Was the universe created by God?

[Eclipse Now]

That the claim was made is not the same as the claim being true (or even falsifiable).

I agree. I was not suggesting that. All I was trying to define (and I really think I tried to spell this out quite clearly) is that sometimes we have to just put up with trying to find out something based on historical evidence rather than the empirical proof of a scientific demonstration. In other words, we start looking for "multiple attestation" and a variety of other historical tools. Does Tacitus satisfy the principle of multiple attestation on his reports of those particular events? I don't think so. But he, who so vehemently hated Christians, at least supports the knowledge we have of the Christian claims. This we find again and again, and not just from Josephus... more on that later.

 

But right now, what do historians make of the resurrection? As in, what do secular, sceptical historians make of the resurrection... even some of the ones that don't believe in it hold certain historical claims in agreement with Christians.

 

This short 6 minute piece is by a personal mate of mine, and I'm pretty sure he has been careful not to over-state his case. Phd in history, Dr John Dickson.

 

I know this thread is not really about the resurrection, but it makes some helpful comments on the relationship between "proof" and historical knowledge.

 

Can we take the resurrection seriously? Part 1

 

The thing is, the way some of the comments above were speaking about science over history, we may as well throw out our history books because if it is all so unknowable, why bother?

[CraigD]

It seems clear to me that historical claims that cannot be verified are no different than contemporary claims that cannot be verified. Each remain speculative.

That the claim was made is not the same as the claim being true (or even falsifiable).

I agree. I was not suggesting that. All I was trying to define (and I really think I tried to spell this out quite clearly) is that sometimes we have to just put up with trying to find out something based on historical evidence rather than the empirical proof of a scientific demonstration.

While methods of physical sciences, such as physics and biology, can’t be as effectively and conclusively applied to the factual claims of religious scriptures, non non-religious histories, and other sources of historic data as it can to data obtained from direct, controlled experiments, they can be used well, I think, to show if claims based on historic evidence are plausible or possible.

 

For example, science clearly shows that early descriptions of the Earth as a flat disk floating on a vast sea, covered by a bowl-shaped dome in which are embedded celestial bodies – a description common to Christianity, Islam, and many earlier religions - are almost certainly incorrect, because it shows that that is not the current structure of the Earth and surrounding astronomical bodies, and no plausible theory suggests that it could once have been but changed in a few thousand years to what we now observe.

 

Similarly, Christian traditional accounts of Jesus’s biological death and revival after 3 days can be scientifically show to be almost certainly incorrect, because we know that brain and other organ and tissue damage is too great after so long to function, even if blood circulation and oxygenation is restored. The Kroran’s account,

Koran 4 (The Women)

:157 (English translation by M.H. Shakir, 1983)

And their saying: Surely we have killed the Messiah, Isa son of Marium, the apostle of Allah; and they did not kill him nor did they crucify him, but it appeared to them so (like Isa) and most surely those who differ therein are only in a doubt about it; they have no knowledge respecting it, but only follow a conjecture, and they killed him not for sure.

, however, is plausible, because we know that it’s possible for such misapprehensions to occur.

 

The next verse of the Koran

Koran 4:158

Nay! Allah took him up to Himself; and Allah is Mighty, Wise.

, taken in context, is as a claim of physical fact the same as Christian traditional accounts of the Ascension. Physically, this is not impossible – lifting people, sometimes with little visible equipment, is not uncommon at present. Here, however, methods of history can be used to show that this ability was not present ca. 1 AD, showing the claim to be very implausible.

[modest]

In other words, we start looking for "multiple attestation" and a variety of other historical tools. Does Tacitus satisfy the principle of multiple attestation on his reports of those particular events? I don't think so.

 

Of course, if we include all the historical accounts of Vespasian's miracles then it does indeed satisfy "the principle of multiple attestation". Here are a couple more besides Tacitus that I've just found using a google search:

 

Suetonius

: De Vita Caesarum—Divus Vespasianus 7.2 (ca. 110 CE)

Vespasian as yet lacked prestige and a certain divinity, so to speak, since he was an unexpected and still new-made emperor; but these also were given him. A man of the people who was blind, and another who was lame, came to him together as he sat on the tribunal, begging for the help for their disorders which Serapis had promised in a dream; for the god declared that Vespasian would restore the eyes, if he would spit upon them, and give strength to the leg, if he would deign to touch it with his heel. Though he had hardly any faith that this could possibly succeed, and therefore shrank even from making the attempt, he was at last prevailed upon by his friends and tried both things in public before a large crowd; and with success.

 

The Lives of the Caesars - Google Book Search

 

Dio Cassius

: Roman History 65.8 (ca. 200 CE)

Hard upon Vespasian's entrance into Alexandria the the Nile overflowed, and rose in one day a palm higher than usual; indeed, such an occurrence, it was said, had taken place only once before. Vespasian himself healed two persons who had come to him because of a vision seen in dreams. One of them, who had a weak hand, he cured by treading upon that member, and the other one, who was blind, by spitting upon his eyes. His divine power herein shown gave him great repute, yet the Alexandrians, far from enjoying his society, detested him heartily; not only in private but in public they were forever making fun of and abusing him.

 

Full text of "Dio's Rome : an historical narrative originally composed in Greek during the reigns of Septimius Severus, Geta and Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus : and now presented in English form"

 

And there are many others besides Vespasian who are historically accredited with performing miracles and controlling nature or bringing people back to life. By the credibility you give historical accounts, we must accept the god of Serapis as plausible along with the divinity of Vespasian.

 

You can't believe everything you read.

 

~modest

[modest]

The Kroran’s account,

Koran 4 (The Women)

:157 (English translation by M.H. Shakir, 1983)

And their saying: Surely we have killed the Messiah, Isa son of Marium, the apostle of Allah; and they did not kill him nor did they crucify him, but it appeared to them so (like Isa) and most surely those who differ therein are only in a doubt about it; they have no knowledge respecting it, but only follow a conjecture, and they killed him not for sure.

, however, is plausible, because we know that it’s possible for such misapprehensions to occur.

 

Aulus Cornelius Celsus (ca 25 BC - ca 50) wrote De Medicina giving an excellent description of the state of medicine from that time. He talks about the possibility of the kinds of misapprehensions you refer to in Book 2:

 

13 I know that on this point someone may question me:— if there are such sure signs of approaching death, how is it that patients who have been deserted by their medical attendants sometimes recover? And rumour has spread it about that some have revived whilst being carried out to burial. 14 Democritus, indeed, a man justly renowned, even held that the signs of life having ended, upon which practitioners had relied, were not sufficiently sure; much more did he not admit that there could be any sure signs of approaching death. 15 In answer to these I shall not even assert that some signs, stated as approximately certain, often deceive inexperienced practitioners, but not good ones; for instance Asclepiades, when he met the funeral procession, recognized that a man who was being carried out to burial was alive; and it is not primarily a fault of the art if there is a fault on the part of its professor. 16 But I shall more modestly suggest that the art of medicine is conjectural, and such is the characteristic of a conjecture, that though it answers more frequently, yet it sometimes deceives. A sign therefore is not to be rejected if it is deceptive in scarcely one out of a thousand cases, since it holds good in countless patients. 17 I state this, not merely in connexion with noxious signs, but as to salutary signs as well; seeing that hope is disappointed now and again, and that the patient dies whom the practitioner at first deemed safe; and further that measures proper for curing now and again make a change into something worse. 18 Nor, in the face of such a variety of temperaments, can human frailty avoid this. Nevertheless the medical art is to be relied upon, which more often, and in by far the greater number of patients, benefits the sick. It should not be ignored, however, that it is rather in acute diseases that signs, whether of recovery or of death, may be fallacious.

 

LacusCurtius ? Celsus ? On Medicine ? Book*II

 

I think this supports your conclusion very well.

 

~modest

[Eclipse Now]

I guess I was trying to describe the different states of "knowing" things.

 

For example, (and this may sound like I've suddenly turned into an internet troll 'being trollish' but there's a point coming), can someone please prove to me that Australia is actually a continent surrounded by water, the "world's largest island", and is not actually attached somehow to Europe or America?

[Moontanman]

I guess I was trying to describe the different states of "knowing" things.

 

For example, (and this may sound like I've suddenly turned into an internet troll 'being trollish' but there's a point coming), can someone please prove to me that Australia is actually a continent surrounded by water, the "world's largest island", and is not actually attached somehow to Europe or America?

 

Uh, I've seen lots of pictures taken from orbit that would seem to be proof positive that Australia is an island, what's your point?

[Eclipse Now]

Were you there when those pictures were taken? Have you seen that Australia is an island, from space, with your own eyes? How do you know it's not some kind of conspiracy to prevent us venturing to some sensitive area? How do you know?

[Moontanman]

Were you there when those pictures were taken? Have you seen that Australia is an island, from space, with your own eyes? How do you know it's not some kind of conspiracy to prevent us venturing to some sensitive area? How do you know?

 

So you are saying we have no way of knowing that the maps and globes not to mention pictures from space are all faked to hide the truth that the world is much smaller than we think? You want to insinuate that literally millions of people are involved with this scheme to fool everyone on the earth, the space programs are all fake, no google Earth, no orbiting satellites, no way to know that Australia is not connected with Europe? All the millions of people who have traveled from Europe to Australia via airplane and ship are either being fooled or are in on the scheme? Not to mention all Australians who live all along the coast of Australia who know it is not connected with Europe and the fact the weather is not the same or even similar to Europe? I hope you have a point.

[REASON]

I think Eclipse Now's point is simply that at some point, where we don't have first hand information to draw from, we have to trust the information we get from some other source.

 

The question for all of us is, where do we draw the line of acceptance or belief? How much, and what type of information is necessary?

 

For some, very little is required, particularly if it is emotionally satisfying.

[modest]

Moontanman has given ways to test that Australia is surrounded by water. It is falsifiable and testable and knowledge gained regarding the question is thus considered fact.

 

Unless Eclipse Now can give some way to test the answer to "who created the universe" or "where will a person's soul go when they die" then there's no comparison. Answers to these questions are not falsifiable, they are not fact. They are faith.

 

Most people of faith that I know would agree that their faith is not based on evidence. The object of faith is not empirically demonstrable—not testable. Even the bible says you shouldn’t test God. Christians for the most part seem to think God should be a matter of faith. Your approach, Eclipse Now, befuddles me. It seems not to recognize the obvious.

 

~modest

[REASON]

Most people of faith that I know would agree that their faith is not based on evidence. The object of faith is not empirically demonstrable—not testable. Even the bible says you shouldn’t test God. Christians for the most part seem to think God should be a matter of faith. Your approach, Eclipse Now, befuddles me. It seems not to recognize the obvious.

 

Yes, that's right, modest. So in this case, people are willing to adopt a belief system that they are openly willing to admit is based on a faith or trust that requires nothing to substantiate it. I tend to think these choices are made primary for emotional reasons. Where there are no rational explanations for any concept, our emotions and biases become the basis for whether we accept or reject it. You'll hear people say things like, "I don't know, it just doesn't feel right to me," or, "I know there's a god because I've felt his presence," as if the emotional experience becomes the empirical rationale.

 

An important key to understanding why someone chooses to believe as they do in matters of faith is to understand their emotional connection to them.

[CraigD]

For example, (and this may sound like I've suddenly turned into an internet troll 'being trollish' but there's a point coming), can someone please prove to me that Australia is actually a continent surrounded by water, the "world's largest island", and is not actually attached somehow to Europe or America?

I don’t think you’re being trollish - phenominalistic, yes, but not trollish. Questions like these are central to epistemology.

 

The scientific worldview is often, and with some justification, I believe, considered epistemologically simplistic and naïve, so affords simple answers to the example question. I could prove to you that Australia is separate from the other continents by sailing you around it in a boat, or even walking the coastline. I could in principle show this it more directly and compellingly by flying you over it at a great enough altitude (about 475 km, well into space) to see the entire coastline.

 

I’ve not personally circumnavigated Australia, nor seen it from space with my own eyes. If I felt a compelling need to know with personal certainty that it’s not connected to another continent, however, I could (circumnavigate it – I don’t have either the qualifications not the financial means to fly in space). My faith in the accounts of many other credible-seeming people, lots of maps and media, combined with my knowledge that it is physically possible for distinct continents and islands to exist, and the lack of personal significance to me of Australia being or not being separated from the other continents, results in me not feeing a compelling need to personally verify that it is.

[Eclipse Now]

Yes, of course I **believe** Australia is an island. Of course Australia is an island that I could set out to empirically test by sailing around it. But how many of us have actually done that? How many of us have gone and interviewed the elevator serviceman before getting into an elevator?

 

In other words, we all operate on "belief" from other people's "good enough" explanation of events. We could not survive without this level of "belief", we'd be classified as mentally ill or being obsessive compulsive or paranoid delusional if we wanted to test Australia as being an island because we couldn't trust satellite shots, and then being compelled to speak to each elevator engineer before getting into a lifts, etc etc and so on.

 

So my point is that these "beliefs" we have, which help us get by in life, are on a spectrum.

 

**A comment on analysing emotions**

I just think we come to the resurrection with our assumptions dictating the outcome of our investigation. Many today don't find the assertion that Australia is an island to be that confronting. But look at the level of controversy around global warming? Why the extra angst? There's plenty of bits of evidence. At his stage I "believe" in global warming... I'm not even a scientist but have a welfare / humanities background. But enough peer reviewed papers have been broken down into arguments I can understand for me to accept that there is a problem. How many people think they've found counter-evidence? Another explanation? Do we really "know" global warming is real? Can we test it? Can I walk outside and see it? Or can we study many different criteria and "smaller bits" of evidence to put together the larger picture, which might for all intensive purposes be invisible on human time-scales?

 

Global warming is controversial, even though I think there is solid science around it, because it requires change.

 

How much more so the claim that one human being was actually GOD come to live with us, and that we killed Him, and that then He rose to new life? Jesus had all those confrontation things to say about being either for Him or against Him. He's one of the most confrontational figures in history.

 

So rather than deal with that, we indulge in philosophical squinting (such as Neitsch), or "seeing through" someone's truth claim to the motivation behind it.

 

Others have called it "Bulverism", and rather than proving THAT I'm wrong, they'll psychoanalyse WHY I'm wrong.

Bulverism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Lewis wrote about this in a 1941 essay of the same name, later included in the anthology God in the Dock. He explains the origin of this term:

 

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it "Bulverism". Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — "Oh you say that because you are a man." "At that moment", E. Bulver assures us, "there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall." That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

 

Let's avoid Bulverism please?

 

All I was saying is that "facts" as we know them are often beliefs until we have actually run the experiment ourselves, and that most of us don't do that yet "believe" stuff anyway. Those beliefs are probably correct, and unless we have a profound reason to suspect otherwise maybe we are fine to run with them for now.

[Moontanman]

All I was saying is that "facts" as we know them are often beliefs until we have actually run the experiment ourselves, and that most of us don't do that yet "believe" stuff anyway. Those beliefs are probably correct, and unless we have a profound reason to suspect otherwise maybe we are fine to run with them for now.

 

Some "facts" are more likely to be true with out personally checking them out than others. Believing what a several thousand year old book says just because it says it is not comparable to believing the world is a sphere or that Australia is an island. I can personally experience that the Earth is round, I know personally people who have flown across the oceans and visited other countries. There are a great many ancient books that claim to be real, why should the bible be given any more credence than the others?

[Fujing]

It was a shrewd assessment. Study.

[Eclipse Now]

There are a great many ancient books that claim to be real, why should the bible be given any more credence than the others?

This is a question of history and philosophy more than science, one of 'more probable' historical evidence and eyewitness accounts.

 

As an example of the questions and discussions raised that give me 'enough' evidence (which might not be called a scientific proof, but remember we are dealing with questions of history and philosophy, not empirical evidence here)...

 

Consider this as a philosophical issue: most religions claim to know a way to live, heaven, nirvana, etc. Jesus claimed he was the way.

 

It goes on. Many people have died as martyrs for many causes, both religious and non-religious. But the Christian apostles were martyred because they stated they had met God in the flesh, and that they had personally witnessed Jesus their God-man rise to life again.

 

That is a fundamental difference between Christianity and all other religious claims to faith. Yes there are other stories of rising to new life in other pagan myths and legends, but they read as such. The facts that the disciples claimed to have seen Jesus rise to new life can be verified by ancient non-Christian historical documents, not just the New Testament documents.

 

Yes it is a totally different line of thought to the opening thread, but I was just replying to your comment. Have a great New Year!

[TheBigDog]

I've given this a whole lot of thought. No. She prefers to be called Layla, but Chi-Chi is what her friends call her. She created the universe while she was waiting for some bread dough to rise. I have heard that it was Rye dough, but I suspect it was sour dough.

 

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

 

Bill