leroy
Well-Known Member
I wrote, "What should we expect to see if there were only nature and no supernatural realm or denizens? I suggest that all we would see are natural objects passively obeying physical laws and no miracles (violations of those laws). That's what we see as best we can decide. That's the evidence for naturalism - it can account for all observations ever made."
OK. Do you have any observation which can not possibly have a naturalistic explanation? I'll bet not.
Of course I can´t, that is an impossible task.it is impossible to prove that there is “no possible natural explanation” because I don’t know everything about the natural world. ……..If my drawers start to open and close and then I see an nebulous image of man that says “BOOO” I would probably conclude that it was a ghost (supernatural) but I would not be capable of showing that a naturalistic explanation is literally “not possible”
But I think there are many observations/events where supernatural explanations are better than their naturalistic counterparts………. The OP provides an example of such event.
Consider 2 hypothesis
1 a god exists and he decided to resurrect a man 2000 years ago
2 James and the disciples saw someone that looks like Jesus and therefore mistakenly concluded that he is the risen Jesus
I would claim that hypothesis 1 is better……. And honestly I think that 1 is a better hypothesis than any other naturalistic hypothesis that I am aware of.
The probability that a god exists given the data that we have, is much stronger in my opinion, than the probability that someone would conclude resurrection just because they saw someone similar
Your point was that John's and Paul's accounts were arrived at independently. Now you want to move the goalpost to something that can be stipulated and the accounts still not be independent.
My point is that John likelly didn’t concluded that there was a resurrection because he read paul----------any disagreement?
and that is what John did? is that what you are claiming?I showed you a way to use one post as a template for a reply without omitting important points made in the first one.
Granted, simpler means “less elements” O.R. is only concerned in the number of elements, not on weather if the elements are supernatural or notYour last statement paraphrases Occam. Yes, if all competing hypotheses account for all relevant observations, that is, "If everything is equal," we prefer the simplest explanation, where simplest doesn't mean fewest words, but the least number of elements proposed to exist or be implicated.
All I am saying is that a naturalistic hypothesis that invokes 2 elements is less parsimonious than a supernatural hypothesis that invokes 1 elementUnevidenced natural mechanism? That there are mindless processes in nature in is well evidenced. Drop a ball to see one at work. Or do you think a falling ball implies supernaturalism?
I think that you are the one that doesn’t understand O.R. any hypothesis with say 2 elements is more parsimonious than a hypothesis that adds 3 elements. This has nothing to do with being natural or supernatural………….Wrong twice.
You still don't seem to understand what parsimony means in this context. Claiming supernatural resurrection is ALWAYS the least parsimonious hypothesis. ALWAYS. No exceptions. But you will never understand that without understanding what parsimony means, and it appears that none of us can teach you. You keep making the same error.
Yes that is correct, but I don’t see the relevance……… you mean that the apostoles hallucinated because they had peer pressure?Also, the Asch conformity experiment showed that people will doubt the evidence of their senses if enough peer pressure is applied: "The Asch conformity experiments consisted of a group “vision test”, where study participants were found to be more likely to conform to obviously wrong answers if first given by other “participants”, who were actually working for the experimenter." That falsifies your claim that there is no evidence that such a thing can happen. Ready to agree that that is correct and you just learned something?
Twice wrong yet again. Both were already done. If you didn't read it, or didn't understand it before, there is no reason to believe repeating it will help you.
I haven’t seen a post where you develop a hypothesis and explain why is that a better explanation than resurrection…………… you simply say “fraud” “error” “myth” without developing a clear hypothesis……….. I wonder why?
I made loooooooong post explaining why I think the appearances are historical events and your reply was “it doesn’t matter”……. So which one is it?You keep forgetting that most of us don't accept that account as factual, yet you keep arguing as if others do. What appearances? You mean the unevidenced, unfalsifiable claim that there were appearances?
1 do you reject the historicity of the apperances? Why? why is the evidence that I provided not good enough? Why do you think that most scholars are wrong?
2 do you accept the historicity of the apperances? (at least for the sake of this thread)? How do you explain them?
Wrong again. Of course he could have made it up. Or are you going to contend that, "there is no prior evidence for" people making false claims as you did for mass delusion?
First of all that is a strawman, I never said that “mass delusion is impossible” I said that mass hallucinations are impossible (or very very very unlikely)
Second, Paul was a persecutor of Christians, the fact that he changed his religion and was willing to become a persecuted person who eventually was imprisoned and killed strongly suggests that he didn’t made it up (he honestly thinks that the things that he preached are true)…………. So once again you made a straw man. The claim is not that “someone making up stuff” is improbable………… the claim is that it is improbable for someone to make something up, if he had nothing to win and everything to lose.
That is fine, because I am invoking supernaturalism, and I told you how to falsify the resurection hypothesis...............so your accusations of "not falsifiable" are not justifiedOnly if we not invoking supernaturalism, in which case it's already falsified by thermodynamics. There is no natural path back to the organized structures that characterize life. If you want to make the tissues and cells of a three-days dead body live again, you'll need to feed it to a living thing to digest, absorb, and metabolize into new living cells.
If you find the tomb of Jesus, you would falsify the resurrection hypothesis, if you find 1st century documents that explain that Jesus didn’t died in the cross, or that his cadaver was found, etc you would falsify the hypothesis.