Jenesis on 8/12/2007 at 21:41
Quote Posted by Chimpy Chompy
You keep talking about "wrong tool for the job" and then don't propose a reliable alternative. Why should I believe claims for something that appears impossible today?
Let's get back to Caesar walking on water - if there were a bunch of texts completely unrelated to christianity, claiming that, and written "within living memory" would you believe them? If not, why not? What makes one particular ancient text special?
Also if I got together 500 people today saying they saw a dude in 1970 walk in water - should a historian from the year 4000 take it on face value that someone did something physically impossible?
The more I think about what to post in this thread the more I think of things I probably should have said before. If this is starting to look like a dodge, I do answer your question eventually. It's not just the witnesses that are meant to convince us of the truth of the Bible, I think. It's also what Jesus is like - we're back to the relational stuff again. Jesus himself claimed that he did these things through God's power. And when I read about Jesus, I see a man of compassion, integrity, honesty, and conviction. In short, a man I can trust. And so I'm prepared to trust him when he says that God gave him the power to do these things, and that he himself was God. C. S. Lewis famously put it this way, rather better than I expect I could manage:
Quote Posted by "Mere Christianity"
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of thing Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher.
All the stuff about witnesses to the miracles in "1970" is first of all an added bonus to give us greater confidence in our assessment of Jesus, and a foundation on which we need not necessarily dismiss claims of miracles in some book out of hand (it's not just over 500 seeing him alive again, though this is the supreme miracle, but thousands fed from a child's lunchbox, and untold hundreds healed of various ailments, and so on), and also what convinces me that the accounts about what Jesus said about himself are real - they do have the level of small detail that comes from eyewitness reporting (and that didn't exist in fiction at the time), and I am convinced that they are genuine. I'll let Lewis take over again briefly:
Quote Posted by C S Lewis, I forget where
I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of the text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage--though it may no doubt contain errors--pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read.
I'm not with Lewis when he talks about errors, but that's a different debate about the inspiration of the Bible. But his main point is pretty clear.
The eyewitness factor, that the gospels were written by witnesses or those who had heard them speak, and that the New Testament writers could point with confidence to still-living witnesses, gives me confidence that the way Jesus is portrayed in the Bible - as claiming that he did these things by God's power - is accurate. So, to finally get round to answering your question, are all these witnesses supposed to convince you that Jesus was God and all this stuff happened? Not by themselves, no. Read the Bible and get to know Jesus, and see if you trust him. Then decide. The two help hold each other up. Indeed, rather than asking you to read the Bible historically rather than scientifically I should actually have asked you to read it relationally, as that's what it's primarily about. My alternative to science is trust. Which brings me to...
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No, I wouldn't abandon science as long as we're talking stuff that happens in the physical world where science applies. All historical claims of the seemingly impossible should be treated with skepticism, and alternative explanations sought. And if we can't find an explanation, we don't just assume "god did it". That's an intellectual failure. We just keep looking.
Yes, these things happened in the physical world, but since the claim is specifically that a being outside the universe altered the way he wanted it to work temporarily, surely science
doesn't apply, as its whole basis for operating - repeatable observation - can't happen.
This is not to say, however, that you shouldn't be skeptical. Nor would I say that we should attribute anything we can't explain to 'God did it'. The thing about Jesus, however, was that he claimed specifically that God did it, and in the case of things like his resurrection, he claimed it before the event. He told us 'when this happens, it'll be because God did it'. And if it did happen - as many witnesses testify - then the possibility that Jesus really did know what was going on, what would happen, and how, needs to be seriously considered. Christians don't say 'we haven't got a clue where Jesus' body ended up as we can't see how anyone could have got hold of it under the circumstances*, so we reckon God must have done it' off the top of their heads. The man at the centre of it all claimed that's how it would happen, and we believe him. And we believe him because whilst he was on earth he showed us that he was trustworthy.
*Except for the people who wanted Jesus dead in the first place, since they were the ones who arranged for Jesus' tomb to be guarded, but if they'd taken it, surely they'd have produced it once people started claiming Jesus was alive
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That's not telling us how the natural world can tell us about god, it's just repeating the claim that it can. The rest of what you post is really just "oh if only you'd open your mind" which is a fairly generic complaint voiced by anyone who wants to be believed. If you insist on going on about "oh you want to repress god so you can do your own thing" , it's very easily inverted. "You want a god to give your existence and\or this universe a sense of purpose". That just drags us into arguing peoples subjective biases. Some people feel the need for a god, some don't.
As to your very first point here, I must apologise, that's me being muppety with my phrasing. That bit from Romans wasn't meant to tell you 'what', I just wanted you to read it so it was in your mind as I continued on. Then I said I'd realised that what I'd said wasn't really what Paul was getting at. The point of that bit of Romans isn't precisely what the world tells us about God in any great detail, but the fact that it does at all, but that humans are in a state of rebellion against him and ignore it. I wasn't really trying to say 'oh, just open your mind', either, the point rather being that we're so blind we need God to sort that problem out for us, which he does through the Bible. Essentially, the whole thing was a rather unfortunate sidetrack on my part that missed the point of what the passage I quoted was getting at in the first place.
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Finally you mention the bible being the "word of god" a few times. How do you know its the correct religious text, and not any other one? Why should I read it and not some ancient Hindu works? If you want to say you have a relationship with god because he talks in your head, or you just have a sense of him inside, or something, then that's one thing. It's only right for me to be skeptical, but I can't disprove that. But you're not going to have a lot of headway saying relationships come via the bible.
Yeah, I am saying that this relationship comes via the Bible. God doesn't speak to me in my head, nor do I generally have a sense of him inside or anything. But not only does the Bible tell me about God - doing the biography of Hugh Laurie bit - but when I read it, God talks to me. Not in my head, but in the words on the page. God is unchanging, and his will is also unchanging, and so what he has to say to me now is the same as what he had to say to his people in the past. They are still his current words today, and always will be. And because my relationship with God is restored, I can also talk to God in prayer and know that he will hear me and answer the prayer (though of course, the answer might be no). Now, you might want to argue that God isn't really treating me as an individual, but within the limits God sets there's more than enough scope for me to be me and still be living for God and pleasing him. He doesn't tell me what job to do, where to live, who to spend my time with, and so on - he's far more interested in
why I do what I do rather than what I do. There are some jobs he tells me not to take - prostitute, for example - and similar things in the other categories I mentioned, but within those bounds I am free.
As for why I believe the Bible and not some other text, there are two things - first that I believe the eyewitness accounts of Jesus - and if he said '(
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=50&chapter=14&verse=6&version=31&context=verse) No one comes to the Father except through me', then what can any other religion offer?
The second is the fundamental difference between Christianity and all other religions. The other religions are about what man must do to reach God, whilst Christianity (in which I include the Judaism it fulfilled and superceded) says that humans cannot ever put themselves right with God, but that God must forgive us, and has made this possible through Jesus.
Think of it in terms of an adulterous wife (a picture the Bible often uses of a wayward Israel). The marriage relationship has been broken. What can put it right? Surely it doesn't matter how sorry the wife is, how many gifts and flowers she buys, how much she wishes she hadn't been unfaithful. What needs to happen is for the husband to decide to forgive his wife. Then the relationship can be repaired if the wife will return to her husband. This is one of the pictures that the Bible uses of salvation (you may already have followed my link to bits of Hosea, (
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Hosea%201-3;&version=31;) Hosea 1-3 paints the picture more fully - well worth reading to see the point made at length). Yet the other religions would have us believe that the wife
can force her way back into a repaired relationship by her own efforts, but when you look at it this way, you can see that that doesn't make any sense. The repair must come from God. And only in Christianity is that repair offered.
Chimpy Chompy on 9/12/2007 at 00:48
Just to concentrate on this bit:
Why do you believe those accounts, and not anyone else's? If he says x, then we have to know that x is correct before we give it preference over any other religion.
That is, if you're claiming your faith is the only true one anyway. If you were putting it forward as just one possible path to the Divine then, well, this argument probably wouldn't be happening. Really, why do the Arbrahamic faiths have to push this DO IT OUR WAY OR ELSE stuff?
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The second is the fundamental difference between Christianity and all other religions. The other religions are about what man must do to reach God, whilst Christianity (in which I include the Judaism it fulfilled and superceded) says that humans cannot ever put themselves right with God, but that God must forgive us, and has made this possible through Jesus.
What's wrong with reaching god? Why does that disqualify a faith?
You then launch into talk of how we've somehow done something wrong - using an adulterous wife as an example. Why is this the case? If your example is based on what the bible says then, well, we're questioning if the bible is right here, so your argument is in danger of being rather circular.
Chimpy Chompy on 9/12/2007 at 00:50
Just to concentrate on this bit:
Why do you believe those accounts, and not anyone else's? If he says x, then we have to know that x is correct before we give it preference over any other religion.
That is, if you're claiming your faith is the only true one anyway. If you were putting it forward as just one possible path to the Divine then, well, this argument probably wouldn't be happening. Really, why do the Arbrahamic faiths have to push this DO IT OUR WAY OR ELSE stuff?
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The second is the fundamental difference between Christianity and all other religions. The other religions are about what man must do to reach God, whilst Christianity (in which I include the Judaism it fulfilled and superceded) says that humans cannot ever put themselves right with God, but that God must forgive us, and has made this possible through Jesus.
What's wrong with reaching god? Why does that disqualify a faith?
You then launch into talk of how we've somehow done something wrong - using an adulterous wife as an example. Why is this the case? If your argument is based on what the bible says then, well, we're questioning if the bible is right here, so your argument is in danger of being rather circular.
