Says the guy that equates someone telling him to go open a science textbook to teach himself about what evolution actually says to asking him to "just blindly believe"

Hainesy-

Thank you for your detailed reply. I am going to try to type out a quick but detailed response. Apologies in advance if anything comes out muddled.

(1) Intuition - I have no doubt that your intution may serve you well. And for others, it may serve them horribly. I'm fairly certain I've read about this sort of thing and intuition is often just the result of subconscious examination of stimuli/information. To make an easy poker analogy- some people would say they intuitively know the strength of the other person's hand. In reality, I would argue they are reading external signs and using that information, even if they are not conscious that they are doing it. I know I've seen literature on this subject but I won't pretend I can find it quickly. You and I may may disagree on the nature of intuition - as I believe its just an extension of one's analytical abilities and isn't some "magical" thing. Its analytical and, often, emotional. This is also why its not consistantly trustworthy for everyone.

(2) While you said you do not dismiss followers of other religions, keep in mind that Christianity (and other Christians) tell us that the others are all wrong. That there is only one true God and the followers of those other religions will suffer for eternity. Most religions claim they are right and the others are wrong. Most rely on faith. The point being that most people use this same method of determining the truth of their religion and come to different conclusions. Since they all define themselves as being the one and only true religion, All but one of them should be wrong. And, the way people tried to find the truth (intuition/faith/feelings) is undoubtedly a horrible way to find the truth since MOST people come to the wrong answer.

Surely if someone was teaching someone to do math and the methods used lead most of the students to have different answers, we would question the method. Yet, intuition/faith consistantly leads to radically different conclusions. Clearly most people are wrong. (and everyone assumes its the other guy) This should give the faithful pause (I know it doesn't for most)

(3) I disagree here. See 1 and 2 above. Logic and science shows consistancy in the finding the truth. People following spiritual truths don't consistantly come to the same conclusions. Yet they all feel they have it. So obvious its a crappy system that is far inferior to the spiritual path. I'm willing to hear why I'm wrong but one really has to resolve 1 and 2 above to be convincing. (btw- we see this on the forum all the time. Christians telling other christians that they are wrong. Christians telling atheists they are wrong. Because they know spiritually they're right. Never mind that the other Christians who have different conclusions also feel they have the spiritual truth. If there are spiritual truths, how is one supposed to know? "Feeling it with all your heart" is clearly unreliable.

While I understand the idea that one has no choice but to beleive, I still come from the school that my beliefs should hold up to tangible evidence. As listed above, Faith is horrible. Just because something "feels true" to me doesn't mean it is. (and to put all the cards on the table, I'm not sure that I believe in a true mystic... because again, there are many who make that claim from many belief systems... all with contradictory different gods, truths, and beliefs. (if its not clear, this is a big road block for me. One that I've never seen a theist resolve in a way that is satisfactory to me. For example, my brother is a born again and the matter ends with him 'knowing in his heart he is right and they are wrong.' When I say that a Muslim says the same thing, he just gets quiet and it goes no further. I can't be satisfied with that.)

Finally- regarding rebirth.... I agree that the resurrection is a reoccuring theme in different religions because it represents a powerful concept for man. Since men are concerned with their death, the idea of an eternal soul/rebirth is very powerful and comforting. And there is likely much wisdom or peace to be found in the religious use of this imagery.

But my point, as it pertains to this thread, is that this imagery is a re-occuring motif that predates Christianity. yet, I'm quite certain that most Christians dismiss the truth of it for other religions and accept it as a fact for their own. Yet, the evidence for each is pretty much the same (in that some ancient people say it happened).

I'll come back and give a more detailed response later when I have time. I just wanted to address a couple things generally:

I'm going down a road of how to correctly weigh past evidence in order to come to a conclusion. Probability is involved, but there's no way not to involve it (unless you want to claim it comes down to faith). When you talk about the evidence being strong for a given event, you are in essence speaking probabilistically.

Also what makes you think miracles are outside of the realm of probability? I'm not talking about the actual miracles, I'm talking about assessing the evidence for a claim of a miracle to determine whether it actually happened.

This is actually making my point for me. The reason you are sure your hand is a royal flush is because it's nearly impossible for it to look like a royal flush when it really isn't! You'd basically have to be hallucinating. But it's pretty easy to tell that getting dealt a royal flush is much more likely than hallucinating about getting a royal flush, so the correct conclusion is that you are in fact holding a royal flush.

I'll be back later to expand.

I am really interested in an answer to this if it is not too much trouble. If no, do you consider the resurrection situation any different and why?

Sry, I don't remember seeing this before.

If I saw the person go through extreme torture and beaten almost to death then nailed to a cross (or something similar) then had a sword stuck in their body, then 3 days later they were fine and I asked them what happened and they told me the died and came back, yes. I don't think that there would be a more plausible explanation. (assuming I didn't spend the last few days on some crazy drug or something.)

Ok we'll start with this. I won't hold you to it but at least I can start going somewhere. A twentieth of a percent is about 1 in 2,000. The implication of this is that in order to believe the resurrection is a likely event (greater than 50% to have happened), you must believe that resurrections are better than a 1 in 2,000 shot to occur before knowing any of the evidence. This isn't some fancy math trick either, this is logic.

Where I'm going with this is that the judgment that the resurrection is likely to have occurred based on the evidence we have has to be deduced through logical means. The evidence that you and other Christians often cite (historicity, eye witnesses, etc.) is meaningless in determining the likelihood of the event in question without other assumptions about the prior likelihood of the event. It doesn't matter if the apostles would have all had to be lunatics and if the oral tradition was near perfect, it's still not enough information to make a rational judgment. But all I ever hear is the one side!

A good example of what I'm talking about is a story that an acquaintance told me. He's not a chronic liar or anything, but he's been known to not get his facts straight from time to time. He told me a story about being at a blackjack table, and having the table limit moved up to $40. I immediately knew this had not happened, but if he had said $25 I would have believed his story completely. Why? The evidence I had was the exact same in both situations, namely the word of mouth story of an acquaintance. What was different? Well, I happen to have spent a lot of time in casinos, and I have never once seen a table with a $40 limit, but I've seen lots that have a $25 limit. And that information was absolutely necessary for me to form a good judgment about whether that part of the story was true.

What this comes down to is that in order to believe the resurrection is likely to have happened, you must believe that resurrections are more likely than non-supernatural occurrences that make it appear as though a resurrection has occurred. Based on the estimate you gave me above*, and given your belief that the resurrection occurred, I can deduce that you think resurrections are a fairly pedestrian event.


*I think we likely have another miscommunication about the question given your answer. I would put the likelihood much much lower than that. What that estimate tells me is that you think a random person born in that time would have a 1 in 2,000 shot to end up with pretty strong evidence that they came back to life. I'm pretty sure you don't actually think that obviously.

And as theists usually do, you severely underestimate human fallibility.

I would think it much more likely, had I been in this situation, that one or more of these episodes could have been a hallucination, a dream mistaken for reality, some form of mental instability, or maybe some combination of the 3. And that's the best case scenario because this situation is assuming that you or I witnessed these events, which we obviously did not! At BEST, human fallibility, exaggeration, storytelling, and outright lying account for much, much more likely reasons as to why the Jesus story exists today than the laws of nature being violated by someone being raised from the dead.

And given that it was not you nor I who saw this, there's many other possibilities, such as people just plain making the story up, either in part or in whole, or perhaps there is some shreds of truth that were greatly exaggerated as the manuscripts were verifiably added to and edited decades after the events supposedly took place.

This human process of cobbling together accounts by unknown authors of the events is quite a precarious way of asserting the divinity claims in the bible. At the very least, wouldn't you wonder...couldn't Jesus/God have come up with a better documentation process whereby to be able to better convince humans in the future of Jesus' divinity and thus saving more souls?

Can you please explain how you can possibly argue that the laws of nature being violated in Jesus' resurrection are more likely to have been the root cause of this story than human fallibility? I would be shocked if you could form anything close to a rational argument for that.

personally i would just go with the most simple explanation which is: if i am the only witness i would assume i just went insane
if there are multiple sources confirming the resurrection i would assume he had an 1: unknown twinbrother 2: i have been tricked and have no idea how 3: it was true
The higher % of 3 being true the more likely i am to follow his preachings. how much the preachings make sense is also important when considering if to follow them.
i.e i would likely follow Jesus because alot of what he was preaching is concistent with my values. if it was something like a charles manson cult i would not follow no matter what i thought of the resurrection.

Kurto:

I studied advanced-level psychology at college, and have been interested enough to read around certain aspects of it in my own time since as well. I would count my psychological knowledge as an essential part of my spiritual perspectives. I am aware of the psychological stance on most issues that tie in with spirituality, including the one you touch upon above wrt intuition. I fully agree that part of our intuition is the mental processing of external stimuli that happens just beneath the threshold of our consiousness. this level of the mind is utterly fascinating and highly ambiguous, and has been of particular interest to me for many years.

To hijack your analogy, when I play live poker, and go into "the zone", I am very much a feel player with a poker radar. I acknowledge that it would not work had I not spent countless hours playing, analysing my own game, reading books, talking with other players etc. but I also believe there is an extra element at work too. Something that can only come from the deeper more powerful parts of our mind, that is not available in our relatively narrow conscious mind. Very Jedi I know, but hardly original or ground-breaking or unique to me. A perusal of both the psychological and spiritual literature would turn up references of this phenomenon, and more important than that, you can always experience it for yourself if you are that way inclined. I would not try to argue that this element of intuitive power that comes from deeper levels of our mind is exclusively spiritual either, or perhaps not spiritual at all, but I do believe by working with it and examining it we are crossing a line into a very murky area which can cross the line into spiritual experience, contributing to altered states, channeling leftfield revelations into the conscious mind etc.

I am aware of the stance many Xians take, that is not for me to comment on though really. I only have my own perspectives to offer, I do not speak for any group. I will restate what I said before though: higher truth is objective; the many translations and interpretations of it are not. Also, in response to your last sentence, most people do not have direct spiritual experiences, religious or otherwise. they are following what has been told to them by others.

We will have to agree to disagree. I would argue that all spiritually developed people would acknowledge the non-role that science and logic play in these matters. Perhaps a good quick example would be the Zen Koan: utterly illogical by its nature but containing the key to a higher state of mind if understood fully. The truth is the truth, regardless of how illogical it may seem to our highly conditioned modern western psyche.

So long as you require physical evidence for your spiritual beliefs, you will not have any spiritual beliefs. Spirituality is an internal process that happens in your internal space, very rarely does it cross over into external reality and offer physical evidence of itself.

In response to your mystic comment, allow me to relay a maxim from a book I once read, author etc. long forgotten:

Fill a room with lay followers of the world's religions and belief systems, and they will argue and bicker non-stop until you open the doors and let them leave.

Fill a room with the mystical adepts of the world's religions and belief systems, and they will share the truth they have all found on the common ground they all share.

Christ is a word representing a reality, as is God. Lay followers concern themselves primarily with the word, and get their knickers in a twist when they see it's spelt differently to the next holy word. Mystical followers concern themselves with the reality the word represents, and instantly see that reality wherever else it may present itself and in whatever guise. Christ himself said that any good teacher should "speak to each man on his own level of understanding".

Not at all. There is no such thing as wisdom born out of falsehood.

The genuine seeker of truth does not look for comfort or crutches, and finds abhorrent the prospect of believing in something for any reason other than that it is the truth.

The reality represented by the spiritual motif of resurrection is one that can be experienced in this life.

I find the road signs analogy extremely apt here again, for both believers and atheists alike.

Thank you for the response. Do you mind if I quote what you wrote here in a new thread? I think it would be fun to see what others on this forum would consider the bare minimum of evidence necessary to believe that somebody was resurrected.

Greywolf, do you mind if I quote you in a new thread too? Your three points are essentially that about which I wanted to discuss.

you have my permission.

Jib is so praying for this thread to die

This is just not true. My number is the likely hood that the exact same effect in the exact same situation could have come from a non-resurrection cause. My number has nothing to do with the likely hood of random resurrections.

pedestrian events given the exact same variables, maybe. But I know of no other time where the exact same variables existed.

Once again, this is just way off. My estimations are based off of evidence, not random likelihoods. I don't have to believe that a resurrection has ever or will ever happen again in order to believe that the resurrection was the best explanation for X.



Let's talk about prior likelihood of this event. How do you gauge the prior likelihood that God raises someone from the dead? We are not talking about random people rising from the dead, or given X person A will rise from the dead. We are talking about God deciding to raise someone from the dead.

I think that we need to take a closer look at what you are saying. Your problem is that you are focusing on the cause, when you should be focusing on the effect. It is not about how likely cause A was, but how likely effect A was given that cause A did not exist.

For example, if a buddy of mine had no $10,000 to his name today, and next friday he had $230,000,000 and he told me that he won the lottery, I do not have to believe that winning the lottery is more likely to occur to a random person than making $230,000,000 by some other means. Winning the lottery would be the most plausible explanation given the circumstances.

Jibninjas, is it okay to quote you for a new thread?

go for it

Cool, thanks.

I'm now regretting the line of argument I took in this thread. I just don't think we're communicating clearly here (and I don't think it's your fault). I don't think your responses are wrong or anything, I just don't think you're answering what I intended to ask. That being said, I still think there's still fruitful discussion to be had based on your other comments:

This is a good question, and I briefly touched on it earlier. While this obviously can't put an exact number on it, we can certainly put some sort of range on it. If I say, "there's a 1 in 4 chance that God will raise someone from the dead," you'd laugh at me. God deciding to raise someone from the dead is clearly a very rare event. There have been like a hundred billion people that have ever lived. How many of them do you think God has decided to resurrect?

This is wrong. You have to focus on the effect and the cause. This is what I was saying earlier when I said it's meaningless to just talk about the strong evidence for an event. In the other thread David put it very well:

This annoyed me when I saw it because it's exactly what I've been trying to say in this thread but much more succinct.

Do you disagree with his statement?

Nice forum manners.

Nice forum manners manners.

I don't have a ton of time to respond, but I wanted to comment on this. Yes, I agree that evidence that is considered extremely strong for one event might not be strong evidence for another event.

The problem really comes down to "how do you quantify the strength of evidence for an event". There are many people (some I believe are on this forum) that would never consider any historical evidence strong enough for an event like the resurrection. Are they wrong? I think so, and maybe someone more intelligent than me could even show how they are being inconsistent. But really I can "prove" that they are wrong. They set up what they believe to be a reasonable level of necessary criteria for an event to be shown true. I cannot tell them they are wrong, but on the same note they cannot tell me that I am wrong.

I think this is what bothers me so much. No one here would let me dictate what they should consider to be a reasonable amount of evidence, but they are more than happy to dictate it to me what is not a reasonable amount of evidence.

Huh? Isn't a big chunk of discussion/debate on any topic precisely about what is sufficient evidence for X. Are the RedHats going to win the trophy? The difference of opinion ( rational opinion, not emotional) will be over the strength of various bits of evidence.
Nobody can "dictate" obviously, but they have to point out deficiencies, inconsistencies, goalpost shifting, etc with regards to evidence. Otherwise we'd just have polls and then go fishing.

But according to the gospels, Jesus was also pierced in the sides by 2 Roman soldiers to ensure he was dead, so it is impossible that they mistook him for being dead.

I think it was standard for the Romans to pierce him. They had a methodology (standard operating procedure) they followed for the way they handled crucifixions. The one step they skipped was breaking his legs. That was standard for crucifixions but in accordance with the prophecies: not one of his bones was broken.

You can compare it with a mafia "kill" or "hit". They have a methodology they follow (like bullet placement) to ensure death occurs as purposed at the outset.

Discovering mysterious forces does not make some random other claim of a mysterious force more likely. X-rays didn't make voodoo more likely, magnetism didn't make "the force" more likely, untraviolet rays didn't clairvoyance more likely, .. on and on. By now all those "more likely's " should be pushing on "1" for some of this stuff.
There is a claim of a mysterious force/event - it is weighed by the evidence for it. The only increase in probability that comes from other phenomena are those in the same family with similar features. Bending spoons held in your hand contributes nothing to our usual "supernatural" events one way or the other. I can pick up salt off the counter just by passing my hand above it. de-da-de-da-de-de-de-de...