Glenn Morton wrote:
> George wrote:
>
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: george murphy [mailto:gmurphy@raex.com]
> >Sent: Tuesday, January 23, 2001 5:01 AM
>
> > No, it would say nothing at all about "divine interaction". It
> only would
> >only say that the Bible has a few pieces of correct information about a
> flood that
> >happened long ago. & even if one does believe (going well beyond the
> geological &c
> >evidence) that the flood showed divine interaction, it still proves nothing
> about the
> >resurrection, as any Orthodox Jew will tell you.
>
> OK, let me throw the ball into your court. You say we don't have a faith
> based upon faith. What exactly is verifiable about Christianity which
> actually makes a difference to the main claim of the book.
>
> Jesus' existence doesn't require that he be the son of God
> the Existence of crucifiction doesn't require that Jesus was crucified.
> The existence of wine doesn't require that he made wine miraculously.
>
> Maybe we all have a faith based upon faith, and if that is the case, so be
> it. But at least we should pretend
>
> > I could respond in detail to the errors and distortions of
> >my position in
> >your statements. (E.g., I of course never suggested that the
> >dates of the NT
> >documents "automatically makes them true.") But that seems
> >superfluous.
>
> And I didn't say that you beleived that. I was using that as a illustration
> of the logic. Don't get sensitive here.
>
> The more I
> >learn of your arguments, the less sense they make. If it were a
> >matter of arguing
> >that there has to be historical evidence for the resurrection, OK,
> >I understand that
> >& am in basic agreement.
>
> If it's a matter of arguing that the
> >biblical flood
> >narrative must be historically accurate if we're to have
> >confidence in the biblical
> >accounts of the resurrection, OK, I understand that too, though I
> >don't agree. But
> >to brush away all historical and literary evidence supportive of
> >(N.B. not probative
> >of) the resurrection, to say that it cannot be "verified" even
> >though it's important
> >to believe that it was a real historical event and to refuse to give any
> >consideration to what the resurrection would mean if were true,
> >and then to claim
> >that supposed verification of the flood somehow supplies the
> >evidence needed to
> >enable people to believe that Christianity is true, is absurd.
>
> Then kindly name one thing that can actually be verified that actually
> indicates or supports the claims Jesus made about himself. If you can't,
> then we have faith based upon faith. What I am trying to do is find some
> way out of merely having faith based upon faith. Maybe the flood isn't it,
> but I can't figure out any other way out of this problem either. Can you? I
> doubt it so while you claim that you don't have faith based upon faith, you
> haven't really provided any confirmation, absent faith, that the claims of
> the Bible are true.
Burgy has responded to this already. Let me come at it from a different
angle.
First, a great deal hinges on what will be accepted as "verification."
This has been a notorious problem in the history of science and I won't get into
all the debates about it but will try to keep what I say about it fairly simple.
What sort of verification can there be for historical events? And in
particular, what sort of verification could there be for the critical events of
the gospels? When we get any distance into the past we usually can't get
physical evidence tied more or less directly to events that we're concerned
with. We have records of Lincoln's autopsy, Booth's pistol &c, & could disinter
Lincoln to get more data. But there is no such evidence for the assassination
of Julius Caesar. Even less is there such evidence for the _resurrection_ of
Jesus: The claim about the empty tomb is that it was & is empty.
But no one seriously doubts that Caesar was assassinated in Rome in
44 B.C. because the written accounts we have of that, and the coherence of it
with many other things which we know of Roman history, archaeology (e.g., we can
identify the the place where he was supposed to have been killed) hold
together. Finally, though, our knowledge of that depends on what people wrote,
& the writers had their various political &c axes to grind. Some of them could
have been lying, deluded, misinformed, &c. But the almost universal belief of
historians is that these writings are correct as far as the basic truth of
Caesar's assassination is concerned are concerned. & in fact there is
widespread agreement about many historical events for which the evidence is
weaker than this.
What about Jesus? If the gospels said nothing about Jesus'
resurrection then we'd just have a story about a charismatic Jewish carpenter
having been crucified by the Romans, something which would hardly be without
parallel. We would also be able to identify the setting of Jesus' supposed
crucifixion with some degree of confidence and would have independent evidence
for the Roman governor under whom this was supposed to have occurred. The
variation in details about Jesus arrest & trial, what he was supposed to have
said, &c. among the four gospels would of course indicate that these accounts
couldn't all be 100% "history as it really happened" but it would be easy enough
to identify a basic core of events common to them. There would be little debate
by historians about how Jesus died - and of course not a great deal of
interest.
This may seem like a tedious recounting of the obvious. The point
is that while we do not have "verifiable" physical data about Jesus of the sort
we have about the Chicxulub event, we do have evidence of the sort that
historians usually have to be satisfied with and which in fact they routinely
use. & here you'll see the reason for my "sensitivity" to which you referred
above, sensitivity which is not simply personal. If you think that the "logic"
of presenting the supportive evidence which I've sketched is equivalent to that
of claiming that the gospel accounts make Jesus' crucifixion "automatically
true" & therefore reject it, then I have nothing further to say.
Of course the claims about the resurrection raise harder questions.
Let me know the extent to which you're with me so far and we'll see if it's
worth proceeding further.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
"The Science-Theology Interface"
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