Evidence: In argument.

Thank you Dan for your very well thought out post. I'm glad to see you're out in full force!

Before I get into my retort, I want to address that we are starting to get into a game of "Who can do more research than who." Which I think is going to get us into a downward spiral of endless debate, and not at all my intent of this blog. That's exactly why I try to keep specific religions out of it. At some point, we're going to have to agree to disagree.

That being said, I'll try to address your arguments.

1. "I'm having a hard time with this, Mike. On one hand you concede that the 66 books of the Bible were penned by ~40 different authors over the course of ~1,500 years, yet your assertions belie your concession of these facts because they either presume collusion between the authors or some sort of conspiracy to edit all 39 books of the Old Testament and 27 of the NT into harmony with one another. The former is quite literally impossible given the time frame we're talking bout and the latter is rather preposterous in the light of the manuscript evidence against that argument. So really, it's actually quite arbitrary to discount the validity of 66 books just because they are bound under one cover." 


I'm not arguing anything about conspiracies or some formal setting where people over hundreds of years sat down to put a book together.  You are missing my whole point, which I'll try to make a little clearer.  Instead of saying, "The Bible is true because it says it is." maybe I should say you are making the argument, "Christianity is true because it says it is." or "Jesus is the son of God, because he says he is."  It's all referring to the same belief system.  You are arguing, "My belief is true, because what I believe in tells me it's true."  It's a circular argument.  If I tell you I am God, you can't logically argue that I am because I say I am regardless of how many people believed me.  I've explained this several times, and I'm not sure how else to tell you.


"If it claims to be true and it demonstrates itself to be historically reliable and internally consistent, what rational reason would we have to discount its testimony of itself? " We are talking about an invisible man in the sky, who we've never seen. He sent his son, who is also himself, to perform miracles, tell us how we can also go to the sky instead of burning underground.  This son not only raised the dead, but came back from the dead himself. This all happened 2000 years ago or more, in a time when people had no other reasoning to explain the unknown world then to attribute it to supernatural forces. I'm calling shenanigans.  It sounds ridiculous to me, and that is why I discount it's testimony.  It is NOT historically reliable (as I eluded to in my last post about getting the dates wrong about the census). And I can write a whole post with examples on how it isn't internally consistent. If Jesus is the son of God, there needs to be proof other than the hearsay of people who couldn't explain the world without the use of superstition.
Of course parts of the Bible are true.  We have archaeological evidence to back up that there were cities, people, and even some events talked about in the books.  But we have no evidence of the supernatural tales which were written. The inaccuracies alone in the Bible show that we need outside evidence to prove any sort of validity in the tales.


"Claiming invalidity of this kind of testimony is just plain invalid unless it can be demonstrated that the writers colluded with one another or that the documents have been altered over time to make the books cohere" Argument from Ignorance fallacy aside, No, I'm not claiming anything like that.  I am however claiming that the stories of Jesus were fabricated/adjusted/stretched from the truth in order to fit the tales of him to the predetermined indicators of the messiah.  I'm sure we'll get into an argument over this, but I think that argument is best left for another thread.


"If I'm reading you correctly, you don't seem to have a problem with the prophesies that were made so much as the record of their fulfillment. Would that be an accurate assessment? If so, perhaps it would be more productive if you could pick out a specific prophesy and demonstrate why it is a lie or otherwise invalid?" I'm not willing to concede that the prophecies' provide accurate wording for there to be indisputable proof of their fulfillment.


2. "Okay, fair enough. But what do you do when you have no newspaper articles from the time that talk about his speeches? Do you discount what we know about Julius Caesar because his Commentaries on the Gallic War is the only source we have? From what I understand, though I'm certainly not an expert on Socrates, all we know about him is what was written by Plato. Do we then have to throw out Plato's writings as unreliable and "without proof"? We don't have to discount anything, but we also don't have to consider it to be 100% accurate, and it's certainly NOT proof.  For all we know, Plato did make up Socrates.  He also made up Atlantis. I assume that Socrates is real, but if given good enough reason to doubt his authenticity, then I'm willing to doubt. In fact, you have me doubting now.... thanks.


"Please correct me if I'm misreading this, but it sounds like you are saying that if the witnesses were testifying in your favor, you would accept their testimony but if they were testifying against you, you would claim that eyewitness testimony is unreliable. Assuming I'm reading you correctly, isn't this special pleading?" Yep. Special pleading is a tactic I could use in a court of law, but not in the field of science and logic. That's exactly my point when I say there's a difference between, "Courtroom proof" and "actual proof".  I elaborated more on this in my recent response to Cory here.


3. I'm not quite sure why you re-listed your arguments for the prophecies of the messiah. I know what you posted earlier, and why you believe they fulfill my requirements. That is what we are in the middle of debating.


4. "I think you have a false dichotomy here, Mike. You are presuming that those in the first century church recognized the canon based on a purely arbitrary basis. Why do you suppose none of the apocrypha enjoyed anything more than temporary or local recognition? Why did none of the apocryphal writings have anything more than a semi-canonical status? Why did no major canon or church council recognize them as canonical?"


We are getting WAAAY off topic here.  So this is the last I'm going to discuss this in this thread. The early Christian Church was a hodgepodge of ideas and beliefs that were very much a result of where they being taught, and who was teaching them.  When a system of formality was put into place, they picked things to be considered dogma based on what would show the Church in a light they deemed appropriate.  This doesn't mean what was left out was inaccurate, or that what was left in was accurate. On the occasion of the first Council of Nicaea, leading members of the church were FORCED to concede or be exiled. This is what happened to Arian (who's followers did not recognize the Council's results as canonical).


5. "Again, similarity means nothing especially in light of the differences between the works you cite and the account of Christ. But really this is just a red herring, Mike. That the ancient mystery religions and other pagan accounts bear some passing resemblance to the life and work of Christ is completely irrelevant. The question on the table is "Is the Bible trustworthy?" Let's stick to that question and not get distracted with the periphery." The statement I made was first started to show how invalid the story of Jesus (and therefore the New Testament) most likely is.  My statements are the proof I am showing to back up my claims. At the time when I first stated them, it was poignant to my argument, but I also agree it has become non-sequitur and we can address these issues at a later date.


6. "I wonder…when you last played "telephone," were you allowed to verify the message you received with the person who originated the message?" Even if I did, sometimes it still turns out wrong, especially if it's a game of telephone that has gone on for decades.


7. "About what story are you unsure? That the disciples were a bunch of cowards? Or that all but one were murdered for their testimony? Aristotle is credited as saying that "the benefit of the doubt is to be given to the document itself, not arrogated by the critic to himself." What about these accounts of the disciple's actions before and after Christ's resurrection do you find that discredits them?" I can try and come up with a list of inaccuracies of the New Testament if you want, but that's for another time.  I already gave a few examples, which I think is more than enough to make my point.


8. "Joseph Smith, Jr. was murdered by an angry mob while trying to defend himself from within the confines of a jail cell. I don't really think he had time to go about making statements before he passed. Secondly, Joseph Smith, Jr. was never (to the best of my knowledge) stoned, beaten or flogged for for his doctrine (2 Corinthians 11:16ff), and he never suffered physical torture, much less death, at the hands of someone seeking a retraction of his teachings. " Joseph Smith was MURDERED for his claims... why does him having to be physically tortured make a statement any more valid? From my understanding, I'm not an LDS Historian, but Joseph Smith had a chance to get away, but when confronted about it, decided to go face the ensuing mob. That sounds like martyrdom to me.  All he had to do was leave, or change his claims, and he did neither.  


"So I ask you, is your comparison of Joseph Smith, Jr. to the biblical writers fair?" I don't see why not. He is just as much a prophet to the Mormons as the Apostles are to all of Christianity.


Of course, this topic is also getting WAY off subject, and I'd rather leave it alone at this point.


9. "A discrepancy is not the same as an error, Mike. A discrepancy is simply a difference. Just because there is a difference reported by two people concerning the same event doesn't mean that they are not both telling the truth--it just means you have to do more than scratch the surface to discover the truth." It sounds to me like having to come up with a band-aid answer to reason why it's not wrong.  There may also be a DISCREPANCY to weather or not Jesus was actually the Son of God (which there is). The Bible, and more narrowly, the New Testament is full of them.


This is getting to be another non-sequitur argument, much like the "Jesus is based of old god stories" argument.


Well, these are getting to be amazingly long posts. I think we'll need to take it down a notch, lest we start running off would-be readers.


Thanks Dan!


-Mike