> How is Christianity considered a monotheist religion?

Ignoring the OP's reference to the Saints as potential Gods/Demigods, I will attempt to discuss the concept of the Christian Trinity where God (Yahweh) is one God but with three personalities.

It was important for early Christians to embrace and promote a monotheistic God for the same reason that Judaism went from a polytheistic pantheon to the monotheism of Yahwehism (YHWH) - by claiming a monotheism, the adherents were able to claim a superior God and imbue this deity with attributes in excess of other Gods (i.e., the one and only true God, multi-omni's).

The concept of the Christian Trinity (three persons distinct yet coexisting in unity, and are co-equal, co-eternal and consubstantial; Father, Son [God made Flesh], Spirit), for many of the Christian sects, allows for assignment of different 'essences' - which in pre-monotheistic Yahwehism, would have been been assigned to different deities. There is no direct identification of the "Trinity" concept in the New Testament, rather the doctrine of the Trinity was contrived in the 2nd/3rd century by Christian apologistics using various scripture passages interpreted to establish the foundation of the Trinity concept.

Some references about this non-polythesitic concept is available:

• Trinity - wiki
  
• THE REVELATION OF GOD AS TRINITY - Holy See/Vatican
  
• The Trinity (Triunity) of God
  
  The triad concept is seen in many supernatural deity religions:
  
  
• Egyptian: Osiris, Isis, Horus
  
• Canaanite/Ugarit – Early Israelite: El the Father God, Asherah the Wife/Consort (depicted as a Serpent), Baal-Hadad
  
• Hindu Trimurti: Brahma - the Creator, Vishnu - the Maintainer, Shiva - the Destroyer
  
• Olympian Greek Religion: Zeus, Athena, Apollo
  
• Roman Capitoline Triad: Jupiter, Juno, Minerva
  
• Sumerian: Anu, Ea, Enlil
  
• Babylonian: Shamash, Ishtar, Tammuz
  
• Christianity: Yahweh, Holy Spirit, Jesus
  
  The early books of the Tanakh, specifically the Torah, deal with the earlier history of the beginning of Judaism and, like the related Old Testament of the Bible, contain many references which show the historical transition from a polytheistic belief in the El God pantheon to the monolatry of the (initially subordinate) rain/fertility/warrior God Yahweh incorporating many of the transferred attributes from the El pantheon, and from there to monotheistic worship where Yahweh took the supreme position.
  
  As Yahweh was accepted into the prominent religion of the region and incorporated into the pantheon of Gods headed by El, the Father and Creator God [there is reference in Ugarit documents to Yahweh also being one of the sons of El]; Yahweh came to be dominant to the Hebrew peoples of Israel (meaning: saved by the God El) through a process of convergence, differentiation and displacement (synthesis and syncretism) of the polytheistic triad of the most prominent Canaanite and Ugarit Gods - El (the father God), Asherah (goddess, wife or consort to El), and Baal (storm/rain God, son of El) - to the monolatry of the rain/fertility/warrior God Yahweh incorporating many of the transferred attributes from the El pantheon, and from there to monotheistic worship where Yahweh took the supreme position. Given that the Old Testament is essentially the story of Yahweh, and the humans that Yahweh created, as protagonists, the identification of God's (Yahweh's) created humans as the "chosen people" makes sense.
  
  References to El, Asherah (her icon/standard is the Serpent), Baal and other sons and daughters of El litter the Christian Old Testament. For example, Genesis 1, the universe and world creation story, refers to El and Family. Genesis 2 refers to a limited creation of humans and an Eden by Yahweh. Genesis 3 is the story of Yahweh withholding morality from his human playthings and the ascendent God Asherah corrected Yahweh's transgression (my interpretation of the allegorical story) against his creations (Yahweh was not happy and continued to throw temper tantrums for the next 1500 (or 700) years (depending on which date of the authorship of the early books of the OT you accept). Yahweh was a jealous God, as befitting a warrior god, and instructed his creations to put Yahweh first and foremost (Exodus 20, the first set of the verbal ten commandments) above the other Gods of the Israelites. Eventually the adherents of Yahweh were successful in transferring the attributes of the other Gods into Yahweh to create and enforce monotheistic Yahwehism. The derivative monotheistic Yahwehism is a creation by humans for humans - yet serves as the foundation of the Father God for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It is interesting that Christianity incorporates a triad in the Trinity. The Father God, Yahweh; the mother/consort God, Holy Spirit, and the son God; Christ - analogous and corresponding to El, the Father God, Asherah, the consort/wife of El, and Baal, the son God; which predates Yahwehism and from which Yahwehism is derived.
  
  More online references with discussion the origin of the monotheistic God of Israel:
  
  
• Israelite Religion to Judaism: the Evolution of the Religion of Israel
  
• The Origins and Gradual Adoption of Monotheism Amongst the Ancient Israelites
  
• The evolution of God
  
• Ugarit and the Bible
  
  Other:
  
  
• The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel by Mark Smith
  
• The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts by Mark S. Smith
  
• A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Karen Armstrong
  
• The Religion of Ancient Israel (Library of Ancient Israel) by Patrick D. Miller
  
• Religions of Ancient Israel: A Synthesis of Parallactic Approaches by Ziony Zevit
  
  
  TL;DR Christian apologistics constructed a 3-in-1 poly to monotheistic construct, using selected 'interpreted' Old and New Testament scriptures, in order to allow the claim of a superior monotheistic God having attributes usually assigned to a multiple or pantheon of Gods - resulting in the one true and only God.

> If God will exist, I am already living by it.

It sounds like your standards are based on just yourself (circular logic).

God is an infinitely intelligent being that knows the optimal thing to do at each moment. Do you think that you are living a perfect life in charity and virtue ? Are you helping as many people as you possibly could ? The truth is that all have fallen short of God's grace. We are all sinners. The best that we can do is be thankful and repentant.

Saint Vincent Ferrer was probably the most holy person to walk the earth since the Apostles and He lamented at how sinful he was. If you don't realize your own sinfulness in the sight of God, then you don't know about God.

> Having a plan and not telling me about it.

The word "plan" is misleading when referring to God. He is outside of time and knows the future, but we are locked in this timeline. From God's perspective, things have already happened AND they are currently happening...so it's not quite a "plan".

From our perspective, all we need to worry about is that we have free will, and whether or not we're making the most of it.

> Having a plan and not telling me about it.

Unless you are blind and quadriplegic, God has given you great abilities and a sense to make the most of them. You will be accountable for what you did or didn't do with them. Choose wisely.

You'll know if you are doing the right thing if you have a sense of joy. ...Like rescuing children from Human trafficking, or helping homeless people get back on their feet.

For reference, Mother Teresa would clean up people who were dying in the open sewers of Calcutta. Most people would avoid there because of the terrible smell, yet it brought her great joy. I would guess that you have more physical abilities than she did as a 100 pound little woman.

> Not all gay sex is adultery,

The Christian definition of adultery is not definable by each person (circular logic). All Gay sex is abhorrent in the eyes of God because He gave us the gift of procreation to have children. The Bible says this in several places, but it is also possible to reason out theologically. Since God is your creator, Gay sex is like master-bating in front of your parents, while they are begging for you to have grandchildren. Gay sex only serves one's own physical lusts. Gay sex can not produce a child, or serve someone in charity (Love). The physical effects like AIDS was God's way of warning people not to do it. God also gives mankind dominion over the physical world, which is the only reason why AIDS hasn't been more destructive.

> and strait martial sex can give you stds.

It's not just a matter of gay versus straight. Lots of straight people commit adultery. e.g. Porn stars. However, two wrongs do not make a right.

Christianity's standard is monogamous marriage and abstinence before marriage. If people had followed that, then millions of innocent people would not have died of AIDS and other STDs.

> homosexuality is not a choice. God made some people attracted to men, and his mad?

Human will is more complicated than that. By the time a child is 5, the child has had millions of impressions. I don't think that homosexuals are consciously deciding to be gay. It is more the product of malformation. For example, there are towns in Thailand where young boys are trained to be prostitutes for men. They are not "choosing".

I believe that God gives each of us the necessary graces to overcome our situations. There are tonnes of great testimonials of former homosexuals on www.couragerc.org.

> Not all parents are homophobes.

Not sure what you mean by that. If parents encourage homosexuality, they will have a very hard time facing God. Parents are supposed to teach their children to love God, not indulge in their physical lusts. For example, children also want to eat candy all day. Parents are supposed to teach responsible behavior.

God calls everyone to Heaven, but only the repentant can face Him, because He is Truth itself and shines like the sun. Those who can face the Truth are glorified by God's light. Those who have unrepentant sin are burned by His light. That's the basis of Heaven and Hell. They are both fueled by God's light.

> And if it's only bad if God is real, I call that blind faith.

Well, I was an atheist~agnostic for over 30 years and now understand that there is nothing blind about believing in Christianity. Quite the opposite. It is like openning one's eyes.

Ironically, believing in things like abiogenesis requires blind faith. There is ZERO proof of it, and it defies the laws of physics, like entropy.

I agree with Dr. Turek and his book title:

"I don't have enough faith to be an atheist"

https://www.amazon.com/Dont-Have-Enough-Faith-Atheist/dp/1581345615

Young Earth Creationists start with the conclusion that the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is the inspired word of God, without any error, and absolutely true in all that it says. And they believe the whole of the Pentateuch is straight-forward history. In my opinion, they regard it that way because they honestly can't conceive of any other [legitimate] way to interpret it.

And I'll admit it's hard. It's hard because our culture (20th/21st Century, American/Western European, Post-Enlightenment) only has a couple of categories for things. Best to use the language of the new Common Core...we have "literature" and "informational texts". And "literature" equals "fiction". So, if anything is supposed to be "true" (that is, "factual") than it must be read like an informational text. That is, whatever it says must be read as "literal".

(I'm sorry for all the box-quotes, but a big part of the problem, apart from categories, is the words we use--like "literal". I think N.T. Wright says a mouth-full in this clip with Peter Enns, where he says that what people usually mean by "literal" is "concrete", vs. abstract.)

As I said, the YEC's read Genesis as straight-forward history, because they don't have any other way (I think) to be faithful to the witness of Scripture as the true word of God. They don't have any other category to interpret it in. They wish (they are impelled) to regard it as true, but in doing so, they suppose the inspired author must have meant it to be a dry recitation of facts; i.e. this happened then this happened, etc.

They're reading Genesis through post-enlightenment, 20th century eyes. There shouldn't be any doubt about this, since Young Earth Creationism, of the Ken Ham, Henry Morris, ICR variety only had its beginning in the last century.

There is a great deficiency in our schools, and there has been for a very long time. Most of us are unable to separate myth from fiction. Or literature from fiction.

So, what's my opinion of YEC's. I think they ought to be commended for their faith in God and for their defense of His inspired word. But they need to be marinated in the whole history of the Church and the people of God, in order that they may begin to understand what it was--what truth--it was that the inspired author of Genesis wished to communicate.

I think John Walton is an important read in this respect. He takes his reader back to the time, and the mindset, of the people by whom and for whom these texts were written. I particularly recommend his book, "The Lost World of Genesis One.

Another important point, though, has to do with when these texts were written. Or, to whom they were written.

What's interesting, as Fr. John Behr points out in one of his talks (maybe not the one I've linked to) is that Adam, Eve, Noah, etc, really aren't mentioned in the whole of the Old Testament after those first 11 chapters. Maybe a genealogy here or there, but there's more emphasis on these personages in the letters of Paul and Peter than there is in the whole sacred texts of Israel prior to the exile. And has been often pointed out, the stories in the first eleven chapters of Genesis seem to borrow from, and refer to, Babylonian motifs. Might it be (perhaps) that Israel knew nothing of these stories before the Babylonian captivity? Might it be that they were therefore written by and to Jews returned from Babylon in the middle of the first millennium B.C. with the intent that they teach a theological, rather than an historical, truth?

I say "perhaps" and I say it advisedly. Because I'm not ready to dismiss the historicity of the first eleven chapters of Genesis completely out of hand. But what I will say, is that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are literature, they are figurative, and they are meant to reveal deeper and more substantial truths than any bear recitation of historical facts could convey.

And I think that when YEC's interpret these chapters "literally", they do the inspired author (and themselves) a disservice, though their hearts may be in the right place.

If we're going to get into the Bible as the source for a description of god, then we certainly have an issue. Which Bible are you reading? If its one of the millions of Bibles in the US, then its likely an English translation, and it isn't actually describing the god worshiped by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. For that, we have to go back to the Canaanite religion, which we've learned about from clay tablets found at the Ras Shamra site. The Canaanites were polytheists who worshiped a great number of gods. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were primarily followers of El Shaddai, "God of the Mountains", another name for El Elyon, or "God Most High". El Elyon appears to Abraham in human form at one point. Jacob is described as asking El Elyon to become his elohim, or primary god, in order that he might receive special protection. He also climbs a ladder to heaven and speaks with El Elyon in person, and later even wrestles with El Elyon.

Its also not the god of Moses. Moses was a follower of Yahweh, the war god of the ancient Israelites. Yahweh wasn't a Canaanite god, but he also wasn't a monotheistic god. In the (likely mythical) story of Exodus, the Israelites even note after gaining their freedom "Who among the gods
is like you, Yahweh?
Who is like you—
majestic in holiness,
awesome in glory,
working wonders?." (Exodus 15:11) It helps the verses make more sense to get the full context; upon reaching the promised land, the Israelites stray and worship other gods. That seems silly in today's version; why worship Baal or Asherah when you know that there is only THE LORD? But when you realize that Yahweh was just the war god, as Ares was to the Greeks, it makes more sense. Once you're no longer in a time of trouble, why not worship Baal (god of fertility and storms) or Asherah (the mother goddess) instead of Yahweh (god of the armies)? And its a lot more obvious why the Old Testament god was so obsessed with blood and death; he was the war god, like Ares.

Yahweh didn't become the primary god of Israel until the reign of King Josaih, a strict Yahwist, in about 640 BCE. This was the period of the Deuteronomic reforms; it was at this time that the book of Deuteronomy was "found" in the temple, supposedly a new book of law written by Moses that placed Yahweh above all other gods. However, its rather convenient timing and the linguistic signature indicate that it was actually a forgery, created for political expediency. Even here, though, there is still evidence of polytheism, in the Ten Commandments themselves. "6 I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 7 You shall have no other gods before me." (Deuteronomy 5:6-7)

Only in about 570 BCE, when the Israelites were exiled into Babylon, did the monotheistic god "the LORD" appear. An author known as Second Isaiah had his words appended on to the original Isaiah, the book of Leviticus was authored, and the history of Israel was rewritten to say that El Elyon and Yahweh were the same god, and that this god was the only god. The other books extant at the time were rewritten to make it look like there had only ever been one god of Israel. So despite the story saying that this god has always existed, he only appears in the archaeological record 2600 years ago.

A very different picture appears when you know where all the stories came from, and put them in their proper historical context. The Old Testament just screams polytheism, even through the multiple rewrites and translations. I recommend A History of God by Karen Armstrong for more details. Or, you can find a good summary on YouTube from Evid3nc3.

> You are making a huge assumption that the Bible is god's guide.

I am answering from within the parameters you gave me. You asked originally about JW's interpretation of Christianity. I think I am granted such assumption in the light of this fact.

> What about all those people who fervently believe the Koran or Old Testament (only) or the Upanishads or the Veda or any other holy book to be god's guide to man?

God will judge them, not me. My task is to spread His good news to them. If He deem them worthy of salvation, then they are worthy of salvation.

> Do you not pause and question what makes your holy book so special, what makes your holy book the true word of god? If other people believe in other holy books with as much you zeal as you do in yours, how can you tell your not falling into the same false belief as they are? How do you know you are following the true word of god and not some impostor?

I suggest Plantinga's book Warranted Christian Belief or C.S.Lewis' Mere Christianity.

My argument for it is fairly simple. The God worshipped by the Christians is the same God that was already being worshipped when Ur was the most important city in the world. The other gods came and went, but He remained.

> If you are truly following the word of god (bible) and Hindus aren't (in general), shouldn't you feel god more?

No, why should I?

> Shouldn't god give you some indication you are on the right path as oppose to how you would feel if you were Hindu?

O, but He does! Truth will set you free, and that is your signal.

> That is like giving your children a test and then rewarding everyone who answered the questions equally regardless if they got it right, and then punishing those who got it wrong (punishment depending on your belief on heaven/hell can simply be having it somehow worse off in the afterlife then another person).

The destiny of mankind is to stay on Earth. No one will be 'worse off' than anyone else.

> How are any of your children supposed to know what the right answers (any 'lifestyle/faith' that gets you the best possible afterlife) are if you give everyone equal encouragement throughout the learning process and test?

There is no best possible afterlife. There is a simple hope of eternal life here on Earth.

> If Hindus can/will obtain the same level of afterlife as members of your faith, then again I ask, why are you spreading your faith?

Why do you tell your friends when something good happens to you?

> Not all theories are correct. But yea, if it's from God it kinda is a good idea.

Hmm...does that put you in the camp of something is moral because God commands it? You subject yourself to the arbitrary (per the Bible) whim of an incomprehensible deity who says that genocide is moral in specific circumstances because he commands it?

> Created to do? Nope.

Very much so. God creates humanity, gives them free will and can't help but know that they're going to exercise that free will, so he also sets up the conditions that will ultimately lead to their downfall via the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Could he have set up conditions so that the exercise of their free will doesn't condemn them? He's God, allegedly omnipotent and omniscient. It's ridiculous to assert that he couldn't do that, therefore he chose to do so.

> Seriously. As a group, atheists definitely don't stand out as moral.

Don't be too sure. Nor is it a fluke.

> What? What you think is right is not from God. What really is right is from God. Not everyone agrees what is moral. Thus it would be stupid to say that all have gotten that from God.

That is precisely my point. Someone who is getting their guidance from the True God ought to be demonstrably more moral than someone who doesn't, yes?

> Also to statistics and such, it's not enough to watch statistics between "all christians as you define it" and "all atheists". Because all christians as you define it includes whole lot of people who don't follow Jesus and thus mess with the statistics.

Now, that is the definition of No True Scotsman. You don't get to define who is or isn't a Christian just because you don't approve.

> Now that first part we can agree, that's a lot different than what you have said before, that ending not.

Okay, then please explain how we are seeing people who are receiving guidance from the True God are demonstrably different from those who aren't.

> Mmm... benefits... Christians are not supposed to look for benefits of this world, because things in this world are supposed to be of no worth.

Exactly! That's the scam! Make a claim that turns all empirical data irrelevant, and assert that the proof is in the afterlife so it's impossible to verify. It's fiendishly clever.

But again, we have certain promises about this world that simply aren't true.

> Untestable and cannot be falsified? Nah.

Well, since you say so.

> There would be a way to falsify bible to some extent. That is to put more people (honest ones) digging in areas where biblical stuff was supposed to be happened.

Um...no, not really. What archaeological evidence demonstrates is that the various writers of the Bible were contemporaries of those historical times. There's no archaeological evidence to demonstrate the Israelites were ever slaves in Egypt, or that they successfully rebelled against Ramses II. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that Jericho was once a city of that era, but not that the Israelites knocked down its walls through divine intervention. This is the equivalent of claiming that spell-casting wizards are real because the Harry Potter novels give an accurate description of London.

> Also there is pretty direct evidence from a certain prophecy I certainly would hope that there'd be more archeologists there. In Lachish letter, or Lachish ostraca it was said that there was a prophet who had warned about a certain attack, and that there was 2 named cities left. Jeremiah gives those same names for cities, but also one more, which just says that it did fall before those 2. This also could of course be possibly forged, but if the text indeed is before they fell and as they tell same story as Jeremiah...

If you examine the evidence critically, you'll find that most prophecies in the Bible are worded vaguely enough that later writers can go back and reference them to fit their own narrative. A book that makes a prediction, and later confirms its own prediction, is not valid evidence of fulfillment of prophecy. The Bible is filled with wishful thinking.

I agree with both points.

I don't believe Adam and Eve were the only ones. Recent writings by Dr. John Walton (https://www.amazon.com/Lost-World-Genesis-One-Cosmology/dp/0830837043/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520516984&sr=8-1&keywords=the+lost+world+of+genesis+one+by+john+walton&dpID=41GOJy03JKL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch) proposes a theory about Genesis 1-2 that I love. It says that the text is about how the cosmos functions, not about how it came to be. Light and dark function to give us time, the firmament functions to give us weather and climate, the dry land functions to bring for plant life (the function of agriculture), the sun moon and stars function to give us times and seasons, humanity functions to fill the earth and subdue, to rule over the earth. It's about why the earth was created (to cosmos was to function as God's temple, his dwelling place, and the earth to function as the place of meeting and relationship between God and the people he created and loves), not about how it was created, what processes were used, or how long it took. According to the Bible, God is still definitely the creator of the world, but that's not what Genesis 1-2 are about. Genesis 1-2 are about how God ordered the world so that it functions the way it does.

Taking Genesis 2 in this light, it is not about the material creation of Adam and Eve, but rather about what their function is. In Genesis 2.15, for instance, the words "work it" and "take care of it" are not agricultural words, but priestly ones. Adam and Eve weren't gardeners, but priest and priestess. They were taken out from among other hominids (also Gn. 2.15), invested with God's breath (they became souls), and were given the role and function of mediating between God and men, and for God to reveal himself to them. This became the line of homo sapiens that exists today.

So it's altogether possible (if Walton is right) that Adam and Eve were not necessarily the first humans nor necessarily the only humans. Walton also wrote a book called "The Lost World of Adam & Eve" if you are truly interested in doing some fascinating reading.

> the land of Nod

The identification of Nod is technically undermined—we can't be certain of it. More to say about that after Eden.

The identification of Eden is most likely in Kuwait or Iran. Satellite photos and geological studies have found evidences of two other dried up rivers in the region, along with evidences of ancient grasslands, lakes, and forests. Kuwait, at the mouth of the Kuwait River, is rife with pebbles, which is a clue that river used to be there. Research reveals that a river used to flow across the Arabian peninsula, possibly what the Bible calls the Pishon. The gold, bdellium, and onyx that the Bible mentions are in the general region of Mahd edh-Dhahab in Saudi Arabia.

Nod is defined in Gn. 4.16 (correcting your reference of 3.16) as "east of Eden," as you say. By the way, the Mesopotamian flood hero, Utnapishtim, (in the Gilgamesh Epic) is similarly located "faraway, at the mouth of the rivers," east of the head of the Persian Gulf. If our identifications of Eden are correct, Nod is in present-day Iran.

The point of my comparison was: It seems unstructured to me. And I am often confused by that lack of rules moderates live by.

I constantly meet people who consider themselves Christian or Muslim or whatever but do not follow the rules of that religion. For instance a good friend of mine who is a Catholic, like many american's, believes the sacrament is symbolically the body and blood of Christ and also uses contraception. These are big no-nos for a Catholic. Another friend is Muslim and he loves bacon and also uses contraception and does not believe his daughter should grow up thinking herself less than a male.

Essentially, these types of people make up the bulk of religious people I meet. So maybe they are a good %age of the religious in america. But effectively they are not religious. They simply believe in a god and pick the rules they want to follow based on a number of different criteria. Those criteria are almost always cultural.

This seems like sentimental (in the philosophical sense) religion to me. Why not drop the religion altogether?

EDIT: have you read this book? http://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347757261&sr=8-1&keywords=misquoting+jesus

> You’ve asserted that three times now and still won’t back it up with anything more than an online encyclopedia where the whole of epistemology can change at the click of a mouse.

I recommend Forged by Bart Ehrman. If you don't want to spend money and would like a quick version, here's a lecture he gives at Cambridge on the subject. Ehrman's not only a distinguished scholar in the field, but he's just a great character -- he was a fundamentalist Christian (like I was!) who became an agnostic atheist through intense, obsessive study of the Bible, while still retaining an incredible enthusiasm for and appreciation of Christianity and its history.

I honestly get into just as many debates with atheists who subscribe to the Jesus Myth hypothesis, a fringe concept that Ehrman vehemently opposes. He even wrote a book defending the historicity of Jesus. The state of Bible scholarship is really interesting, and Ehrman does a great job of relating it to casual readers, e.g. people who don't speak ancient Hebrew.

>Was this philosopher a chemist? A biologist? Did he write any papers advancing either of these fields? I'm genuinely curious. If not, then I'm afraid he is not on solid ground to be refuting the advances made.

Does he need to be? Does everyone need to be in order to even question the experts? Maybe you are comfortable with giving up your critical thinking process, but I am not. Certainly give them a bit of deference but they need the data to back up their claims.

Look, Science is a uniquely potent method for discovering how nature works but the history of science suggests scientists often make claims that turn out to be erroneous or exaggerated.

And as you write: it's unlikely we'll ever completely unearth solid evidence even if it is true.

Then why believe to be true? How is the proposition that the information in DNA arose naturally falsified if it is to be believed when without "solid evidence"?

You seem to be more of an adherent to naturalism then an adherent to critical thinking.

>Present his best argument and I'll dispute that.

Present his best argument and you'll dispute it? Really? not examine it and see if it has merit? Just go straight to disputing it. That's what i meant by not being a critical thinker.

But anyhow

Flew’s argument in part is that if one tries to produce a 488 letter sonnet by chance it would be take one to the ~10^690 chances to get it right [that is 1 with 690 zeros after it]

For comparison the number of particles in the universe is only ~10^80.

If you took the entire universe and converted it to computer chips each one weighing a millionth of a gram and had each computer chip able to spin out 488 trials at, say, a million times a second; if you turn the entire universe into these microcomputer chips and these chips were spinning a million times a second producing random letters, the number of trials you would get since the beginning of time would be 10 to the 90th trials.

It would be off again by a factor of 10 to the 600th. You will never get a that paragraph by chance. The universe would have to be 10 to the 600th times larger. Yet atheists/naturalists say the info in DNA just happened by "chance". And remember the 10^690 chance is just for a 488 letter sonnet, not the much more complex 3 million base pair of DNA.

But we don’t have since the beginning of time [~13.8 billion years] for life to come about naturally, Earth was formed ~4.5 billion years ago and life first appeared ~3.5 billion years ago. So “chance” had only 1 billion years to bring about life naturally. Which seems like a lot of time until one considers the numbers above. Only if one is wedded to naturalistic philosophy is this not a problem but that is because they simply are not open to any other explanation; the answer must be in line with naturalistic philosophy. That's been decided a priori.

Additionally “chance” has no causal powers, there must be some mechanism. And as you admit there isn't one.

The comeback for naturalists is usually "we don't know" or, “well, it’s not zero so it still possible” so my question would be, how is naturalism falsified? If it can’t be then it is simply dogma.

So it seems the only way to solve the information problem is via an intelligent designer.

Physicist Fred Hoyle agrees: "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.*" source

But wait ID isn't science! But let's not be so hasty

Bradley Monton in [Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1551118637?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=ox_sc_sfl_title_44&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER) argues that He argues effectively that opponents' most frequently-stated dismissals of ID ("it's purely religion," for example, or "it isn't science") fail when subjected to thoughtful analysis.

Edit: Of course you are not going to buy the book but read this paper by Monton to get an idea of where he is coming from.

>And lastly, what do you mean there is no evidence for genetic code coming from natural means?

Exactly that; no evidence for genetic code coming from natural means

>Perhaps you'd like to propose an alternative method?

Flew did. It's Intelligent Design. But that's not "science" the critics will say; but what they really mean is it's not "naturalism" - the philosophy that underlies science. It isn't science that is failing to but naturalism. Or perhaps it's better to say that science wedded to naturalism is failing to explain due to the unwarranted limits that is imposed upon it

And this is another reason why Flew doesn't have to be a chemist nor biologist; he is critiquing the philosophy of naturalism not science.

Science can work perfectly well without the presumption of naturalism; all it needs is an orderly universe if it was designed that way [instead of coming about naturally] doesn't matter one wit.

> Just to be clear, naturalistic pantheism would be the belief that...

This.

> Would you like to help me here?

It would be my pleasure. That was a very admirable statement btw. I started this fkr the same reason, though it was more motivated by finding the truth as early as I can so I can live the rest of my life properly. So the biggest areas of interest there are philosophy of religion and ethics.

I was first convinced by what is called the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument. Here's a great paper on it. You can do some research, but its one of the arguments from contingency that atheists can't write off as easily as other cosmological arguments like the Kalam, as the universe is contingent even if it existed for eternity. If the piano music is coming out of the saloon for eternity, there still needs to be a piano player.

There are a few other arguments that I accept. I'm sure you've heard of Thomas Aquinas' Four Ways and it looks like they don't conince you as of now. Some of them look a little silly and easy to dismiss, but that's because the popular formulationa that atheists have been shooting down are summaroes of Aquinas' full arguments that require knowlesge kf the rest of his metaphysics. I highly highly reccomend this book. I still think the Fourth Way is bunk (but I've heard I need to learn about Neoplatoniam to understand it), and as Feser is a Catholic he has some points where he argues for the immorality of abortion or libertarian free will that you and I would disagree with, but it is overall a definitive case for the Five Ways and the rest of our metaphysics. He weighs all the objections from philosophers like Hume.

So there's that. My favorite is the Argument from Motion. If you want to discuss any of this then you can PM me or Jaeil, who I still bug from time to time about theology. He's the authority around here on Leibniz and Aquinas. Hope that helped!

There's a lot we can unfold from this one question. I want to give you a thorough answer, but that means this will get long. I hope you'll hang with me here. :-)

First, we can still establish some widely accepted facts about the beginning of Christianity (such as the facts I listed for you) even if we consider the Gospel accounts unreliable. Historians can generally tell when Herodotus is embellishing to satisfy his desire for elements of karmic justice in his histories, or when Tacitus lets his pro-Roman bias get in the way of accuracy. Even with bias (which, let's be honest, all historians have) we can still extract facts and assign degrees of historical certainty to them. I think we have good reason to believe the Gospels are reliable (at least by the standards of their genre and period), but we don't have to agree on this in order to discuss the resurrection hypothesis.

Second, the dates usually assigned to the Gospels (between 30-70 years after Jesus's death, depending on whom you ask) are not as bad as you might think when you consider written history at that time. Liberal scholars agree that Mark was certainly written prior to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, at a time when many witnesses of Jesus would have still been alive and thus around to corroborate or refute the stories. We should also consider that some of Paul's letters show up even earlier, with his first letter to the Corinthian church being dated to around AD 55. And in this same letter, Paul preserved in written form a creed that formed part of the oral tradition surrounding early Christianity. It's extremely basic, unlike creeds that developed centuries later, but it does speak of the death, burial, resurrection, and post-resurrection appearances of Jesus. Most New Testament scholars pin this creed's origin down to AD 35 or so, within a few years of Jesus's death, which means that the Christian belief in the resurrection was already set down as oral tradition decades prior to the actual writing of the Gospel accounts.

(As an aside, I sometimes hear people raise the objection that it's hard to remember what happened last year, let alone 30 or 40 years ago. I would say that for the people who were closest to Jesus, the crucifixion and resurrection almost certainly formed flashbulb memories that remained vivid decades after the fact. I can't tell you what I had for lunch last Tuesday, but I can tell you all sorts of details about where I was and what I was doing during the events of September 11, 2001. I remember exactly where I was on the road when I heard the radio simulcast of Peter Jennings announcing that the first tower had collapsed, and I remember the shock and emotion in Jennings's voice. And that was what, 17 years ago? Major events like that have a strange way of sticking when ordinary events don't.)

Third, at this time in history the literacy rates were rather poor. Although the New Testament documents directly benefited from the universality of Koine Greek due to the conquests of Alexander the Great, the number of people who could read or write (according to an estimate I heard recently from Michael Licona) was around 10% and 3%, respectively. For this reason oral tradition was a highly developed skill, and the Jewish rabbinical oral tradition was especially advanced, with sects like the Pharisees priding themselves on being able to quote the entire Old Testament from memory. So naturally the early church, being mostly Jewish, relied on oral tradition when it started. Unlike a game of telephone, however, in which there is no error correction procedure, the oral tradition as used in Jewish and other Near/Middle Eastern cultures had constant opportunities for error correction as it was recited to audiences, and this helped to preserve the core facts accurately.

Fourth, the Gospels bear many marks of authenticity. That is to say, there are things in there you would not expect to see if they were forgeries. For example, take the traditional names of the Gospel authors. Why choose a minor disciple who was formerly a hated tax collector (Matthew), a student of Peter (Mark), and a student of Paul (Luke)? Why not go for the big names to assert your authority? (And in fact the later Gospels that we know to be forgeries, such as the Gospel of Peter, did this very thing.) Also, why include tough verses like Mark 6:5 or Mark 13:32, which make Jesus sound limited and less than omniscient? In a culture where men's testimony was valued far more than women's, why insist that the first people to discover the empty tomb were women? For that matter, why portray Jesus's closest followers as fleeing like cowards while the women remained at the cross? And of course, why leave in the contradictions that people still bring up today instead of taking the time to harmonize the accounts before publishing?

Finally, the New Testament documents are among the most (if not the most) copied documents of their time. Copying was important then for preservation—better to have as many copies as possible so that if some are destroyed you haven't lost everything. Copying is important today for error correction—thanks to the thousands of extant manuscripts, we can tell when verses or passages were added by scribes. The major modern translations either remove these sections entirely or set them off with brackets and provide a footnote indicating that the earliest and best manuscripts do not have that particular section. Despite not having any originals, the textual purity of the New Testament is established to the point that we can be certain that 99% of the words in a Greek New Testament match what was originally written, and the remaining 1% about which there is some debate do not affect any doctrinal issues. Even agnostic Bart Ehrman, who seems to get quoted a lot on this sub, agrees that essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants.

There are a few more dimensions we could add to this, but rather than take my word for it, you can get a more complete view from an actual scholar if you read Craig Blomberg's Historical Reliability of the Gospels. (I haven't personally read this book yet, but it's on my to-read list. I'm familiar with Craig's work through his contributions to other books, however.)

I am not discriminating against Christians by describing what the followers do. I am not denying them services, freedoms, or liberties. If I tried to do that, it would deny the liberties that I enjoy as well. There are major Christian organizations (AFA, AIG, FocusOnTheFamily, LivingWaters, Pat Robertson, etc...) that are perfect examples of what I'm describing. Yes it's obvious that not all Christians do this but I am upset by those that do because they believe it's in Yahweh's best interests.

Anthropologists and archaeologists generally believe the Israelites were once part of the Canaanites and often continued sharing culture and beliefs. There is a lot written on the subject in ancient anthropology in books that can present the findings better than me. I had assumed you already had heard about where Yahweh likely originated, just like the borrowed Sumerian & Babylonian flood and creation myths in the Bible, [Yahweh in the bible also has origins elsewhere.] (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33hIs38-NPE) There are resources explaining the [deities of Canaan and their origins.] (http://amzn.com/080283972X) These might be a little more advanced for armchair anthropologists, but they are informative.

>Wikipedia does not seem to agree with your authoritative stance on these issues.

When wikipedia becomes the goto for scholarship, let me know.

>Why wouldn't you mention this evidence, or give the sources about it?

Because the evidence is in entire books that you have to read through in order to understand it. Look into the authorship of the gospels and the research that various scholars have done... a lot of it is available online, I am sure, but I am not interested in doing the research for you. There are all sorts of things in the gospels that raise huge red flags as to who actually wrote them, like geographical errors, the fact that Jesus and his disciples spoke aramaic and not greek, errors in jewish custom, etc.

>Many first hand accounts are not written in the first person, and many first hand account include parts that the author was not present, but was informed about later. You are jumping to conclusion in the extreme.

I'm jumping to conclusions? You have a piece of writing that is completely anonymous. It doesn't claim to be an eye witness account. It has numerous scenes that could not have been witnessed by anyone, and numerous other scenes that when considered together make it obvious that no one person could have been the source. That doesn't even take into account the other research I am talking about. Even based on just this, the most obvious conclusion is that it was not written by an eye witness. There is literally no evidence that points to that conclusion. Yet you say I am the one jumping to conclusions? Right.

>A few, but one of the main reasons many weren't added, was because they doubted the authorship. It's good to know that they were vetting out the letters for authenticity, even in the very early church, wasn't it?

Actually there were dozens. And the way they determined if something was authentic was basically whether the writings matched their current beliefs or not. For example, at the council of Nicea, any gospels that portrayed Jesus as being more divine than human were left out. It wasn't about determining which document had the most credibility. They didn't have forensic investigatory methods to determine that stuff. It was almost exclusively about whether the document was heretic or not. The only reason that the gospels even have the names they do is because Papias gave them those names to make them more credible (things were seen as more credible if they had an apostle's name on it... such was the state of their credibility checks). The claim at that time was that Mark was a follower of Peter, not Jesus, and that he was not an eyewitness. Iraneus was the first to suggest that more than one gospel should be followed... before him, it would have been very unusual to follow the teachings of more than one.

>To say that the apostle John did not write John, simply because it was not written in the first person, and he probably didn't see absolutely everything he wrote about personally, is ludicrous.

I'm sorry, but we know with almost absolute certainty that none of the disciples wrote John. The vast majority of modern scholars believe (and teach in schools all across the world) that John was written later having been passed orally to different communities.

Here is a book by Christian scholar Richard Bauckham that tries to make the case that the gospels are based on eye witness testimony.

http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1295405950&sr=8-3

In fact, he only asserts that a single one of the Gospels was written direct by an eyewitness: the Gospel of John. However, he does not think he was a disciple, but instead just an unnamed follower. Credibility kind of goes out the window when you've narrowed it down to "an unnamed follower." As I said, he doesn't actually argue that the other three gospels are based on first or even second hand eye witness testimony, and he admits that most scholars won't agree with his view on John.

I can assure you that this is taught in seminaries around the world, and is accepted by scholars all over the world, christian or not.

I don't think these things can be asserted so confidently as what "we know" from the research of modern historians. It is true that there are many historians who see the gospels as deriving mainly from oral traditions several decades removed from the original events (not as legends, which is the view Lewis is attacking), many excellent historians who do think the gospel authors were or spoke with eyewitnesses, like Richard Bauckham, who makes the case in his book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses that the synoptics all derive closely from the testimony of both major and minor eyewitnesses, and that the author of the Gospel of John was himself an eyewitness. Lewis' assessment of the gospels as history, which he sees as falling within his own professional expertise ("I have read a great deal of legend" doesn't just refer to how he liked to spend his free time), remains perfectly defensible today. In fact, the 20th Century largely saw a move in biblical studies away from the hyper-critical views of the late 19th Century.

Let's stick to the firmament for a bit. Your authors are quite wrong on a number of counts.

Here's the definition of the Hebrew word from my condensed copy of BDB, considered the definitive Hebrew lexicon:

רָקִיעַ n.m. extended surface, (solid) expanse (as if beaten out) — firmamentum

1. (flat) expanse (as if of ice), as base, support.
   
2. the vault of heaven, or ‘firmament,’ regarded by Hebrews as solid, and supporting ‘waters’ above it.
   
   First, there's a few places in the Bible where the firmament is shown as clearly solid:
   
   http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=job%2037:18;%20Job%2022:14&version=HCSB
   
   (Note the verb translated "spread out" is the verb form of the word translated as firmament. In every use in the OT it means to beat out a solid thing. Here's two other uses of the verb form.)
   
   A bunch of guys got to go up there and see God on top of the firmament:
   http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ex%2024:9-10&version=HCSB
   
   Also Ezekiel's vision clearly shows his views of the solid dome God lives above:
   http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%201:22-25;%2010:1-2&version=HCSB
   
   At minimum this makes the claim that they didn't know of this cosmology seem silly. The same is true of the claim that it wasn't a common cosmology. We have good evidence for the summerian and canaanite and other groups.
   
   One of your other sources claims the Bible has birds fly in the firmament. That's not true, and it doesn't read that way in any modern translation, only those derived from the KJV. The verse in Genesis literally says "flies in front of the face of the firmament of the heavens". The word face is also used for the surface of the earth and other solid things, and a better translation is really "flies in front of the surface of the firmament of the heavens."
   
   
   Consider also where the fire comes from to burn up Elijah's offering, where the chariot of fire goes up to, Jacob's ladder, etc.
   
   There's tons more evidence, and if you want a book by a conservative Christian scholar on the issue, check out this one.
   
   He also wrote The Lost World of Genesis One where he deals with how he thinks this information should be used to change our understanding of the goal of the writers of Genesis. An essay version of the main points of his book is here.

>Since you seem to be the "Keeper Of All Things Aquinas" around here

The man has many fans, including atheists. Anthony Kenny and Mortimer Adler are both famous non-theists who nonetheless considered themselves Thomists. Ed Feser tells the story of his professor who was a militant atheist, but who readily acknowledged the brilliance of Aquinas, especially in light of the shittiness of modern Christian apologists.

Truly, if you love to hate Lee Strobel and other modern pop apologists, Aquinas will help you hate them even more.

>I would appreciate a recommendation for further reading.

This is the book to read. Don't touch the Summa raw. Without knowing the background assumptions, you'll read incorrect sensibilities into it that Aquinas never intended.

>I remember that you posted some videos a while back

Here. But they could be better, and I want to learn Flash and start from scratch. I don't think I explained things well enough.

> Do you agree that some metaphysics are better than others? That metaphysics can become outdated?

Some can be better than others, but that has nothing to do with their age. By definition, metaphysics doesn't make empirical claims(that is regular physics).

> if the total sum of the universe in terms of energy (matter cancelled by antimatter, heat + energy countered by gravity, etc) is zero.

Potential isn't conservation of energy, momentum, nor the increase in entropy(I did mechanical engineering in school). The division of matter and antimatter could have not happened or have happened differently. That is potential.

> Why do you use the word "decide" here?

Neil deGrasse Tyson used it too when he talked about nothing.

> This is not yet proven, but one day we may be able to say with almost absolute certainty that causality does not follow classical laws at the quantum level.

Causality along the time axis is only one such route of causes. In going from nothing to the universe, time itself must be caused much like the three spatial dimensions and the matter/energy they are causally tied to. We say God is timeless, not was or will be.

> would you like to quickly give me a short overview of A-T philosophy?

There are four causes to consider to really understand something. First, there are efficient causes, the way a thing got the way it is. This is what empirical science does the best with.

There is the final cause, the thing the object is directed or ordered toward. A seed is directed toward becoming an adult plant, the final cause of the reproductive system is to reproduce, etc. Dawkins waged a silly war on it.

Next, is the formal cause which is it's orientation, resolution of the degrees of freedom it possesses. Is a switch on or off. Finally, there is material cause. What a thing is made of.

As far as I can tell, the final cause is the biggest difference. A-T metaphysics can tell what a thing is supposed to do rather than just what it is or what would happen if certain things are done. So a Descartes type philosophy that denies final cause would only say a person has a certain germ and a certain drug will kill that germ, but can't say it's an illness. Really, words like disorder and medicine(restoration to it's ordered state) only really make sense in this kind of metaphysical system.

I don't know if I'm conveying it to you, but really, you need a book.

Reported? For what? Baffling...

A Universe from Nothing

>One of the few prominent scientists today to have crossed the chasm between science and popular culture, Krauss describes the staggeringly beautiful experimental observations and mind-bending new theories that demonstrate not only can something arise from nothing, something will always arise from nothing.

Of course, that's nonsense and he's been taken to task for his definition of "nothing" – but, yeah, he thinks "the Big Bang started from literally nothing..."

I'm honestly baffled why citing a scientist who premiumsalad claims doesn't exist is a problem for this sub. But, yeah, this will certainly be my last post here. Cheers.

> Many of these 'proofs' you mention are just oft repeated statements.

No, many of these "proofs" are agreed upon consensus from historians and biblical scholars. No offense but I'll take their word over some random guy/woman that IDK from the internet.

> I can find no references from historians or peer reviewed articles that support this view among new testament historians.

Really? Go read up on it. https://ehrmanblog.org/do-most-manuscripts-have-the-original-text/

>The manuscripts used to translate the ESV or the HCSB are wonderful translations directly from the earliest manuscripts. I honestly do not see any strange inconsistencies with the new testament.

Well, given that I've just recently finished up reading the ESV bible, I cannot understand how anyone, who's actually bothered to read the entire bible, can say that.

> The earliest manuscripts of Mark were written 7 years after the events of the gospel and I believe the parts that were in later manuscripts are true as well.

Again, not so. The consensus is that it was written ~30-40 yrs after Jesus's death.

http://www.bc.edu/schools/stm/crossroads/resources/birthofjesus/intro/the_dating_of_thegospels.html

>The thing we must all wonder is why? Why would these men die for something that they knew wasn't true.

This is a fallacy. Men will die for what they BELIEVE is true but that doesn't mean it is true. Happens all the time. 9/11 hijackers and Heavens Gate are two prominent examples. Just cause someone believes it true doesn't make it so. I use to believe Santa Clause was true. I had good reason to think so. Such as the yr we went away before Christmas only to come home and find presents under the tree. Even got into a fist fight over the whole "is Santa real?" discussion in grade school. Of course, it was later reveal that my parents had us simply wait in the car while they went back in the house to get something they "forgot". But I sure did BELIEVE that Santa was real.

>We have excellent historical accounts of these martyrs deaths and many many thousands more.

Again, not really. Only church tradition that I'm aware of. No contemporary accounts. If I recall correctly, the bible doesn't discuss their deaths either. But even if we did, that still doesn't prove their claims. And as far as "thousands" of martyrs, probably only in that it feed early christian's fetish for wanting to be like Jesus. There's actually no real evidence that there was this centuries long campaign to persecute christians. Hell, there is actual evidence that chrisitans DEMANDED to be persecuted. In one case, a group of christians went up to a Roman official demanding to be crucified only for him to basically say: LOL! Go home, you're drunk. There was another group (name escapes me) that would go on raids just hoping to be killed for Jesus. Very ISIS like. read up on by NT scholar Candida Moss.

> If you could get passed that you still can't explain the insanely fast spread of christianity from 12 men to millions in a few hundred years. No religion has seen such growth in so short a time.

Yea....'bout that...Doesn't seem to the the case. Islam spread far more quickly and rapidly than christianity did upon it's inception. And remember, christianity didn't necessarily spread out because of it's message but because of the sword. The Inquisitions, Crusades, Manifest Destiny, Salam witch hunts, etc. In some countries, like Ireland, it's still a crime to blaspheme Christianity. I think it was Seth Myers who was recently looking at 2 yrs in jail over there for that "crime". Hell, there was a kid just about 3 yrs ago that was basically brought up on blaspheme charges in Pennsylvania and sentenced for portraying himself receiving a BJ from a Jesus statue.

>My theory is that christianity especially in its earliest execution worked. It just worked. The miracles, the Holy spirit confirming, the whole thing worked, and people could see it for themselves.

I'll make you the same offer I make every christian who proclaims this. This is what Jesus allegedly said: He said to them, “Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.” Matt 17:20 (ESV)

If I see you walk outside and command a mountain to move in Jesus's name and it magically lifts up and flies off, I will give away everything I own to your church, done sackcloth and cover myself in ash. I will then go proclaim Jesus to the world myself.

To date, I've not had any takers but I sure have had a lot of apologetics and excuses given.

>Atheism requires far far more blind faith to believe than christianity.

No...No....that's not what it is. It's simply a rejection of your position that there is a god. Hell, you're an atheist for every god out there but one. I just happen to be an atheist for all the gods.

>Atheism is a religion, one that believes in chance.

No, again that's not what being an atheist is. I don't worship anyone/thing. There's no dogman associated with being an atheist. No religious text or rituals.

>Do the math. Do you know the odds of a universe coming into existance out of nothing? It's zero. Out of nothing, nothing comes.

How did you determine this? How did you determine that the universe came out of "nothing"? Because, to my knowledge, no-one knows that answer. But the fact is that a universe can come out of "nothing" but "nothing" isn't what you think it is. Yea, it's complicated. I've listened to the book a
few times on Audible and I think I have a grasp of it. But it's a pretty bold statement you're making there and I'll challenge you to tell me how you know what the initial conditions were at that time. It's the same reason I disagree with Stephen Hawkings reasoning on why he doesn't believe in a god. In short, time began when the universe did so therefore, there was no time for a god to exist in. Now I don't pretend to be on his level of intellegence but I would LOVE to sit down and discuss it with him and I would ask him the same I'm asking you: How do you know?

That aside, improbable things happen all the time. For example, what do you think is the probability of a specific leaf falling off a tree on a trail out in the middle of the woods in central Russia and hitting me in the face on Oct 12th, 2032 at 2:34:43PM? I would argue that the probability is so low as to be zero. You surely wouldn't make a bet of it I'm sure. However, it CAN happen, correct?

>The chicken very obviously must have come before the egg.

Nope, the egg came long before the chicken ever evolved. Dinosaurs laid them. We even have some fossilized dino eggs.

>Causes do not come from effects.

Ok. So what caused your god to come into being?

Well as I understand it there are a number of different kinds of multiverses that can exist. The one with the strongest evidence comes out of understanding of the inflation theory which is the currently widely accepted theory that fits with our observations. Inflation caused our universe to expand very rapidly shortly after its creation. After a short while that inflation stopped and created the universe that we see today.

However that stopping of inflation did not happen everywhere. We just happen to exit in a place where it did stop. Our pocket of reality exists in a still expanding...well I have no idea what that is, but whatever it is it is still expanding faster than the speed of light. From time to time other parts of the expanding...umm thing... will stop expanding and another universe will pop out. The point is that all these universes would be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light so there is no way they could interact with one another.

All of that comes as a natural consequence of our current theories of inflation which have substantial evidence to back them up. They are not proven, but they are our best current understanding. Other theories of multiuniverses come from string theory which I believe strive to be internally consistent but aren't backed by any physical evidence or observations.

Edit: I only know this because I just got done reading A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. I'm an atheist but the book is too preachy for my taste. It's author Lawrence M. Krauss says the book came about from debates with theist and it shows. I wish it had stuck with the straight physics instead of diverging from time to time into discussions like would be found on this subreddit. Still, if you want to know more I'd suggest picking it up.

yep, this book Did Jesus Exist is pretty convincing in terms of other historical documents that Jesus was a historical human being. Not all the stories about him are true, notably the Nicodemus "you must be born again" story -- the confusion about being born through your mother again is only true in Greek and Jesus would have spoken Aramaic so that story most certainly did not happen.

Glad I could offer some perspective. I think a key factor in Old Earth interpretation is that one need not choose between accepting Genesis the way it's written and accepting scientific evidence. Old Earth Creationism is 100% accurate to genesis.

If it's a topic you like learning about (even if you ultimately decide that Young Earth is the better interpretation) this book is a good one to look for in the local library (or buy it, it's fairly cheap).

These type of "objections" have been raised a dime a dozen and frankly its getting boring dealing with them. However, I'm in a good mood so lets go. Before I start, I'm a doctor so when I read "the oldest of those dying the painful death of having their teeth rot out of their skull" I just had to ask, what the heck is that????

Ok moving on. Dealing with Genesis, we have to deal with the Hermeneutics of the book itself. It can be said that the book is written in a poetry style and was meant not to educate people about the way the universe formed, but rather to demonstrate that Yahweh was above all that they had worshipped as Gods (sun, moon, stars). If you are into reading, John Lennox's Seven Days that Divide the world could help shed some light on how Christians view Genesis. Not every Christian is Ken Ham in the same way that not every atheist is Josef Stalin.

Before I move on to the next part of your rant, I would like to ask. You mentioned "Heaven, completely capable of intervening, watches this with total indifference." Why does this bother you?

Sauces...Ah, can I just refer you to a book?

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham

Jesus was a very common name indeed. That's why you often see disambiguation when Jesus' name is referred to in conversation but not in narrative (because which other Jesus would they be talking about?):

> Matthew 21:6--The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them.
>
> Matthew 21:11--And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.”
>
> Matthew 21:12--And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.

And then a few chapters later:

> Matthew 26:64--Jesus said to him, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
>
> Matthew 26:69--Now Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard. And a servant girl came up to him and said, “You also were with Jesus the Galilean.”
>
> Matthew 26:71--And when he went out to the entrance, another servant girl saw him, and she said to the bystanders, “This man was with Jesus of Nazareth.”
>
> Matthew 26:75--And Peter remembered the saying of Jesus, “Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.” And he went out and wept bitterly.

But that one is supposed to be easy, because Jesus was a fairly common name (6th most popular in Palestine among Jews). However, outside of Palestine, Jesus was not a common name at all. So would someone outside of Palestine 150 or so years later know to do this kind of disambiguation if they were making up this story? Possibly, but it's unlikely.

The name of John the Baptist is also disambiguated in John 14 in much the same way.

I mention this because if the Gospels are not eyewitness accounts, they use person names very convincingly. The apocryphal gospels, on the other hand, use names in very wacky ways, for example, the Gospel of Thomas's main character is a dude named Didymos Judas Thomas, which means Twin Judas Twin, and no one used names that way back then.

What's also interesting is that in the NT Gospels (early to mid 1st century, except for John which was written probably later 1st century), Jesus is called Jesus. In the Gospel of Philip (mid 2nd century), he's still called Jesus, but he is mostly referred to as "Christ". And then in the Gospels of Peter (late 2nd century) and Mary (late 2nd century), the name "Jesus" isn't even present. Instead you have mainly "Lord" and "Savior".

So yeah, someone in the 2nd century probably had no idea what were the common names in the 1st century among Jewish Palestinians. But the gospels, which were supposedly written so late, gets those kinds of names right. Without the internet.

Perhaps this is not a debate point, but if you're really interested, you should check a book by John Lennox called Seven Days that Divide The World. I think it has some very strong claims that address your claims. There are some lectures of his on Youtube on his book, as well. I'll come back and answer you later today!

Look at what's available to you. Read some things. Attend churches that focus less on it being a religion and more so it being a relationship with God. Talk to the pastors there about your issues with Christianity. Make it a priority in your life to find truth. Go where the evidence takes you. No matter where it does, you're going to have to take a leap of faith since no side can be proven totally 100% true.

I recommend Lee Strobel's Case for a Creator, and Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek's I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist, The Apologetic's Study Bible, The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels by J. Warner Wallace, and really just Apologetics in general

Holy shit, dude. That sounds like the exact opposite of fun. If they've got something important to say, then summarize it here.

Just for fun, why don't you read Misquoting Jesus or The History of God, if you're not afraid to expose yourself to some scholarship that will challenge your most cherished illusions.

>What was? What precise archaeological find conclusively proves that the Bible is false?

The list is endless. Actually read books. Here is a good place to start:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Bible-Unearthed-Archaeologys-Ancient/dp/0684869136.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3873.A_History_of_God

And as I said not only the archaelogy. The bible itself shows YHWH was a tribal god.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/faithpromotingrumor/2010/03/god-gods-and-sons-and-daughters-of-god-in-the-hebrew-bible-part-iii/


>Yes, and I refuted your claim with my list of authors, who were eye witnesses.

Are you daft? The books are anonymous!!! Take 5 minutes on google to see who actually wrote the gospels. What evidence do you have that matthew wrote matthew?

>Many times.

Then why would you think mark is an eyewitness? Why do you think even christian scholars admit they are not eyewitness accounts?

>I'm not asking that you grant it is true (yet).

You already did.

>I'm asking that you grant it is possibly true, and interpret the evidence in the light of that position, and opposed to refusing to consider whether it might possible be true and mis-interpreting the evidence as a result.

Nowhere did I do this. You are very desperate now. I once held your views. They don't stand up to scrutiny. For crying out loud you tried to argue that god created light en route or that the bible decpetively is written from the reference point of traveling .999999*C. REAALLY! That's not just mis-interpreting the evidence that's just lying to yourself and everyone else.

I would recommend reading The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, not because I'm trying to convert you but I do think there are a lot of good points brought up by a lot of Ivy League PhD scholars. The more knowledge the better, even if you still find it insufficient

> I consider myself a recovering atheist, and on most days believe Jesus Christ, or more appropriately for me, Joshua, was a real person who had, for the most part, some pretty awesome things to say.

So he was a real person?

The Case for Christ - Once past the first chapter or so, this book falls into stride, and has interviews with lots of really intelligent people. As a former athiest, seeing/interacting with people more intelligent than myself that are Christians was the largest contributing factor to me opening up to the idea of God. Either way, bravo for at least wanting to see what all the fuss is about!

Two thoughts. First, if you are interested in a scholarly work that refutes Ehrman et al, here is one you can check out.

Second, "what is true"?

A painting [generally] isn't photorealistic. It has all sorts of things that aren't accurate in it. In some senses, it isn't "true." But the difference between it and reality also serve a function. Because of these differences, the artist is able to communicate a message. The artist didn't make something photorealistic because he wasn't trying to. Instead, he was trying to communicate something.

Ancient biographers approached their work in much the same way. They were completely uninterested in doing modern biography, where you lay aside all bias and present the facts in precise chronological order. They felt free to play around with details (especially of chronology and geography, and especially by mixing and matching different speeches) to present a picture that they thought most accurately painted the life, personality, and core teachings of their subject. In some ways they treated biography more like literature than journalism. So when you ask "what time precisely did Jesus die [or what order did he call the disciples, or did he clear the temple at the beginning or end of his ministry, etc...]" my answer is:

The Gospel authors weren't concerned with communicating that. So I'm not going to evaluate them the way I evaluate modern biography. I will evaluate whether or not they were accurate in the things they were trying to be accurate in. But those weren't details like chronology and geography.

Referencing Steve132's hierarchy of evidence from earlier in this thread it seems you wish to judge evidence that is properly in category 3 (legal/historical) as if it were supposed to be in category 2 (scientific/repeatable). Every record of a miracle is the record of an individual person's action, whether that person is God or someone acting through Him. We can use category 2 evidence to say that it is very unlikely that someone could be raised from the dead. However, that likelihood is unhelpful if there is a claim that it actually happened, because unlikely events happen all the time. In order to determine if an unlikely event which is claimed to have happened has actually happened we have to turn to forensic and historical evidence. There is extremely good historical evidence that Jesus Christ was resurrected, and it's unreasonable to simply say "there is no evidence" if you haven't even examined books like N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God or John Lennox's Gunning for God: Why the New Atheists Are Missing the Target

>The intellectual knowledge of God is completely reliant on faith.

Er, no-- faith is emotional or revelatory knowledge of God. Intellectual knowledge of God comes from rational argumentation-- philosophy and theology, basically (Thomism, Neoplatonism, etc.)

>What incontrovertible evidence do we have that God exists?

I'm not sure what you mean by incontrovertible but there is evidence in many of these arguments' premises. I would start with a list of arguments for the existence of God. I'm partial to Thomas Aquinas and his philosophy (Summa contra Gentiles, Summa Theologica, and On Being and Essence) expounded on and explained by philosophers like Edward Feser. If you're interested in actually examining the evidence, look into them-- don't simply write them off at first, or examine them through the lens of a critic.

There's a list here, although I find some of them, naturally, faulty.

> Evolution does not necessarily predict useless organs (although some do exist that are nearly so)

Yes it did. It seems you aren't well versed in the history of your theory. Like I said earlier, the evidence of this mistake is found in all the missing appendixes from surgeries not dealing with the appendix at all. If you really want me to I can find biology books that define vestigial as useless. That's neither here nor there. Why neo-darwin evolution is harmful because it first assumes things are left over evolutionary artifacts when it first appears so. It takes convincing to think otherwise. This train of thought has not only been consistently wrong, but also very harmful.

> If this is the case, then this is a rather poor example of falsifiability.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say you don't have a phd in the philosophy of science. Therefore I'm going to point you to an authority on the matter.

Dr. Bradley Monton wrote a book on this subject Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design

> Can you elaborate on the first bit about distinguishing living from non-living?

ID infers design by detecting CSI. From the FAQ: Living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals fail to qualify as living because they lack complexity; mixtures of random polymers fail to qualify because they lack specificity. [ L.E. Orgel, 1973. The Origins of Life. New York: John Wiley, p. 189. Emphases added.]

> Can you point out any single adjustment ID has undergone based on observations?

Why does an adjustment need to be made? There is room for adjustments, for example we may need to refine the algorithm we use to calculate CSI. Just because one may or may not have happened is inconsequential.

> As far as I can tell, front loading is an absolutely unproven hypothesis that in no way refines previous theory.

It's progressive.I thought that's what you asked for?

> If ID were open to experimental checking, then it would have admitted to being incorrect a long time ago. Whether by the fossil record that clearly shows numerous transitional species

First of all, ID is not incompatible with common descent. You mis-understand these very simple things because you, like most are unfamiliar with ID. Good news is it's in the FAQ which you and everyone else pretty much refuses to read. ID is a theory about the cause of complex biological information. Common descent (CD) is a theory about the modalities of implementation of that information. They are two separate theories about two different aspects of the problem, totally independent and totally compatible. In other words, one can affirm CD and ID, CD and Darwinian Evolution, or ID and not CD. However, if one believes in Darwinian Evolution, CD is a necessary implication.

Aside from that, if we went from bacteria, plankton, and algae to trilobite and brachiopods then new body plans and organs would have had to been created. These transitions should be evident in the fossil record. The darwinian model of evolution requires small and gradual changes thus demands an abundance of transitional forms between species. Yet the fossil record remains silent on this, rather than an abundance we have a dearth. The fossil record shows what happened -- an abrupt appearance of distinct and novel body plans. This supports the notion that quantum level programming was behind it all. Also classifying the so called transitional fossils may say more about our classification system than it does about any apparent lineage.

> or by vestigial traits such as the detached, minuscule, and useless leg bones found in many species of whales

Again, an evolution of the gaps type argument. Just like cave dwelling fish, there is most likely DNA in whales that's waiting to be turned back on when selection demands it. Vestigial? Maybe so, but probably only temporarily.

> This is a pretty weak assertion. By contrast, it is easy to point to internal leaked documents that show the outright religious objective of groups like the Discovery Institute, as well as the simple cut/paste manner in which certain ID documents were lifted from creationist texts.

ID and Creationism share some things in common, no doubt. They both start with the premise of a designer. However, where they branch off is ID doesn't base it's science off the bible but empirical evidence. It doesn't try to fit the bible into what it observes. This is evident by concepts such as front loading.

Sure! A History of God by Karen Armstrong. Fascinating book.

http://www.amazon.com/History-God-000-Year-Judaism-Christianity/dp/0345384563

>lack of evidence

If you are interested in re-evaluating your position, I recommend a 700 page argument for the historicity of the resurrection of Christ. It might be more informative than a reddit conversation.


The Resurrection of the Son of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 3


http://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Christian-Origins-Question-Vol/dp/0800626796


What (other than prejudice) would keep you from reading it?

>So then according to early israelite/canaanite belief, yahweh and satan were brothers?(as they are boths sons of el and asharia)

It's possible, but we don't really have any manuscript support for that notion. We do know that Satan appears in later Israelite religion as one of the sons of elohim. Some scholars suggest that the Canaanite god shachar may have been the equivalent of Satan, but other scholars dispute that.

I would recommend the Early History of God for context on ancient Israelite mythology.

Honestly, I'm not one hundred percent up to speed on more than the basics of essentialism, though David Oderberg seems to have no compunctions about accepting both evolution and essentialism in the later chapters of his book on the topic: https://www.amazon.com/Essentialism-Routledge-Studies-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/041587212X?SubscriptionId=AKIAILSHYYTFIVPWUY6Q&tag=duckduckgo-d-20&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=041587212X

Then we have papers like this which seem to take the question right be the horns: https://www.academia.edu/23058295/Aristotelian_Essentialism_Essence_in_the_Age_of_Evolution

Tacitus' words on the crucifixion of Christ are widely considered accurate. Josephus and Mara bar Serapion also record events surrounding Christ and the crucifixion. As a result of these and other evidences historical scholars (regardless of personal theistic position) agree that the person referenced as Jesus C hrist by us moderns did in fact exist.

There is ... vigorous argument around the veracity of the core of the four gospels. I found Cold-Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels very interesting because an atheist cold-case forensic analyst set out to prove the Gospels were false. Instead he became convinced they are factual eyewitness accounts.

>Single point... a very hot and dense... already existing... single point... which rapidly expanded (the expansion being the Big Bang).

Ahh gotcha, so this is what you're talking about asking for proof the universe began.

Then I'd recommend the following further reading:

A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking
The Inflationary Universe by Alan Guth

>Universe was not created per evidence.

There's a high level primer here.

Yep, I recommend misquoting jesus. It talks in depth about the translation issues in the Bible.

https://www.amazon.com/Misquoting-Jesus-Story-Behind-Changed/dp/0060859512

There's a book that I believe does a decent job of tackling this subject. In it, the author addresses the order of creation, the meaning of 'days', as well as many other topics.

He's also written another book that tackles the silly notion that science and faith cannot coexist.

I know this is not really conducive to debate, but I thought it pertinent to bring these books to everyone's attention.

>I'm in no way saying that it is wrong because I do not know and in fact Hawking does not know if that is reality.

Actually this is just math. We do know that universes can create themselves, and we do know that with an infinite number of trials
every possibility will occur an infinite number of times.

Your "contingency" argument can be dismissed out of hand. That's just First Cause in new fish wrap. Prove the universe is contingent. Explain why God is not. Philosophy has no application to the origin of the universe anyway. That's a scientific question, not a philosophical one. Theoretical physicists are not stumped by apologetic pseudo-philosophy.

>I do not know that it was ever possible for nothing to exist. By occam's razor though it does seem as the simpler state. I would be interested to read what you have read that says quantum physics tells us that pure nothingness cannot exist because at this point I've never heard anything like that.

Lawrence Krauss A Universe from Nothing

Lecture available on youtube

It's backed up by a lack of evidence to the contrary and a myriad of evidence for the positive claim. Read Fitzgerald's Nailed to start with if you want to see what I'm backing up my conclusion with. Feelings have absolutely nothing to do with it; if I made conclusions based on feelings and emotions I'd still be a Christian.

1. I know James Barham is an atheist philosopher who ascribes to ID. As he wrote: "What is certain is that the Darwinian explanatory framework is logically confused and scientifically superficial with respect to the phenomena of normativity, teleology, and agency. Darwinism is a gigantic obstacle obscuring these important problems from our view, and I doubt we will make much progress towards solving them so long as Darwinian dogma retains its death grip on the minds of so many."
   
2. Philosopher and mathemetician David Berlinski, although having Jewish heritage, is an agostic, religion critic, and ID proponent.
   
3. While not a subscriber to ID, atheist Bradley Monton wrote a book defending ID as valid science.
   
4. There's also atheists Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, who wrote What Darwin Got Wrong. From their interview on salon.com: "Creationism isn't the only doctrine that's heavily into post-hoc explanation. Darwinism is too. If a creature develops the capacity to spin a web, you could tell a story of why spinning a web was good in the context of evolution. That is why you should be as suspicious of Darwinism as of creationism. They have spurious consequence in common. And that should be enough to make you worry about either account."
   
   When reading the profiles of ID'ers creation scientists, I frequently find conversions from atheism, deism, and theistic evolution, often only after years of research in their fields. Conversely, the deconversions I read occur at the beginning years of university, after young students reject the sham Hovind-style creationism being taught by people who know nothing about science. Senior NASA climatologist Roy Spencer described the trend:
   
   > Twenty years ago, as a PhD scientist, I intensely studied the evolution versus intelligent design controversy for about two years. And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as 'fact,' I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism. ... In the scientific community, I am not alone. There are many fine books out there on the subject. Curiously, most of the books are written by scientists who lost faith in evolution as adults, after they learned how to apply the analytical tools they were taught in college.
   
   Conversely, TalkOrigin's list of creationist deconversions is all high school and college kids. Seemingly because they encountered the tree of life, junk dna, and haeckel's embryology diagrams in the texbooks and were convinced by such "overwhelming evidence".
   
   
   
   

You should check out this book. Even if you disagree with it after finishing it, you'll have learned a great deal about the current state of our knowledge of cosmology and where it's going.

If you want to verify what why_am_I_here2 has referenced, you can pick up this book:


Karen Armstrong's "A History of God"


Alternatively, an atheist youtube series covers some of the content of the book in his videos:


3.3.3 Atheism: A History of God (Part 1)

Here is a documentary done by the History Channel on the same book:


A History of God

Nowadays we would use the term "plagiarized", but at the time the Israelites/Hebrews were transitioning from polytheistic worship to monolatrous worship, and then eventually (much later on, during their exile in Babylon if I recall correctly) their form of worship shifted further into monotheism.

The origins of the Israelites are unclear, but one thing that is obvious is that they were intimately associated with (what we nowadays call) the Canaanites:

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Canaanite_Religion

http://fontes.lstc.edu/~rklein/Documents/mosesone.htm

They might have originally been Canaanites, they might have been the lowest levels of the earlier Bronze-Age Canaanite society, they might have been invaders who did indeed conquer and then adapted Canaanite culture for their own purposes.

https://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/article_canaan_bimson.html

Some have suggested that the origins of the Israelites may have been among the "Sea People" who apparently invaded much of the Mediterranean area and brought many advanced (for that time) civilizations down. However, if the origins of the Israelites were among a sea-faring people, the later Israelites showed a woeful lack of knowledge about ships and sailing, as especially demonstrated in their version of the "Ark" story.

For that matter, the very name of the Isra - EL - ites contains the name of the much older EL of the Canaanite polytheistic grouping of gods.

http://contradictionsinthebible.com/are-yahweh-and-el-the-same-god/

http://thetorah.com/who-was-balaams-god/

It also appears that many common Hebrew names contained "EL", too: http://www.abarim-publications.com/NaLi/2plusEl.html#.XFyKZExFyUm

You might be interested in checking out these two books (if you haven't already read them):

https://www.amazon.com/Did-God-Have-Wife-Archaeology/dp/0802863949

https://www.amazon.com/Early-History-God-Biblical-Resource/dp/080283972X

[edit to change 'which' to 'who']

That's not true. There's polytheism written all over the old testament. You've probably never read A History of God by Karen Armstrong.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0345384563

No, I meant like this:

https://www.amazon.ca/Did-Jesus-Exist-Historical-Argument/dp/0062204602

Nothing in that article makes me think Ehrman doesn’t believe what he’s saying.

Enough to write a whole book.

http://www.amazon.com/Universe-Nothing-There-Something-Rather/dp/1451624468

Both of these books discuss it:

A History of God

The Bible: a biography

It's not stupid at all. When you're dealing with a text that is (parts of it, anyway) roughly 3,500 years old (assuming the pentateuch was completed in roughly 1,500 BCE) AND wasn't available for wide release until the creation of the printing press in the mid-15th century during which time illiteracy was the norm and- until that point- was copied by scribes, then of course you have to wonder about the veracity of today's bible.

I read a really interesting book called Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman that helped me understand this very problem. Note: he is a biblical scholar and practicing Christian, lest you think this is an attack on the bible.

That's not much of an argument. A better source. Here's a book by a christian theologian that talks about the history of God. I still find it surprising she remains christian after this, but shes a theologian. Most theologians find evidence to contradict their beliefs but ignore it anyway.

Delusion for sure.

No, the null hypothesis is "we don't know".
God(s) did it is a claim, as is it sprang into existence on its own. There is some evidence for the latter (1, 2)

Check out this book

You don't have to buy it. Click on "Look inside" and there's a large portion of it available for free as a sample. The table of contents has a section called "Did Jesus Really Rise From the Dead?" which you can click on and read through the chapter. The points range from proving that Jesus absolutely did die, the reliability of the NT account, and eye witness accounts not connected with, and sometimes opposed to, Christianity.

Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman.

Also Ehrman responds to Richard Carrier here

The "Jesus" of Christianity is largely fabricated, I agree.

But, reading Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman convinced me that Jesus of Nazareth existed, taught stuff, and was crucified under Pontius Pilate.

I like what ex-Evangelical blogger Neil Carter says about the historicity of Jesus:

>When climate change deniers want to insist that our actions have no impact on global temperatures, they display a remarkable disdain for an entire discipline populated by credentialed professionals in that field who say otherwise.  It doesn’t seem to bother the deniers that they themselves have no specialization in the academic field they disparage because in any field of study there will always be at least some small contingent who go against the consensus.  The existence of those outliers is justification enough for the deniers to say, “This business is far from certain, you know.  Just look at these four people who disagree!”
>
>That’s how I feel when people in the skeptic community argue that Jesus never existed.  They are dismissing a large body of work for which they have insufficient appreciation, most often due to the fact that they themselves have never formally studied the subject.

​

Honestly, I don't remember the evidence that Bart Ehrman brought up to prove that Jesus was real. But Ehrman is an agnostic NT scholar who vociferously opposes those who deny the existence of Jesus. Most scholars agree that Jesus at least existed, and Ehrman explains why.

Interesting article. I appreciate his points. I may have fallen into the error that he describes of quoting people when I haven't taken the time to checkout their sources (or else misquoting them).

I disagree with your first paragraph.

I disagree with his dismissal of "Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Author of Hebrews, James, Peter, and Jude." with the exception of Paul. When he starts to dismiss Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Lucian, then I think that it doesn't pass the smell test. I suspect that he will dismiss anyone, no matter what. A priori.

And then of course, there are counter references: http://www.bethinking.org/jesus/ancient-evidence-for-jesus-from-non-christian-sources

As far as I can tell, the historical reliability of the gospels is well established. There are a number of books, articles, etc, etc. that are convincing enough for me. (I've just put a random one below). If the gospels are reliable historically, then there are 4 more witnesses for Jesus' life.

https://www.amazon.ca/Historical-Reliability-Gospels-Craig-Blomberg/dp/0830828079


but I have to get back to my real job now and do some work ...

Depends on what you mean by "literal." I'm partial to John Walton's approach. He argues that Genesis one is describing the assigning of functions in the temple opening ceremony of the cosmos, NOT the material creation of the universe. If that is so, and with the insights pointed out by mynuname regarding the logic behind the structure of the assignments, there is no scientific problem. This reading is "literal," but it is with an awareness of the historical context in which Genesis was written. For more on this see: http://www.amazon.com/The-Lost-World-Genesis-One/dp/0830837043

>> “Elyon”, translated “the Most High”, is probably a separate god from “Yahweh”
>
> Why?

You act as if Basilides has simply pulled all this out of thin air, as if no biblical scholar in their right mind would think Yahweh was originally one of many sons of El in the ancient pantheon. But this theory is not as off-the-wall as some believers might think.

While such an idea might seem outrageous to you as a believer, try to withold your contempt based on unwarranted certainty. There's a whole world out there beyond the believers perspective. Embrace it.

Jesus lived a life here on Earth, He died on a cross for our sins and was resurrected from the dead. That isn't a delusion, it is a historical fact which can be verified by examining the evidence. I recommend this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Cold-Case-Christianity-Homicide-Detective-Investigates/dp/1434704696

I'm just gonna post a link to the amazon review page for his book. You should probably take the time to read some of the negative reviews (some which come from atheists) which claim that he uses very poor historical methods and also fails to mention information that is highly relevant but doesn't support his side. I haven't read his book but I doubt it is a scholarly endeavor

User Basilides answers your eyewitness claim eloquently:

> "...one of the things Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses) proposes is that the Twelve Apostles are named in order to identify them as eyewitnesses and also that the twelve were responsible for assuring the accuracy of the gospel narratives. But if that were true, how is it (As Stephen J. Patterson noted in his review: "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses," Review of Biblical Literature; 2010, Vol. 12, p365-369)
that we ended up with four wildly divergent accounts? If the Twelve took it upon themselves to "peer review" the manuscripts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, then whence so many discrepancies?

> I have already pointed to plenty of bullshit in the gospels. As Richard Carrier pointed out in his essay on the Resurrection, why is it that no one else in history noticed the tearing of the temple veil mentioned in Mark's passion narrative, not even the priests whose sole duty was attendance of the veil? Also see my previous post on the subject of gospel reliability here. Fact is, either the gospels are not based on eyewitness testimony or the eyewitnesses are pathological liars. Neither hypothesis is encouraging for someone arguing the resurrection."

> Was Jesus Raised: Reliability and Authorship of NT Documents

The claims of an eyewitness account are extremely shaky.

> bottled in the same plant

Are the factory codes the same? The factory codes on the can would be the analogy to the oxygen ratios of the rocks.

> Evidence?

Do you have evidence they witnessed it? Let's see it.

> commonplace for people to write down history

Not only do we have many manuscripts from that time, but we are talking about a singularly unique event: Re-animated corpses wandering around the town for days. And no one wrote a single page about it? Writing was indeed common then, so why don't we have documentation of it?

> Tacitus' Annals ... yet no one questions his authenticity

No extraordinary claims are made. We don't really have a reason to doubt them. I'm sure we could dig up someone who would disagree with their historical accuracy. How is this relevant to the veracity of the resurrection claim?

> Few objects of that sort survive this long.

The most important figure to ever walk the earth is crucified, and there are no relics of his life left behind? There are no souvenirs? We have manmade relics that date back thousands of years before Christ. They survived the ages just fine.

> Faith is the evidence of things not seen.

Faith by its very definition is gullibility. It is belief without evidence. It is belief without reason. People had "faith" in the god Mithra long before Jesus was around (6 BC). They had the exact same evidence you have. Born on the 25th of December to a virgin, witnessed by shepherds who followed a star, known as the son of god, could raise the dead, cure the blind and sick, sacrificed at the spring equinox (Eostre or Easter), rose up after three days and ascended into paradise. Get this, followers would even 'eat' their god in the form of wafers and bread marked with a cross. Followers even spoke of a judgement day when 'sinners' and the 'unbaptized' would be dragged into darkness.

Sounds pretty familiar right? These followers had just as much evidence and faith as you. Why are they wrong, and you are right?

Sorry it has taken me a little while to respond. It seems that in many of my discussions with people over evidences for Christianity, we disagree strongly on what counts as evidence. I am curious, do you think that evidence is subjective? Can something be evidence for me and not for you?

Thanks for responding to my points. Let me give some responses to your pushback

1. You can disagree with me about the supposed accuracy of the gospels. I agree this subject has been extensively written on and discussed from both sides. Again if you are interested in a scholarly defense of the gospels, I would point you to The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.
   
   As to your statement,
   
   > accuracy is no measure of truth
   
   I am not really sure what you mean by this statement. If you mean that the gospels accuracy is representing the life and words of Jesus does not mean that what Jesus says and later interpretations of his acts and words were true, then I agree. However, if the gospels are accurate in representing Jesus life and death, then the empty tomb and reported resurrection must be accounted for.
   
   
2. Again we might not be using the term evidence in the same way.
   
   > Why does that rise to the standard of evidence? That would mean there is no other possible > explanation of events, other than his actual resurrection, right?
   
   I have yet to hear another explanation of the empty tomb, the reported sightings by the disciples and followers of Jesus and the uniform pronouncement of the early church as to the bodily resurrection of Jesus which is a alternate viable alternative. I would recommend The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright if you are interested in further reading in this area.
   
   
3. Humans are capably of incredible good and selfless acts, but also capable of intense acts of evil. I believe that are natural bent is toward selfish behavior which is naturally evil. Look at a two or three year old and you will see the natural ego-centric and selfish behavior towards which human behavior is inclined. Christianity provides a viable explanation for why this is true of humans and accounts for the existence of evil.
   
   Beyond that point, the existence of a category which we call evil demands an external standard by which good and evil can be measured. A moral law demands a moral law giver. See Mere Christianity by CS Lewis.
   
   
4. By no means am I trying to use the argument, "I don't believe in evolution, therefore God exists." That would be a vast over simplification and a terrible argument. I would identify myself as a proponent of some form of Theistic Evolution. However, I don't think that evolutionary theory has provided a satisfactory answer to the origin of the universe. How did it start? Why is something here instead of nothing?
   
   
5. Again, I am not making the claim that "Something is happening, therefore God exists." I am simply saying that transformed lives are an evidence of something happening in that persons life which needs to be accounted for. You can appeal to drugs, social pressures, etc.. but it must be accounted for somehow.
   
   I hope this provides some clarifications. Also, I am listed many books as references. I would be happy to read (or at least skim) anything which you would recommend in this area.