Historical Case for the Resurrection of Jesus

[Subduction Zone]

I don't understand there being no zero unless maybe there was a bounce and a previous universe bounced back out just before reaching zero.
I do have a problem with time having existed forever without some beginning of it however.

There may have been a before the Big Bang. But that does not appear to be what most physicists think. Do you not understand the analogy of a number line that begins after zero? You can get as close to zero as you like, but you still won't be at zero. And I could easily be wrong about that. I am no expert.

Fair enough.

I have to admit, it is a hard idea for our heads to understand. Though it can be expressed mathematically.

 

[shunyadragon]

Which claim do you think is unverified and which claim are you referring when you ask according to whom?

It's possible the experiences were what you say but then again it's also possible they weren't. What we're looking for is the best explanation, not just a possible one.

I believe the questions presented by @Jayhawker Soule are legitimate and unanswered adequately to support an argument.

Simply the supernatural events in ALL religions cannot be objectively verified.

The book you cited presented nothing new that has been published by different authors thousands of times in the past and on the internet. The purpose motive was to sell books to the faithful that already believed.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

Why do you feel that you have the right of accusing others of committing fallacies, if you can´t support those accusations?

I have supported my claims.

Yes that is what I said and this is 100% true, or at least you haven’t shown the opposite to be true

Your words were, "Because it is, (at least more parsimonious than the naturalistic rivals)……… I am only adding one element “that miracles are possible” (specifically the miracle of the resurrection.) Naturalistic hypothesis, add much more elements"

The comment reveals a misunderstanding on your part of what parsimony means with regard to hypothesis formation. I've been unable to explain it to you, and it's likely you didn't read any academic treatment of the term. You're misunderstanding element here. You're adding an entirely new aspect of reality to nature and the laws of physics and equating it with elements in nature.

I said that a tomb of man named Jesus who was crucified within the year 30 within that area (Jesuralem) would falsify the resurrection hypothesis,

That changes nothing. You'd need to positively identify that body, which would be impossible without Jesus' fingerprints if the corpse still had any or his DNA if there was enough organic matter to sequence a genome. Falsify mean to rebut, which is to make an argument that if correct, makes the claim rebutted incorrect. If your claim is that such a finding demonstrates that the Jesus of the Gospels and this are the same person, then you are wrong. If your claim is that that might be the same guy, then you are correct but haven't falsified the claim that that might not be same guy and that the Jesus of the Gospels might have been resurrected if resurrection is possible.

Why don’t you pick one hypothesis , develop it and defend it. Why are you jumping from one hypothesis to another?

I don't know what you mean. I have given multiple hypotheses, all but one naturalistic, and ordered them in terms of parsimony. I've told you that myth is at the top and supernaturalism is at the bottom. That's all of the development possible - an ordered list of possibilities that account for scripture and its claims, none of which can be ruled in or out at this time.

WLC´s reasons to believe are irrelevant

His reason to believe is faith, which has him locked into a position refractory to falsifying evidence. It's an intellectual impasse for those who see faith as a virtue and have chosen a falsifiable belief. They cannot be redeemed. That's what locked in means here. It leads to confirmation bias and motivated (tendentious) thinking.

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

God is everwhere, in and out of time. God knows what will happen and what He will do about it, if anything. Knowing is different to thinking. But God can think and reason in time and still be the same God with the same traits etc before, during and after thinking or doing anything. I think you have the wrong idea of what "God does not change" means.

What I asked was, "Is your god conscious? If so, it exists and changes in time as its mental states evolve. Does it create? If so, it exists and acts in time." I don't see your answer in that apart from telling me that I don't know what God changing means. I know what consciousness is - a perception of time and an evolving mental state. You're claiming this god lives outside of time and doesn't change. I'm saying that that is an internally contradictory proposition (incoherent), that as it thinks, time passes and it changes.

When it comes to talking about God and spirits scientists know no more than anyone else.

You originally implied that they know less than others: "A problem we have is that science does not really know what it is talking about when it comes to spirit and timelessness and spacelessness." Now you say nobody knows. OK. That's correct. These are unfalsifiable claims about reality.

It is called a faith for a reason. I might even say that I know something about God, but it is through faith that I gain that knowledge and not through scientific testing.

That's not knowledge as I use the word. That's insufficiently justified belief (faith).

when it comes to God and spirits, they are not of this universe and you don't know what they are capable of.
So basically your question is nonsense when it comes to comparing existing things in and of the universe to God.

I asked you to delineate the differences between things that do exist like wolves and those that don't like werewolves, and that was your reply - a special pleading fallacy. Both I and Tagliatelle Monster gave you the same suggested answer: things that exist [1] occupy space [2] in time and [3] interact with other existing things. The nonexistent do none of them.

So what God did in the OT is not the way He chooses to do things in the NT. A problem with skeptics is that they cannot see the different scenarios of the OT compared to the NT and the different things God was doing and His different roles in both scenarios.
To a skeptic it boils down to a different God

That god changed between Testaments. That was the rebuttal of your claim that god "exists" outside of time and never changes.

in reality it is a blindness to what the story is at different parts of the Bible.

Not my blindness.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

You do that, I know, even when there is evidence.

There is no evidence. There are only people that believe.
That's not evidence for your religion any more then Tom Cruise is for Scientology.

I interpret the Bible differently than you do.

I don't actually think so. The problem likely is that your moral compass is based on an appeal to biblical authority of might makes right.

It is ambiguous and implies that the universe had no beginning.

We have explained at length why that is not true and aside from that.... are you capable of answering questions?
Everytime I ask you a question you completely fail to answer it.

But I understand what you are saying even if I have heard people say that the materials of the universe have always existed

They have. Again, you should really start to comprehend what the word ALWAYS refers to. It means "all of TIME".
All of time: from T = 0 till today (which is T = 13.7 billion years).

Can you point me to a moment in time where the universe, or the materials contained therein, did not exist in one form or another?

and I am pretty sure they were not speaking as literalists and that they did mean that the materials did not have a beginning.

Or what they call a "beginning" is not what your human mind insisting on a classical level of physics (physics of the universe) understands to be.

For example.... take energy.
Did you know that the total amount of energy of the universe can be said to be 0?

For example: +1000 and -1000. That cancels eachother out to 0.
So you can have positive energy and negative energy. The expansion of space time or initial inflation or whatever (I'm not a physicist) could be the cause of that split into positive and negative energy. If memory serves me right, that negative force would be gravity with the other forces accounting for the positive energy.

Again, sure, it's weird stuff, but it is what it is. Regardless of how we intuitively feel about it.

I am using "popped" to mean that all of a sudden at T=0, time began and space started to expand.
This of course means that it started without any cause in time. The cause and the effect had to have happened at the same instant.

Causality doesn't even apply. Causality is a phenomenon of the physics of the universe. And even then really only at a classical level of physics. It's not really applicable at the quantum level, which is more probabilistic instead of causal.

In any case, the universe can't have a cause. Causality, to the extent it even is a thing, is inherently temporal in nature.
It is not applicable in a setting where time doesn't exist.

I was not really trying to summarize it.
How would you summarize the B theory of time?

I would rather not even try because I'll probably do it wrong anyway.
It seems to be related to relativity of time and time dilation through gravity.

To take an extreme example, say that what is like 1 second to some alien in another galaxy, is like 1 million years to someone on this planet that is observed relative to that alien due to some extreme gravity well.
That's enough time for humanity to evolve, go through its entire evolutionary history and go extinct in a nuclear war.

Now... did that alien live simultanously with Julius Ceasar as well as with David Bowie? All in that one second?
What is a "moment"?

It is far above my paygrade. But it seems to me that that is the type of stuff it tries to deal with.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

So what you are doing here is trying to paint me in a bad light by misrepresenting what I said. I was talking about some scientists and not all of science.

I am not misrepresenting you. It was your choice to use the word "scientists". Why else would you do that, if not to draw science into it.

You should have used the word "people" instead.

 

[Brian2]

What is the difference between a dragon that does not exist and an existing dragon that has no detectable manifestation?
What does it even mean "to exist" without detectable manifestation?
How do you distinguish such a dragon from a dragon that doesn't exist?

God has detectable manifestations, but God is not a thing that science can test. Science does not know how to test for God or what God does to make things happen in the material world.
This may be the reason that science has a naturalistic methodology but does not say that God does not exist.

There was time at the "beginning of the BB".
The "beginning of the BB" is the start of expansion. It's planck time. At T = 0 + 5.39×10−44 seconds

Time, and the universe, started at T = 0.
Again I asked you a question which you did not answer:

Can you point me to a moment IN TIME when there was no universe?
If your answer is "no", then how is it wrong to say that the universe has always existed?
Given that "always" = "for all of time".

OK

The universe isn't "made from" material. The universe contains material.
But anyway: no.

The BB is the expansion of the universe (NOT THE ORIGINS THEREOF). Obviously, the universe existed when it started to expand.

What is the difference between the universe contains material and the universe is made from this material?
Is that a special definition of "the universe"?

We don't know that. The origins of the universe are unknown.

But that the universe sprang into existence is a possibility?

"somewhere else"? What are you talking about?
You are referring to a place in space. Space is part of the universe again.
The universe doesn't expand "into" something. Space itself is part of the universe.

Why is it, do you think, that the universe is called the space-time continuum?

You keep making these same classical errors.

I don't think it is an error. Isn't the idea of multiverse that there might be somewhere else.
The thing is that anything is really speculation. Science can study this universe and that is all. It might be presumed in some models that there is nowhere else, but that is not know.

You imagine a lot of things.
I'ld rather stick to things that can be somewhat validated through observation / evidence.
There might be something like the multi-verse producing an infinite amount of space-time bubbles.
But it is wrong to think off these as existing "before" the universe or in "some other place".

It might be wrong in current science but that is all. It seems like hubris to think that this universe is all there is.

And doesn't do anything either.

Hubris again to think that we humans can find out about whether there is a God through science and what a God might do or have done.

 

[Brian2]

However? As with all religions supernatural aspects are simply not historically verifiable in the past or today. The gospels may have been in a simpler earlier form called Q, but it has been documented by text analysis that the gospels have been edited and redacted up until ~200-300 AD, and some of Paul's letters were not written by Paul.

Those things, even if true, don't give modern historians the right to say with any certainty that the gospels were written after 70AD.
That is no more than skeptical presumption brought in to give it's opinion of scriptures that are said to be from God.

 

[Brian2]

What are you claiming to objectively know?

I said, post 586
Sometimes people are talking from personal experiences.
Sometimes people are talking from what they believe has been revealed to them from someone who knows, God.

I am not claiming to objectively know anything in that.

 

[Colt]

I love how you just double down on your personal insult fallacy instead of actually trying to give a proper reasoned argument.


Oh well.

There was no personal insult, just a plain true statement about the amount of effort Atheists put into trying to undermine Christians on this forum.

Agan: "Another day at work for the Atheists trying to undermine Jesus Christ and yet another swing and a miss! The sheer amount of effort that they put into discrediting faith says everything about their lives!"

You must be oversensitive if you see that as an insult?

 

[Brian2]

There may have been a before the Big Bang. But that does not appear to be what most physicists think. Do you not understand the analogy of a number line that begins after zero? You can get as close to zero as you like, but you still won't be at zero. And I could easily be wrong about that. I am no expert.

I can imagine time slowing down more and more towards T=0 (something like approaching a black hole) and time slowing down so much that it never reaches T=0.

I have to admit, it is a hard idea for our heads to understand. Though it can be expressed mathematically.

I have a distrust of mathematics at extreme places, such as talking about infinity. It is easy to be bamboozled by mathematics at times.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Really are we still talking about this?
It is not wrong is everyone knows what is meant by always and it is not ambiguous.

I wish I didn't have to still talk about it.............................

Material means anything beyond "nothing",,,,,,,,,,,,, meaning "absolute nothing".

So your god = material?
I guess so. That or your god is "absolute nothing".

The wording "for ever" had me thrown.
So why do you say that at T=0 the universe existed instead of saying that at T>0 the universe existed or is it just the convention you chose and it does not really matter?

T = 0 is "the first moment".
The universe existed then.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

That is a rather odd definition. " absolute nothing" does not appear to exist.

Not to mention that that definition makes his god "material" or "absolute nothing".
So far for "immaterial undetectable spirits that don't exist in space and time" I guess....

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

God has detectable manifestations,

Really?
Please share with us the objective test by which that manifestation is detectable.

For example, we can use a Geiger counter to detect radioactivity.
How do we objectively detect the presence of god?

but God is not a thing that science can test. Science does not know how to test for God or what God does to make things happen in the material world.

You said god had detectable manifestation. This implies that you can distinguish an existing god from a non-existing one.
Please explain how this can be done, instead of rambling on how it can not be done....

This may be the reason that science has a naturalistic methodology but does not say that God does not exist.

Science also doesn't say that the undetectable dragon that follows me everywhere I go doesn't exist either....
But the question is how do I distinguish said dragon from one that doesn't exist.

So how do I distinguish your supposedly existing god with supposed detectable manifestation from a non-existing god?

What is the difference between the universe contains material and the universe is made from this material?

I don't know what is tripping you up....

"The pool contains water, but is not made of water."

Surely you understand the difference between "to contain" and "to be made up of", no?

But that the universe sprang into existence is a possibility?

The universe exists and it is finite into the past. So it seems like a given that it began somehow in some way.

I don't think it is an error. Isn't the idea of multiverse that there might be somewhere else.

Not "somehwere".

"Where" is a place in space.
"When" is a moment in time.

If you remove the universe, aka the space-time continuum, then both space and time go out the window.

Yes, our minds can't really comprehend what that means.
Yet, here we are.

This is the dificulty of the frontier of physics. It is so much out of our daily common experience that we don't even have proper english words to express such things.
Because our language is completely geared towards temporality and the notion of "places". But neither exists if you remove the universe.

So really, these notions can only be (somewhat) properly expressed in math.
Yes, it's confusing, I know... I hate it too. And love it at the same time, LOL

But yeah... when it comes to the idea of a multi-verse in a context where the universe doesn't exist... there is no "there" there, nor is there a "when".
Or at least not in the way we understand those terms.

Or perhaps the multi-verse itself is another giant "parent" space-time bubble within which new space-time bubbles form... perhaps in black holes or something. I once read some crazy mind bending theory like that. It had a crazy conceptual image illustrating this but sadly I can't find it anymore.

In any case, all this is speculation and the fact is that we simply don't know.
The fact simply is that words and concepts like "where" and "when" only really make sense within the confines of our space-time bubble called the universe.

It might be wrong in current science but that is all. It seems like hubris to think that this universe is all there is.

I don't make that claim. Neither does science to my knowledge.
But it is certainly true that we only have evidence of this universe.

Although we also have some rather solid theories that somewhat predict things like multi-verses.

Hubris again to think that we humans can find out about whether there is a God through science and what a God might do or have done.

You started this post by saying that god has detectable manifestation.
Are you backpeddling already?

 

[shunyadragon]

There was no personal insult, just a plain true statement about the amount of effort Atheists put into trying to undermine Christians on this forum.

Agan: "Another day at work for the Atheists trying to undermine Jesus Christ and yet another swing and a miss! The sheer amount of effort that they put into discrediting faith says everything about their lives!"

You must be oversensitive if you see that as an insult?

I do not see it as an insult but as a gross one-sided exaggeration of the dialogue and debate between Christians and atheists. Yes, atheists debate against Theism in general. but yes, there are firm grounds for an atheist argument based on the objective issue of the lack of evidence of God, but also the problematic ancient tribal scripture Jews, Christians, and Moslems rely on. It is most definitely a two-way street, and there is abundant evidence of aggressive negative attitudes of Christians against atheists not only in debate and dialogue but in general in society.

Of course, the argument that God(s) absolutely do not exist is weak, but there is a strong argument that the ancient mythical Gods portrayed in ancient scripture do not exist,

I believe in a 'Source' some call Gods, but find ancient religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam aggressive and often violent and threaten the future of humanity with their belief in manifest destiny and their belief in dominion over the world by force if necessary in history and today.

The current tragic political situation in the USA is a witness to the ancient agenda minefield of the Bible.

 

[Subduction Zone]

I believe the questions presented by @Jayhawker Soule are legitimate and unanswered adequately to support an argument.

Simply the supernatural events in ALL religions cannot be objectively verified.

The book you cited presented nothing new that has been published by different authors thousands of times in the past and on the internet. The purpose motive was to sell books to the faithful that already believed.

Apologetics is quite different from evangelism. It is used to keep the faithful, faithful. As a result the arguments are only convincing to those that want to believe. A lot of troubled Christians do not want to lose faith so almost any explanation can be good enough for a heavily prejudiced mind. If one is thinking rationally many of these arguments are laughable.

 

[Colt]

I do not see it as an insult but as a gross one-sided exaggeration of the dialogue and debate between Christians and atheists. Yes, atheists debate against Theism in general. but yes, there are firm grounds for an atheist argument based on the objective issue of the lack of evidence of God, but also the problematic ancient tribal scripture Jews, Christians, and Moslems rely on. It is most definitely a two-way street, and there is abundant evidence of aggressive negative attitudes of Christians against atheists not only in debate and dialogue but in general in society.

Of course, the argument that God(s) absolutely do not exist is weak, but there is a strong argument that the ancient mythical Gods portrayed in ancient scripture do not exist,

I believe in a 'Source' some call Gods, but find ancient religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam aggressive and often violent and threaten the future of humanity with their belief in manifest destiny and their belief in dominion over the world by force if necessary in history and today.

The current tragic political situation in the USA is a witness to the ancient agenda minefield of the Bible.

But this isn't a dialogue between Christians and Atheists, rather its Atheists joining a "religious forum" to heckle and condescend to believers, not understand the spiritual truth content of religion.

 

[leroy]

They're not facts, they're reasoned opinions from informed people, as I pointed out.

And my reasoned opinion is above.

It's possible to account for Mark, hence the gospels, without there having been an historical Jesus at all; or if there was an historical Jesus, without the author of Mark knowing anything much at all about his life. The miracle stories in Mark make it clear that a whole lot of fiction ─ perhaps 'earnest storytelling' is the phrase ─ is involved in that narration.

again even if true, that woudlnt refute the alleged facts from the OP

 

[shunyadragon]

But this isn't a dialogue between Christians and Atheists, rather its Atheists joining a "religious forum" to heckle and condescend to believers, not understand the spiritual truth content of religion.

I do not buy this based on the evidence of my many years on the most prominent forums. Heckle is another gross exaggeration from an aggressive Theist perspective, I consider there is a great deal of heckling from Christians and in professional wrestling.

Again . . . as a Theist I find many of the objections by non-believers such as atheists and agnostics well grounded and reasoned concerning Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

 

[Subduction Zone]

again even if true, that woudlnt refute the alleged facts from the OP

It does refute the argument of the OP. You do not seem to understand this. It relies on those being facts. Claims do not make a belief rational.