Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.
Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!
At the very least, Platonic epistemology became absorbed into Christian thought relatively early on, and persisted until... well, it still persists to this day. Clearly you had adaptations of neo-Platonic metaphysics as well, but that was hardly unique to Christianity- although there is something essentially Platonic about the Christian metaphysical picture, even at a bare minimum.
What does "exist outside time and space" mean? Sounds to me alot like "north of the north pole"- i.e. nonsense. To exist is to be subject to various relations- causal, temporal, physical relations. To not be subject to any such relations- to be "outside space and time"- is to not exist. If this is accurate- and it passes the smell test at least- then to "exist outside of space and time" is contradictory, no less than being a "married bachelor".
Um, what? Is that something from The Matrix?
The sentence I quoted.
Very true. However, the "most ancient Christian texts" mean only that we are aware of certain aspects of the movement through these texts, not that they were Hellenic. Also, the texts themselves (despite the language in which they were written) attest to a Semitic origins, as we find in them both with and without translation/explanation Semitic words as well as phrases that have meaning only in a Hebraic/Aramaic context and not the Greek expressions we have now.
Virtually everybody does. The most thorough, systematic, and persistent attempt to dispute this was from scholarship in and around Nazi controlled Germany.
If Pythagoras existed, then he didn't. And the Pythagoreans didn't either.
The accuracy of everything you said.
Statistics are notoriously hard to use and constantly used improperly. However some must and do use them appropriately.
What results? Did you post a study I missed somewhere? How in the world would anyone test this? Is there some spiritual litmus paper I am unaware of? The thing is I do not even need a fraction of the extremely conservative numbers I have given. You can (based on nothing what ever) half them, quarter them, divide them by 10, or even take their square root and you are still left with a data set so large you cannot (by any rational means) diminish their significance.
The elderly, where did you get that arbitrary data set? I did not mention certainty of a belief. I am not even talking about doctrine or intellectual agreement with a proposition. I am talking about those that claim to have been born again by a sovereign and unmistakable act of God. There does not exist a similar claim to experience of even a meaningful fraction of the numbers Christianity has. That is the point, not the certainty of left handed, red haired, short people in a parable or teaching.
Find any claim where I made numbers equivalent to proven fact. I always use them as strong indicators in the sufficiency of evidence as they should be and are constantly used to do in every form of discourse in academia. In the equation that determines what we believe it is only a small part. It is an extremely well established, clearly indicative, and substantial part of the equation but merely one part among many.
Truth is that none of this has anything to do with what I claimed.
That's not what the study your referring to says.
Let me ask a question or two.
No argument needed here either. I even gave an example of this one at one point.
It is specifically because I have spent far more time tracking down claims about multiverses than they deserve my claim is true. The use the term "evidence" to try and give speculation legitimacy by terminology alone. They have no idea what another universe would be like. In this purely speculative arena a universe could be anything. How could they possibly know what anything would produce? There exists nothing more speculative possible that this garbage, yet all they have to do is claim "evidence" and you are convinced. That explains quite a lot. Not even to mention that in every single case where I asked for this evidence and read the links none actually existed what so ever of any kind. The last one for example was supposedly some garbage about the mathematical or physical effect another universe would have on this one and their looking for it. Forget that that whatever they were looking for was the result of speculations piled on assumptions, squared. When I actually read the article it was only a theoretical methodology and no actual measurement at all that was "discovered". This subject is so stupid, picking on it feels like wrestling a child to the ground. However you may try and do what no one in history has done. Explain exactly how we know what to even look for to indicate evidence of a multiverse, then provide examples of us actually finding it.
Nope, what I said. The arrogance displayed in your commentaries is so repulsive to me at the moment it renders replies unjustifiable. However you may invent false dichotomies and apply them to my motives whether you have access to them or not at will. I could not separate your side from it's favorite tactic if I tried anyway.
You implied I had not supplied evidence or something similar for a specific claim. I replied you had not done so in your reply.
I offered to provide that which you faulted me for failing to provide.
That is not true. That is more what is required for a properly basic belief. In every court case ever decided it was possible the opposite conclusion could have been true, yet law decided (just as Christ did) that 12 people was enough to reach a reasoned conclusion with enough certainty to base life and death on it. Science, philosophy, nor faith has the burden you gave except where mentioned. It does not even pretend to, and in fact almost never meets it by accident.
That is garbage and I can prove it. A large number of the scholars in history that are best trained to know what logical validity is and means (far greater than your likely capacity to know) hold to the cosmological arguments validity. If your pet attempt to negate the established arguments of Aristotle, Plantinga, Philoponus, Saadia, Hackett, Bonaventure, Leibnez, Clarke, Aquinas, Craig, Gail, Pruss, and Islamic philosopher's, etc.... it most likely only deserves a hasty burial.Seriously, you're here arguing that the cosmological argument is valid, when you do not even understand what logical validity even is?!
You will find demands made on my behavior a waste if time. I have a much higher judge and authority than you. I will do as my conscience suggests, God requires of me. You have become permanently hostile. Explain to me what the relevance of observable is first, so I know in what context your using the word observable. Are you suggesting only things verified by eyesight are valid? Are you talking about observable as in verifiable through experience? What?
In what way does any definition of observable apply to a thing which is in-detectable by any means what ever? I do not think the word means what you think it does? If by observable you are trying to suggest it's effects can be observable then the effects of God would also be observable.
That was the point, your question pre-supposed a burden nothing has I know of and certainly not faith claims. The questions is invalid so I did not answer it.
I gave that article as a response to a claim there exists no reason to think mind is independent of matter. I did not even think the article strong in that respect and said so many times. I certainly did not use it as proof of any God what ever. So I have no need to counter your misapplication of it concerning me.
I believe this is probably true for a small percentage of these claims. However having experienced and studied the types of claims these are illustrates they are of a character that does not allow much ambiguity or uncertainty.
The context of my claim here was to the Christian. Craig wrote a long piece on the sufficiency and nature of the born again experience and it's philosophic sufficiency as proof to the one who experiences it, and would be more informative than my attempts to explain it. I was not implying it is proof to those who did not experience it. Given the large numbers it is a very reliable indication of it's truth but not proof of it. It is subjective proof and objective evidence.
Of course you don't. I was just asking.
It's not a deistic God. Maybe that's why you don't understand the concept. The evidence is nature itself, just like Paul said.
