely Christian but just accused of being Christian by way of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What you have is a wealth of a lack of evidence.And Theodoric notes that you've had this discussion before, so it's a bit of a dissembling approach to go into this discussion and never write a sentence somewhere along the lines of, "Now in our earlier discussion you raised the objection...etc..." You no more have answers now than you had then. You just have a willingness to raise the subject again.We were discussing evidence and your associated equivocation. First you have the evidence then you have no evidence then you do, and you give short shrift to the evidence other religions offer for the truth of their beliefs. These Patristic Fathers no more recorded evidence of Jesus than anyone else. Do you think it's a coincidence that were you born into a culture steeped in Christianity and that it's Christianity's myths that you think real?I am aware that it is controversial in our Christian culture to raise the possibility that there was no such person as Jesus, but people who existed and did what he did and died the way he died do not just disappear into a religious book.--Percy

If you're not trying to pretend that both sides are on equal footings then stop saying "We both have evidence," because we don't both have evidence. We have evidence and you have "something else." There's no point seeking rhetorical arguments that will suddenly transform your religious views into evidence because that just isn't possible. I think you meant to say that philosophical evidence and scientific evidence are two very different things, and this is true. One is evidence and one isn't. You haven't yet defined philosophical evidence, but it was clear from the beginning that it's not actual evidence. You're just playing word games by putting a modifier on the front of "evidence."
​ You seem to be on both sides of the fence, but most importantly your quote doesn't explain what philosophical evidence is, so there's nothing useful I can garner from all you said.
​ Ya think? No, scientific evidence does not go beyond empirical evidence. Scientific evidence, by definition, is empirical evidence, i.e., based upon observation.The theoretical side of science does go beyond the empirical. For example, it was theorized that the Higgs Boson existed before empirical evidence for its existence was found. Once this evidence was produced it meant that the Higgs Boson was no longer theoretical but empirical. Until you can provide a concrete definition of "philosophical evidence" you should definitely not be giving it a moment's thought. Scientific evidence is what matters. That religion is subjective is why there are so many religions in the world. That science is empirical is why there's only one Boyle's Law, one Theory of Relativity, one germ theory of disease. I responded to this claim once already and you didn't respond. Now you're just repeating this claim yet again as if no one had ever responded to it. This is what you do, over and over. It's why people get frustrated at you and why you leave because you don't like the treatment that you yourself are instigating.
​ Pasting the "subjective" label on what we say does not make it so. We have evidence for what we say and you don't. You keep forgetting this, not just from one post to the next but from one paragraph to the next. Our replicated evidence-based conclusions are tentative, not subjective. Ockham's razor. Why are you postulating the existence of something for which there is no evidence? You need to demonstrate what you're postulating experimentally. For example, mix hydrogen and oxygen and provide a spark. Do this once in the presence of an "external intelligence" and again in the absence of an "external intelligence." Observe whether there are any differences in what happens. Any differences would be evidence that the presence of an "external intelligence" can have an influence on natural processes. Before you start researching how an "external intelligence" came to exist you have to produce some evidence that it even exists.--Percy

This is last Thursdayism. You seem to think your inability to make the case yourself is due to a weakness of expression on your part, but that's not true. It's that there's no case to be made. It doesn't matter whether it's you or <fill in the blank, e.g., Chris Barrigar, C. S. Lewis, etc.>, nothing can change that. And yet if you ignore the material world it will quickly convince you how real it is, even killing you if you insist on taking it to that point. But we can ignore all aspects of everyone's non-material or spiritual beliefs and suffer no consequences whatsoever. That you're an atheist when it comes to the Flying Spaghetti Monster was kind of the point of its invention.--Percy

I see Taq has responded, but I haven't read it yet. My response is to quote John McEnroe: "You cannot be serious." Like Jesus, Joseph Smith is believed by his followers to be a great prophet and worker of miracles, but unlike Jesus there is unimpeachable evidence that he was a real person who actually existed.The usual response to this is that Joseph Smith (or any founder of any other religion) was nothing like Jesus, as if he were the template, as if true religions can only be founded by people born of virgins who had a final dinner with their apostles before being arrested and crucified.--Percy

You eventually arrived at "subjective conclusions" after beginning with "We both have evidence" and "philosophical evidence" and trying to draw a false equivalence. Can we finally at last get a concession from you that scientific conclusions, (theories) that are arrived at through research and study, experiments, observations, replication, peer review and consensus are not in any way "subjective conclusions"? That they, to the best of human ability, correspond to actual material reality while your religious beliefs do not even come close? That to talk of both having evidence is absurd? How would you ever come to know about anything unobservable? Consider other unobservable things that were once believed real, like Thor and Zeus. They now have no believers at all. What is different about your belief in the unobservable? Before you go citing the Bible and the patristic fathers, while fewer writings might have survived you can be sure that people also wrote about Thor and Zeus with just as much faithful fever.--Percy

This already has a number of replies, including from me, but I find I have more to say. A premise is an assumption or hypothesis. It's strength depends upon how much evidence you have, and you don't have any. You're only playing word games. There are no amount of vocabulary changes that will suddenly make evidence appear out of thin air.
​ I don't believe you mean this for a second. Within some small number of messages you'll again be back to your claims of evidence. For example, you still believe that the mere existence of life is evidence of a "cosmic intelligence" or "external intelligence" or whatever term you move on to in the future. But it isn't evidence. It's your personal opinion.
​
--Percy

From the Wikipedia link that you provided:

Wikipedia on Richard Bauckham:

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This is against the scholarly consensus that the four gospels were written later and not via interviews with direct eyewitnesses, but were rather the result of a longer chain of transmission of stories of Jesus filtered through early Christian communities over time.

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So much for eyewitnesses. History records a great deal about Simon bar Giora, but of Jesus, nothing. History records a great deal about Simon bar Kokhba, but of Jesus, nothing. Paul, an itinerant preacher who founded churches in the Jewish diaspora, created the religion that eventually became Christianity. There is no way of knowing whether he based Jesus upon a real person, a composite of real persons, or made him up out of whole cloth, but that the gospels are works of fiction, just like the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran and the Book of Mormon, there can be no doubt. If you read Eusebius's quote of Papias he makes it seem like the early second century was just teeming with eyewitnesses of events from 70 years before. Does that seem likely or even possible to you? And apparently Papias's books about Jesus were so valued by the Christian community that they didn't survive the Middle Ages. Yes, we know Polycarp had contact with the disciples because he said so. I guess that settles it. And what evidence does Polycarp provide about Jesus? Nothing in his one book that survives.No books by Papias or Polycarp received consideration for inclusion in the canon at the Nicene conference.There is no contemporary record of Jesus preaching to thousands and performing miracle after miracle before being crucified and resurrected and seen by hundreds because it didn't happen. But as Christian churches took hold interest naturally grew in the supposed founder of the religion, which Paul said was Jesus, and some began asking those few in their 90's whether they'd witnessed any of Jesus's activities. Likely many were willing to attest that yes, they'd witnessed him, just like today when so many claim to have seen the planes hit the towers or to have been at Woodstock (millions, when it was only about 500,000). Do you know what one of the biggest problems is in law enforcement? False or mistaken eyewitness testimony.About 4.7% of people live to be 90 today, and it must have been much less in 2nd century Judea.The writings that did survive until today are the testimonies of the early Christian churches of the Jewish diaspora which had never had any contact with Jesus and had no reliable source of information about him.At least you're not claiming there's more evidence of Jesus than of Julius Caesar.--Percy

In this thread you can't "still" be discussing Kreeft because this is the first mention of him here. You're thinking of the Testing The Christian Apologists thread.Kreeft seems to like the idea of absolute truth. That's a lot better than science can do, he must be a great man.--Percy

XWhat is wrong with you? Everyone understands having limited time and not being able to reply to everything. But you can't pretend the arguments you didn't respond to never happened, and that's what you're doing when you make an argument yet again as if there had never been any rebuttals.How do you not see how dishonest this is? "Oh, I'm short of time, therefore any mistreatments of people I'm debating with are okay."Stop making excuses for yourself and blaming your difficulties on others. You're bringing this on yourself. There's no timetable here, no schedule. Take your time and do right by people. It would be the Christian thing to do.
​ No, up to then it was not belief. It was theoretical. And no one thinks the evidence conclusive in the sense of a timeless truth. It is tentative.
​ Yes, religion and science are different, as in the former has no evidence and the latter has plenty. It isn't a question of agreeing or disagreeing about a designer. What matters is that you have no evidence of a designer. What you've got is, "Oh, look at this flower, it's so beautiful, it must have been designed for our appreciation." This is countered by, "Oh, look at this parasite painfully destroying its host from the inside and finally exploding it before moving on to the next host." "Oh, look at this plague make someone sick in the morning and painfully kill them by evening." "Oh, look at this earthquake bring houses down on the innocent killing men, women and children." "Oh, look at this underwater Sumatran earthquake cause a tsunami killing over 200,000 people."None of these things have anything apparent to do with a designer, but if they did the evidence against a designer, or at least for a malevolent designer, is much greater. Yes, that's the key point, you have no evidence. Learn it, love it, live it.--Percy

You're not listening. Your writing skills relative to them are irrelevant. If you understood what they said then use your own words to say it and use links as a reference. And if you didn't understand what they said then don't say anything (i.e., don't be Phat). This is trivially true. Can you say something that is an actual response to what I said about the material world having a real impact while the spiritual world can be completely ignored without consequence?--Percy

Can we keep this discussion out of the realm of the absurd? Things that happen leave evidence behind, and Joseph Smith left a lot of evidence behind as well as a huge amount of contemporaneous accounts of his activities. And yes, there's a grave site with a long complicated story behind it that you can look up if you're interested: Well, yes, this is absolutely true. Having no evidence I can reach no conclusions. I have nothing to argue for or defend, just a vague feeling that existence happened for a reason.But you, by your own admission, also have no evidence yet have reached plenty of conclusions. How can that be? The answer is that though you keep saying you have no evidence, you don't really believe it. You think the Bible and the Patristic Fathers and Papias and Polycarp and Tacitus are so on are all evidence. It seems that if someone writes something supportive of your viewpoints you blindly accept it without subjecting it to critical analysis.--Percy

Couldn't you just buy the Kindle version and be reading it now?--Percy