Given that nobody couldn’t convincingly prove that Jeshua didn’t exist, it would be pointless to try to argue that - people would look at you like if you said Caesar didn’t exist. They’d heard tons about that Jeshua fellow, from people who claimed to know; how could he possibly not exist? Far easier to toss more stories onto the pile, since people would have no reason not to believe in gossip.
Is that what you think is happening? Seriously?
Huh? Which atheists are those? Most atheists I know don’t care very much whether Jesus existed.
I suppose I shouldn’t just drop my previous dismissal and walk off (not looking back at the large explosion behind me).
Not to speak for all atheists, but of the few who bother to discuss this sort of thing at all, they’re arguing because they think that truth is better than fiction and that truth should be defended. Sort of the same reason people bother to argue, well, anything about the world prior to ten years ago. It’s not because they see some functional benefit in the world accepting the nonexistence theory; it’s because they believe the theory to be true and feel like presenting and defending their theory. Because seriously, whether Jeshua existed or not really makes no difference whatsoever.
What might make a difference, on the other hand, would be whether the dude was divine. A Jeshua indistinguishable from every other dime-a-dozen itinerant wanderer is a nobody. A Jesus who walks on water and rises from the dead is a whole 'nother beast, and a fair number of atheists think the world would be better off if christians accepted the former. But whether he merely existed? Meh. A trivia question.
“So many”?? I don’t, and I don’t know anyone who does. I’ve heard of Carrier, who I suppose does it to sell books, just like the people who sell books on pyramid power or whatever. In a world of billions of people, you can easily find a fraction of a percent who advocate for any conceivable thesis. But anyone who gives it a minute’s thought can see that it is just as impossible to prove that Jesus didn’t exist as it is to prove there is no God. Specific acts, yes, but mere existence, no.
If you are a conservative Christian, it may seem to you like the mythicist numbers are legion, because it is to the advantage of conservative pastors and media outlets to magnify their numbers. Just like the mythical War on Christmas.
But in any case, your question was about first or second century Romans, and at that time, Christianity was not the dominant religion of the western hemisphere, with great influence over the laws of the land; it was just one of dozens of weird cults. So they had even less incentive to debunk it. It would be like the US government going out of its way to debunk the Moonies. And debunking the Moonies would not depend at all on denying the existence of Moon.
Yeah, I’m sure you can find a handful of loud atheists making that argument. But, fwiw, I’m basically an atheist (and certainly a non-Christian) as are most of my friends, and at the rare times when “did Jesus exist?” comes up, it’s not considered a controversial or interesting question.
It seems to me to be exact opposite question is the real one: “Why so many “christians” feel the need to validate their beliefs by proving Jesus did exist?”
As an atheist I’ve had many discussions with different Christians about the historical basis for Jesus. In every case they were the ones that started the discussion. “So you’re an atheist? I just read that they found a tablet with Jesus’s name on it, that proves he existed…”
My belief is that:
Based on posts in this thread, it’s much easier for an atheist to distinguish the concept of X being a historical figure versus X therefore actually performing miracles and therefore actually being a divine being. One does not remotely follow the other.
Faith should not require proof.
Richard Carrier, Who is possibly the current leader in the Jesus never existed camp.
Richard Cevantis Carrier (born December 1, 1969) is an American author and activist, whose work focuses on empiricism, atheism, and the historicity of Jesus. A long-time contributor to self-published philosophical web sites, including The Secular Web and Freethought Blogs, Carrier has published a number of books and articles on philosophy and religion in classical antiquity, discussing the development of early Christianity from a skeptical viewpoint, and concerning religion and morality in the modern world. He has publicly debated a number of religious scholars on the historical basis of the Bible and Christianity. He is a prominent advocate of the theory that Jesus did not exist, which he has argued in a number of his works.[2] However, Carrier’s methodology and conclusions in this field have proven controversial and unconvincing…New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman writes that Carrier is one of only two scholars with relevant graduate credentials who argues against the historicity of Jesus.[79] Discussing Carrier’s theory that some Jews believed in a “humiliated messiah” prior to the existence of Christianity, Ehrman criticizes Carrier for “idiosyncratic” readings of the Old Testament that ignore modern critical scholarship on the Bible.[80] Ehrman concludes by saying “[w]e do not have a shred of evidence to suggest that any Jew prior to the birth of Christianity anticipated that there would be a future messiah who would be killed for sins—or killed at all—let alone one who would be unceremoniously destroyed by the enemies of the Jews, tortured and crucified in full public view. This was the opposite of what Jews thought the messiah would be.”[81]
Reviewing On the Historicity of Jesus, Daniel N. Gullotta says that Carrier has provided a “rigorous and thorough academic treatise that will no doubt be held up as the standard by which the Jesus Myth theory can be measured”; but he finds Carrier’s arguments “problematic and unpersuasive”, his use of Bayesian probabilities “unnecessarily complicated and uninviting”, and he criticizes Carrier’s “lack of evidence, strained readings and troublesome assumptions.”[5] Furthermore, he observed that using Bayes theorem in history seems useless, or at least unreliable, since it leads to absurd and contradictory results such as Carrier using it to come up with low probability for the existence of Jesus and scholar Richard Swinburne using it to come up with high probability that Jesus actually resurrected.[82] Gullotta also says that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever, either documentary or archaeological, that there was a period when Jews or Christians believed that Jesus only existed in heaven as a celestial being, which is Carrier’s “foundational” thesis, rather than living as a human being on earth.[5] Carrier is observed to constantly misinterpret and stretch sources and he also uses extensively fringe ideas like those of Dennis MacDonald … Gullotta also observes that Carrier relies on outdated and historically useless methods like Otto Rank and Lord Raglan’s hero myth archetype events lists, which have been criticized and rejected by most scholars of folklore and mythology, in which Carrier alters the quantity and wording of these lists arbitrarily to his favor.[83] Gullotta describes the belief that a historical Jesus never existed as a “fringe theory” that goes “unnoticed and unaddressed within scholarly circles”.[75]
Michel Onfray is another.
I’m an atheist who thinks it is more likely than not that Jesus existed. The existence of Jesus is not an extraordinary claim, and does not require extraordinary evidence. The miracle stuff on the other hand …
Which I think is the answer to your question. The existence of Jesus is one of the few things about Christianity which Christians have the slightest hope of demonstrating.
BTW, most atheists I listen to on YouTube etc. do think Jesus probably existed.
Well, I am not a Christian, or if I am, it is of the extreme doubting sort. I respect the words of Jesus as a man, certainly. But we dont need to prove Jesus. existed until someone tries to prove He never did.
I posted here in response to the question asked, which is exactly what we are supposed to do. We get about one How do we know for certain Jesus really lived? Thread a year. And so I respond.
Have I ever started a thread of “Jesus really existed and here is the proof?” I wouldnt be surprised if we have seen a thread like that, years ago in GD when witnessing was more common. But we get “How do we know for certain Jesus really lived?” fairly often.
So a question was asked, and I answered. I do feel the “need” to do that, as it is something I have studied quite a bit.
So in answer to your question: “Why so many “christians” feel the need to validate their beliefs by proving Jesus did exist?” - I have no belief and I dont think any one here is attempting to validate their beliefs by proving Jesus did exist. And that wasnt the question posted by the OP.
I concur.
As to the miracles, I am willing to believe that with faith healing, perhaps a few “sick” were “healed”, since science has shown faith can act as a placebo. The rest of the miracles I have great doubts. Walking on water? Feeding the multitude? Well, mass delusion could explain that, of course, and that has been documented as occurring at time. Water into wine? :dubious: If Lazarus was really dead- I’d have to have some damn solid proof.
I dont think Jesus was the Son of God, but I think He was a great man, and if you want to believe He was Divine, then more power to you.
But I spoke to Elvis, and he said that the faking of the Apollo Moon Landings was positive proof of the Flat Earth Conspiracy.
I’m quite sure we were rational, we were wearing gasmasks and tinfoil hats to protect us from the Chemtrails reflecting the power of HAARP’s deathrays.
It’s easy enough to prove God doesn’t exist to the usual standard of the word “proof” outside of mathematics and Aristotelian logic: It’s a thing we have no real evidence for, which runs counter to logic, and which can’t be demonstrated to exist. Unless you get really into special pleading or, possibly, violence, I’ve just disproven God.
The problem, of course, is the special pleading, the people saying I haven’t disproven God because God is special, so using normal logic and evidence is wrong, somehow. It amounts to an isolated demand for rigor: I can disprove the claim that there’s a ten-ton golden idol in the middle of my living room by vaguely gesturing at the empty space, but I can’t disprove the existence of a God because I haven’t worked it out from first principles using the predicate calculus. It’s dishonest because no proof can ever possibly satisfy them.
That special pleading is one reason the Christ Myth idea sounds so appealing to some people: They get the idea that previous historians were either too blinded by their preconceptions to ever seriously investigate whether Christ was real (see also: septimus) or were too frightened of being assaulted to do the job. I’m not saying that’s good history, or a defensible position, but if everyone around you seems to implicitly assume something without giving any evidence, and when some people are rather violently opposed to that idea being questioned, it’s natural to ask what seems to be the forbidden question. Finding people like Carrier with their plausible-sounding counter-narrative just seals the deal, and there you have it: A fringe notion being oddly prevalent among some sub-sets of a larger group, even if it’s still rare within that group as a whole.
Not even close. What you’ve done is make a middling case that some small subset of possible Gods, whose characteristics include being detectable by humans, doesn’t exist. It’s only middling because we are even now discovering perfectly detectable plant and animal species that somehow went undetected until this year. But it is very easy to conceive of a god who is indetectable by humans. Or even if he is detectable in principle, it may be that he cares nothing about earth or its occupants, and no longer frequents this part of the galaxy, if he ever did. Such a god might as well not exist as far as we are concerned, but that’s hardly proof that he doesn’t.
I don’t believe that any god exists, because, like you, I see no evidence for one. But my knowledge is limited to an infinitesimal fraction of what is possible to be known by humans, and what can be known by humans is an infinitesimal fraction of what happens in the universe, so I also don’t believe that no god exists. All I can say is that I see no convincing evidence for any god, and I see lots of evidence against specific Gods, e.g. those of any religion I’m familiar with.
Ah, the redefinition of “God” to fit into the gaps in our current knowledge. Maybe there’s a catchy name for this gappy-God, this God-which-fits-in-gaps…
Yes, it’s possible to create a God of the gaps which can’t be disproven because as every individual element of its being is shown to be due to something non-godly, poof, God no longer has that attribute. Of course, as you do that, God shrinks to something indistinguishable from a good feeling, or a vague sense of contentment.
Finally, of course, there’s Russell’s Teapot: If the totality of the observable Universe is no different whether or not something exists, and that thing adds no predictive or explanatory power, it’s incoherent to say it exists.
It’s more honest to say something like “I enjoy imagining a God” or similar than it is to insist that a completely undetectable God exists.
I want to pick this out for special attention, because it’s something I’ve gotten very angry about in the past and I want to talk about it while I’m not angry:
Be very careful what you mean when you say “believe” because the word has at least two different meanings.
If you say “I believe it’s raining outside” is that a statement of dogma? Is it a statement that you belong to the It Is Raining Outside Church of Latter-Day Precipitation? No. It means that, to the best of the evidence and reasoning available to you, it is raining outside. Maybe someone’s being free with a firehose. Maybe someone’s pissing on your leg. If you get new evidence, you can revise that belief and believe that someone’s being a jackass with a hose outside.
If a Catholic says “I believe Mary, who was a virgin, gave birth to my Lord and Savior who died for me on a cross” do you think they’re going to be amenable to a biology lesson on how humans become pregnant?
Now, which of those two meanings of the word “believe” do you think is meant when someone says atheists believe there is no God? Which of those two meanings should be used?
I’d be very, very happy if I was never again accused of having a dogmatic faith.
An utterly absurd comparison. All newly discovered organisms have characteristics basically the same as other known organisms. Proposing that an entity might exist whose characteristics are completely different from other any known entity, and which violate known science, is ridiculous. This is like proposing that if there are some undiscovered Amazonian tribes, therefore ghosts might exist.
Fine, but nobody insists on that. Atheists or agnostics at most admit the possibility, and theists claim that God is detectable, so all you have is a straw man.
I didn’t accuse you of dogmatic faith; I accused you of shoddy logic. And your response has done nothing to persuade me differently.
The moment you claim to possess a method for detecting god, they open up their claim to scientific scrutiny and analysis. Theologians and followers of other religions who arrive at a diametrically opposed “deity detection” may also take issue and suddenly be all about using science to analyze such a claim. Everyone who has come forward with a claim to be able to detect god or the supernatural has, to my knowledge, failed to demonstrate that ability.
BT
To DrDeth’s question about “why so many” atheists feel the need to try and disprove the existence of Jesus… well, first I generally agree with what others have said upthread on the subject. It’s really not that many. Though I personally am happy to grant that some guy formed the basis for the Jesus now worshipped by Christians, I think the question that started this thread is nonetheless important because, even as it tends to lead to a discussion of the evidence that mostly looks favorable to the “Jesus existed” position, the nature of that evidence—what is accepted as actual evidence, vs. what is discarded as tall tales and mythical—is damning to the broader Christian position.
For a Christian to “prove” (or for Christian to sit back as atheists discuss the evidence amongst themselves and come to agree) that Jesus is more likely to have existed than not must surely be a Pyrrhic victory, because in doing so one must be exposed to just how tenuous the historical evidence of a “miracle Jesus” actually is. If all you go off is “the Gospels say Jesus existed, so he existed,” and then a full stop, you’ll get laughed out of the room by anyone interested in genuine historical scholarship. If you actually look at the generally accepted historical documents that lend credence to the position that there was a historical Jesus and point to an early origin for Christianity shortly after his supposed death, then you’ve given away the store to save what’s on the shelves: the best evidence you can come up with points strongly to a non-miraculous mere mortal man who managed to make a minor nuisance of himself. So you have your historical Jesus, sure, but you also undermine claims about his divine nature.
DrDeth insists he is not a Christian, but believes Jesus was a great man who said some nice things. Trouble is, using the same historical methods as those used to demonstrate the probable existence of a historical Jesus, I cannot for the life of me tell how he or anyone could confidently believe that we actually know a single word Jesus actually said, never mind whether or not the things attributed to him are particularly good or wise.
It’s ridiculous to think we won’t find phenomena that violate known science. We pretty much do it every day, right here on earth. At that point, known science expands a bit. I wouldn’t be amazed if there were organisms in this very solar system that are completely different from any known entity, and which violate known science, and I would say it approaches certainty that there are such organisms somewhere in the universe. That is not to say they are supernatural; it is just saying “known science” has plenty of room to grow.
Not what I said at all. My analogy to undiscovered species was not an attempted proof of God, it was an attack on shoddy logic. Namely, “we haven’t detected X, therefore X doesn’t exist.” Derleth called that proof, and that is shoddy logic, no matter what X is.
I’d like everybody to do me a favor: stop capitalizing “god” when you’re not using it as a proper name.
The exchange you’re replying to here was using the term “God”. Now, as far as I’m concerned, “God” is a pretty damn specific character - the christian one. (Sometimes known by other names like Allah or El.) God has allegedly done things that don’t fit very well in any gap, which have been written about rather extensively in a very old book by people who allegedly are in a position to know some things he’s said and done.
The term “Gods” should never be used (aside from at the start of sentences) unless the Christian god has literally cloned himself.
The character God can be rather handily disproved. When speaking of gods generically, many of them are impossible to disprove, but most of those don’t matter at all.
That’s a very Christian oriented assertion. (BTW: I capitalize “Christian”.)
There are many, many people who believe in God but don’t consider that being to be the deity of either the Old or New Testament. (Many theists, for example.)
You are really hurting the quality of your posts by making such statements.