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?

[Sir Hamilton]

I find this quote interesting given our debate on the separate forum pertaining to the resurrection. I think your comments are much to sweeping. The Resurrection is grounded in history and has historical evidence supporting it in both the gospels, the letters and the early church life. To sweep it away as baseless or without any historical grounds is for the mouse to stand on its hind legs, place its paws on its hips and begin to give the elephant before it a good dressing down. Your simple psuedo-solutions do not answer the historical voice of the sources. Explain, if you can, in a structured manner the reasons to judge the resurrection narratives as unhistorical and inventory. [/url]

"Inventory?" I'm having trouble understanding what you mean by this. At any rate this subtopic and others address your question fairly thoroughly. The question isn't whether or not the resurrection is mentioned in ancient documents. The question is, 'How reliable and accurate are those documents, given that they were not recorded contemporaneously, have anonymous authors, were written to support an argument, and contain stories that require the suspension of natural laws.

They were not written contemporaneously but probably within about 30 years from the death and resurrection of Jesus. This is not necessarily a good basis to reject them on. Actually the author of the gospels are known...they are named after each author. Written to support an argument?? That is your opinion. Now stories that require the suspension of natural laws is your best one...you need to go with it even though I think that what you refer to as natural laws may only apply to our 3 dimensional view of things. Doesn't physics allow for the existence of more than our 3 dimensions? Maybe there are things that go on in these dimensions that we can't understand? I know that I can't understand some of the miracles of Jesus but I recognize that I am a finite imperfect creature with limitations....and so are you.

[FarWanderer]

[Replying to post 2565 by iamtaka]

First off, thanks for laying that all out. I know it takes some time.

I've seen 99a post again and again that non-believers think that something came from nothing, and I myself and others have objected to this claim time and time again including explanations as to why 99a is wrong. But 99a has, to my knowledge, never addressed these objections and just continues to post the same claim over and over.

In contrast, when TotN was faced with an objection to his characterization of the opposite side, he addressed the objection. If it was a strawman before (and maybe it could be said to be), it's not anymore. The focus of contention can be said to have been shifted to the proper point.

Except it really hasn't. The arguments are completely derailed at this point.

[FarWanderer]

It's true that Relativity doesn't show that the universe has always existed. He is wrong.

Explain how please. Is, or is not, time part of the universe, according to relativity?

[FarWanderer]

I think you are a bit confused. I was not argueing over whether or not the universe exist. I agree with you that the universe exist. What we are disagreeing over is the origin of the universe. What evidence do you have that proves the universe has always been? Are you serious when you say you have no idea what the word God means?? Even small children can grasp somewhat of the idea of what God means.

Relativity has already shown that the universe has always been. It has shown that time is part of the universe, so there exists no point in time in which the universe has not existed.

So yes, the universe has "always been". This is true regardless of whether the universe extends finitely into the past or infinitely.

How has Relativity shown the universe to always have been?

Did you read past the first sentence of my post? Because that's where the answer is.

[iamtaka]

I've seen 99a post again and again that non-believers think that something came from nothing, and I myself and others have objected to this claim time and time again including explanations as to why 99a is wrong. But 99a has, to my knowledge, never addressed these objections and just continues to post the same claim over and over.

It's frustrating, right? I know the feeling.

In contrast, when TotN was faced with an objection to his characterization of the opposite side, he addressed the objection. If it was a strawman before (and maybe it could be said to be), it's not anymore. The focus of contention can be said to have been shifted to the proper point.

Except it really hasn't. The arguments are completely derailed at this point.

This is probably the case. It's a shame, too.

[Danmark]

They were not written contemporaneously but probably within about 30 years from the death and resurrection of Jesus. This is not necessarily a good basis to reject them on. Actually the author of the gospels are known...they are named after each author. Written to support an argument?? That is your opinion. Now stories that require the suspension of natural laws is your best one...you need to go with it even though I think that what you refer to as natural laws may only apply to our 3 dimensional view of things. Doesn't physics allow for the existence of more than our 3 dimensions? Maybe there are things that go on in these dimensions that we can't understand? I know that I can't understand some of the miracles of Jesus but I recognize that I am a finite imperfect creature with limitations....and so are you.

The dates and authorship of the gospels are disputed. Some of the dates are as late as the beginning of the 2d Century. Scholars disagree about the dates and who the authors were. I'm not aware of any scholar who simply says, 'The authors are the ones who bear the traditional names. It was common in those days to attribute works to famous people in order to give the writing more value or authority.

I agree that there are things we do not know for certain, but the problem with abandoning the knowledge and laws we know is that we can simply conclude anything we want, not based on what we know, but on what we want to be true.

There are many people on this forum who are more knowledgable than I am about the authorship and dating of the gospels, but two facts among others that bother me are that if any of the original disciples of wrote them, why did they not use their own language, aramaic, and why did they wait 30 to 70 years to record such important events. The Gospel of John, for example, is thought to be the work of several authors and did not reach it's final form until as late as 100 CE.

Also, scholars conclude that Paul wrote prior to the publication of any of the gospels and he appears to not know of any of the gospels. From the evidence I have seen it appears they were written by church leaders long after the fact and in order to bolster the opinions and positions of those leaders.

I think that what happens with many of us who were raised in the church is that we grew up being taught to revere the Bible as very special. Those pages, enclosed in leather and inscribed with the title "Holy Bible" in gold letters became a magical talisman or relic given almost supernatural power and certainly something to be revered over and above any other written work or object. Thus the Bible became an idol, something not to be questioned, but to be reverenced as the word of god.

It comes as quite a shocking blow to find that the canon was decided by men, not god; that there are great disputes about the authorship and dating of the bible and that there are competing ideas and conclusions among scholars about these various issues.

[instantc]

Regarding the origin of the universe you can conclude either that it has always been, or that it came from nothing. It takes an extra step to come up with the idea of a god, but even if you do jump to that conclusion, you have the same choice. Either God always was, or he came into existence out of nothing.

I don't think it's quite that simple. There is a further point to be made here for the theist side that has got to do with philosophical problems associated to the idea that the universe has an infinite past. An infinite number of things seems to lead to a self-contradiction, as demonstrated by Hilbert's Hotel. If that's correct, then the universe has a finite past. Thus, the universe either came about 'spontaneously' from nothing, as Lawrence Krauss believes, or it had an external cause, which would have to somehow exist outside time (and space). That's where the God-hypothesis steps in.

If the universe can somehow have an external cause, why jump to the conclusion it has a personality, or is personal or is 'God?'

I haven't heard a convincing one to date. However, there's a great mystery in cosmology and I'm certainly interested in any suggestions as to why the said 'first cause' should be a person, as it well might be. My point was, there are real problems associated to the idea of an infinite past, and thus the idea of a timeless first cause is not entirely unsupported. It shouldn't be dismissed that easily by Occam's razor.

Actually there is an easier way to deal with this. If we define the universe as everything that exists, then there is no external cause. Once one posits an external cause, that cause instantly and simultaneously is part of the universe.

Sure, but the same question still remains, what caused the space/time into existence?

[Haven]

I haven't heard a convincing one to date.

Perhaps even more problematic for the theist, if an infinite regress truly is impossible, then that creator god must also have a beginning, and therefore must have either generated uncaused (which the theist claims is impossible) or been created by yet another external agency, which itself must have been created, and so on ad infinitum. Either way, positing a god just pushes the problem one step back; it is not a satisfactory explanation.

However, there's a great mystery in cosmology . . . what [if anything]* caused space / time into existence?

*insertion mine

I don't know. A more important question at this stage, however, is can this mystery be solved through scientific inquiry and objective evidence? If yes, then let's keep researching until we find the answer. If maybe, then let's keep researching until we find the answer. If no, then it's just an unsolvable mystery and it's pointless to waste our intellectual energy on something epistemically unavailable to us.

[Haven]

As you mentioned, instantc, theists will often try to say that God is outside time to get around the infinite regress problem. This is problematic for three reasons:

• It's very ad hoc. Time is problematic to the notion of a god, so the theist simply -- without evidence -- claims God is outside time to get around the problem. This is not convincing at all.
  
  God is said to either have a mind or be a mind. This is problematic on a timeless view, because a thinking mind is by definition a process, and for something to be a process it must necessarily exist within some kind of time-structure (because 'process' implies before-->during--->after, which are all temporal terms). This is very damaging to the 'timeless God' view.
  
  If a timeless cause is necessary to explain the universe, then why couldn't this timeless cause be impersonal? In fact, what reason is there to believe that a personal timeless cause is even possible or logically coherent (see point two for an argument against such a cause)? Intuitively (observing that things seem to go from simpleness to complexity in nature), it seems far more likely that such a cause would be simple and impersonal rather than complex and personal.

[Danmark]

Regarding the origin of the universe you can conclude either that it has always been, or that it came from nothing. It takes an extra step to come up with the idea of a god, but even if you do jump to that conclusion, you have the same choice. Either God always was, or he came into existence out of nothing.

I don't think it's quite that simple. There is a further point to be made here for the theist side that has got to do with philosophical problems associated to the idea that the universe has an infinite past. An infinite number of things seems to lead to a self-contradiction, as demonstrated by Hilbert's Hotel. If that's correct, then the universe has a finite past. Thus, the universe either came about 'spontaneously' from nothing, as Lawrence Krauss believes, or it had an external cause, which would have to somehow exist outside time (and space). That's where the God-hypothesis steps in.

If the universe can somehow have an external cause, why jump to the conclusion it has a personality, or is personal or is 'God?'

I haven't heard a convincing one to date. However, there's a great mystery in cosmology and I'm certainly interested in any suggestions as to why the said 'first cause' should be a person, as it well might be. My point was, there are real problems associated to the idea of an infinite past, and thus the idea of a timeless first cause is not entirely unsupported. It shouldn't be dismissed that easily by Occam's razor.

Actually there is an easier way to deal with this. If we define the universe as everything that exists, then there is no external cause. Once one posits an external cause, that cause instantly and simultaneously is part of the universe.

Sure, but the same question still remains, what caused the space/time into existence?

My working hypothesis is that the universe has always been. It may have changed and gone thru endless cycles but it has always been. This, to me, is a preferable conclusion than that it suddenly came from nothing.