I recently viewed Dr. David Wood’s video, Scooby-doo and the Case of the Silly Skeptic. The target of Wood’s criticism was Dr. Michael Shermer (pictured above), who defended a principle which he referred to as “Shermer’s Last Law,” in the course of a debate with Wood on October 10, 2016. According to this law, any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God. The reason is that technologically advanced aliens could easily produce effects that would look like miracles to us. As Wood puts it (paraphrasing Shermer’s argument): “They might be able to cure diseases instantly, or regenerate limbs, or change the weather. These kinds of things would seem miraculous to human beings, and so from our perspective, aliens who could do these kinds of things would be indistinguishable from God.” So if we saw something miraculous, how would be know that it’s God and not aliens?
In the debate, Wood fired back at Shermer, asking: “If you did want to know that God exists, wouldn’t you want some method to figure out if He exists, something that would lead you to the truth about that? According to Dr. Shermer, there can be no such method, because [for] anything God could possibly do, you could say, ‘Aliens did it.’ … So it’s built into the methodology that you could never know whether God exists or not. If it’s built into your methodology [that you can] never know the truth about something, then I have to question the methodology.” In his video, Dr. Wood added: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Finally, Wood administered his coup de grace against those who demand proof of God’s existence: “When I use an atheist’s methodology against him, he can’t even prove his own existence,” since advanced aliens could make me believe that I am arguing with an atheist when in fact I’m not, simply by messing with my brain.
Wood also attacked Shermer’s hypocrisy for asking why God doesn’t detect amputees: even if He did, Shermer still wouldn’t be convinced of God’s existence. And how reasonable is it, asks Wood, for Shermer to believe the evolutionary naturalist myth that life originated from non-living matter, while at the same time insisting that the regeneration of a limb from living matter would somehow constitute proof of God’s existence?
Is Shermer simply being willfully perverse, as Wood seems to believe? Much as I profoundly disagree with Shermer, I would argue that his position is at least intellectually consistent, even if I also consider it to be unreasonable. Here’s why.
Why I think Shermer’s skeptical position is an intellectually consistent one
1. Philosophically speaking, there is nothing inconsistent in the position of someone who refuses to believe in God’s existence unless she has proof, or at least good evidence, that God exists. (Arguably, the person who says, “I won’t believe in anything unless I have proof or good evidence that it’s real,” is being self-referentially inconsistent, since there are some things – e.g. the external world – whose reality we just have to accept as given; but the skeptic who restricts the scope of this evidentiary principle to supernatural beings is perfectly consistent. Such a restriction might strike many people as rather ad hoc, but inconsistent it ain’t.)
2. There is also nothing obviously inconsistent in a skeptic maintaining, on independent grounds, that for any extraordinary effect E (e.g. the instantaneous regeneration of an amputated limb), the hypothesis that aliens produced the effect will always be more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. [And what might those “independent grounds” be? Perhaps the skeptic might argue that the existence of an all-knowing Being Who is absolutely simple – as classical theism insists that God is – is fantastically improbable, on antecedent grounds, as it is difficult to see how an utterly simple Being could give rise to the sheer variety and complexity of things that we see in this world.]
From these two premises, it follows that no effect, however extraordinary it may be, can provide good evidence that God exists. What this means is that if a theist is going to defend the reasonableness of belief in God when arguing with a skeptic who accepts the above premises, then it would be advisable to stick with ordinary effects, and then deploy a philosophical argument (say, the cosmological argument or the teleological argument) to show that the best explanation for these effects is God. But I digress.
What if the same skeptic mocks religious believers, asking them why God never heals amputees? (Or does He? See here.) The question is a perfectly legitimate one, since the absence of such healings is, on the face of it, puzzling if God exists. But if the skeptic goes on to admit that even such a healing wouldn’t convince her that God exists, is she being inconsistent? I think not. She is simply making two independent points: (i) the best sort of evidence that could possibly be adduced for God’s existence (namely, well-documented evidence for extraordinary miracles, such as the instantaneous healing of an amputee) appears to be lacking; and (ii) even this evidence wouldn’t be enough to show that God is real, anyway, since the antecedent probability of the existence of the God of classical theism is far lower than the probability of advanced aliens existing.
Let’s go back to Dr. Wood’s remark: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Dr. Wood’s point is a rhetorically powerful one, but it seems to me that Dr. Wood is guilty of an equivocation here. For the skeptic is not saying that nothing could ever count as evidence for God; rather, what she is saying is that according to her own epistemic principles, any effect that would qualify as evidence for God would simultaneously as even better evidence for the existence of advanced aliens, since their existence is antecedently more probable than God’s. In other words, the classical theist’s definition of God is epistemically self-defeating, since it makes the task of establishing God’s existence with even a high degree of probability an impossible one. “Don’t blame me,” the skeptic might argue in her defense. “Blame your definition of the Deity. That’s where the real problem lies.”
Refuting the skeptic
So, what’s wrong with the skeptic’s two-step argument? I’m not going to attack the skeptic’s first premise. I think that for someone to argue that we ought to believe in a supernatural being, he needs to produce good evidence that such a being exists. In the absence of such evidence, I see nothing wrong with someone believing in such a being, simply because this belief makes his life meaningful. Fair enough. Far be it from me to scoff at beliefs that people hold onto, because their very sanity depends on their continuing to believe them. That’s not wishful thinking; it’s psychic self-preservation. If giving up your belief in the supernatural would make you sad, that shouldn’t deter you from pursuing the truth, even if hurts your feelings. But if you think that giving up such a belief would make you go crazy, then you’d be best advised to let sleeping dogs lie. So I don’t think fideism is necessarily irrational. However, if someone wants to tell me that I ought to accept his supernatural belief, then I think it is perfectly reasonable for me to demand good evidence – particularly in an age when different people’s beliefs about supernatural beings mutually conflict.
Where I would find fault with the skeptic is in the second premise of her argument: that for any extraordinary effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced it is always more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. Even if we judge the existence of aliens to be antecedently more probable (given our background knowledge of the world) than the existence of the God of classical theism, we need to bear in mind the following:
(i) it doesn’t follow from this that for any effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced E is more probable than the hypothesis that God did. There might be some highly specific effects (which I’ll discuss below), whose production by God (assuming He exists) would be vastly more probable than the production of these same effects by aliens. In that case, the degree to which these effects tend to confirm God’s existence might outweigh the antecedent improbability of the existence of God, when compared to aliens. That would tip the balance in God’s favor;
(ii) unless one is claiming that God’s existence is logically inconsistent with some known fact F, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence, while low, is not zero or even infinitesimal. Given that the number N of events that have occurred in the observable universe is finite, and given that none of these events is logically inconsistent with God’s existence, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence (from what we know about the world) will also be a finite number which is measurably greater than zero. Indeed, I would argue that for any simple hypothesis H, we should always rate its antecedent probability as greater than or equal to 1 in 10120, which has been calculated by Seth Lloyd as the number of base-level events (or elementary bit-operations) that have taken place in the history of the observable universe. In a post I wrote several years ago, I argued that the antecedent probability of the existence of some supernatural agent(s) should be assigned a value of at least 1 in 10120: “…[I]f we imagine embodied particle-sized intelligent beings scouring the cosmos from the moment of creation onwards, the maximum number of observations they could possibly make of naturalistic occurrences is 10120, hence by Laplace’s sunrise argument, the prior probability they would rationally assign to a supernatural event would have to be 1 in 10120.” That being the case, belief in a supernatural agent could be rendered reasonable by evidence which favors theism over naturalistic hypotheses by a factor of more than 10120 to 1. How might this happen? The mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871), in Chapter 10 and Chapter 13 of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, makes the perspicuous observation that whereas the evidence against miracles increases an an arithmetic rate as non-miraculous occurrences accumulate over the course of time, the evidence for a miracle increases at a geometric rate, as the number of independent eyewitnesses increases. It therefore follows that even a vanishingly low antecedent probability of a miracle can be overcome by the testimony of a sufficient number of independent eyewitnesses;
(iii) theism is not the same as classical theism. Most people who believe in God hold Him to be omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent (although they might quibble amongst themselves about exactly what these terms mean). But when we look at the other attributes of the God of classical theism – changelessness, impassibility and simplicity, for instance – I think it is fair to say that: (a) most people care little for these attributes; (b) Scripture is at best an ambiguous witness in their favor, and the reasons why Jews, Christians and Muslims came to insist on God having these attributes are largely philosophical; and (c) today, however, many philosophers and theologians would dispute the claim that these attributes are an “all-or-nothing” package. Hence even if someone had what looked like a solid argument against one of the attributes traditionally ascribed to God, it wouldn’t necessarily constitute a good argument against God Himself.
I suggested above that even if the existence of advanced aliens is vastly more probable on antecedent epistemic grounds than the existence of God, the production of this or that miracle might turn out to be readily explicable only on the hypothesis that God exists, and astronomically improbable on all other hypotheses. But what sort of miracle are we talking about here? I’ll let a New Atheist answer that question.
Miracles that would overwhelmingly point to God rather than aliens as their cause
(The following section is excerpted from a previous post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)
[New Atheist Professor Jerry] Coyne has conceded that if he found the phrase “Made by Yahweh” in every human cell, he would tentatively conclude that God was responsible. In a post titled, What evidence would convince you that a god exists? (July 7, 2010), Coyne explicitly declared that if scientists found messages in our DNA, it would be reasonable to infer that God or other supernatural agents were responsible:
Over at AlterNet, Greta Christina describes six things that, if they happened or were observed, would convince her that God exists. These including magic writing in the sky, correct prophecies in sacred texts, accurate information gained during near-death experiences, followers of one religion being much more successful (in ways that couldn’t be explained by economic and social factors) than followers of other faiths. Go read it: she qualifies and explains all of these things in detail…
Making the same point, I provided my own list in a critique of the claim that science and faith are compatible:
There are so many phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces: faith healers could restore lost vision, the cancers of only good people could go into remission, the dead could return to life, we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been scientifically documented gives us added confidence that we are right to stick with natural explanations for nature. And it explains why so many scientists, who have learned to disregard God as an explanation, have also discarded him as a possibility.
In a subsequent post titled, “Shermer and I disagree on the supernatural” (November 8, 2012), Professor Coyne was even more explicit, writing that he would “provisionally accept” the existence of “a divine being” if scientists discovered confirming messages written in our DNA:
I’ve previously described the kind of evidence that I’d provisionally accept for a divine being, including messages written in our DNA or in a pattern of stars, the reappearance of Jesus on earth in a way that is well documented and convincing to scientists, along with the ability of this returned Jesus to do things like heal amputees. Alternatively, maybe only the prayers of Catholics get answered, and the prayers of Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, don’t.
Yes, maybe aliens could do that, and maybe it would be an alien trick to imitate Jesus (combined with an advanced technology that could regrow limbs), but so what? I see no problem with provisionally calling such a being “God”; — particularly if it comports with traditional religious belief — until proven otherwise. What I can say is “this looks like God, but we should try to find out more. In the meantime, I’ll provisionally accept it.” That, of course, depends on there being a plethora of evidence. As we all know, there isn’t.
In an earlier post, titled, Can there be evidence for God? (11 October 2010), Coyne challenges New Atheist P.Z. Myers (who said that no amount of evidence for the supernatural would budge him) on this very point, appealing to the virtue of explanatory simplicity when pressed as to why he would take certain public signs (such as the healing of amputees by a man descending from the clouds who identified himself as Jesus) as evidence for God. In this post, Coyne specifically mentions healed amputees, but his point about there being an abundance of documentation would apply equally well to the discovery of a “Made by Yahweh” message in every human cell, which he mentioned in the passages cited above:
Now you can say that this is just a big magic stunt, but there’s a lot of documentation – all those healed amputees, for instance. Even using Hume’s criterion, isn’t it more parsimonious to say that there’s a God (and a Christian one, given the presence of Jesus!) rather than to assert that it was all an elaborate, hard-to-fathom magic trick or the concatenation of many enigmatic natural forces?
And your evidence-based conversion to God need not be permanent, either. Since scientific truth is provisional, why not this “scientific” truth about God as well? Why not say that, until we find evidence that what just happened was a natural phenomenon, or a gigantic ruse, we provisionally accept the presence of a God?
Coyne’s attitude here strikes me as eminently rational, and what I would expect from a man of science.
Are there any special miracles that can unambiguously be ascribed to God?
As we noted above, Professor Coyne would tentatively accept the existence of God, given the (well-documented) occurrence of certain specific miracles. But can we go further, and point to miracles (such as the resurrection of a man from the dead) which could only be caused by God, and which could therefore be unambiguously ascribed to God?
(The following section is an excerpt from an earlier post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)
[Thomistic philosopher Edward] Feser thinks that the resurrection of a dead body would be a clear-cut example of a supernatural event or miracle that in principle, only God could have caused:
Christ’s resurrection from the dead would be a paradigm case of such a miracle. But establishing such a miracle in turn requires a lot of philosophical stage-setting. It requires establishing God’s existence and nature, divine providence, the possibility in principle of miracles, the possibility in principle of a resurrection, and so forth. All this groundwork has to be established before the occurrence of a miracle like the resurrection can be defended. (Again, see the post just linked to for discussion of this subject.)
While I would agree with Feser that only a supernatural Being could raise a dead person back to life, as such an event would constitute a massive violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I have to disagree with his implicit claim that a well-documented case of a corpse coming back to life could only be ascribed to God. For the problem is that what looks like a resurrection might not actually be a resurrection. Consider the following scenario. Suppose there is an advanced race of aliens who are capable of very quickly moving bodies wherever they choose, using technologies beyond our ken. The aliens are also capable of transforming one person’s appearance (including the DNA of their cells) into that of another person, in the twinkling of an eye, although such feats of course require an enormous amount of energy. To simulate a resurrection, then, all the aliens would have to is quickly remove the corpse from the scene, transform another individual into a replica of what the deceased person looked like while he/she was still alive, and rapidly transport that person to the place where the corpse was before – all in the space of a fraction of a second. Ridiculously far-fetched? Yes, of course. But is it demonstrably impossible? No.
Nor is there any reason in principle why an alien could not tamper with our visual systems and/or our memories, making us think that we had seen a dead person come to life even though nothing extraordinary had taken place.
To make matters worse for Feser, there is another possibility that he has to consider: that demons may be able to bring about or at least mimic the resurrection of a dead body. Consider the following passage from Exodus 7:
10 So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. 11 Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: 12 Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs. 13 Yet Pharaoh’s heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said. (NIV)
Commenting on this passage in Exodus, St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in his Summa Theologica, vol. I, question 114, article 4, reply to objection 2, was willing to allow that demons can transform inanimate objects into frogs, using “certain seeds that exist in the elements of the world.” And although he went on to argue that demons could not raise a dead man back to life, he added that demons were perfectly capable of creating a “semblance of reality” so that “something of this sort seems to be effected by the operation of demons.” Demons are capable of producing collective hallucinations too: “the demon, who forms an image in a man’s imagination, can offer the same picture to another man’s senses.”
The point I’m making here is that even when evaluating miracles, we have to adopt a balance-of-probabilities approach. Yes, one might imagine an advanced race of aliens pulling off a stunt like that. But it’s not rational to suppose that aliens would do such a thing: first, we haven’t discovered any aliens; and second, even if they existed, it’s extremely unlikely that they would bother to pull religious pranks on us. And for all we know, demons may be capable of causing us all to suffer hallucinations. But we have no special reason to believe that they would – and if we believe that the world is governed by Divine Providence, such a scenario would seem especially unlikely. The most obvious interpretation of an event such as a dead person coming to life is that it’s a supernatural sign from Heaven. And that should be enough.
[Case study: the Resurrection]
The best defense of the Resurrection of Jesus on Bayesian probabilistic grounds that I have seen is The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth by Professor Tim McGrew and his wife, Dr. Lydia McGrew. What the authors attempt to demonstrate is that there is “a small set of salient public facts” that strongly supports belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Taking into account only the eyewitness testimony of the women at the tomb of Jesus, his twelve apostles and St. Paul, they calculate that the facts in question are 1044 times more likely to have occurred, on the assumption that the Resurrection of Jesus actually happened, than that on the assumption that it did not. However, their argument makes no attempt to calculate the prior probability of a man rising from the dead.
(In my post, I go on to argue that using Laplace’s Sunrise argument, the prior probability of a man rising from the dead in the first century A.D. can be calculated as about 1 in a billion, rather than 1 in 10120. Since 1044 is much greater than one billion, the evidence supporting the Resurrection vastly outweighs the antecedent improbability of a Resurrection occurring. In any case, given that there were actually 500 witnesses to the Resurrection, we could still establish the reasonableness of belief in this miracle, using the lower figure of 1 in 10120. In another post, titled, Good and bad skepticism: Carl Sagan on extraordinary claims, I also deal with the common skeptical objection that the witnesses to the Resurrection may have been the victims of mass hallucination.)
Conclusion
Dr. Shermer’s skeptical point that any extraordinary effect could have been either produced or simulated by advanced aliens is a valid one. But the inference he draws, that belief in God is never warranted by the evidence, is a faulty one. God may not be the only possible explanation of any particular event, however extraordinary. Nevertheless, He may be the only reasonable one.
Perhaps it was animatronics……….Fred
peace
He’s apparently in denial at present, but so was Lord Marchmain. All it takes is the slightest tug and Jesus will reel him back in.
Flebderkamps, IMHO
Why do “skeptics” here believe anything they read on the internet as long as it reinforces their “lack of belief” about God?
Mung,
We don’t.
I see you two no less infatuated with the Bible. It’s the only scripture you know, that’s probably why. I happen to know more than the Bible, but nobody ever references anything else. When I do, it gets ignored. So I could say you are even more infatuated with the Bible than I am.
A basic distinction for you:
– The writing.
– Things told in the writing.
Never once did I say Bible was true. I said its manuscripts are temporally closest to the actual authors and the textual integrity is better attested than any other documents in antiquity. I can make this distinction. Can you?
Go back read again what you are responding to.
About manuscripts, your link commits the usual “skeptical” error:
– When it comes to Bible manuscripts, they are strictly dated. Yes, the earliest scraps are dated to 2nd century CE.
– When it comes to any other-than-biblical manuscript sources, concerning Caesar in this case, they give the author’s lifetime, not the earliest available manuscript.
Ask yourself why.
This is disappointing. Of course Ehrman offers nothing new about biblical studies, that’s why I said reading this one book was just “a start … only a beginning”. I erred in trusting you, thinking your request for information was honest. It’s no big deal, I won’t make that mistake again (thinking you honest.)
Whether the Bible is “the best-preserved document from antiquity“, whether it “has been better preserved” than others is irrelevant; the question is whether it has been sufficiently preserved to rely on its claims when used as you are trying to use them. It has not. Sorry if that hurts, but I will not bear false witness.
And there’s a bigger problem.
Whether the Bible is “the best-preserved document from antiquity“, whether it “has been better preserved” than others is irrelevant in another, critical way. And to keep repeating this irrelevancy demonstrates that you, Erik, don’t understand the problem. Your comparisons to Plato and Homer also manifest your confusion.
Should we treat the Bible as just another really old book? Or should we treat the writings of Homer and Plato reverently, as sacred texts like the Bible? Should we regard these writings (Biblical, Homeric, and Platonic) as being categorically the same?
I’m certain most persons (including you, Erik) would answer NO, NO, and NO.
Assuming that I am correct and that you believe that the Bible is categorically distinct from the writings of Homer and Plato (and all other ancient texts?) then the problem begins to emerge into daylight: if the Bible is distinct and of much greater moral and social import, then it is improper to treat it as an ordinary ancient text. This use of the Bible also requires that it be held to a much higher standard.
No one “knows what Homer or Plato said“; we only know what is reported. But since it is rarely-to-never that their words are treated as commandments, that’s satisfactory for most purposes.
When Biblical texts are used to justify religious or moral obligations, or as “evidence” in disputes about science or nature, the biblical claims must be held to a higher, more exacting standard. To expect otherwise is to contradict yourself, claiming the Bible is both unique and ordinary, distinct and typical.
This is fair; for ordinary uses Biblical texts should be held to an ordinary standard. For extraordinary uses they must be held to a higher standard.
sean s.
By what logic can the best-preserved document of antiquity not be sufficiently preserved?
How specifically am I trying to use the Bible’s claims? Am I trying to assert that you should accept them as true?
Is that what Ehrman says, or is this another of your “gospel according to sean samis” sayings?
What would be an “ordinary use” of the texts? As history? As biography? As doorstop?
Maybe the Bible wasn’t written for you. What then?
I’m not terribly interested in any of it, actually–Bible or non-Bible. For reading purposes, I like a little Mahabharata occasionally and Butler’s ‘translations’ of Homer are fun, but I don’t read any of it for factual content.
Btw, your hubris is flailing again.
Well I certainly don’t think it’s the best-preserved document from history. There are many letters and documents that are the originals. Certainly many Dead Sea Scrolls are close to the source, and some may be originals. Sumerian texts abound, many of which are no doubt one-off accounts of some rather dull project or business transaction, or records of events.
Perhaps Erik means it’s the best-preserved of what we typically think of as “texts,” though, the books written for the many, or the like. That could be, for all that I know.
Maybe the bigger point (other than that they’re not sacred text to current audiences, that is), though, is that whatever we get from Homer or Plato does not really hinge on being actual history. Plato wasn’t really quoting Socrates, and whatever Achilles said is not supposed to be recorded in the Iliad. We know that Homer wrote epics that are fictional (to be fair, it seems that many Greeks did not know that, hence the anti-Homer sentiments of somewhat later writers), and Plato’s Socrates is quite different from Xenophon’s Socrates. Homer’s books stand on their own as epics, and Plato is teaching philosophy with his fictions. We just don’t care that neither Homer nor Plato relates believable history.
The problem with the NT is that it really is supposed to tell us what Jesus said and did, and it was written decades afterward by devout members of a sect who wished to portray Jesus as being what they thought he was. A book like Mark is close enough to the source that it is going to relate some of what was said and done, but it’s also far enough away that it’s certainly no reliable history. Memories fade and change, sometimes gaining new “facts” as they are recounted and considered how they fit into Christian theology. Even if the writers had been out to be as accurate as possible (doubtful where something might point to Jesus’ divinity, but probably trying to get more practical facts to be accurate), it’s really not possible at the time that they were writing. Does anyone believe Herodotus’s accounts of discussions with Darius, the Persian king–other than that they might reflect something about his reactions?
NT texts are not bad texts overall for the historian, I think, but why would anyone believe the miracle claims? We generally don’t believe contemporaneous miracle claims today (most religious people don’t believe most miracle claims), we don’t believe them in other texts, and we don’t find highly partisan writers and witnesses to be especially believable, notably where the miraculous happens. To be sure, something like 500 post-resurrection witnesses could easily be true if Jesus had not died, but merely went unconscious and revived (even he may have believed in his resurrection in that scenario), but I’d hardly say that Paul’s claim warrants such a conclusion. He heard that from others, and believers aren’t notorious for questioning the veracity of something that bolsters a central belief.
For histories, the NT texts are too sectarian and too late to be believable when wondrous events are recounted. You just can’t rely on a bunch of believers retelling miracles and wonders to be accurate in the first place, and especially not with decades of retelling. So the NT may be the best-preserved “history” in being written close to the time the events happened, what really matters is that someone like Tacitus wrote from actual records and presumably some rather reliable accounts, while NT writers wrote from sectarian memories decades after the events occurred (or possibly, did not occur). So we’re more inclined to believe Tacitus, and clearly he’s not going to get everything right either.
Glen Davidson
Do they?
By the same logic that says in a bus full of blind amputees, the blind guy with two arms still makes a terrible driver.
Then you are participating here out of sheer non-interest? That’s interesting.
Then why would you possibly blame any text for non-factual content, in this case the Bible? Out of non-interest again?
I have no idea what you’re talking about, Erik. So, I guess that makes two of us.
Manuscripts don’t include stone and metal inscriptions. I said this earlier.
Dead Sea scrolls are biblical literature, not personal correspondence or records of business transactions or the like, so “originals” is not quite applicable here.
If we include inscriptions, it somewhat changes the discussion, but if we are keeping ourselves to the same genre – prayers, religious myths, epics – then for example Egyptian and Babylonian inscriptions are, like the Bible manuscripts, copies of earlier texts, as conservative as possible, in no way “originals”. Creativity is hardly permitted in this genre, and this makes the Bible actually exceptional with its books by prophets and epistles by apostles.
In my view, Christian apologists are making a big disservice to their own cause if they try to portray Biblical writings as ordinary history. Writings of history don’t prove miracles by any stretch of the imagination. Suppose, for example, that a personal secretary of Stalin or Churchill wrote that the guy was able to levitate. Suppose four secretaries wrote that. Hardly anybody outside a small circle of die-hard devotees would believe. Similarly, history writings don’t get you resurrected Jesus, just like they don’t get you resurrected Osiris. Only religious scriptures get that.
“Sufficiency” depends on the purpose for which “sufficiency” is considered. If all you want is to show what early Christian writers believed, the NT is sufficiently preserved. If you want us to treat these stories as accurate accounts of what really happened (that the Resurrection actually happened), then the NT stories are not even close to sufficient.
And as GlenDavidson relates, whether the NT is “the best-preserved document of antiquity” is not a given.
If you’ve forgotten what your intentions are here, then it’s on you to straighten yourself out.
If you think I’ve misunderstood your point, you could restate it.
If you are not asserting that these stories (especially the story of the 500 witnesses) are true, then we should be finished with that tale.
sean s.
This is funny, actually. You make the Bible “the best-preserved document of antiquity” by arbitrarily excluding everything better.
On this last point we agree completely. Amazing. But you cannot portray Biblical writings as something categorically different from “ordinary history” without evaluating them with categorically different criteria. As you write, “history writings don’t get you resurrected Jesus,”.
But when subjected to the necessary scrutiny, neither do Biblical writings because they are not even close to sufficient.
sean s.
Yes, you said that, but you were also wrong. There are a good many clay tablets, papyrus letters and documents, and some parchment or vellum originals, that exist as originals from the ancient world. A letter from King Tut’s wife (or possibly from Nefertiti) was found in the Hittite archives, for instance. I suppose it wouldn’t have to be original, but at worst it’d probably be a copy from the original, and copied well. Here’s a peace treaty also in the Hittite archive. Possibly not “the original,” you know there weren’t a whole lot of copies made, so it’s at least very close to the original, and almost certainly very very faithfully copied (and really, legal “copies” are often considered official and in effect “original” and binding).
The Reisner Papyri from Egypt include a number of records, presumably most being original (why would anyone bother to copy them?)
Hardly, many are sectarian works found nowhere else.
So what? If you really think that only inscriptions in metal and stone exist from the ancient world as “originals” (and why would even these be original?), your level of knowledge of the ancient world is abysmal.
I wouldn’t disagree with that.
Glen Davidson
What would the necessary scrutiny be like?
Indeed, why would anyone copy a pragmatic text of one-off purpose? Those texts did not spread much, because they either were casual, of limited official purpose or private. This doesn’t characterize scriptures. So we are mixing up genres and comparing apples and oranges here.
Instead, it should be interesting why documents of momentous interest for us and of definite impact at the time, such as writings of major philosophers and of the most prominent statesmen (who in antiquity were regularly deified, by the way), were not preserved better than the Bible, but far worse. Wouldn’t the thoughts of a deified person merit copying and distributing far and wide? Or of a poet who was universally acclaimed through all times? Why should only Christians succeed in this?
If the emphasis is on “found nowhere else”, then that tells of limited impact. But at least in this case we have writings of the same theme – scriptures, about scriptures, and for the sake of scriptures.
I thought I said clearly enough that they wouldn’t be originals. Certainly if we are talking about the same genre, which we hopefully are.
I’ve have already told you that. If you haven’t read or comprehended things I’ve already written, I can’t expect you’ll read or comprehend them if I write them again. I’m not going to facilitate your sloth by repeating myself.
sean s.
quote:
but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.
(Joh 10:26-27)
end quote:
peace
Wood calls it truing the skeptometer to 10.
We all do it with evidence that conflicts with what we want to believe.
peace
fifthmonarchyman,
If I have to choose between being skeptical and being gullible, I choose skepticism. There are just too many false prophets.
sean s.
Did you watch the video?
It’s not about being skeptical verses being gullible
The choice is between using skepticism as a tool for discovering or denying the truth
peace
The New Testament was written in the language of the common people. It’s obviously not of divine origin. QED
I am not remarking on the video; this thread moved on from it long ago.
Believers are as likely to “deny the truth” as anyone. Skepticism or gullibility are merely tools some people choose from to rationalize their denial of truth.
I do not “deny” any deity; you cannot deny what you have never known; you cannot reject what has never been offered to you; you cannot refuse what has never been asked of you.
sean s.
In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.
– Acts 17:30
I agree, it’s an equal opportunity affliction.
In this instance I’m not saying you are denying a deity.
I’m implying you are using skepticism as a tool to deny a possible truth that you don’t like. You have admitted as much.
quote:
When Biblical texts are used to justify religious or moral obligations, or as “evidence” in disputes about science or nature, the biblical claims must be held to a higher, more exacting standard.
end quote:
There is your technique for doing this right there in black and white.
IOW “When it comes to the bible turn the skepticometer to 10”
peace
…said some human who died centuries ago. No deity has ever given me a command.
sean s.
Or anyone else, actually.
All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,
(2Ti 3:16)
peace
I’m skeptical of that bold unsupported claim 😉
peace
No. I am using skeptical reasoning to test a possible falsehood. I have no particular like or dislike for your claims; they simply fail to add up. I am not troubled by the possibility of a deity; I simply have no credible reason to believe any exist.
No, I haven’t. One cannot “admit” to a falsehood.
There in black and white is nothing but simple, basic reasoning. Any reasonable person will doubt extraordinary and unsubstantiated claims. Only the gullible do not.
sean s.
…said some human who died centuries ago. No deity has ever given me a command.
sean s.
“Derp, derp, derpity derp. Derp, derp derp, da derp dee derp da yeetley derpee derpee dumb”
(Derp l0l:l0l)
Find the line between skeptical and gullible, children.
I’d quibble with the phrase “possible truth”. On the other hand it does also read like an admission. We usually test what is possible by trying it. Observation, experiment and so on. What do we have, other than what various people have said or written at different times* (and that being a huge plurality of claims) for the existence of deities, omnipotent or not?
*And observing Trump demonstrates how people can make stuff up!
I agree.
Sean is not Testing. he is simply demanding that claims he does not like be held to a “higher, more exacting standard” than those he does.
We all do that of course it’s not simply about him. But it’s important to recognize our bias and that this approach can be means for us to deny rather than discover the truth.
You could say the same about any person or event before the age of electronic recording.
What evidence do we have for Plato’s life and teachings but “what various people have said or written at different times”?
peace
What evidence would convince you that the claims are substantiated?
Be specific please.
peace
Ah, but! As far as I am aware, there are no claims for Plato having supernatural powers. If texts related that Plato was prone to do a quick circuit of the Acropolis at fifty feet off the ground before breakfast, I might be skeptical of those texts.
It’s not a bright line. Several of the theists infer from that point that God exists.
What happens when I find it and cross it? Are you going to hit me?
If there is an omniscient god, then he would know what would convince me of his existence. So, I concede that it is possible I could be convinced, and it would require that he do the thing that he knows would convince me. This may not seem specific, but it specifies the quality of the most relevant attribute of the event.
There. Does that make me a proper skeptic in your mind? Or can God make a person so skeptical that even God cannot convince him?
I completely agree but that is beside the point.
In order for you to think it possible that you are wrong in any tangible way YOU need to be able to conceive of evidence that would convince you. Can you do that?
Perhaps that is what hell is about. A grand eternal experiment to see if God can ever get you to acknowledge the obvious.
peace
So your skepticism like Sean’s is limited to claims that you don’t like.
Got it.
What evidence would convince you that it’s possible that something can exist that is Supra (beyond) nature? Be specific please
peace