: : But the resurection is a historical event that can be proved. Refute it. I'm ready for some apologetics.
: Floyd: Easy: : [snip]
: 3) The only people who claim to have had personal contact with Christ after the alleged resurection all stood to benefit considerably from claiming that it happened. They therefore had a strong motive to lie.
: This is not conclusive evidence that the event did not occurr, but it is a powerful circumstantial case, IMHO. Point #2 is, of course, the most important agrument. If you can provide independent evidence of the resurrection, please do so.
: -Floyd
: Piper: I have always found it hard to conceptualise the claim that those who had personal contact with christ would have consciously lied so as to promote their cause.
Perhaps you have found it hard to conceptualise this, but of course historical events aren't determined by what the people of the future will or will not be able to comprehend, of course. Whether or not we are able to understand the motivations of people who lived long ago simply has no bearing on the issue of what they did or did not do, don't you agree?
:Such actions would have left them as hypocrytes and surely led them to the spiritual void
Actually, to lie in the service of god has often (historically speaking) been considered a just and noble action. Most creationists still think that "lying for the lord" is a good thing.
:(you cast your response in terms of motivation, so i take it that you mean it to be a conscious decision).
That is the way I was thinking about it at the time, yes, but the argument stands even if it was unintentional. For example, if they all benefitted from being decieved, or from misinterpreting an event, the fact that they benefited does not change.
: As to independent evidence, well, aside from a questionable passage in Josephus (Taking my cue from Voltaire: "The Christians, by one of those frauds called pious grossly falsified a passage in Josephus. they attribute to this Jew, so obstinate in his religion, four ridiculously interpolated lines; and at the end of this passage they added: He was the Christ. Come now! if Josephus had heard people talk about so many events against nature, he would not have limited himself to four lines about them in the history of his country!..." etc), i have to agree there is little (But then is that not often the case with history?).
Sometimes it is indeed the case. However, if he was who they say he was, I suspect he would have made more of an impact on his contemporaries. You'd think some of the Romans might have noticed and said something about a guy who can bring folks back from the dead and heal lepers, right? I mean that's certainly newsworthy stuff, so you'd think it would have been recorded somewhere!
: Nevertheless can not personal experience be used to count as evidence that stands independeant from the facts alleged in the bible. If i claim that the existance of god is self-evident upon reflexion does that not constitute a form of evidencce?
Would it stand up in court? If I told a judge that "my innocence of a murder is self-evident upon reflection," would he say "Oh, O.K. you can go then." without demanding more evidence? I doubt it. You might reasonably argue that your belief is a valid means of generating hypotheses, but logically it can not also be considered a test of those hypotheses. The concept "God must exist because I believe in him" is not a logical proof, no matter how eloquently it is re-phrased.
Now, as I've said over and over, this is not a disproof of God or of Jesus, or an attempt to do anything like that. I'm simply pointing out that logical proof of the supernatural world is impossible and further, that no unequivocal evidence for any supernatural phenomena has ever been presented. As a result, I have to maintain agnostic. That's not
to say that I wouldn't like to believe either, I'm just not capable of turning off my rationality that way. If God created me, he created me to be skeptical and agnostic, since that's my nature. If he didn't, that's still my nature. Peace-out
-F
