768 thoughts on “I lost my faith in ID”
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The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
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Nope. It’s not possible. I understand the magnitude of the evidence: it’s not even evidence.
I saw your list Bill. Starts ridiculously wrong. No need to go in depth for something like “we exist therefore Christ.”
Yup. We have a much more mature philosophy, and we have science. Unfortunately both are deformed by apologists, like those working for the ID bullshit.
Let’s see:
Here comes the extraordinary evidence!
We exist therefore magical being in the sky exists??? If you felt the need to start here I doubt what follows is any better.
A bunch of stories is not evidence.
A bunch of stories is not evidence.
A bunch of stories is not evidence.
A bunch of stories is not evidence.
A bunch of stories is not evidence.
A bunch of stories is not evidence.
A bunch of stories is not evidence.
A bunch of stories is not evidence.
A bunch of stories is not evidence.
Remember this is not whether I can “refute” your evidence, but whether the evidence stands as outstanding and strong enough to believe in a magical being in the sky who finally gave up on people being able to stop being what he created them to be in the first place, and thus sent himself to be killed to pay the price of people’s sins. Oh, but not for everybody’s sins, just for those who believe in the absurd story.
Stories, no matter how forced into coherence by the Bible compilers, are just that: stories.
I’m impressed by how it is inconceivable to you that anyone could be aware of the same evidence that you are and draw a different conclusion. That’s truly the mark of a healthy critical intellect.
Kantian Naturalist,
For someone with purportedly such a high level of confidence that looking into the details is compelling, Bill seems strangely reluctant to get into the details here.
I for one was looking forward to his point-by-point response to Flint’s post.
Kantian Naturalist,
My judgement is if you look at evidence no matter how compelling and emotionally want to reject it you will. You will also not understand it when you are done. I have been guilty of that myself.
DNA_Jock,
Flints post shows no grounding in reality.
This is an example of misrepresentation. This is what all the counter arguments look like starting with KN using the false equivalence of Paganism. This above is true but it fails to show why so many came to believe that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah.
I think you do not understand the idea of extraordinary evidence. While your list doesn’t look like evidence at all, if it were, this statement alone is an admission that it is weak evidence at best.
Again, this is not about whether you’ll find a refutation compelling, but about whether there’s evidence to support those extraordinary claims. You’re mistaking your role here. It’s not you who needs to be convinced otherwise, it’s you who claimed to have extraordinary evidence to present, yet you have naught.
In the antiquity of the Jews by the Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus Jesus, John the Baptist and James were not missing.
Entropy,
Evidence piece by piece can look weak until you put the puzzle together.
If that were actually true, there would not be so much talk of “faith”.
And yet you concede that it is true.
Furthermore, you respond to Flint’s point (7) by citing and quoting a translation of Josephus, blithely ignoring the fact that the comment you are responding to discussed that passage in Josephus, and why many believe that it is a later addition.
This is an example of misrepresentation.
Yes, this is widely quoted, and precisely the passage I referred to. There are few (if any) biblical historians, most of whom are devout Christians, who regard this passage as having been written by Josephus. I guess I’ll repeat, the evidence that this was added later is that
(1) It was written in a very different style from the rest of Josephus;
(2) It uses vocabulary found only in this passage and nowhere else in Josephus;
(3) While Josephus’s historical approach was to develop observations within the context of the times, citing his sources, writing such things at length and in detail, this passage is not connected with any context, not part of any narrative, not citing any sources. It is simply plunked down almost randomly into Josephus.;
(4) Josephus, a Jew, would never have said this person was the Christ. And while nearly nothing is known of the period, it is known that the subsequent evolution of the Christian church occurred about 800 miles away, and the new testament is in a different language.
Surely if the events of the gospels had actually happened, they would have been remarked on by a great many, in great detail, and the early Church would have worked strenuously to preserve every word. Instead, the evidence suggests the early Church worked even more strenuously to find and destroy all works that should have provided detailed accounts. There is strong indirect evidence that even documents that should have (but didn’t) refer to the primary documents were also destroyed. Where vast outpourings of references would be expected, we find only silence. Which is entirely consistent with the idea that if these events did NOT happen, their lack of mention in related documents would be conspicuous. Can’t have that, right?
Seriously, what seems most plausible when there would certainly be many volumes of writing written at the time of, and about, the gospel events, and the church would certainly have preserved them all, yet preserved none! Might it also be plausible that someone at a later date inserted a rather clumsy passage into Josephus in an attempt to get it aligned with later church doctrine?
Now, I’m not a historian, but when enough of them say the same thing, using the same evidences, applying appropriate historical techniques, I’m inclined to listen. Especially when many of these historians are Christians.
Now, it’s possible that all these people (I read at least five historians, who referenced other historians) have no “grounding in reality.” But generally, historians are concerned with reality, and careful not to render history into fantasy.
Joe Felsenstein,
Thanks for the correction. One of those things I’ve checked before, but doesn’t seem to stick. WUSTL is a private ‘secular’ university in contrast with TWU which is a private, ‘religious’ university. Harder for me to forget is Saint Louis University, where Marshall McLuhan taught for 7 years before returning to Canada.
Flint,
I think it is sensible to be skeptical of ad populum arguments especially when they contain conspiracy theories.
http://www.josephus.org/home.htm
Flint,
There were Flint and they have been replicated and preserved like nothing else in ancient history.
They are called the gospel of Luke, John, Mathew and Mark along with Acts, The letters of Paul, Jude, James and Peter.
For each of those, please note the time they were written in years from Jesus’s death.
As you appear to be responding to that, but I think if you provide the detail I’m asking for you will realize you are in fact not.
I insist on you not understanding what extraordinary evidence means. It doesn’t mean trying too hard to make it look as if it were evidence.
And edited, don’t forget edited.
Entropy,
It turns out the life of Jesus as told in the Gospels is the gold standard of extraordinary evidence for an event in ancient times. I have spent 3 years trying to break this story and I cannot. You are a smart guy and I open myself up to your criticism and you have nothing of any substance to challenge this documented evidence. Maybe you should take a fresh look at the worldview you abandoned. The tools exist now to understand how this puzzle fits together.
I don’t see how you can either confirm or discount the various aspects of Jesus’ story (history, divinity, miracles) simply by reading the texts.
I told you about low standards, didn’t I? It doesn’t matter if you consider it “gold”, it’s a very poor standard compared to the claims:
A magical being in the sky gave up on humanity. This because humanity does what this magical being in the sky created them to do in the first place. So, to “fix” his mistake (though blaming humanity for it), this magical being in the sky became his own son and sent himself to Earth to be sacrificed and thus satiate its blood thirst, thirst caused by his own mistakes, which, again, the magical being blames on what he created. The magical being was thus able to forgive those mistakes his creation makes by design. Oh, but only if those evil humans believe the absurdity.
Do you see the humungous difference between the magnitude of your pathetic “evidence,” compared to what you want me to believe about some absurd story by some absurd magical being in the sky? It doesn’t do the job Bill.
It’s not about whether you can break the story. There’s plenty of well-written fantasies situated around real events, etc. Fantasies that would be hard to “break.” Yet, they’re still fantasies. The issue is not whether you can break the story, but whether the stories are sufficient to believe that the events were real, that there was really a divine being walking among us, and that there’s such magical being, angry and all the absurdity, on top of it.
You’re twisting the burden of proof here. It’s not about proving a story false, it’s about proving it true. The evidence, if it’s evidence at all, is absurdly poor compared to the claims. Sorry.
I don’t care about the puzzle fitting together. It’s absurd and the claims huge. The evidence should fit the claims. You want me to believe in an absurd all-powerful, all-knowing, magical being Bill! That’s already absurd, add the absurdity of Jesus’ sacrifice to himself! That you’re able to come up with excuses for such absurdities doesn’t make them true. Sorry.
You should, at least pro forma, acknowledge that there’s no evidence for Jesus outside the gospels, written long after the events in a land far away. You might be concerned that the gospels are all anonymous, that they cite no sources, that they copy heavily from one another, that tales repeated from earlier to later gospels become increasing embellished, yet that they purport to quote the exact words of Jesus.
You might also note that Paul, whose Jesus came much earlier, never mentions anything about Jesus the man – no parents, no birth, no ministry, no relatives, no adolescence. Paul’s Jesus came down from seventh heaven to trick Satan into making him a martyr, then returned back up where he came from. Paul’s Jesus was never an actual human being, but rather an emissary from god sent on a mission of redemption for human beings.
So you might at least notice that the “life of Jesus as told in the gospels” rests on no original sources whatsoever. Mark basically made it up, copying heavily from the lives of other demigods from the literature of the time. Consider how many of these characters were born to virgins, rose from the dead, performed miracles (hint: all of them). The “life of Jesus” broke no new ground.
Now, I’m sure you can wave your hand and dismiss such authors as Richard Carrier, Bart Ehrman, Raphael Lataster, and so on, and certainly their presentations are widely disputed. But they raise significant issues that ignoring them won’t solve.
Alan Fox,
Very good question. Two issues here. How the book hangs together with 40 independent authors and the prophetic nature of the book. The more you read it you see how interconnected it is. How consistent the message is from the Torah through the New Testament.
The discovery of the dead sea scrolls was big because through modern science you could date these prior to Jesus birth. Psalm 22 and the book of Isaiah were preserved and both contain significant Messianic prophecies.
I am not sure where you get your information but like the discussion with Trump you are hearing what you want to hear. What you wrote here appears to be completely false if I understand what you wrote correctly.
About 3 years ago based on a discussion here I took a fresh look at the evidence for Christianity. Bart Ehrman was the first person I listened to. The weakness of his arguments against Jesus divinity got me to investigate further.
Bart is a brilliant guy and to see him argue brilliantly is to watch him argue against Jesus mysticism. His difficulty arguing against the divinity of Jesus shows the weakness of that position. Here is a debate where he argues for the historical Jesus.
Entropy,
If your satisfied with your worldview based on circular reasoning and incomplete epistemology who am I to get in your way 🙂
Entropy,
You don’t see how this fits with the customs of ancient Judaism and the original covenant between God and Abraham?
I don’t. But, more importantly (for me) I don’t see why that is relevant to Jesus’ teachings. Surely they should stand on their own, no?
I mean, if you draw a line in the sand over the age of the Earth, for instance, in the face of all logic and evidence, merely on a questionable interpretation of an ancient text, you are forced into such evidence-defying contortions it must be dangerous to your health.
Alan Fox,
This gets a little complex but let me give it a try. the Bible starts with man becoming morally separated from God based on Eve choosing to listen to the Serpent instead of listening to God. What follows that is interesting is God gets mad at the Serpent and in Genesis 3:15 says.
And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring[a] and hers;
he will crush[b] your head, and you will strike his heel.”
Some claim this to be the first Messianic prophecy. To me this is a story that helps us understand the rest of the Bible and it symbolizes man and Gods separation. Jesus mission on earth was to crush the Serpents head or separate man from evil.
Prior to Jesus the Jewish custom for atonement was animal sacrifice as a way to atone for sins and return to relationship with God. When God was making a covenant with Abraham he asked Abraham to sacrifice his Son Isaac. God was testing Abraham and he passed the test. This is the same sacrifice that God made 2000 years later to complete the covenant with humanity and crush the Serpents head.
Jesus was the ultimate sacrificial lamb. God sacrificed his own Son in order to reconcile with humanity. While this ultimately ended in glory the process was horrendous. If we think about asking one of our children to go through this it brings to light the magnitude of Gods love for humanity.
In the end Jesus teachings are a piece of a much bigger story.
Alan Fox,
This is where people get hung up. Genesis can be both story and history. This is part of the brilliance of the Bible.
Sounds like it requires a subjective judgement which is which. Maybe other parts are both a story and a history
newton,
Over time we can verify what is history. This is secondary to the message. Just going out on a limb the Serpent is a metaphor :-).
I ran into a great deal of this sort of attitude when I was reading the various books and blogs, and it indicates what I think is a serious problem. There are those who (like Carrier) start with questions like “what actually happened back then?” and “what evidences to we have, what is their pedigree, where do they come from?” The starting point is approximately “Jesus never existed, unless we can find unimpeachable evidence otherwise.” Which doesn’t really exist.
Then there are those (the majority) whose starting point is that Jesus was an actual historical person, accounts of whom may be unreliable. But the idea that these accounts might be entirely fictional is simply not permitted. Jesus DID exist as an historical person, he did, he did, he did. I would place you in this majority, because you dismiss counterclaims as “completely false”, and seem flat closed to the notion that there simply doesn’t exist enough verifiable material to make claims with any certainty.
Now, Bart Ehrman thinks there was an historical Jesus, but his scholarship leads him to find the gospels problematic (and see the commentary about this by Matthew Ferguson on textual analysis). Nonetheless, it’s Ehrman’s thesis that Mark and probably Matthew rely for their source material on what Ehrman calls the “M” document. He’s so certain of this that he believes that this document actually existed, and he’s reconstructed it based on commonalities between Mark and Matthew. As for Luke, Ehrman imagines up an “L” document, even less probable. Ehrman goes so far as to say we HAVE these documents! In my opinion, Ehrman’s contention that Christ existed rests almost entirely on these imaginary documents.
All in all, I find these positions irreconcilable, both because of a lack of verifiable evidence, and because of a conviction that Jesus did, or did not exist, as a foregone conclusion. In your words, both sides hear what they want to hear. So you might as well go convince the south sea islanders that John Frum never existed. Good luck. In this matter, faith isn’t based on evidence, faith directs a desired interpretation. That is, a foregone conclusion.
Flint,
How do you define verifiable evidence?
My worldview has no such problems. Maybe you’re projecting, after all, I doubt that a worldview like yours, based on poor evidence and absurd claims on top of each other constitutes a complete epistemology. It’s you who puts philosophy backwards to defend what you believe after all.
I didn’t know that the covenant demanded killing a god in order to forgive sins, let alone sins committed by the poor design of a supposedly all-powerful all-knowing being.
Entropy,
What would be a better design?
Your required use of words like Magical being is evidence of circular reasoning. You are assuming your conclusion that a creator is not real.
Your appeal to brute facts is evidence on incomplete epistemology. Your argument style is assertion based. Have you entertained the idea that there may be a problem with the position you are defending.
My conclusion is assumed until proven otherwise. Given that all the magical beings so far proposed, as far as I have read and heard, are ridiculously absurd, they cannot be real. Nothing circular about it.
What do you mean by brute facts Bill? What do you mean by a complete epistemology?
I normally don’t present arguments to you. I normally present explanations. There’s differences between arguments, assertions, and explanations.
Since my position is one where correcting errors is welcome, if I find any problems I can fix them. I do not see how that could be a problem.
Focus Bill. It’s absurd to kill a divine being to forgive sins that we were designed to commit in the first place. That’s poor design: being made by the magical being, so that we would do what the magical being in the sky doesn’t want us to do.
What historians generally do is collect relevant materials from as many sources as possible. So verifiability is a matter of degree. If there is only a single source not even referred to by any other source, this is normally assigned a fairly low level of reliability. Imagine such a sole source, embedded in an environment where it is known from multiple sources (and from internal indications as well) that the material in question underwent a considerable amount of selection, redaction, interpolation, and editing. Imagine further that the agency making these changes is strongly committed to a narrative which guides all aspects, from what materials are preserved to how they are altered to fit the narrative.
When the issue in question happened millennia ago, when the ONLY remaining documents are heavily breathed-on, and by a church in the process of establishing and institutionalizing a doctrine, certainty about anything is a dream. But what IS certain is that a church with a strong agenda was the only entity in a position to select and modify, and that NO relevant documents were preserved outside that church.
The OT is actually quite different, and amenable to archaeological research. And sure enough, Jericho’s walls existed, and they did collapse. And the stone and wood construction of the temple walls remains today just as described. That makes those particular items more verifiable.
So, once again, the search for external supporting evidence has been assiduous. And, once again, the LACK of it is strongly suggestive. Why would the early church excise from existing histories ONLY those passages and discussions that would have most directly supported them, if the gospel tales were factual? To use a modern phrase, actual miracles attested to by multitudes would have been front page headlines, written about extensively and concurrently with the events. Josephus would surely have devoted whole books to it, yet Josephus is silent (except for a single obvious interpolation). Did Dio Cassius just happen to sleep through it? Do you not even wonder about these things?
Entropy,
This is the definition of circular reasoning.
Brute fact is a term you used to describe things you cannot explain. A complete epistemology is an all inclusive explanation for our existence.
Explanation meaning what your saying is asserted to be correct?
You are having difficult defending your position and I don’t think that is based on your skill level. The Atheist worldview is very hard to defend without either limited epistemology or circular reasoning.
Richard Dawkins who is a very talented guy has the same issue. His argument is fundamentally circular. His science is based on a concept that has never been empirically validated.
Paul’s divine being was never killed, of course. His divine being only scammed Satan to rectify the heavenly power structure and bring hope to humans. Speculation (not mine) is that earthly messiahs all got offed by the Romans, so the “real” messiah couldn’t be earthly. But celestial messiahs like Paul’s were too abstract for the common people, who wanted real flesh and blood.
After the Jewish war 66-70 CE, it became possible to move the “real” messiah back down to earth, but to place him long ago and far away (and in a different language). This produces the best of both worlds – Jesus was an historical person nobody around had ever met, nor knew anyone who had. You could say whatever you wanted, and have him say whatever you wanted, and who would be the wiser. A clever compromise.
Which makes it even more amazing that even the most intelligent and thoughtful people who ever lived outside the Christian religion never realized how circular their thinking was. Not the ancient Greeks, not the Chinese, not the Buddhists, not the Hindus. ONLY Christians with their imaginary god have managed to escape this trap.
Flint,
The old and new testament are very tightly integrated. Do you have evidence of substantive changes to the NT?
Josephus wrote 4 books which was a lot given the limitations of the time. He wrote the entire history from Adam and Eve on. Jesus was mentioned and confirmed the Gospel messages including fulfilling the prophecy of the OT prophets mentioned earlier in his book.
I listened to Richard Carrier today and he is quite a story teller. I now see why the mystic group has emerged as it is very hard to deny Jesus divinity if he is a real historical figure. His match with the OT prophecy is too close for those who want to cast doubt.
Deuteronomy 18
Flint,
Your evidence for this is?
Your evidence for this is?
It seems to are unwilling to address simple facts when they are inconvenient for you.
This is what you were responding to:
Flint also said this:
To which you respond:
So it’s clear that you believe Luke, John, Mathew, Mark, Acts,and the rest we all written at the time Jesus lived. Otherwise what does “they were” referring to? They were what?
So I ask once more:
For each of Luke, John, Mathew, Marc, Acts etc, please note the time they were written in years from Jesus’s death.
Was it one zero years? One year?
It’s not a hard question. The answer is not exactly controversial. But you seem blind to, well, brute facts. And everything you’ve said so far alludes to them being created contemporaneously.
You don’t need evidence for a logical claim. I can write about.a man after he died who nobody remembers and get him to say anything I like. That’s one of those brute facts. There’s no evidence required. Just like there is no evidence required to write a book of fiction.It’s all made up. Such a book can be entirely self consistent and used as ‘evidence’ for the existence of the man and what he ‘said’. But that would hardly convince you would it?
And yet if I pretend the book is 2000 ish years old suddenly inconsistencies become celestial puzzles to solve and nothing is too outlandish to believe.
Out of interest, where do you believe he got that information from?
If such were even possible that would have to mean the earth is young, right, or how would anyone remember? So you not only believe that people who were not Adam and Eve had access to the ‘history’ of the garden of eden but that history was communicated from the first couple until it could be written down for the first time?
Do you genuinely believe all that? As I don’t see how the earth can be billions of years old AND people remember the garden of eden. So which is it, as it’s not both?
So, colewd, were there many volumes of writing written at the time of, and about, the gospel events or not?
Simple question. Such events happening would be recorded, if they indeed happened. So it’s logical that recording happened close to the event itself in time. So what was written at the time and does it include the evidence that you cite? Were Luke, John and all the others you reference written at the time or not?
If not, what does that indicate to you? What reason can you think of for such extraordinary events not to be documented at the time?
If indeed they were not, as we simply don’t know yet as you won’t say when those books were written. They may have been written the day after, which makes sense. Or the week or month after, which also makes some kind of sense.
I don’t know when they were written, I’m not a biblical scholar like you are. But if they were written when Jesus was alive or shortly thereafter it would seem to support all your claims. So, when were they written? Within a generation of Jesus’ life? Or more? A week? A day? A century? I just don’t know and as it seems to central to your argument I’m sure it’s something you can just clarify instantly.