Let's cut to the chase. Do you have any evidence?

[no evidence no belief]

I feel like we've been beating around the bush for... 6000 years!

Can you please either provide some evidence for your supernatural beliefs, or admit that you have no evidence?

If you believe there once was a talking donkey (Numbers 22) could you please provide evidence?

If you believe there once was a zombie invasion in Jerusalem (Mat 27) could you please provide evidence?

If you believe in the flying horse (Islam) could you please provide evidence?

Walking on water, virgin births, radioactive spiders who give you superpowers, turning water into wine, turning iron into gold, demons, goblins, ghosts, hobbits, elves, angels, unicorns and Santa.

Can you PLEASE provide evidence?

[Goat]

I like the way Peter Kreeft deals with this:

. . . Suppose our best and most honest reflection on the nature of things led us to see the material universe as self-sufficient and uncaused; to see its form as the result of random motions, devoid of any plan or purpose. Would you then be impressed by reading in an ancient book that there exists a God of love, or that the heavens proclaim his glory? Would you be disposed to take that message seriously? More likely you would excuse yourself from taking seriously anything claimed as a communication from the Creator. As one person put it: I cannot believe that we are children of God, because I cannot believe there is anyone to do the adopting.

It is this sort of cramped and constricted horizon that the proofs presented in this chapter are trying to expand. They are attempts to confront us with the radical insufficiency of what is finite and limited, and to open minds to a level of being beyond it. If they succeed in this—and we can say from experience that some of the proofs do succeed with many people—they can be of very great value indeed.

The Argument from Change
The Argument from Efficient Causality
The Argument from Time and Contingency
The Argument from Degrees of Perfection
The Design Argument
The Kalam Argument
The Argument from Contingency
The Argument from the World as an Interacting Whole
The Argument from Miracles
The Argument from Consciousness
The Argument from Truth
The Argument from the Origin of the Idea of God
The Ontological Argument
The Moral Argument
The Argument from Conscience
The Argument from Desire
The Argument from Aesthetic Experience
The Argument from Religious Experience
The Common Consent Argument
Pascal's Wager



-http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/ ... stence.htm

Of course, one thing that it seems many people can not understand, arguments are not evidence. And, by the way, each one of those arguments are highly flawed, they have been discussed on various threads over and over again.

In general, they start with an unprovable assumption, go through a line of reasoning that is untenable, and then come to a conclusion that is predetermined
by the personal belief, rather than have anything to do with , well, verifiable facts.

[Tired of the Nonsense]

[Replying to 99percentatheism]

It would be just as easy to make this charge against materialists/atheists. You know things are true to you because you all reinforce each other constantly.

One certainly might make the case that non believers reinforce each other on this forum I suppose. But since there is not now nor has there ever been a church of atheism for atheists to congregate at for the purpose of inventing and establishing atheistic truism and traditions, your argument falls completely flat. I first reached the conclusion that I was an atheist when I was about 13 years old, back in the early sixties. It was years before I met my first other avowed atheist. I could only dream of having intellectual atheistic reinforcement back then. Being all alone never served to alter my conclusions however

[no evidence no belief]

This is the "everyone knows it's true" argument which is essentially the heart and soul of Christian assumptions and Christian beliefs. Because this is what Christians tell each other is true based on what they know must be true, and so declare to BE true according to common consent among themselves.

It would be just as easy to make this charge against materialists/atheists. You know things are true to you because you all reinforce each other constantly.

The problem is not when a belief is reinforced by the fact that many around you believe it as well.

The problem is when this social reinforcement is the only reason for believing something. Or is only coupled by equally weak reasons for believing something.

Part of the reason I am comfortable with the belief that the earth is a globe is indeed that everybody believes it as well.

But at the core of my belief that the earth is a globe is measurable, empirical data. I personally tested the belief.

That's the key difference between most secular beliefs (which you and I both hold) and supernatural beliefs (which only you hold).

[Star]

It would be just as easy to make this charge against materialists/atheists. You know things are true to you because you all reinforce each other constantly.

Is this how you perceive science, a sort of groupthink that uses circular logic?

[no evidence no belief]

It would be just as easy to make this charge against materialists/atheists. You know things are true to you because you all reinforce each other constantly.

Is this how you perceive science, a sort of groupthink that uses circular logic?

I know, right? A groupthink that uses circular logic.... to land unmanned vehicles on Mars and perform heart transplants

[no evidence no belief]

The way that you have worded your request leads me to think that you have never heard or dealt with any moral arguments for God's existence. Would this be an accurate assessment?

No, it would not. I'm familiar with the moral argument, and it's rubbish.

It goes something like this:

1) Primates and other animals seem to exhibit restraint in actions that cause harm to others.
2) baseless assertion
3) argument from ignorance
4) random faith statement
5) unfalsifiable claim
6) Therefore donkeys can talk and zombies are real

LOL based on all this nonsense it seems that you are NOT familiar with the moral argument. Your ridiculous caricature is rubbish.

The moral argument has been subject to much scrutiny and a lot of philosophical scholarship and your response does not address any of the relevant issues regarding the argument. All you have done so far is regurgitate ad nauseum 'I want proof for talking donkeys and farting fairies.' Guess what, this subforum is for debating Christianity and Christianity does not claim that donkeys talk and fairies fart. You should try to gain a genuine understanding of what Christianity is and maybe it would clear up a lot of this confusion about talking donkeys and farting fairies.

The basic claims that are central to Christianity are that a theistic God exists and that Jesus was God incarnate. You have many Christians in this thread presenting historical evidence and philosophical arguments for these claims and, in response, you simply dismiss all this by providing cartoonish caricatures of the arguments and evidence. How is this productive?

So you agree the silliness in Numbers 22:
28 And the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?

29 And Balaam said unto the ass, Because thou hast mocked me: I would there were a sword in mine hand, for now would I kill thee.

30 And the ass said unto Balaam, Am not I thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? was I ever wont to do so unto thee? and he said, Nay.

And the talking serpent in Genesis are pure mythology and have nothing to do with the basic claims that are central to Christianity?

Yup, pretty much. I don't believe that the donkey talked, or that there was an actual serpent in an actual garden of Eden with only two actual people. I do believe that miracles have and do occur, but many of the stories in the Old Testament don't make sense when taken literally. Much of the content within the Old Testament seems to be scientifically invalid, and I try to go where the evidence leads.

You stated that you go where the evidence leads and that you believe that miracles have occurred, and you are active on a thread requesting evidence for the supernatural.

So, are you going to give us an example of a supernatural that you believe happened, and the evidence that, quote, "leads" you to this belief?

Thank you

[no evidence no belief]

The way that you have worded your request leads me to think that you have never heard or dealt with any moral arguments for God's existence. Would this be an accurate assessment?

No, it would not. I'm familiar with the moral argument, and it's rubbish.

It goes something like this:

1) Primates and other animals seem to exhibit restraint in actions that cause harm to others.
2) baseless assertion
3) argument from ignorance
4) random faith statement
5) unfalsifiable claim
6) Therefore donkeys can talk and zombies are real

LOL based on all this nonsense it seems that you are NOT familiar with the moral argument. Your ridiculous caricature is rubbish.

The moral argument has been subject to much scrutiny and a lot of philosophical scholarship and your response does not address any of the relevant issues regarding the argument. All you have done so far is regurgitate ad nauseum 'I want proof for talking donkeys and farting fairies.' Guess what, this subforum is for debating Christianity and Christianity does not claim that donkeys talk and fairies fart. You should try to gain a genuine understanding of what Christianity is and maybe it would clear up a lot of this confusion about talking donkeys and farting fairies.

The basic claims that are central to Christianity are that a theistic God exists and that Jesus was God incarnate. You have many Christians in this thread presenting historical evidence and philosophical arguments for these claims and, in response, you simply dismiss all this by providing cartoonish caricatures of the arguments and evidence. How is this productive?

So you agree the silliness in Numbers 22:
28 And the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?

29 And Balaam said unto the ass, Because thou hast mocked me: I would there were a sword in mine hand, for now would I kill thee.

30 And the ass said unto Balaam, Am not I thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? was I ever wont to do so unto thee? and he said, Nay.

And the talking serpent in Genesis are pure mythology and have nothing to do with the basic claims that are central to Christianity?

Yup, pretty much. I don't believe that the donkey talked, or that there was an actual serpent in an actual garden of Eden with only two actual people. I do believe that miracles have and do occur, but many of the stories in the Old Testament don't make sense when taken literally. Much of the content within the Old Testament seems to be scientifically invalid, and I try to go where the evidence leads.

You stated that you go where the evidence leads and that you believe that miracles have occurred, and you are active on a thread requesting evidence for the supernatural.

So, are you going to give us an example of a supernatural that you believe happened, and the evidence that, quote, "leads" you to this belief?

Thank you

You also said that you disbelieve in much of the content of the OT because it seems to be, quote, "scientifically invalid".

Could you please present a claim in the NT which seems scientifically valid?

The maggot-infested brain-dead and heart-dead decomposing carcass coming back to life and floating into the sky?

[Goose]

You brought up Serpion, so I discussed his process; now you complain I am ‘harping’ on him.

You claimed:
“The uniform evidence from the early church suggests they made a point of rejecting works that were considered pseudonymous (1 Peter wasn’t one of them by the way) thus giving us evidence that pseudonymity was not an acceptable practise [sic] in the early church.�

This is simply false, and we have to go no further than 2 Peter to demonstrate it.
Yet even Eusebius (your listed authority) agreed 2 Peter was not written by Peter and did not belong in the canon.

It's not false at all. The uniform evidence from the early church does suggest they made a point of rejecting works considered pseudonymous providing evidence it was not an acceptable practise. That 2 Peter, despite being disputed as authentic by some, managed to make its way into the canon doesn’t make that statement false.

In sum, as Ehrman writes:

“...critical scholars are fairly unified today in thinking that Matthew did not write the First Gospel or John the Fourth, that Peter did not write 2 Peter and possibly not 1 Peter. No other book of the New Testament claims to be written by one of Jesus’ earthly disciples....�
Lost Christianities, p 236

The first part of that quote from Ehrman says, “As we have seen…� But what did Ehrman provide as evidence? He provides it on the previous page.

Let's have a look. (yes, I have a copy of Lost Christianities)

�The proto-orthodox claimed all of these apostles as authorities—Peter, James, Paul, and many others. But not all of the books used by the proto-orthodox churches were written by apostles—or in some cases even claimed to be. The four Gospels that eventually made it into the New Testament, for example, are all anonymous, written in the third person about Jesus and his companions. None of them contains a first-person narrative (“One day, when Jesus and I went into Capernaum . . .�), or claims to be written by an eyewitness or companion of an eyewitness. Why then do we call them Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Because sometime in the second century, when proto-orthodox Christians recognized the need for apostolic authorities, they attributed these books to apostles (Matthew and John) and close companions of apostles (Mark, the secretary of Peter; and Luke, the traveling companion of Paul). Most scholars today have abandoned these identifications,11 and recognize that the books were written by otherwise unknown but relatively well-educated Greek-speaking (and writing) Christians during the second half of the first century.� – Bart Ehrman, Lost Christianities, p235.

Here's Bart’s Blunder. If we apply his objections to the Gallic Wars, for example, he must also reject Caesar’s authorship to remain consistent. Of course no classical scholar would dream of rejecting Caesar's authorship because the evidence is just too strong despite the fact that he Gallic Wars are 1) strictly speaking just as anonymous as the Gospels 2) also written in the third person 3) does not claim to be an eyewitness account 4)Suetonius is the first to clearly attribute authorship to Caesar sometime about 165 years after it was written. That was the tradition that had come down to Suetonius.

You see, there is a double standard among scholars like Ehrman who reject the authorship of the Gospels.

[Goose]

The burden is on you here to establish that something incredible and perfectly unrealistic not only actually occurred, but necessarily MUST HAVE OCCURRED.

No, you’re confusing me someone trying to convince you. I’m not. Frankly, I don't care if you believe or not. I’m justifying the Christian’s belief in the resurrection by showing the evidence to be strong. I’ve made that quite clear from the beginning. I'll take your demand here to shift the burden as a tacit admission you realize I've done that and you can't refute the argument.

There is no other tradition which has come down to us in either external writings or manuscript attributions of authorship of the Gospel of Peter either. Or the Gospel of Mary. Or the Gospel of Philip. The same may be said for the Acts of Andrew, or the Acts of Thomas, or the Acts of Timothy. In fact there are no alternate traditions for the dozens of so called Apocryphal works, copies of many of which have survived to modern times. All accepted as perfectly valid and true at the time by one Christian faction or another, as established by the fact that they were lovingly copied and recopied. Some of these works, the Acts of Thomas, or the Gospel of Peter for example, have had their admirers right down through the centuries, and continue to have their admirers today. But even the most ardent Christian zealot today recognizes the vast majority of these works for what they clearly are. Pure flights of fancy derived from the enthusiastic musings of True Believers. They were attributed at the time to the apostolic individual for whom they were named, and no other tradition has come down to us. But who actually wrote them? What is their pedigree? The weight of evidence suggests that No one knows!

You're conflating first century works that are internally anonymous such as the Gospels with later second century pseudonymous works such as the Gospel of Peter which internally claims to have been written by Peter. So your argument is misplaced and doesn’t undermine my argument for Matthew as my argument applies to anonymity not pseudonymity. The strongest explanation for there being no alternate traditions for authorship or dispute over authorship is the Gospels were never truly anonymous. You haven’t refuted this.

Further, you say, “All accepted as perfectly valid and true at the time by one Christian faction or another, as established by the fact that they were lovingly copied and recopied.� But the fact is, these works were rejected as inauthentic.

�But we have nevertheless felt compelled to give a catalogue of these also, distinguishing those works which according to ecclesiastical tradition are true and genuine and commonly accepted, from those others which, although not canonical but disputed, are yet at the same time known to most ecclesiastical writers— we have felt compelled to give this catalogue in order that we might be able to know both these works and those that are cited by the heretics under the name of the apostles, including, for instance, such books as the Gospels of Peter, of Thomas, of Matthias, or of any others besides them, and the Acts of Andrew and John and the other apostles, which no one belonging to the succession of ecclesiastical writers has deemed worthy of mention in his writings. And further, the character of the style is at variance with apostolic usage, and both the thoughts and the purpose of the things that are related in them are so completely out of accord with true orthodoxy that they clearly show themselves to be the fictions of heretics. Wherefore they are not to be placed even among the rejected writings, but are all of them to be cast aside as absurd and impious.� Eusebius, Church History 3.25.6-7

It is clear that early Christian writers indicated that the apostle Matthew had undertaken to write a gospel in Aramaic. It's also clear that the perfect Koine Greek gospel which Christian tradition has declared to be a gospel written by the apostle Matthew IS NOT the Aramaic gospel that early Christian writers were referring to.

You are still not countering the argument repeating the above. Eusebius conflated the Hebrew Matthew with the Greek one.

He says, �For Matthew, who had at first preached to the Hebrews, when he was about to go to other peoples, committed his Gospel to writing in his native tongue, and thus compensated those whom he was obliged to leave for the loss of his presence.�- CH 3.24.6

Then, just a few sentences later Eusebius picks up on Matthew again, quotes from our canonical Matthew 4:12, and attributes it to Matthew,

�For Matthew, after the forty days' fast and the temptation which followed it, indicates the chronology of his work when he says: “Now when he heard that John was delivered up he withdrew from Judea into Galilee.�� - CH 3.24.9

You see, to Eusebius, and probably the earlier church, the Greek Matthew WAS essentially the Hebrew Matthew. Their understanding was these were the same book. In Eusebius’ mind there was no Hebrew Matthew and then some other Matthew.

Eusebius recognized it was not unprecedented for educated Jews to write the same work in both their native language and Greek. Only a few sentences earlier Eusebius makes the following comment about Josephus.

�He wrote the whole of the Antiquities of the Jews in twenty books, and a history of the war with the Romans which took place in his time, in seven books. He himself testifies that the latter work was not only written in Greek, but that it was also translated by himself into his native tongue.� - Eusebius CH 3.9.3

As a cross reference here are Josephus’ own words where he states he wrote the work first in his native language and then translated it to Greek.

�I have proposed to myself, for the sake of such as live under the government of the Romans, to translate those books into the Greek tongue, which I formerly composed in the language of our country� - Josephus, Wars of the Jews, 1.

Guess what? The Hebrew version of Josephus’ War of the Jews is lost to us. But apparently Josephus was able to make this translation from Hebrew to Greek without showing any discernible signs of translation. Sound familiar?

And have you noticed at all, the way the deeper you dig into Christian "evidence" the less and less actual solid footing you discover that you really have? You are personally convinced that solid evidence for the truth of the flying reanimated corpse story is there. Frustratingly though, you just can't quite seem to nail it down. Notice that?

Quite the opposite. The more I dig the more I realize how strong the evidence really is. Especially when I compare it to other ancient events such as the assassination. Do you notice that?

Please, oh please, keep this particular "canard" going. The only one who doesn't seem to get the joke is you. Which only serves to make it funnier

What you intended to be a joke has become a great big neon sign on your chest flashing “WARNING! I reason illogically. A duck is a goose! A duck is a goose!�

[help3434]

[Replying to post 1724 by Goose]

What does Ehrman say about Gallic Wars?