Is It Reasonable to Believe Gods Don't Exist?

[Brian2]

Agreed. But that's not how I came to my present position. I began with examining the evidence which led to a tentative conclusion based on the evidence. What you describe is more like what the faith-based, Bible believer does. He begins with a belief such as that the Bible is an honest account of an actual god, and THEN looks at scripture through THOSE eyes and sees what he's decided in advance he wants to see.

I don't think people come to a belief in God and Jesus by first believing in them and that belief convincing them to believe. But maybe I am wrong.

That's also not what happens. If there is a naturalistic explanation possible, it makes the supernatural one much less likely, not wrong. Occam's parsimony principle is a razor, that is, it orders hypotheses by likelihood according to the degree of complexity of the narrative relative to the degree of complexity it needs to account for. The optimal hypothesis is the one complex enough to do the job by no more complicated than that.

You read the prophecy with the preconceived idea that you will not believe it because Occam's Razor always trumps belief in a God who gives accurate prophecy. Your reasoning is there from the beginning.

I don't. I'm not the one making the claim of miracles having occurred.

Neither am I. We both see the claims in the book. I believe them and you invoke Occam's Razor and the idea that any natural explanation is better than invoking a deity. And of course you have your skeptic friends who have already done the work of making up natural explanations and/or reasons for the reports in the book to not be authentic,,,,,,,,,,,,,, and anything trumps a deity.

Prophecy and prediction are synonyms.

In a thesaurus maybe, but we both know that a scientific prediction is completely different to a religious prophecy.

 

[Brian2]

Not about Jesus. There is nothing about a 2 time messiah. It's the church that has kept revelation as canon because of the unfinished business of messiah.

In the NT the one Messiah dies and is raised to life and goes to heaven to receive the Kingdom and rule over it while the word of God in the gospel is preached to the world and God's Temple is built that way, a Temple in which God lives because He lives inside the stones of the temple, the people.
In the OT we find exactly the same thing in more indirect ways, in various prophecies about the Messiah and what He would do.
IOW the OT teaches the same about the Messiah as the NT tells us about Jesus.

Why? Do any note that what was promised did not occur?

It seems to have started with lies about Jesus body having been stolen by the disciples of Jesus.
The Jews started to persecute the early Jewish Christians just as Jesus said would happen. They did to them what they had done to Him.
Jesus and the Christians were made anathema in Judaism. These days many Jews think Jesus was a gentile god.

Since when are the songs of David as prophecy? There are so many misinterpretations of bible that it is sad to even have these debates.

Thank you for being pleasant about the conversation.

There are many prophecies in the Psalms both by David and others.
The meaning of them, what they were pointing at could not be seen until after it happened however. That is as it is with many Biblical prophecies, after things have happened we can read the prophecies and say "God knew and told us a long time ago".

 

[Brian2]

There are a thousand different "records." What makes yours more accurate than the Sumerian's or Mayan's?
How does one tell folklore or myth from fact? Even if a report were accurately recorded, how reliable was the reporter? There are many completely sincere people reporting all sorts of bizarre things, mental hospitals are full of them.

OK

What defines a miracle? Is it something inexplicable, or just unexplained? Can something truly inexplicable even happen?

I think truly impossible things cannot happen, but miracles are not impossible, they are just unexplained with the natural laws of nature that we know.

What do you find in Nature that confirms God? Why do those who study nature not see this?

Plenty of people who study nature see confirmation of God there.
These days more people are being told that the only things that are real, the only evidence worth believing, are material things that can be studied by science.
Others just look with awe at nature and can see God's handiwork in it all even when a mechanism is found for how it works or a so called possible naturalistic explanation of how it all came to be.

The more interesting question would be how? By what mechanism?
And what makes you think these things even happened? If they were reported by someone today, would the reporter be believed?

Probably less people would be willing to believe, people would wait till the official and scientific explanation was published, and the most that would say about a miracle is that they did not know how it happened, or some possible natural explanations might be given, and many people are willing to believe anything other than a miracle.
I suppose I believe the miracles by Jesus because I believe in Jesus.

"The power of God" explains nothing. It just dodges the question of mechanism.

It does not try to answer the question of mechanism. It recognises that the mechanism is beyond the laws of nature that we know.

Not necessarily lying. Maybe just mistaken. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. And again, what makes 2,000 year old testimony reliable, after thousands of retellings? What makes it more believable than Hindu or Zulu religious folklore?
Prophecy? Vague, ambiguous, apophenic patterns perceived in random events? Faces in the clouds?

Some things, such as the resurrection appearances of Jesus to His disciples, are either true or lies.
Some prophecy is vague and ambiguous, true, and other prophecy is not. It seems to be a subjective thing. Some people claim there are no OT prophecies relating to Jesus and what He did, others claim to see over 200.
But if God is there and giving prophecies important to humans then we can probably not be very concerned about the unknown ones, presuming God would make sure His words are reasonably well know if important to us humans.

 

[Bthoth]

In the NT the one Messiah dies and is raised to life and goes to heaven to receive the Kingdom and rule over it while the word of God in the gospel is preached to the world

There was no gospel when jesus was here. Likewise, there is no kingdom. Many words claimed to be of god.

and God's Temple is built that way, a Temple in which God lives because He lives inside the stones of the temple, the people.

Temple? Now people are stones, a temple? Is that like peter as a rock? 23 and he having turned, said to Peter, `Get thee behind me, adversary! thou art a stumbling-block to me, for thou dost not mind the things of God, but the things of men.'

In the OT we find exactly the same thing in more indirect ways, in various prophecies about the Messiah and what He would do.
IOW the OT teaches the same about the Messiah as the NT tells us about Jesus.

I agree, the OT has doctrine representing messiah and the NT is about Jesus but closes with revelation talking about messiah coming

It seems to have started with lies about Jesus body having been stolen by the disciples of Jesus.

As I read books of bible, I noted He walked out of the tomb, hungry, hiding in the shadows and then left town.

The Jews started to persecute the early Jewish Christians just as Jesus said would happen. They did to them what they had done to Him.
Jesus and the Christians were made anathema in Judaism. These days many Jews think Jesus was a gentile god.

Many variations. AS you wrote, there is no consistency

There are many prophecies in the Psalms both by David and others.

Is Iron Man a prophecy by Ozzy

The meaning of them, what they were pointing at could not be seen until after it happened however.

But you claim to see the point before messiah (end times) even shows up

That is as it is with many Biblical prophecies, after things have happened we can read the prophecies and say "God knew and told us a long time ago".

Did you ever consider that prophecy are visions rather than told by a god?

 

[It Aint Necessarily So]

You read the prophecy with the preconceived idea that you will not believe it

I already denied that, and you have offered no evidence or argument to rebut my explanation. Until you do so and successfully, I consider the matter resolved. You are accusing me of beginning with a "conclusion" and only then evaluating the evidence, making it conform to my preconceptions, but that's a description of the motivated reading a faith-based thinker with a confirmation bias employs. I go from evidence to conclusion. My profession and one of my major avocations are both deductive pursuits.

In medicine, we begin with data and develop a hypothesis - a so-called differential diagnosis that is a list of illnesses consistent with the known signs and symptoms gleaned from a history and physical, which is then narrowed to a definitive diagnosis. We go from evidence to conclusion and then use more evidence to confirm it, such as diagnostic testing (bloodwork ad radiology) and response to therapy. The religious approach, which would be to begin with a diagnosis believed by faith before collecting evidence would leave a lot of preventable morbidity undiagnosed and inadequately treated.

And then there's duplicate bridge, which is the same process of collecting evidence (bidding, the play of the cards), generating hypotheses, and then testing them. Do this well and win at the game. Use the religious approach - guessing that the next hand makes four spades, so bidding it before I looking at the cards - and lose. Badly.

Occam's Razor always trumps belief in a God who gives accurate prophecy.

Occam's Razor supports greater belief in a transhuman intelligence in the presence of strong prophecy. Unfortunately, no religion has that. What is has is what can be called weak prophecy - vague predictions that can be satisfied by any number of events interpreted by motivated believers and predictions of mundane events (you just mentioned Jesus allegedly prophesying that his new religion would meet opposition) aren't convincing.

But if they rose to the level of scientific prophecy, you could use them to deceive the religious as Columbus did when he predicted an eclipse for the New World natives he encountered, convincing them that they needed to feed his sailors. Biblical prophecy can't do that. Columbus could have read predictions from his holy book all day, which would be expected to have zero effect, because those prophecies are weak tea.

you invoke Occam's Razor and the idea that any natural explanation is better than invoking a deity.

Yes.

anything trumps a deity.

Any naturalistic explanation that can account for observation is more parsimonious by orders of magnitude than one imaging an entire other unseen reality.

Why stop with just one unneeded god? Let's add more. We can make that explanation even worse by adding even more complexity that explains and predicts nothing, like a creator god for the one that allegedly created our universe. No wait. Make that three gods working together to make another god that made our universe. And throw in how these three failed at first, producing a creator god that they regretted and had to destroy with a supernatural disaster equivalent to a flood after which they tried again and made a new covenant with their second god. Now throw in devils and angels. The more the merrier. And then let's just believe it all by faith, because how could that be a mistake or lead to false and unfalsifiable beliefs?

Or how about we just stick with naturalism until we encounter something it cannot account for?

In a thesaurus maybe, but we both know that a scientific prediction is completely different to a religious prophecy.

Just in terms of quality and intent. They are both pre-dict-ion ("say beforehand"):

the OT teaches the same about the Messiah as the NT tells us about Jesus.

Disagree. This is also the result of motivated reading. I can easily see what you have a stake in not seeing. There is no possibility of you seeing it any other way however disparate the descriptions of the Hebrew messiah and Jesus are. How could they possibly be more different? Maybe if Jesus were a gentile or a woman. Either of those would make Jesus even more unlike the Hebrew messiah of scripture. It's hard to make it worse than that, but let's try. Jesus was a "woman" horse - a mare.

I don't believe that any or even all of those would be a deal killer for you were they in the Gospels. You'd STILL see THAT Jesus fulfilling prophecy and claiming that that proves that the Bible comes from a god. Why wouldn't you? What would be different then for you? What would stop you then that isn't stopping you now?

 

[Valjean]

So when do you think the gospels were written and by whom?

Apparently some decades, at least, after the crucifixions, by unknown authors. The current attributions to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were added a couple centuries later by church elders. None of the originals were signed.

 

[Valjean]

Yes magicians spend a lot of time and effort to set up their illusions. Jesus just walked around and healed blind and deaf people and raised others from the dead and calmed storms and walked on water etc

What evidence do you have of this? Aren't these just folk tales incorporated into church doctrine to bolster the religion?

Miracles have not happened to me so if they do I won't believe it anyway. OK.

I have a problem with people being talked out of their God belief and into another belief, one that says only the material is real and anyone who claims to have experienced more is delusional or lying.

What is a miracle, anyway? Is it an inexplicable event? If so, doesn't that make it an impossible event?

People aren't indoctrinating the religious into new beliefs. We don't have any new doctrine to promote. We're just questioning the basis of their beliefs, and pointing out the dearth of supporting evidence. The religious are then free to believe whatever they want.
We're not maintaining that miracleists are lying. I'm sure many are completely sincere, and many really believe their claims. The point is: the claims are dubious, hearsay, and unevidenced, and the reports many times removed from the original claim.

 

[Valjean]

I don't think people come to a belief in God and Jesus by first believing in them and that belief convincing them to believe. But maybe I am wrong.

I think they come to that belief in the same way believers in other doctrines come to theirs. They learn it from the adults around them, before they have any ability to critically evaluate claims in the light of actual evidence.

You read the prophecy with the preconceived idea that you will not believe it because Occam's Razor always trumps belief in a God who gives accurate prophecy. Your reasoning is there from the beginning.

And you begin with a belief in God and accurate prophecy, and then seek passages and events that could be construed to conform to your preconceived beliefs.
The problems with these "prophecies" have been pointed out.

Neither am I. We both see the claims in the book. I believe them and you invoke Occam's Razor and the idea that any natural explanation is better than invoking a deity. And of course you have your skeptic friends who have already done the work of making up natural explanations and/or reasons for the reports in the book to not be authentic,,,,,,,,,,,,,, and anything trumps a deity.

But there is no evidence backing up any claim of deity. The belief could just as well be pulled out of your hat. A claim of miracle working mice would have exactly equal evidentiary support.
You're making an extraordinary and untestable claim. It's your burden to support it. If you cannot support it with objective evidence, it's reasonable to dismiss it, pending discovery of actual evidence.

 

[ppp]

I have a problem with people being talked out of their God belief and into another belief, one that says only the material is real and anyone who claims to have experienced more is delusional or lying.

How about being talked out of their belief and into the position that there has yet to be a person who has demonstrated a reliable methodology for demonstrating they they know or are capable of knowing that there is something other than the material? That is neither a claim that the material is all that there is, or that someone is delusional or lying.

 

[Valjean]

OK

Disregarding some inconvenient questions?

I think truly impossible things cannot happen, but miracles are not impossible, they are just unexplained with the natural laws of nature that we know.

"...that we know."
So anything that baffles someone can be called a miracle? I think miraculous means something more than just not understood.

Plenty of people who study nature see confirmation of God there.
These days more people are being told that the only things that are real, the only evidence worth believing, are material things that can be studied by science.

Most people who study nature understand it's natural workings; that there are understandable, testable explanations for nature's remarkable features. No magic needed.

Others just look with awe at nature and can see God's handiwork in it all even when a mechanism is found for how it works or a so called possible naturalistic explanation of how it all came to be.

Claims are a dime a dozen. There are millions of them, many contradictory. How is one to decide which, if any, are reliable, if not by evaluating the actual evidence or by direct, personal experience.
How is it reasonable to simply accept what everyone else around you believes, or accepting unevidenced claims by religious leaders?

Probably less people would be willing to believe, people would wait till the official and scientific explanation was published, and the most that would say about a miracle is that they did not know how it happened, or some possible natural explanations might be given, and many people are willing to believe anything other than a miracle.
I suppose I believe the miracles by Jesus because I believe in Jesus.

Isn't it reasonable to withhold belief in what is unevidenced? Isn't the evidence for Leprechauns or Isis just as strong as the evidence for God? What makes your belief in God and His miraculous son more believable that belief in Quetzalcoatl or Odin?

OK, you believe in Jesus. Why? Had you been born in Riyadh, would you believe in Muhammad?

It does not try to answer the question of mechanism. It recognises that the mechanism is beyond the laws of nature that we know.

So unknown mechanism = miracle? Were earthquakes, eclipses and disease once miracles? If we discover the cause of something, does that remove its status as miracle?

Science has been rapidly toppling claims of miracles, as evidence of their actual mechanisms is discovered. Should we disregard or condemn this science? Wouldn't the reasonable approach be to simply say "I don't know," and live with that till the mechanism of a miraculous event is discovered?

Some things, such as the resurrection appearances of Jesus to His disciples, are either true or lies.

No. A lie is an intentional deception, not a sincere but unevidenced belief. Would anyone believe even a first-person account of such an event today? If not, why believe apocryphal hearsay, many times removed, promulgated by people with an agenda?
The Jesus account is an extraordinary claim. Believing it without evidence is not rational.

Some prophecy is vague and ambiguous, true, and other prophecy is not. It seems to be a subjective thing. Some people claim there are no OT prophecies relating to Jesus and what He did, others claim to see over 200.
But if God is there and giving prophecies important to humans then we can probably not be very concerned about the unknown ones, presuming God would make sure His words are reasonably well know if important to us humans.

How about the prophesies claimed by other religions? What are we to make of them?

 

[blü 2]

So when do you think the gospels were written and by whom?

According to people whose scholarship I respect,
Paul c. 51 CE (1st Thessalonians) - c. 55-58 (Romans)
Mark c. 75
Matthew c. 85
Luke c. 85
John c. 95

Paul's were likely written by Paul. (You'll be aware of a school of thought that says they were forgeries prepared by supporters of Marcion in the 2nd century CE, but I doubt anyone could invent such a distinct dingbat as Paul.) As you know, there are some pseudo-Pauline letters in the NT as well.

We have no idea who wrote any of the gospels. We only have traditions from a long time after they were written. Like Paul, none of them ever met an historical Jesus, and were relying on oral tradition, which as you know tends to shift and change and "improve" with each retelling.

Plainly Mark is the first, and Matthew and Luke use it as a template for their own stories, which are compilations from various oral and perhaps written traditions. The motive for writing them must have been a desire to "improve" or "correct" Mark. John also uses Mark as a template, but is of course much looser, and like Paul but not like the synoptics shows gnostic leanings.

But as I said, even if we pretend "prophecy" works, your Daniel quote doesn't apply to Jesus, and the thrice-promised apocalyptic return of the son of man / Man is running two millennia late. (You'll have noted the author of John decides to quietly drop it from the tale.)

 

[Brian2]

Disregarding some inconvenient questions?

I don't go thru all the records of all religions in the world and try to work out what is true or not.

"...that we know."
So anything that baffles someone can be called a miracle? I think miraculous means something more than just not understood.

That is what has happened in the past when people have created a god of the gaps and have attributed to god or various gods, the things that they don't understand.

Most people who study nature understand it's natural workings; that there are understandable, testable explanations for nature's remarkable features. No magic needed.

Yes.

Claims are a dime a dozen. There are millions of them, many contradictory. How is one to decide which, if any, are reliable, if not by evaluating the actual evidence or by direct, personal experience.
How is it reasonable to simply accept what everyone else around you believes, or accepting unevidenced claims by religious leaders?

For belief in God anything can be a subjective confirmation of God's existence. That could be said to be direct personal experience, an ah-ha moment.

Isn't it reasonable to withhold belief in what is unevidenced? Isn't the evidence for Leprechauns or Isis just as strong as the evidence for God? What makes your belief in God and His miraculous son more believable that belief in Quetzalcoatl or Odin?

I don't know the reasons for belief in Leprechauns or Isis or Qutezalcoatl or Odin.

OK, you believe in Jesus. Why? Had you been born in Riyadh, would you believe in Muhammad?

I probably would have been brought up a Muslim and believed in Muhammad if I had been born in a Muslim country.
Nevertheless I believe in Jesus who fulfils the OT prophecies about the Messiah and I can see that Muhammad fulfils no prophecies in the Bible even if it is said that he does.

So unknown mechanism = miracle? Were earthquakes, eclipses and disease once miracles? If we discover the cause of something, does that remove its status as miracle?

Naturalistic causes would remove it's status as a miracle I would say.

Science has been rapidly toppling claims of miracles, as evidence of their actual mechanisms is discovered. Should we disregard or condemn this science? Wouldn't the reasonable approach be to simply say "I don't know," and live with that till the mechanism of a miraculous event is discovered?

People in the past and now know when someone does something that is beyond the scope of normal. We can see it was a miracle.
Sure you can say that you don't know that raising someone from the dead or calming a storm with your command was a miracle and so you are going to withhold belief in it until a mechanism is found and it is shown to not be a miracle, IOWs nothing is going to ever be a miracle for you, OR you could believe the evidence.

No. A lie is an intentional deception, not a sincere but unevidenced belief. Would anyone believe even a first-person account of such an event today? If not, why believe apocryphal hearsay, many times removed, promulgated by people with an agenda?
The Jesus account is an extraordinary claim. Believing it without evidence is not rational.

Even apocryphal hearsay had to start somewhere,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, as a lie.
Many witnesses to the same events by people who are willing to suffer and die rather than deny what the saw, is better than apocryphal hearsay.

How about the prophesies claimed by other religions? What are we to make of them?

I have heard some that are false, have not happened. I have heard of some that may have happened, but are general would be easy to work out even 100 years before, especially if a being such as Satan exists and has a good overview of world events which humans have not. I have heard of some that are vague and could be pinned on a number of events.
I did not think that most religions relied on fulfilled prophecies and actual historical events for the truth of their religions.
I have seen prophecies that are similar in many religions and that might be a copying thing or true prophecies from God.

 

[Brian2]

What evidence do you have of this? Aren't these just folk tales incorporated into church doctrine to bolster the religion?

So somebody lied about what Jesus did and it got incorporated into Christianity? Maybe. If that is what you think then that is what you think.

What is a miracle, anyway? Is it an inexplicable event? If so, doesn't that make it an impossible event?

No, not unless your world view eliminates the miraculous and makes them impossible events.

People aren't indoctrinating the religious into new beliefs. We don't have any new doctrine to promote. We're just questioning the basis of their beliefs, and pointing out the dearth of supporting evidence. The religious are then free to believe whatever they want.

Sort of, but skeptic reasoning about things these days usually uses skeptic analyses of the Bible which of course discredit the Bible. And it uses science as a weapon against belief in God and the Bible when science has no opinion one way or the other about such things.
Skeptics are of course free to believe what they want even when those things about science and the skeptic analysis of the Bible are presented to them.
Faith is faith on both sides and if skeptics want to use rubbish evidence to discredit God and the Bible and claim that only science is real evidence and shows what is real, that is up to them.

We're not maintaining that miracleists are lying. I'm sure many are completely sincere, and many really believe their claims. The point is: the claims are dubious, hearsay, and unevidenced, and the reports many times removed from the original claim.

Someone had to lie originally about the miracles and that is what you are suggesting even if you are seem to not realise it.
I can understand people wanting reasonable evidence for gospel claims, but the gospels themselves are that imo and skeptical assumptions in the analysis of the Bible suggest that the early church lied about the people who wrote them and that they are hearsay, and unevidenced, and the reports many times removed from the original claim. But of course skeptics are entitled to deceive themselves like that even when it is pointed out to them.

 

[Brian2]

Apparently some decades, at least, after the crucifixions, by unknown authors. The current attributions to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were added a couple centuries later by church elders. None of the originals were signed.

The names of Mark, Luke and Matthew and John as the writers of gospel stories are in the writings of the early church fathers.
Quotes from the gospels and epistles also are in the writings of the early church fathers.

 

[Brian2]

I already denied that, and you have offered no evidence or argument to rebut my explanation. Until you do so and successfully, I consider the matter resolved. You are accusing me of beginning with a "conclusion" and only then evaluating the evidence, making it conform to my preconceptions, but that's a description of the motivated reading a faith-based thinker with a confirmation bias employs. I go from evidence to conclusion. My profession and one of my major avocations are both deductive pursuits.

In medicine, we begin with data and develop a hypothesis - a so-called differential diagnosis that is a list of illnesses consistent with the known signs and symptoms gleaned from a history and physical, which is then narrowed to a definitive diagnosis. We go from evidence to conclusion and then use more evidence to confirm it, such as diagnostic testing (bloodwork ad radiology) and response to therapy. The religious approach, which would be to begin with a diagnosis believed by faith before collecting evidence would leave a lot of preventable morbidity undiagnosed and inadequately treated.

And then there's duplicate bridge, which is the same process of collecting evidence (bidding, the play of the cards), generating hypotheses, and then testing them. Do this well and win at the game. Use the religious approach - guessing that the next hand makes four spades, so bidding it before I looking at the cards - and lose. Badly.

Occam's Razor supports greater belief in a transhuman intelligence in the presence of strong prophecy. Unfortunately, no religion has that. What is has is what can be called weak prophecy - vague predictions that can be satisfied by any number of events interpreted by motivated believers and predictions of mundane events (you just mentioned Jesus allegedly prophesying that his new religion would meet opposition) aren't convincing.

But if they rose to the level of scientific prophecy, you could use them to deceive the religious as Columbus did when he predicted an eclipse for the New World natives he encountered, convincing them that they needed to feed his sailors. Biblical prophecy can't do that. Columbus could have read predictions from his holy book all day, which would be expected to have zero effect, because those prophecies are weak tea.

The Bible prophecies usually show that God has predicted events from centuries before. It is only some prophecies that are designed to be warnings for people and so the meanings are known beforehand. But you are correct about the prophecies of the Messiah being mainly weak tea, and a weak tea prophecy is not wonderful as evidence, but a couple of hundred of these prophecies for the one person is strong tea, and prophecies which show what Jesus did and what happened to Him and what He will do and are in opposition to the current Jewish interpretations are also strong tea imo.

Yes.

Any naturalistic explanation that can account for observation is more parsimonious by orders of magnitude than one imaging an entire other unseen reality.

So that imo is knowing the answer first. Any claim of deity is beaten by Occam's Razor.

Why stop with just one unneeded god? Let's add more. We can make that explanation even worse by adding even more complexity that explains and predicts nothing, like a creator god for the one that allegedly created our universe. No wait. Make that three gods working together to make another god that made our universe. And throw in how these three failed at first, producing a creator god that they regretted and had to destroy with a supernatural disaster equivalent to a flood after which they tried again and made a new covenant with their second god. Now throw in devils and angels. The more the merrier. And then let's just believe it all by faith, because how could that be a mistake or lead to false and unfalsifiable beliefs?

Or how about we just stick with naturalism until we encounter something it cannot account for?

Naturalism does not account for this universe and life yet but that is OK, even if it never accounts for those things, naturalism is going to be better than belief in a creator and life giver and will be believed above that,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, even if the claim of atheists is,,,,,,,,,,,,, we don't know. The reality is the naturalistic belief.

Disagree. This is also the result of motivated reading. I can easily see what you have a stake in not seeing. There is no possibility of you seeing it any other way however disparate the descriptions of the Hebrew messiah and Jesus are. How could they possibly be more different? Maybe if Jesus were a gentile or a woman. Either of those would make Jesus even more unlike the Hebrew messiah of scripture. It's hard to make it worse than that, but let's try. Jesus was a "woman" horse - a mare.

I don't believe that any or even all of those would be a deal killer for you were they in the Gospels. You'd STILL see THAT Jesus fulfilling prophecy and claiming that that proves that the Bible comes from a god. Why wouldn't you? What would be different then for you? What would stop you then that isn't stopping you now?

What would stop me then that is not stopping me now is that these things are not prophesied of the Messiah.

 

[Brian2]

But you claim to see the point before messiah (end times) even shows up

We see that Jesus is returning and the details are clearer as the time gets closer. Many prophecies are so that we see them after the events and know that God has prophesied them, many are to warn people about what is going to happen.

Did you ever consider that prophecy are visions rather than told by a god?

Is a vision something that humans get through their own human abilities?

 

[Brian2]

What was there about Jesus that might cause any Jewish onlooker to think he qualified as a messiah?

Many did believe that even with their wrong ideas about the Messiah. When He rose from the dead, that was shown to be in the Hebrew scriptures and they believed that about the Messiah and that He would be coming back.

But those passages you gave to show that Jesus said He would return in the first century, do not actually say that if read carefully.

 

[Brian2]

How about being talked out of their belief and into the position that there has yet to be a person who has demonstrated a reliable methodology for demonstrating they they know or are capable of knowing that there is something other than the material? That is neither a claim that the material is all that there is, or that someone is delusional or lying.

Some people have more knowledge of the spiritual realm than others and show it imo but for most of us it is believing the evidence we have and not being sucked into the rhetoric that the material universe is all there is and that science is the only reliable thing that can show us if the spiritual realm is real or not.

 

[Brian2]

But there is no evidence backing up any claim of deity. The belief could just as well be pulled out of your hat. A claim of miracle working mice would have exactly equal evidentiary support.
You're making an extraordinary and untestable claim. It's your burden to support it. If you cannot support it with objective evidence, it's reasonable to dismiss it, pending discovery of actual evidence.

Nature, the universe is evidence for those who can see it otherwise it is just evidence of itself.
My belief wasn't just pulled out of my hat, it comes from what I consider witness reports (even if skeptical analysis has decided that prophecy is not real and so the gospels had to have been written after 70AD and by people who witnessed nothing)
The gospels are also supported by the OT prophecies about the Messiah and what He would do etc.
I don't know of any miracle working mice with such evidence.
It of course is not easy to test the truth of the historical story without testing the belief itself,,,,,,,,, but maybe more evidence in archaeology will be dug up that supports the Bible authenticity.
I do hear from skeptics that objective evidence for the existence of God needs to be shown before any other evidence for the existence of God will be considered.
So God has to be shown objectively to exist before you will believe in Him. No leaps of faith allowed for a skeptic except when it comes to the belief in naturalism I guess.

 

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Many did believe that even with their wrong ideas about the Messiah. When He rose from the dead, that was shown to be in the Hebrew scriptures and they believed that about the Messiah and that He would be coming back.

The trouble with the resurrection story is that we have no eyewitness account of it, no contemporary account of it, and no independent account of it, The earliest is Mark, which originally ended simply with the empty tomb. Not till Matthew do we have a purported account of the appearances of Jesus afterwards (and Matthew's author has the streets of Jerusalem flush with zombies of the faithful dead). Counting Paul's claim that Jesus appeared to a gathering of the faithful, and the mention in Acts 1, there are six accounts of the resurrection, the earliest with any detail being Mark's some 40-45 years after the purported event; and each of the six accounts contradicts the other five in major ways. We sometimes find composite versions of the four gospel accounts, but they share the vice of being a seventh version that contradicts the other six.

In other words, for an event where an exceptionally high standard of evidence can reasonably be demanded, the very opposite is the case.

But those passages you gave to show that Jesus said He would return in the first century, do not actually say that if read carefully.

In your view, what exactly did Jesus say would happen in the lifetime of some of his listeners?