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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Kantian Naturalist,
I will yield to your expertise here.
colewd: I will yield to your expertise here.
Do you understand the difference between justification and truth? Do you understand the difference between being caused to believe something and have reasons to believe something?
I have no interest in discussing what you call “the quality of the evidence” since I refuse to accept any of it as evidence.
Consider what Homer writes (or is said to have written) in the Iliad. Was any of it true? Does it matter?
For a good period of time, the historicity of the Iliad was doubted — until Schliemann came along and presented sufficient evidence to put doubts to rest.
But does that mean that therefore we should conclude that Achilles really did sulk in his tent because Agamemnon took Briseis for himself, or that Achilles’s wrath only abated when Priam begged for the return of his son’s battered body?
Kantian Naturalist,
A little but I would appreciate your guidance here. Caused to believe is new to me.
Kantian Naturalist,
Do you reject the Historic Jesus?
I’m surprised that “caused to believe” is new to you, since you used that exact phrase here:
I regard the historicity of Jesus as I regard the historicity of Socrates: it’s probable that there was a real person whose name translates as Jesus (in Aramaic it would have more like “Yeshua”) who did something that somehow inspired the stories in the Gospels, just as it’s probable that there was a real person named Socrates who did something that somehow inspired what Plato wrote as dialogues.
But if it turned out that Socrates never existed, it wouldn’t affect my love of Plato’s dialogues, or my understanding of what Plato gets right (and wrong) about what it is to be human.
Kantian Naturalist,
Fair enough. Are the miracles causing you to be skeptical of the detailed claims? What is your view of the Old Testament?
Earlier, I listed the three explanations for the prophecies that came true, all three of which have been presented by many (these aren’t my ideas).
First, the bible’s authors simply did not preserve the very large number of prophesies that never happened, preserving only those that can be interpreted to refer to what did happen.
Second, the bible’s authors had ample opportunity to go back and modify historical prophecies to match what happened. this making them “come true”.
Third. these authors had ample opportunity to simply manufacture prophesied events, when anything resembling fact checking was impossible and unknown.
Oh, I realize I’m pissing into the wind here. Still, the nature of what counts as historical evidence is not trivial. You may be aware that Richard Carrier has gone to great lengths (two books, well over 1000 pages) first showing exactly how historians apply Bayes Theorem to historical claims, and then meticulously applying it to a very large number of biblical claims. The result of this multi-year exercise is a collection of probabilities, which is what Bayes Theorem produces. And an explanation of what factors would be involved in setting confidence levels for those probabilities. An exercise also surely lost on colewd.
ETA: So I find it truly remarkable that after decades of unbiased efforts to find the Nephites and Lamanites anywhere in the Americas, even as high ranking a figure as the head of all Mormon archaeologists was actually willing to concede that most probably Joseph Smith made it all up! Can you imagine a Christian saying such a thing about the gospels?
Briefly here, there is some confusion as to whether John Henry actually existed, or whether the songs and stories take an actual person and decorate it up a bunch, or whether John Henry was a fully manufactured myth growing out of the railroad building as part of nation building. But even taken all together, all those songs and stories don’t make John Henry a historical person by themselves.
Now, less briefly, as to the “documented account of the resurrection available for us to read”, well now:
Who first came to the tomb on Sunday morning?
one woman (John 20:1)
two women (Matt 28:1)
three women (Mark 16:1)
more than three women (Luke 23:55-56)
When did she/they come to the tomb?
while it was still dark (Matt 28:1, John 20:1)
After the sun had risen (Mark 16:2)
What was their purpose?
To see the tomb (Matt 28:1)
To bring spices; they had already seen the tomb (Mark 15:47, Luke 23:55)
The body had already been spiced (John 19:39-40)
Was the tomb open when they arrived?
Yes (Mark 16:4, Luke 24:2, John 20:1)
No (Matthew 28:2)
Who greeted the woman/women?
an angel (Matt 28:2-5)
A young man (Mark 16:5)
two men (Luke 24:4)
Nobody (John 21:1-2)
Did the women tell what happened?
yes (Matt 28:8, Luke 24:9, John 20:18)
no (Mark 16:8)
When did Jesus ascend to heaven?
The same day he was resurrected (Mark 16:9, Luke 24:13)
Forty days after the resurrection (Acts 1:3)
Well, I could go on and on, but I thought it would be interesting to illustrate what colewd means by written evidence.
Oh, and just for grins, here is a list of characters who were all the son of god, were born to a virgin, and rose from the dead:
Osiris, Dionysus, Mithra, Krishna, and Jesus. Probably others as well, but I’m too lazy to look them up and it’s off topic anyway.
Regarding widespread acceptance as an evidential standard certainly makes arguing the evolutionary stance easier.
Ah but this is evidence the various texts are independent. If they matched on content, we’d know they’d cribbed it.
Also each version tells the same story but depending on the level of understanding of the listener each story is about something quite different. Some versions are the “earthly” and some are the “spiritual” and so it’s expected that they don’t all align perfectly.
Or some such BS like that anyway, heads the bible wins tails the bible wins type BS. We’ve actually been through exactly this (contradictions in the bible) with colewb before or if not him then someone just like him (FMM maybe).
It’s not the miracles. I’m just not interested in reading the Gospels as making any factual assertions at all. Likewise for the Hebrew Bible. I’ve read most of it (not all) and I’ve been certainly been emotionally moved by much of what I’ve read. But I’ve never had a reason to read it as anything other than as great literature.
I have a question that comes out of my profound ignorance, so please feel free to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. But here goes.
It’s my understanding that the priors in Bayesian reasoning are “subjective”: they are one’s initial assessment of what to expect. If that is so, then doesn’t that systematically bias Carrier’s entire approach here? Wouldn’t a biblical inerrantist simply assign different values to the prior probabilities?
Yes, Bayesian probability is subjective. If this were the only thing historians had to go by, it would not be much of a science.
Historians look more at internal plausibility (is it reasonable to assume that the writer knows what he is talking about?) and external confirmation. Problems with the gospels are many, but the writings are early enough and have enough external confirmation so that Jesus cannot be just a mythical fiction. There may be some embellishment in the gospels, but it would be embellishment added to an actual character and actual events.
Mileage varies according to how much of a believer one is. Given the historical track record, skepticism regarding e.g. Socrates would be on a much more solid ground than skepticism regarding Jesus.
As to ID, it is possible to believe in it only if one is a Christian in USA and knows nothing about the rest of the world. ID is limited to American Christians, or Anglo-American better put. Christians in the rest of the world, not to mention scientists in the rest of the world, still never heard of it after all these decades of hard research, scholarship, and propaganda.
Kantian Naturalist,
I agree with you and Erik here. If one comes to the conclusion we are in a created universe based on observation of its detailed make up the prior probability of the events in the Bible will be much different than one who believes we live in a random accident.
What prior probability would we assign to a 5 year old child’s capability to fix a broken computer vs the designer of that computer. If the question was what is the prior probability of a person fixing a computer the make up of that person is very important in assigning the prior.
OMagain,
Keiths has made the contradiction argument. What has never been successfully argued is that what we are observing is not typical differences from different accounts.
All the Gospels point to the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 or the psalm 22 with stories that contain different levels of details and different stories.
As long as the priors are not 1 or 0, the subjective initial probability would move towards the “right” direction as more data is taken into account.
(Curiously enough, Sean Carroll talks about this in “the Big Picture”.)
Everyone probably assigns a somewhat different value to the priors, depending on how foregone their conclusions are. A full-throated inerrantist presumably would not be capable of modifying the prior probabilities regardless of what additional evidence should be found,. But this is why confidence levels must be considered. Even Carrier concedes that depending on one’s faith, the probability of Jesus being an historical person vary from near certain to near zero. But the analysis is entertaining.
This is a policy position, NOT the result of an analysis. The writings aren’t that early, the authors are not known, no sources are cited, these were written in a different language and far away, there simply ARE NO external confirmations. Not to Jesus, not to his life, his friends or relatives, his miracles, his parables, nothing! There is even doubt as to whether Nazareth existed at the time, or whether someone confused a “Nazarene” as probably someone from Nazareth.
Now, Bart Ehrman has concocted an imaginary document (the “M” document) as the source behind Mark and Matthew, and he presumes that if we only had this document, we could discover the references and authors. This is a stretch, but Ehrman finds this stretch necessary, because otherwise his considerable research cannot find any Jesus.
As has been pointed out repeatedly, no matter how secure your faith, you simply cannot use the bible as verification of itself.
It seems a long way from a created universe to a carpenter in Palestine being the creator.
That’s the missing bit of logic for me too! What’s the connection?
All this is false. Compare to any other document of antiquity and you will see. Let’s take, for example, Josephus. The oldest manuscript preserved with his text is from 11th century, whereas the oldest complete manuscript of NT is from 4th century, incomplete texts much earlier. The same with any other antique writings. There’s just no way you can have any argument here.
As to external confirmation, many scholars scoffed at the mention of Pontius Pilate, until a stone inscription with that name was found. So, whoever the gospel writers were, they definitely knew what they were talking about, something that cannot be said with equal certainty about e.g. Herodotus.
Ok. So who greeted the woman/women?
Flint,
It turns out you can. Starting with Genesis and realizing that 40 authors wrote a book over a 1000 years with the same message. Isaiah had no idea what the Gospels would be like yet he was able to create a model of Christs life 700 years before the event. The book verifies itself if you study it closely without prejudice. The ability of the prophets to predict the future is very strong evidence of a divine being as the master architect.
Deuteronomy 18.
The Prophet
Exactly! That breaks the circularity. But does that reinforce the possibility of a historical Jesus? A historical novel may weave real characters, events and locations around a fictitious story.
colewd,
Bill, I can’t see anything in that quoted text referring to Jesus. It’s pretty vague.
I do not propose the way many apologists do that the gospels are historical and thus everything in them must be believed. There are many things in historical documents that have no ground, but the primary point of the gospels is not even historical. Anyway, discussion about genres is over your head.
I think a good idea is to ask yourself how and why historians have no problem with the historicity of Manu, Zarathustra, Buddha, etc.
I used to be addicted to New Testament scholarship. Then I tried QAnon.
(I refuse to apologize for how niche this joke is.)
I agree that doubting the existence of “the historical Jesus” (however the intension and extension of that phrase are determined) amounts to doubting the existence of Socrates, Manu, Zarathustra, the Buddha, etc.
One would have to adopt fictionalism towards a lot of people . . . it would be hard to know where that slippery slope would be halted (would one doubt the existence of anyone who had never been photographed?).
Are you sure that Manu is regarded as historical? Seems similar to Adam in genre. I’d put Zoroaster and Buddha in a similar category to Jesus, historical basis with enbellishments.
How do you know that the authors of the Gospels didn’t simply have a copy of Isaiah’s texts with them (or otherwise knew about it), so that they could write what they wanted about Jesus as if it were confirming Isaiah’s prophecies? To make the argument you want to make, it would need to be the case that the two are genuinely independent — that the writers of the Gospels knew nothing of Isaiah and his prophecies.
But since Isaiah’s texts were already part of the Bible that was widely known in ancient Jewish communities, and the Gospel writers came from those communities, I don’t see how you could possibly be entitled to posit the independence of those texts from each other in order to justifiably conclude that a divine hand at work is the most reasonable explanation.
I think the opposite is true. You’re not making your already fanciful Jesus story more probable and more believable by postulating that he also designed and created the universe. You’re just compounding the problem
More importantly (in my view) one can learn much about how to study one’s own mind from reading Buddhist texts, and can weaken the chains of illusion and ignorance that keep us trapped in unhealthy behavior patterns. Whether there really was a historical Buddha seems much less important than what can be learned from the Buddhist tradition.
Kantian Naturalist,
My daughter the Buddhist is locked down with us currently. I’m learning!
No expert but what is the oldest written version of the Bible known?
Quite so. The writings of Isiah (much of which are not included in the bible, but were well known at the time) were the source material for much of the gospels. What evidence we have suggests that a lot of the Jewish cults placed a lot of credence in the wealth of prophecies they had, Isiah prominent among them. And accordingly, reality was commonly bent to validate those predictions, or perhaps a composite of the many predictions of a messiah became the Jesus of the gospel. But don’t forget about the several mythical characters from which Jesus was also cribbed – those who were born of virgins, performed miracles, and rose from the dead.
But those characters were sources of more or less ancillary tales, to be picked over like a buffet. Whereas firm prophecy, like Isiah, HAD to be recreated if the Jewish audience was to have cause to believe.
Kantian Naturalist,
What you describe is certainly not impossible but it is an unlikely explanation. They certainly put together that Jesus was fulfilling the prophecies and did a great job connecting Jesus to old testament prophecy. I would argue it was difficult to say that it is possible that Jesus given Habermas’s minimum facts argument was not the Jewish Messiah as was described in Isaiah 53. If Jesus was simply a man why would he sign up for playing the suffering servant of Isaiah 53. How would he engineer his death to occur around 33 AD based on Daniel 9? How would he engineer being buried among rich and wicked as described in the 53 chapter and confirmed in all 4 Gospels.
If this narrative is made up it has to be the biggest true conspiracy theory of all time.
It was not independent at all as evidenced by the Gospels and the Writings. You could argue that Acts was somewhat independent, I think.
You have however between the writings and the gospels 10 accounts of the fulfilling of the OT prophecies. Like forging Josephus book this explanation of the Apostles making up Jesus to match the gospels is a possible argument but very difficult to pull off in real life without leaving evidence of the forgery. You need to follow all this with a claim that some of the Apostles were martyred for a lie.
The evidence points to the best explanation is all what we are reading here is real. I don’t ascribe to complete inerrancy but that the overall story is authentic.
Alan Fox,
This text matches the Jewish prophets. How you know they are real is that what they predict happens. In the Bible there is a lot of prophecy about future events such as the destruction of the first and second temple and the exile into Babylon.
Flint,
What do you mean “from which Jesus was also cribbed”?
dazz,
It’s the opposite. I first hypothesized the universe was created and you should know this based on our discussions at Sandwalk. I did not look seriously into Christianity until about 2 years ago based on arguments at TSZ.
I do remember our exchanges there, and you were just as deluded back then as you are now. You argued all the same, with the same robotic crap we’ve come to expect from you, in complete denial of reality and impervious to reason. You clearly were a creationist back then just as much as you are today. This whole conversion-from-atheism shtick you guys love to pull is pathetic.
dazz,
This is a false narrative Dazz. When we first met at Sandwalk I really new very little about ID or creationism. What I had recently learned was the DNA and Proteins were organized in a sequence and you guys had no clue how problematic this fact was for evolutionary theory. After months bad arguments by Larry and his followers like you Larry finally started to get the issues as he announced that Steven Meyer kicked Laurance Krauss ass in the UT debate he attended. Larry finally got it you guys remained in denial.
Jewish scholars seem to have no difficulty with Jesus not being the Jewish Messiah.
It’s very easy for anybody to kick Krauss’s ass. the guy is not very good at debating. Thus, I wouldn’t be surprised even if Meyer beat him. But debates are not about truth, they’re about mastery at, ahem, debating. I could agree that Meyer kicked Krauss’s ass and that wouldn’t mean that I was convinced that Meyer was right. Same goes for Larry, acknowledging that Meyer kicked Krauss’s ass doesn’t mean that Larry agrees with the likes of Meyer. It certainly doesn’t mean that Larry agrees with you about those supposed issues.
newton,
And they have taken Isaiah 53 out of their teaching. As such a growing number of Jewish scholars/teachers are accepting Jesus as their Messiah. They are part of the growing Messianic Jewish movement. Here is a messianic Jew talking about his conversion after reading Isaiah 53. Start 2 minutes in.
https://youtu.be/qWTjBmQ09Qc
“Winning” a debate, especially if the subject matter is regarded by both sides as not subject to debate, boils down to prior belief. Whoever is arguing the side I agree with always wins easily, but those who think the other guy won are simply too biased to realize how biased they are. But not me, oh no!
I got great enjoyment out of the various analyses of the candidate debates last fall. Black commentators felt the black candidates did best, while female commentators found that the female candidates swept the field. Then there was some university debate coach who gave top grades to someone nobody else thought was worth listening to.
Remember the Bill Nye/Ken Ham debates? Ham flat refused to address the science, and Nye ignored Ham and the bible while presenting the science. Both realized that to “win”, they had to get the other out of the other’s comfort zone and into theirs, and neither side would budge. For Ham, all answers were in his bible, and for Nye NO answers were in the bible, and we got an exercise in two people entirely talking past one another. The winner was whoever you agreed with, as usual.
Entropy,
I agree with some of your point but Larry in the comments was admitting guys like Behe were doing science and that the Darwin/Dawkins mechanism did not explain the whole show.
https://sandwalk.blogspot.com/2016/03/you-need-to-understand-biology-if-you.html
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Am I reading this right. The post at the link tells us:
So Larry is saying the fact is that 90% of the genome is junk, and the ID prediction was dead wrong. But that “Darwinists” are also unhappy with this finding. What am I missing?