Subject:
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Re: Mercy? (Was Re: My Prayer on this National Day of Prayer)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Sun, 16 Sep 2001 19:48:17 GMT
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Viewed:
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1122 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Ian Warfield writes:
>
> > God has a reason for not intervening.
>
> When you make that non-falsifiable assertion, you are presumably implying
> that We Cannot Know His Ineffable Plan, and therefore we must assume that
> everything will work out for Good. However, if We Cannot Know His Plan, then
> we certainly can't know that it's all for Good--it could as easily (and as
> feasibly) work out for Evil. "Wait and See" just isn't a real answer.
True. This assertion is based on faith more than fact.
(To clarify, the following is one of Jeff's paragraphs, not mine; and I
addressed it in my previous post.)
> > > How are we supposed to know what to obey? There are so many versions and
> > > translations of the Bible (which was written by men anyway) that his
> > > original messages have long been lost. And don't even get me started on
> > > the Pope and priests...
Additionally, I'm Protestant, so I too look with skepticism at some of the
Catholic doctrine: the existence of purgatory, the sinlessness of Mary,
papal infallibility, etc.
> Obviously, the failures of men aren't proof of God's nonexistence, any more
> than the failures of some scientific theories invalidate all of science.
Agreed.
> > I heard somewhere that there are probably five surviving accounts of
> > Caesar's military campaigns, all rife with inconsistencies; yet no one
> > argues that they happened. The Bible has much more internal agreement than
> > those accounts. The Dead Sea Scrolls further reaffirm that the Bible has
> > been copied accurately for thousands of years.
>
> No one really denies the existence of Jesus the man, since the Gospels are in
> themselves sufficient evidence for his mortal existence. However, the Gospels
> are manifestly insufficient proof of his divinity for a number of reasons.
> First among these is the obvious time gap between his life and the Gospels,
The Gospels were all written during the first century, two (Matthew and
John) by people who belonged to Jesus's closest group of disciples, the
Twelve. Having followed Him for His entire three-year ministry, they were
certainly capable of writing a faithful account.
> not to mention the lack of solid first-hand witnesses to the events.
Luke, in the introductions to his eponymous Gospel and the book of Acts,
says that he conducted painstaking research to prove to himself the accuracy
of what he wrote. This included conducting interviews with Jesus's close
associates, such as Mary and Peter.
> Second, we are not able to rely solely on eyewitness testimony in this case,
> since the people of that time were not (through no fault of their own)
> reliable witnesses able to report on supernatural dealings. The functioning
> of a magnet would have mystified them, but that doesn't make it a Divine
> Magnet. Even today, creditable observers are fooled by sleight-of-hand
> magicians into believing that psychic phenomena are at work, but that doesn't
> make them true.
Scattered witnesses here and there could be dismissed as unreliable. But
Jesus's life and miracles were witnessed by thousands of people, including
five hundred who saw Him after the resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:3-6).
Anyway, where would Jesus have gotten enough bread and fish to feed five
thousand men (not including their wives and children) by slight-of-hand?
> Third, the divine events of the Bible have left no direct physical evidence,
At they time they did. "The blind received sight, the lame walked, those
who had leprosy were cured, the deaf heard, the dead were raised", etc.
This confounded the authorities, who could offer no explanation for what
happened.
> and they are entirely in contrast to everyday experience.
That's why they were miracles!
> The life of Caesar, though unusual, contains nothing in direct contradiction
> to mundane observation, and as such can be reliably accounted for by mundane
> records, even if those records are somewhat contradictory. The Divinity of
> Jesus and his miracles are in fact in direct contrast to everyday experience,
> and as such require more than mundane records to verify their occurrence.
Take Jesus's resurrection for an example. The disciples had been clueless
about most of Jesus's teachings during his entire ministry. When Jesus was
seized, they had all deserted Him. After He was crucified, they were scared
silly and afraid even to leave home. After the alleged resurrection, they
defiantly preached the Gospel in the very faces of those who had crucified
Jesus, and from there went out to spread the Gospel throughout the world.
Would there really have been such an abrupt change of behavior had Jesus not
risen from the dead?
> Fourth, we can discuss the inconsistencies between the Gospels (which are, in
> fact, entirely consistent with the process of revision and re-editing by each
> subsequent Gospel authors in pursuit of a more effective work of propaganda).
> Many Christians assert the alleged internal consistency of the Gospels as
> proof of their validity, but I see it much more clearly as evidence that each
> successive book of the Gospel was based on those before it.
These are two sides of the same coin. Mark wrote his Gospel first, and
successive writers drew from it in writing their own, adding extra material
that they had culled from their own experience. The Gospels are
superficially inconsistent because they are written from different points of
view, with emphasis on different details. When they are compared with this
in mind, the inconsistencies quickly resolve themselves.
> > Not only that, but we have external evidence as well. We know that Rome
> > conquered Europe because of the evidence it left behind. Likewise, we can
> > find out about God from the universe He created.
>
> That's called Argument From Ignorance, and it's a falacy; we can't prove
> Thing A, so therefore it must be Thing B.
I don't follow how this is ignorance. Please clarify.
> From the existence of the universe we can only deduce that the universe
> exists--we cannot prove that God created it unless we assume that God created
> it, which I'm sure you recognize to be a circular argument.
Yes, but we can derive the essentiality of a Creator from what we can see
about the universe. I have a whole library of proof on hand, but let me
cite just two very broad points:
-The finiteness of Time. Science has proven that Time has a beginning. How
did it begin, then? Before there was Time or Space, there was Nothing.
Nothing cannot create Something. (Any Something cannot create a Thing
greater than itself.) Since we live in a highly complex, structured
universe in which lives intelligent life, an Intelligence - even greater and
more intelligent than what we can see - must have been behind it.
-The anthropic principle. Science has found that the laws of physics and
chemistry are extroardinarily convenient for matter, let along life, to
exist as it does. The degree of precision is astronomical. Even one
parameter were to be different by as little as 10^-5, life could not exist.
This leads to the conclusion that a Creator had His hands meddling in the works.
> We've all been down this rhetorical road before, but it's a particular
> favorite, so I'm happy to travel it again.
Glad you like it. I've not participated in a LUGNET debate before, so I'm
interested to see what comes up.
> Dave!
Ian
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