Mmmm, and of course, a detective never, ever acts on a hunch, right?

Hey, you're the one who brought detectives into this!

This by the way is my view of Christianity.  The evidence does a lot to support it, and so its therefore reasonable to have faith in Christ.

You can make rational deductions as to which is the superior and likely belief structure.

Welcome back, PT.  We missed you.

Just bow to your Lord and Master Jhiaxus, and there is no need for concepts like religion. Jhiaxus is all you need :P

I've got to tell you, Jhiaxus, I'm not really into that bowing thing.

We can work something out :D

I have been known to kneel before very special guys, but I'm usually to busy (and unable) to talk about it.

That's from a movie?

1) My point, as already explained, is that even if this counted as good evidence, it would be evidence for Judaism, not Christianity. Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism that Jews deny to be true; they're still waiting for the messiah and deny Christ was the son of God. If Moses did receive his inspiration from God, then that's a point in favour of the Jewish God; it does nothing to establish that Christ was the son of God and died for our sins, so doesn't count as evidence for Christianity.

---If you accept the modern Judaic understanding of the Old Testament, then yes, your point would be valid.


Prove that you have his printed word. Prove that what is written is what happened. I've already given you an alternative possibility; Moses meditated on the matter and was inspired by revelation. Maybe he experienced that revelation as a tete a tete with the Big Guy, fine, Jung gives a fairly comprehensive psychological interpretation of experience of the divine. So you say Moses count as evidence for Christianity being true, I say no, the Moses example gives evidence for the power of the human mind.

---So you're admitting that Moses had some sort of super-power.  You're just denying his personal testimony, backed up by other witnesses that it was a gift of God.

2) This accuracy still doesn't count as evidence for anything more than the power of faith. When were the books of the Old Testament written and by who? Presumably you don't want to claim that Genesis was written by an eye-witness do you? I still don't see how the Bible being accurately scribed counts as any sort of evidence for Christianity.

---If it wasn't accurately scribed, it would count against it. So the converse is true, I would think.

The fact that the Textus Receptus is the bar none, premier historical document, cross-validated out to an enormous degree is not the least bit suggestive of the protective power of Providence is what you are saying?  That I can in good confidence relay the meaning of a Bronze Age goatherder across numerous language and cultural and scientific barriers, and be certain that it is accurate is no small thing.  Perhaps this is merely another superhuman power that is not attibutable to God.

3) I have no great love for skeptics, but I have no great love for believers either. To qualify that, I don't mean that I don't like people who believe in some God or other. Rather, a believer is the opposite toa skeptic; the skeptic will always look for doubt, even if God turns up on their doorstep. A believer does the opposite and always assumes belief. So, you can't prove anything to a skeptic, because a skeptic can always doubt any evidence. Likewise, you can't disprove a believer's faith because they will always find a reason to discount the evidence.

--I do look for reasons to believe.  So I am a believer.  However, there have been plenty of people who have approached the Bible intending to disprove it, and found it true.  And although I am a believer, I think I am open-minded and fair enough to acknowledge weak points in my arguement.

I've said before in another case that a good evolutionist can pretty much sink a creationist, while the creationist is doing the same to an evolutionist.

Your question ultimately opens up why I say there is simply no evidence to support Christianity. The only proof that can be sufficient to prove the divine is direct, personal experience of the divine. That's it, that's all there is. In order to prove Christianity, you have to somehow prove that the all-powerful creator of everything sent his son to die for the sins of man. It takes more than reasonable doubt before a jury of twelve to establish that something like that is true! Anything you point to as evidence for Christianity can be explained in terms that are less exotic than a messiah sent by an all-powerful God, and this will always be the case unless you can demonstrate that God exists. And the only way for God's existence to be demonstrated is for it to be experienced.

---This to my mind is the Skeptic's position.  And it is an unreasonable one.  Finally, it is to my mind, an unwise one.  It is my opinion, supported by Scripture, that a direct personal experience of Divinity would kill you.  Moses, after spending much of his life as a servant of God, and being exposed to many miracles (and building up tolerance, I think) could only see what some people say is the bottom of God's foot, or His backside.  Otherwise he would die.

This is part of the point of the Incarnation.  Bringing God into direct contact with Humans without killing the poor limited creatures.

For further on this idea, check out the movie Dogma which was amusing.  Also Lovecraft had the reverse of this idea with the Old Ones being so insane that merely meeting them was very bad for your health.

Now you could say that an infinite God could change this for you.  He could, but this is the way he's designed the universe, and as a game designer, I can sympathize with His desire to run his game the way He designed it.

Lastly, (after my 'finally'--I'm becoming a Baptist preacher), I think if you met the Deity, and did not die, you would be faced with one of two options.  Become totally devout, or go immediately and irretrievably insane.  Because you would be faced with the Truth in an undeniable fashion.  The only defense against complete subjection would be to utterly and totally deny this which would be to deny Reality, and thats insanity.

And so God gives us freedom, and creates an intriguing world, and gives us a chance to study out the situation, and then He obviates all this by appearing in a blaze of glory on our doorstep.  Sounds illogical to me.

Now yes, a skeptic could experience God and then blame the pizza, but the point would be that they would be unable to honestly deny that, at the point of the experience, they believed they were experiencing God. So at the very least, they would have to face up to that one piece of evidence that would support God's existence; sure, they'd spend the rest of their life arguing around it, but that wouldn't stop it being evidence.

---------To their mind, it would not be evidence.  It would be proof of humanity's powers to delude themselves.  I don't see the difference here, evidence is evidence.

Your insistence on a personal revelation as the only relevant evidence is unneccessarily stringent.  Have you personally been to Japan? Are you sure it exists?

Now, no amount of people telling me that they have experienced God will be enough to prove that they did, because there is no way of knowing who are charlatans, who are mad people, and who are people who have experienced a dramatic transcendental experience that they have falsely attributed to experience of the divine. Thus, the only standard of proof is direct personal experience.

4) Show me dinosaur remains that are only centuries old and I'll be happy to consider amending my worldview viz. whether dinosaurs and humans have ever co-habited. Seems more likely to me that the stories of dragon slaying are metaphors depicting Christian knights slaying great evils. Job's description is pretty generic; he's basically described a really big herbivore. There are aboriginal cave paintings that look uncannily like spacemen, does that mean they were visited by aliens?

--With a tail like a cedar tree...thats not an elephant by the way.  And a herbivore is not a crocodile either.

Much of the dating schemes for dinos are circular arguements.  This rock is millions of years old...because it has such and such dino bones in it...and we know the dino bones are that old because they are in these rocks.

I'm not impressed with stories of people who were devout evolutionists but then read a creationist work to laugh at it only to find that they couldn't answer the questions raised about evolution. Scientists are like priests, they have their own religion (empirical objectivism for the most part) and it has its key doctrines (the scientific method, the big bang, darwinism etc) and the old scientists dogmatically stick to the doctrines they grew up with, whilst the young scientists divide between those who agree with the old dudes and those who disagree. In three hundred years' time, the scientific world view will be completely different to what it is now, because science is built on empirical evidence, and over time, as observations and experiments build up, old theories are inevitably replaced by new ones.

So yes, there are holes in scientific theories; that doesn't make them wrong or obsolete, and it doesn't give points to Christianity. Again, how does Job's description of what you interpret to be a dinosaur counta s evidence for Christianity?

---Scientific theories always have holes in them.  The proponents of a theory issue IOU's on the credibility of the major part of the theory, and claim future discoveries will validate their views, and they can keep issuing these until someone says, hey, your IOU's exceed the value of your credibility.  Even then, they keep issuing them, until some new and improved theory comes along.

But at some point, you the reasoning reader says, your IOU's exceed your net worth of credibility, I'm not going to lend you my trust anymore.

And what I'm saying is that an engineer, and a hard SF author who I think won the Hugo looked at the evidence for, and found not just a few, but a lot of holes.  He found what offended him, he found pseudo-science.

No question, this is an arguement from authority, but I think a 1)devotee of the scientific method 2)a very successful hard SF writer 3)an engineer is a good authority.

5) No, the Bible accurately depicting some historical events does not lend weight to the religious message of the Bible, only to its value as a historical/anthropological artefact. The Bible depicts the life, times and faith of an entire people; if some of the events it records are historically accurate, then that just means that the document can also be trusted to accurately document the faith of the people it is talking about. Remember that it is paramount in historical study to keep in mind who wrote a document, why and what biases they might have. Somehow, I think the Bible is more than a little biased.

--Yes, the Bible does have a bias, toward telling the truth.  It tells tales on some of its principal figures, paints them as sometimes pretty disgusting characters.  See Moses, King David, Peter and Paul.  Murderer and coward; adulterer and connived at murder of close battle companion (Nixon was a piker compared to this guy); coward; totalitarian thug.

Assuming the Author of the Bible is God, the fact that He tells the truth in minor details, assures you of greater details.  This also applies to the human authors.

And I have to leave to go do some errands.

---

1) This entails using your current belief system to judge between belief systems. If I ask a Christian 'which is better, Christianity or Islam?' what will the Christian say? What will the Muslim say?

Your comparison of American Capitalism and Soviet Communism is too simplistic; the comparison of Rome and Britain is ludicrous. You need to establish your criteria:

By your fruits ye shall know them.

What does that mean? It seems to mean that you shall know who is better by juding them according to your understanding of what is good and right. But in order to judge what is good and right, you need a concept of good and right. You get your sense of what's good and right from your belief system. So how can you then compare that belief system with another without judging the other to a standard set by your own?

2) Um... no. This is imply unquantifiable. So there are lots of messed up people whose lives are claimed to be better now that they are Christian. There are more non-Christians in the world than there are Christians; does this now mean that all of those people are inferior to Christians? All you've established there is that there is a strong case to say that conversion to Christianity is better than being non-Christian and messed up. You'll find just as many stories of messed up people finding God in other faiths.

3) Don't bring it up if there is probably someone somewhere who might possibly have maybe done something that would perhaps be likely to agree with you. Even if this study existed, it would only be able to show who the happier twin was, or which twin we judge to be the better of the two. Our judgement would be made from within our own system.

Thought experiment:

Identical twins are separated at birth. One is brought up in Iran as a Muslim, the other in America as a Christian. They both wind up as devout members of their respective churches and fairly typical of the particular cultures they have grown up in. They are reunited on Jerry Springer, and the topic for debate is: which system is better, Christianity or Islam?

How do you judge between the two without invoking criteria that presume an answer to the very question you're asking?

4) Liberalism doesn't say solely that people are innately good, otherwise liberals would have no way of explaining why people commit crimes. Liberals tend to say something more akin to people are good by nature, or that people have a tendency towards goodness. Thus, any badness in a person would be explained by environmental factors such as upbringing, zeitgeist, social position etc etc.

Put the serial killer into psychotherapy for a few years and you'll get your reasons. The irony to your agrument is that the liberal and the Christian are saying the same thing; that people have an innate goodness that is corrupted by the world. For Christians, that innate goodness is being created in God's image. To the liberal, it is man's psychological predisposition. Being created in God's image can even be explained as a metaphor for a perfect ideal of human nature.

I can explain why I sometimes want to do bad things, but it would take a while, as I'd need to go into Jung to do my ideas justice. Read up on his Archetypes and the Collective Unconcious, and look up the section on the Shadow (you may already know about this, in which case, you'll know the general thrust of my argument).

5) I'll reject the miracles and prophecies example. You can't prove that the miracles happened and I can't prove that they didn't, so it's just a quagmyre, and very poor criteria on which to base a comparison of two belief structures.

... and actually, if you want to claim that the superior belief structure would be one in which miracles and prophecies would be demonstrable, then you might need to take another look at Revelation, in which the false-prophet comes down and performs great miracles to win support. If the false-prophet were here performing miracles left, right and centre and Christian priests were unable to do the same, wouldn't that make the fals-prophet's belief system superior by your standard? Into the pit with you!

^_^

---

My conclusion in this area is relativism. There is no way of objectively choosing the better of two belief systems without making a judgement that itself has been shaped by a belief system. You can choose the best belief system relative to your understanding of what is good and right, but that's the best you can do.

---

1) I'll hunt it down and give it a read at some point.

2) It's easy to set aside one's deep-seated beliefs in the name of pretending. Ultimately, you don't actually believe that these worlds exist, so it will always be an exercise in fiction for you and thus never contradict your Christianity. All you have to do is take a world where communism is the main force and has worked, and say to yourself 'now, let's pretend that communism works, what would it be like?' and away you go. I could easily imagine a Universe in which the Bible is literally true and have fun sending in a verser at the start of the apocalypse.

3) My opinion or Michael's? ;-p

It's interesting because one of my philosophy modules was 'culture & philosophy' and included a robust look at cultural relativism. This is even more interesting because that was in 2000, and after 9/11, I was in the bizarre position of realising that a huge amount of what I'd studied with regards cultural relativism was directly relevant to the growing conflict between the West and Islam (this is, I think, the rough ideological boundaries of the current conflict). I had to laugh when the Pope spoke out against the evil of relativism!

A cultural relativist is well placed to traverse the multiverse, I think. Though it would actually be kind of fun to play an evangelical Christian verser. It would pretty much go like this:

Arrive in new world. Evangelise. Get killed by angry locals. Arrive in new world. Evangelise. Successfully establish Church. Get killed by angry locals/invaders/ambitious power-seekers. Arrive in new world. Evangelise. Etc, etc. ^_^

So Michael is just dealing with it at the moment. He probably thinks that the magic the priests speak of and wield has some psychological basis, but isn't as quick as the old priest to dismiss the old miracles. As he's based on me, he's something of an idealist, so has a metaphysical outlook that sees what's possible in the world as being in someway shaped by human expectation of what is possible. So, he would say that maybe the miracles were possible once, under the old world view, but were made impossible by a paradigm shift when the Red Lords arrived.

Do versers ever get any sort of explanation as to what's going on, or do they just have to figure out for themselves that they are now immortal and will travel to a new world with each death? Once Michael is more aware of the scope of what lies before him, he'll be ready to just openly accept the actual existence of Gods and so forth. At the moment, though, his worldview, like mine, is focussed strongly on the psychological.

If you accept the modern Judaic understanding of the Old Testament, then yes, your point would be valid.

So you're admitting that Moses had some sort of super-power.  You're just denying his personal testimony, backed up by other witnesses that it was a gift of God.

If it wasn't accurately scribed, it would count against it. So the converse is true, I would think.

The fact that the Textus Receptus is the bar none, premier historical document, cross-validated out to an enormous degree is not the least bit suggestive of the protective power of Providence is what you are saying?

I do look for reasons to believe.  So I am a believer.  However, there have been plenty of people who have approached the Bible intending to disprove it, and found it true.  And although I am a believer, I think I am open-minded and fair enough to acknowledge weak points in my arguement.

This to my mind is the Skeptic's position.  And it is an unreasonable one.  Finally, it is to my mind, an unwise one.  It is my opinion, supported by Scripture, that a direct personal experience of Divinity would kill you.  Moses, after spending much of his life as a servant of God, and being exposed to many miracles (and building up tolerance, I think) could only see what some people say is the bottom of God's foot, or His backside.  Otherwise he would die.

And so God gives us freedom, and creates an intriguing world, and gives us a chance to study out the situation, and then He obviates all this by appearing in a blaze of glory on our doorstep.  Sounds illogical to me.

Your insistence on a personal revelation as the only relevant evidence is unneccessarily stringent.  Have you personally been to Japan? Are you sure it exists?

With a tail like a cedar tree...thats not an elephant by the way.  And a herbivore is not a crocodile either.

Much of the dating schemes for dinos are circular arguements.  This rock is millions of years old...because it has such and such dino bones in it...and we know the dino bones are that old because they are in these rocks.

But at some point, you the reasoning reader says, your IOU's exceed your net worth of credibility, I'm not going to lend you my trust anymore.

Assuming the Author of the Bible is God, the fact that He tells the truth in minor details, assures you of greater details.  This also applies to the human authors.

No, its not just their book.

What Moses did was beyond what a normal genius did.  So he either has some sort of superpower, or assistance.  Perhaps it was aliens.  You're not coping with the level of genius here.

The counter-claim to the Bible being compared to other texts is that the Bible is unique.  Remember, we're talking about the premier historical document of the ancient world (and that by a long shot, the next one in line is not even half as validated.)  So when I see a game of "Telephone" thats been played for millenia, across cultures, from the Bronze Age to the Computer Age, well...its like the old joke...those who don't believe in prayer, believe in coincidence.

More superpowers in other words.

As to archetypes...well, I'd argue that the Bible is in its main essence a good part anti-archetypical.  Human religions say "Be good, give tithes, bow to the king, crawl on your knees ten miles...whatever." Some form of good works to prove you deserve Paradise.

The Bible says not of works of righteousness which we have done, but by his grace (unmerited favor) He saves us.

Thus the Bible is unique again.

A gnostic, as I understand it, is someone who believes in a hidden knowledge which only the special can access.

Your position is that you want God to show up, take away your free will, or drive you insane, or just kill you.  You have in essence, an unreasonable position because you want to have your ability to make careful reasoning taken away from you, and replaced with a drill instructor shouting in your face 'Give me fifty!!'.

I find your insistence that the Old Testament is not part of the Bible to be unusual.  I find your insistence on a special category of proof for the existance of God to be refreshingly honest (since that is what many skeptics do, although most of them don't realize it, or say it), and at the same time to be a denial of the reality of being human.

I also find the notion that one would listen to a story from a fellow, and be more likely to believe it on the basis of minor facts which you check out and find to be true to be completely reasonable.  This is, after all, what humans do.  When you get married, you don't know everything about the girl.  You can't, even if you were obsessively dedicated.  She would not tolerate it, and besides you're a finite being in a finite universe with limited information.

At some point you have to trust. And you refuse to do that.  But it is my position that God gave us room for faith.  In Heaven, as is said, there is no faith, for there is sight.

This is a skeptics position you take.

Its also dangerous for yet another reason. The pendulum does swing from materialist to magician as described in the Space Trilogy most ably by C.S. Lewis.  And Lucifer appears at times as an angel of light.  So even your proof is not enough.

As to the croc, lets say thats one of the explanations advanced for Job's description.  Which has the advantage of actually being an explanation, even if its easily dismissed (key point, a croc doesn't eat grass).  You're just assuming Job saw a cow, and imagined because he was chewing on some Bronze Age LSD that it had a tail forty feet long.

I don't know.  Job doesn't sound much like a Bronze Age stoner.  And there is a lot of proof, most outside the Bible.

No, what this is is a two-fold thing 1)A disproof of your original theses which was way bold.  You'd have been wiser to have advanced a more cautious theses. 2)A beginning for you.  There's a lot more out there that you can find with the aid of Google.  I reccomended one such further resource--James P. Hogan--engineer and hard SF author and skeptic--who is honest enough to see that the Emperor has few or no clothes.  Good place to start.  After that...C.S. Lewis is good although his theology is a little off.  Francis Schaeffer is good. John R. Rice is very good indeed.

My IOU description is what Science is once the theory is made.  Thats how it works.  And in many regards, this is not even a bad thing when its kept within reasonable limits.  I just wish scientists were a little more open-minded, and inclined to accept new theories instead of as one guy put it...Science advances when the old guard dies.

If the girl wrote me a letter in which she told me how to take two batteries and a bucket of water to make a cold fusion device that would then power the metropolis for the next century--equivalent to what Moses did--then I might be tempted to believe her.  It would certainly count as a proof in favor of her story of being an intergalactic empress.

This is what I have offered.

There are hundreds of prophecies fulfilled in Christ from the Old Testament, which tends to support the idea that the OT and the NT are a unity.  I haven't really fought this point that the OT only supports the Jews because it seemed...not a good point.  Like trying to inflate a dirigible with one's own lungs.

Archetypes are indeed found in the Bible.  Or as C.S. Lewis would put it...Christ is the Monomyth...the One True Story all other stories are a reflection of. What I said was that one of the core threads of the Bible seemed anti-Archetypical.

Since the Bible is replete with examples of direct personal experience of God, that would be foolhardy on my part to reject such things. I also have had some. I don't base my views on one support; I use multiple supports.  Reason without faith as you say correctly leads nowhere, to no conclusion.  Faith without reason is a blind leap, and that leads you to...??  Really, to anything.  Good, evil, indifferent the result could be.  We are creatures of logic and emotion; sight and internal vision; the learning of others and the experience of our ownselves.  Your God seems to be a god that only appeals to some of the needs and capabilities of humanity, a rather limited Being, I might say.

As to the angel wrestling with Isaac, well that was an angel.  A magnificent, but still finite being (or as some argue a pre-incarnate Christ clothing himself in the lesser form of an angel), and still Isaac walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

I'll admit you're not a skeptic.  But you still have created a castle unassailable by evidence.  If God doesn't come to you in the way you require it, the door is shut.

Last question: Are you a Multiculturalist?

And thats Pascal's Wager you're discussing.