Again you are making an assumption as the base of your logical construct.
That assumption is that the “laws of physics” are absolute in the sense that you know them. This is already problematic from a scientific point of view because our understanding of what the “laws of physics” are were and are under a constant change.
The scriptures are based on the axiom that god created everything including the laws of physics so when he chooses to, these laws can be defied. You can disagree with that axiom, but that does not mean that the logic is inconsistent.
So if you want to be honest your argument is “I don’t believe the scriptures, so i don’t believe in Jesus” which is perfectly valid, but very different from “I know Jesus is impossible and i can prove it.”
Maybe to make an example in science to wrap it all together. Before the invention of microscopes some doctors theorized about bacteria and viruses as the source of diseases. They often got ridiculed as “some invisible animals making us sick? Yeah you drank too much wine again” . Then the telescope came about and it could be seen what used to be unseeable for humans. Nowadays if you would claim there to be no bacteria you’d be rightfully ridiculed. But we also saw in human history that knowledge got lost and things that were established knowledge became bold theories subject to ridicule again.
So being honest to science and human knowledge the valid position is “I don’t believe in Jesus like described in the bible, as it is inconsistent with what i can observe today, but i have no proof in either direction.”
But this position is not more or less valid than “I do believe in Jesus like described in the bible.” Or “I do believe in Jesus but not like described in the bible.”
The Bible is a bunch of self-contradictory folk-tales. Which makes it useless in knowing any real Jesus. So, while one cannot say historical Jesus absolutely didn’t exist, one cannot cite the Bible as a credible source of any knowledge about him. One might as well contemplate historical Hercules.
Did i ever cite the bible as that? I also think the bible has many inconsistencies and looking at concepts like trinity or Jesus as literal son of god being introduced hundreds of years later, are things i also disagree with.
But i understand that theological differences are something different from scientific differences. And i think it is important to separate the two.
Because scientific differences can be analyzed with repeatable tests and empirical evidence. Theological differences are either a simple matter of different faith or they can only be discussed in whether the theology is consistent in itself. But that again relies on certain axioms, like math relies on certain axioms or many social sciences need to use axioms because of the complexity of empirical information.
No, I am assuming that a book written in the iron age was written by people with no knowledge of physics and I am also assuming, like every other iron age religious text, there’s no need to accept it as truth.
Your whole “you can’t prove it isn’t true” argument is not how anything works. The burden of proof is on the claimant. In this case, my claim is I have no reason to believe any of it is true based on modern physics. And telling me I can’t assume that the laws of physics work all the time doesn’t really compel me to think otherwise since I’ve never seen any modern documented account of the laws of physics not working.
If your god wants me to believe he exists, he knows what he can do about it. I guess he’s fine not providing a shred of evidence he exists outside of an iron age book, which means I’m fine assuming he doesn’t exist.
was written by people with no knowledge of physics
So why would they write about it and describe it as wonders? Do you think they did not understand that walking on water, giving life to the death, curing diseases on the spot and other things ascribed to Jesus as wonders were defying the conventional laws of nature?
The burden of proof is on the claimant.
Exactly. You claim to know that Jesus as described in the bible is an impossibility. So you have to proof that. All i want you to acknowledge, is that you are making an assumption, not providing proven knowledge.
And telling me I can’t assume that the laws of physics work all the time doesn’t really compel me to think otherwise since I’ve never seen any modern documented account of the laws of physics not working.
Ever heard of modern Physics? Relativity theory? Relativistic effects? All of these are the results of observations in defiance of classical Newtonian physics. There is an ongoing revolution in physics since a hundred years because we keep observing things inconsistent with our prior assumptions about the laws of physics.
So why would they write about it and describe it as wonders?
The same reason the authors of the Vedas, the Quran, the Book of Mormon and any other religious text you’d like to mention. I assume you don’t think Vishnu is a god as well as your god. I look forward to the special pleading of why the “wonders” of the Bible are true and the “wonders” of the Trials of Hercules are not though.
Also, you’re “ever heard of” thing doesn’t change the fact that there is not a single documented account of the laws of physics not working. You are describing things being more complicated than was thought, not things not working.
But feel free to show me video of a modern-day miracle your god is responsible for. You know as well as I do that there is no such thing, but I’m sure you’ve got some amusing excuse for why your omnipotent god no longer performs those miracles of his.
So do you believe the people 2000 years ago knew nothing about the laws of nature or did they? Did they understand that walking on water was something regularly possible or not? Did they understand raising the dead was something not normally possible?
Because that is your claim. And i strongly disagree because we have plenty of evidence that people understood the laws of nature quite well, even if they couldn’t verbalize them in math yet. We have many ancient buildings and technologies that only work with a profound understanding of how physical matter behaves under normal circumstances.
EDIT: By the way i do not believe the bible to be an accurate description of Jesus, as there is an accurate description in the Quran. Still i don’t claim to have proof that Jews, Christians or Hindus are wrong, because i have different theological believes. I acknowledge that my believes are that. And Atheists should realize that they also have theological believes, which is fundamentally different from knowledge about natural sciences.
Atheists do not have theological beliefs, atheism is characterized by a lack of religious faith. If one is lacking in faith then they cannot still have faith, that is an incoherent position.
Yes they do. They believe, without evidence, that no god exists. This is specifically different from agnostics, who say that they do not know. So atheism is a form of faith, because they choose to believe something about the nature of the divine, even if that is the absence of any divine.
Interestingly there is also religious atheism for instance in some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism.
I always find it silly, when atheists proclaim to “believe in science” violating the very principles of scientific research by proclaiming something as factual and absolute they have no evidence for. If someone is true to scientific principles he’ll say he does not know hence he is an agnostic. An Atheist however is always a person of faith, even if many people fight tooth and nail to deny it. Which brings me back to what i wrote here somewhere earlier in the comment chain that my impression is most atheists to be traumatized by bad religious practice or actors abusing the religion to harm them, and not having found a healthier way to address their trauma yet.
I think you’re operating on a different understanding of the words ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ here. Do you believe that Tuesday comes after Monday? Do you believe the Earth orbits the Sun, or that puppies are cute? Belief in something does not require faith, faith is a specific kind of belief. This is the kind of belief I have when talking about God.
I do not need evidence to disprove the existence of God, much the same way that I do not need the same for Dragons, or Magic, or the Flat Earth. I am not claiming these things do not exist, I am simply not going to believe they do until there is some evidence of their existence. I would suspect you do not think that I am religious in my lack of belief in dragons.
I also do not “believe” in science. That is a misunderstanding of science, which is simply a methodology. One cannot believe in it any more than they can math. It just is.
Tuesday coming after Monday is an arbitrary convention. In the same way that for natural numbers in the decimal system we called the number after one two and the one after that three. But we could have also called them three, two, one, four…
And yes i claim that believing there to be no god is a form of faith.
Think about it this way: God promises the believers who do good and ask forgiveness for their sins paradise and threatens the disbelievers with eternal hellfire. This is reiterated throughout history multiple times by prominent figures and the believe in god is the standard around the world. So from a rational risk minimizing point of view believing in God is the safer thing to do. Especially with how little religious practice Christianity requires compared to Judaism or Islam.
But to get to your core argument: Flying Squid claimed Jesus like in the bible did not exist because it is impossible for him to have existed in this way.
That is like saying you know for a fact Dragons never existed because there is no Dragons today. Now replace Dragon with Dinosaur and you see why this line of argumentation is problematic from a scientific methodological point of view.
So i think we agree that what is consistent with scientific methodology and what are matters of believes need to be separated in argumentation.
Fact: when science holds an incorrect idea, based on observable evidence - the idea changes to match reality.
If there were observable evidence of your imaginary sky guy, scientists would update their idea or theory to match the observable evidence.
Saying that there might be elephants living on top of clouds doesn’t make it true.
Entertaining the idea without proof is not science or even theory.
Even with perfect faith, elephants still live on terra firma.
Where did i say that it should be scientifically proven? I merely reject the idea that it is scientifically disproven or to claim that what has no scientific proof does not exist. This kind of thinking has rejected microorganisms, atoms, gravity and many other nowadays established things. Heck people acknowledge it to be perfectly reasonable to theorize about the existence of dark matter that is unobservable to us and holding the universe together.
It is simply unscientifc to claim to have “facts” against what is written in the scriptures as they describe events from 1400 to 5000 years ago. Not believing in them is perfectly valid, but it needs to be acknowledged as a matter of believe, a matter of faith and is in such in no way more valid than the believe that a scripture is true.
Things that exist, can be scientifically proven.
We have evidence for the presence of dark matter. This is a placeholder for something we don’t know what it is yet.
We don’t have evidence of gods in any way that can be tested.
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” - hitchens razor
It sure is convenient that the omnipotent and wise God decided to send his son to earth and perform wonders to prove he is the messenger of God long before humanity had advanced enough to create better records and spread that truth. I wonder why God has not wisely re-upped on this, given technological advancement, which God should be pretty caught up on.
The final prophet Mohammed s.a.s. whose life and effect are well documented as well as the direct word of Allah s.w.t., preserved as original in the Arabic language of revelation in the Quran. You should not though that according to Islam Jesus was merely a human messenger as Allah neither was born nor gives birth. In the same wake Allah is one and not three. But these concepts were added by the church to the Christian theology four hundred years after the life of Jesus.
You’re making an incorrect assumption that says the burden of proof is not yours. I’m not making absurd claims about things that defy all logic and physical limits.
You are.
The burden is on you.
Your invisible helper cannot carry this burden for you.
the burden of proof lies with the one who speaks, not the one who denies) is the obligation on a party in a dispute to provide sufficient warrant for its position.
Flying Squid said it is impossible what is described in the bible. So he or you if you take his side are the one burdened with proof. In fact the bible provides a very straightforward reasoning. Jesus was granted the power to do wonders by God so people would recognize him as a messenger of God and listen to him spreading the message of God.
You can say you dont believe in that. But it is not a proof of it not having happened. Especially as a lot of people who lived at the time said otherwise.
Again you are making an assumption as the base of your logical construct.
That assumption is that the “laws of physics” are absolute in the sense that you know them. This is already problematic from a scientific point of view because our understanding of what the “laws of physics” are were and are under a constant change.
The scriptures are based on the axiom that god created everything including the laws of physics so when he chooses to, these laws can be defied. You can disagree with that axiom, but that does not mean that the logic is inconsistent.
So if you want to be honest your argument is “I don’t believe the scriptures, so i don’t believe in Jesus” which is perfectly valid, but very different from “I know Jesus is impossible and i can prove it.”
Maybe to make an example in science to wrap it all together. Before the invention of microscopes some doctors theorized about bacteria and viruses as the source of diseases. They often got ridiculed as “some invisible animals making us sick? Yeah you drank too much wine again” . Then the telescope came about and it could be seen what used to be unseeable for humans. Nowadays if you would claim there to be no bacteria you’d be rightfully ridiculed. But we also saw in human history that knowledge got lost and things that were established knowledge became bold theories subject to ridicule again.
So being honest to science and human knowledge the valid position is “I don’t believe in Jesus like described in the bible, as it is inconsistent with what i can observe today, but i have no proof in either direction.”
But this position is not more or less valid than “I do believe in Jesus like described in the bible.” Or “I do believe in Jesus but not like described in the bible.”
The Bible is a bunch of self-contradictory folk-tales. Which makes it useless in knowing any real Jesus. So, while one cannot say historical Jesus absolutely didn’t exist, one cannot cite the Bible as a credible source of any knowledge about him. One might as well contemplate historical Hercules.
Did i ever cite the bible as that? I also think the bible has many inconsistencies and looking at concepts like trinity or Jesus as literal son of god being introduced hundreds of years later, are things i also disagree with.
But i understand that theological differences are something different from scientific differences. And i think it is important to separate the two.
Because scientific differences can be analyzed with repeatable tests and empirical evidence. Theological differences are either a simple matter of different faith or they can only be discussed in whether the theology is consistent in itself. But that again relies on certain axioms, like math relies on certain axioms or many social sciences need to use axioms because of the complexity of empirical information.
No, I am assuming that a book written in the iron age was written by people with no knowledge of physics and I am also assuming, like every other iron age religious text, there’s no need to accept it as truth.
Your whole “you can’t prove it isn’t true” argument is not how anything works. The burden of proof is on the claimant. In this case, my claim is I have no reason to believe any of it is true based on modern physics. And telling me I can’t assume that the laws of physics work all the time doesn’t really compel me to think otherwise since I’ve never seen any modern documented account of the laws of physics not working.
If your god wants me to believe he exists, he knows what he can do about it. I guess he’s fine not providing a shred of evidence he exists outside of an iron age book, which means I’m fine assuming he doesn’t exist.
So why would they write about it and describe it as wonders? Do you think they did not understand that walking on water, giving life to the death, curing diseases on the spot and other things ascribed to Jesus as wonders were defying the conventional laws of nature?
Exactly. You claim to know that Jesus as described in the bible is an impossibility. So you have to proof that. All i want you to acknowledge, is that you are making an assumption, not providing proven knowledge.
Ever heard of modern Physics? Relativity theory? Relativistic effects? All of these are the results of observations in defiance of classical Newtonian physics. There is an ongoing revolution in physics since a hundred years because we keep observing things inconsistent with our prior assumptions about the laws of physics.
The same reason the authors of the Vedas, the Quran, the Book of Mormon and any other religious text you’d like to mention. I assume you don’t think Vishnu is a god as well as your god. I look forward to the special pleading of why the “wonders” of the Bible are true and the “wonders” of the Trials of Hercules are not though.
Also, you’re “ever heard of” thing doesn’t change the fact that there is not a single documented account of the laws of physics not working. You are describing things being more complicated than was thought, not things not working.
But feel free to show me video of a modern-day miracle your god is responsible for. You know as well as I do that there is no such thing, but I’m sure you’ve got some amusing excuse for why your omnipotent god no longer performs those miracles of his.
So do you believe the people 2000 years ago knew nothing about the laws of nature or did they? Did they understand that walking on water was something regularly possible or not? Did they understand raising the dead was something not normally possible?
Because that is your claim. And i strongly disagree because we have plenty of evidence that people understood the laws of nature quite well, even if they couldn’t verbalize them in math yet. We have many ancient buildings and technologies that only work with a profound understanding of how physical matter behaves under normal circumstances.
EDIT: By the way i do not believe the bible to be an accurate description of Jesus, as there is an accurate description in the Quran. Still i don’t claim to have proof that Jews, Christians or Hindus are wrong, because i have different theological believes. I acknowledge that my believes are that. And Atheists should realize that they also have theological believes, which is fundamentally different from knowledge about natural sciences.
Ah, I see, rather than special pleading as to why the Bible is true and the Vedas are false, you’re just going to ignore the whole thing.
I suppose that’s a way to maintain that your god is the one true god though, ignore any challenges from other god beliefs as if they don’t exist.
Atheists do not have theological beliefs, atheism is characterized by a lack of religious faith. If one is lacking in faith then they cannot still have faith, that is an incoherent position.
Yes they do. They believe, without evidence, that no god exists. This is specifically different from agnostics, who say that they do not know. So atheism is a form of faith, because they choose to believe something about the nature of the divine, even if that is the absence of any divine.
Interestingly there is also religious atheism for instance in some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism.
I always find it silly, when atheists proclaim to “believe in science” violating the very principles of scientific research by proclaiming something as factual and absolute they have no evidence for. If someone is true to scientific principles he’ll say he does not know hence he is an agnostic. An Atheist however is always a person of faith, even if many people fight tooth and nail to deny it. Which brings me back to what i wrote here somewhere earlier in the comment chain that my impression is most atheists to be traumatized by bad religious practice or actors abusing the religion to harm them, and not having found a healthier way to address their trauma yet.
I think you’re operating on a different understanding of the words ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ here. Do you believe that Tuesday comes after Monday? Do you believe the Earth orbits the Sun, or that puppies are cute? Belief in something does not require faith, faith is a specific kind of belief. This is the kind of belief I have when talking about God.
I do not need evidence to disprove the existence of God, much the same way that I do not need the same for Dragons, or Magic, or the Flat Earth. I am not claiming these things do not exist, I am simply not going to believe they do until there is some evidence of their existence. I would suspect you do not think that I am religious in my lack of belief in dragons.
I also do not “believe” in science. That is a misunderstanding of science, which is simply a methodology. One cannot believe in it any more than they can math. It just is.
Tuesday coming after Monday is an arbitrary convention. In the same way that for natural numbers in the decimal system we called the number after one two and the one after that three. But we could have also called them three, two, one, four…
And yes i claim that believing there to be no god is a form of faith.
Think about it this way: God promises the believers who do good and ask forgiveness for their sins paradise and threatens the disbelievers with eternal hellfire. This is reiterated throughout history multiple times by prominent figures and the believe in god is the standard around the world. So from a rational risk minimizing point of view believing in God is the safer thing to do. Especially with how little religious practice Christianity requires compared to Judaism or Islam.
But to get to your core argument: Flying Squid claimed Jesus like in the bible did not exist because it is impossible for him to have existed in this way.
That is like saying you know for a fact Dragons never existed because there is no Dragons today. Now replace Dragon with Dinosaur and you see why this line of argumentation is problematic from a scientific methodological point of view.
So i think we agree that what is consistent with scientific methodology and what are matters of believes need to be separated in argumentation.
Fact: when science holds an incorrect idea, based on observable evidence - the idea changes to match reality. If there were observable evidence of your imaginary sky guy, scientists would update their idea or theory to match the observable evidence.
Saying that there might be elephants living on top of clouds doesn’t make it true. Entertaining the idea without proof is not science or even theory.
Even with perfect faith, elephants still live on terra firma.
Which is why is said scientific arguments need to be separated from theological arguments.
Saying you believe there is no god is a theological argument based on a believe. It is not scientific.
Saying there is not observable physical proof or disproof of a divine power, which is agnostic, is in compliance with science.
Science is about testable repeatable actions and concepts. Science describes what can be observed.
What can be observed and tested in your claims?
Where did i say that it should be scientifically proven? I merely reject the idea that it is scientifically disproven or to claim that what has no scientific proof does not exist. This kind of thinking has rejected microorganisms, atoms, gravity and many other nowadays established things. Heck people acknowledge it to be perfectly reasonable to theorize about the existence of dark matter that is unobservable to us and holding the universe together.
It is simply unscientifc to claim to have “facts” against what is written in the scriptures as they describe events from 1400 to 5000 years ago. Not believing in them is perfectly valid, but it needs to be acknowledged as a matter of believe, a matter of faith and is in such in no way more valid than the believe that a scripture is true.
Things that exist, can be scientifically proven. We have evidence for the presence of dark matter. This is a placeholder for something we don’t know what it is yet.
We don’t have evidence of gods in any way that can be tested.
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” - hitchens razor
It sure is convenient that the omnipotent and wise God decided to send his son to earth and perform wonders to prove he is the messenger of God long before humanity had advanced enough to create better records and spread that truth. I wonder why God has not wisely re-upped on this, given technological advancement, which God should be pretty caught up on.
You make good points. May i introduce you to Islam?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_in_Islam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran
The final prophet Mohammed s.a.s. whose life and effect are well documented as well as the direct word of Allah s.w.t., preserved as original in the Arabic language of revelation in the Quran. You should not though that according to Islam Jesus was merely a human messenger as Allah neither was born nor gives birth. In the same wake Allah is one and not three. But these concepts were added by the church to the Christian theology four hundred years after the life of Jesus.
I appreciate your confidence.
You’re making an incorrect assumption that says the burden of proof is not yours. I’m not making absurd claims about things that defy all logic and physical limits.
You are. The burden is on you.
Your invisible helper cannot carry this burden for you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
Flying Squid said it is impossible what is described in the bible. So he or you if you take his side are the one burdened with proof. In fact the bible provides a very straightforward reasoning. Jesus was granted the power to do wonders by God so people would recognize him as a messenger of God and listen to him spreading the message of God.
You can say you dont believe in that. But it is not a proof of it not having happened. Especially as a lot of people who lived at the time said otherwise.
If it’s possible, reproduce the claims. Until you can produce evidence of something, they are unfounded claims.
The Heaven’s Gate cult wrote things down and had a whole group of folks that would confirm the beliefs they had.
According to you, the burden of proof is on society.
So I challenge you in the same way you’re attempting here.
Prove the Heaven’s Gate cult wrong. They made very reasonable claims(according to them) and it’s up to you to prove them wrong.
That’s what you are doing. Until you can prove someone is able to do the things in your text(s). It’s a fable. You’re still arguing in bad faith.
New topic: provide your initial rules and conditions for entering responses.