Well figure that in a hundred years time, humans will have sufficiently advanced quantum computers to perform scientific simulations of humans, Earth, and the solar system. Surely we won’t just have a single computer running a single such simulation, there might be hundreds or thousands. And as technology progresses, there will be ever more such simulations run. Popular MMORPGs will run in simulated realities and the players will run around talking to dynamically generated NPCs that will have full AI but no inkling that they’re artificially crafted.
If humankind isn’t the only species in the universe smart enough to create computers, then over the next few billion years of the universe, we can expect trillions of artificial creatures to be simulated by advanced creatures - for study or for fun.
So while there’s only our one universe, it could house trillions of sub-universes. Which means that if your universe and those simulated universes are all that exist, there’s still only a one in a trillion chance that any one person born is a real, non-simulated being. And that also means that there’s only a one in trillion chance that the reality we know is un-simulated.
So long as a universe has enough complexity that it can house a simulated universe, we can presume that it can also house intelligent life. And subsequently we can presume that any universe which has both of those will create as many simulated universes as they can and any of the people in those simulated universes will do so as well, again, so long as the simulated universe has enough complexity to allow for it. Though we can safely assume that each sub-universe will be less complex than its parent, since that would require greater complexity than the parent has the resources to house. Thus we can say that there will be a bottom to the descending tree of realities. But we can’t say how high the tree is.
We have no reason to assume that there isn’t a larger, more complex universe, so statistically it is far far far and so much further away from likely that we’re really real that it’s almost not worth considering.
Given all the dead space in the universe, that the majority of people are law-abiding and live a decent life performing tedious labor, and the various flaws of the human body, it seems pretty clear that if we are a simulated universe, the development of our planet and our species occurred through random physical events and natural selection. So, if we are simulated we’re in a scientific simulation, not a game. (Or we’re in a game that has re-used a scientific simulation and we’re in the part of the universe that’s been allowed to generate itself naturally, because the developers focused their attention elsewhere.) So, basically, I’d say it’s a 0.1% chance (i.e., a 1 in 1000).
My hunch is that he did exist, that he was low enough on the social ladder during his life that nobody bothered to keep any record of his life until after St. Paul ginned up popular fascination with his message, and that he most likely bears very little resemblance to the familiar image of him.
How many Jews from Roman-era Israel can be cited by name, as opposed to how many there actually were alive during that era? The lack of specific written details from his contemporaries is unremarkable.
Currently, I’m of the “synthesis of multiple historic personages” view, but I’m not averse to the “single person, but nothing in the Gospels is accurate” view. I used to be a full-on mythicist, but in actuality a lot of the mythicist arguments about parallels to Jesus in Near Eastern mythology (e.g. Mithras) aren’t that convincing to me anymore.
Such as him being commonly referred to as “Jesus of Nazareth.”
He was supposed to be the Messiah. The Messiah was supposed to be born in Bethlehem. Matthew and Luke were so embarrassed that he was called “Jesus of Nazareth,” that they each made up extremely unlikely (and contradictory) stories about how a guy from Nazareth was actually born in Bethlehem.
If he had been completely made up, he would be “Jesus of Bethlehem.”
Yes, I totally think so. And I do believe he performed the miracles outlined in the Bible plus his divination and connection to God and the holy spirit were truly felt by many including non-believers back then and today. No way any fictional person could have had such a worldwide impact.
I honestly feel that when I pray to him I’m getting a real connection and I feel he communicates with me.
Spiderman was commonly referred to as “spidey”. Some people thought his parents were simple parents who died when he was young, but since this was embarrassing a back story was later created where they were spies in WW11.
You are perfectly free to open a thread challenging religious beliefs or the idea of a divine entity. This is not that thread and your comment amounts to threadshitting.
When Matthew wrote his story, he was trying to find prophecies he could claim were fulfilled – One such was the ‘branch’ in Isaiah 11:1 or “Nazarene”, which Matthew mistakenly thought was someone from “Nazareth.” Modern scholarly consensus is that Isaiah 11:1 has nothing to do with Nazareth, so this wasn’t really any sort of fulfilled prophecy, but that confusion led to the convoluted stories around “Jesus of Nazareth” that really make no sense now.
Referring to him as “Jesus of Nazareth” at all makes it more likely that Matthew made up the story to try to fit his (mistaken) understanding of the scripture rather than basing his story on any real person.
Quite the opposite. I think believing something, basing your whole entire life around it, and, the fate of your eternal soul, without even a shred of proof or any form of real evidence, is, naive. Also wishful thinking and all kinds of other logical fallacies.
I’m willing to concede there was “probably” a preacher type figure named Jesus or some derivative of that name. I’m not willing to label or accept that such a priest type figure definitely existed without any proof.
Just for the record, Jews would read Micah as claiming no more than that the Messiah would arise from the House of David. But, yes, there appears to have been an effort to weave a narrative that could point to the Tanakh for some level of validation. Perhaps the worst example of this was the misuse of Isaiah 7:14.
Then we disagree. Our knowledge of early history is often single-sourced and necessarily provisional. So, for example, our understanding of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes is informed primarily by Josephus supplemented by the Mishnah and by Jewish and Christian scripture.
It is important to understand the difference between evidence and proof. we can and do draw reasonable inferences from the former in the absence of the latter.
I tend to side with Christopher Hitchens on this, in that the clumsy mangling of the details of the Census of Quirinius suggests an attempt to fit the prophecy to an actual person, i.e. someone who was from Nazareth but needed to have been born in Bethlehem. If Jesus was wholly fictional, just have the story say he was born in Bethlehem.