Rich Blinne wrote:
>What I find most dismaying about Glenn's approach is the intangibility of >the resurrection because it is not repeatable. I respect the courage of >theoretical falsifiability of Christianity. The Apostle Paul did that but >the topic WAS the resurrection. The apostles staked Christianity's >reputation on it being tangible, but Glenn's definition of tangible is too >restrictive. His repeatability criteria would also make historical science >not real science..
Rich, The difference between us and Paul is that we have to believe Paul. He had access to living witnesses--we don't. He had access to existing historical records--which no longer exist. From our temporal vantage point all we can do is believe the resurrection. We can't really approach any real historical examination of the event except through the records of the adherents of this new religion and all those documents were written 20+ years after the event by people who believed. Thus, this isn't something one can actually say is as sure a historically documented event as we are often told. It doesn't mean it isn't true, it is only saying something about the evidence for it.
Now, the problem I keep trying to get people to focus on is the fact that the religious world is much larger than NOrth American christianity. Try living in a place where no one shares your theology, or even has a theology. You quickly realize how sheltered North American Christians are. One can't start with "Assume the Bible is true therefore...."
That approach, which both YECs and many ASA members take, quickly begins to sound like the man who went to the owner of a large chicken meat company. The guy told the owner that he could cut the company's costs by 40% by mechanizing the feather plucking. The guy told the owner that he would no longer have to hire hundreds of chicken pluckers. The owner, quite interested asked how the man would do that. The man said, " I built a feather plucking machine. Here are the diagrams. First, assume that you have a spherical chicken....."
When one looks beyond North America and sees what is out there, one realizes that we Christians are busy assuming spherical chickens. And then we create these marvelous apologetics which are utterly worthless.
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