I don’t know what you think evidence is exactly. Evidence is simply information that points to the truth or falseness of a statement. If there’s a bar fight and 3 people say that they saw someone pull out a knife, that’s most certainly evidence. It isn’t conclusive because they could have been mistaken or in collusion, but it is certainly evidence. And of course the eyewitness accounts don’t have to change, that’s absolutely ridiculous. I can imagine a court hearing where the defense says, “I’m sorry, it’s impossible for there to have been a knife, could we recall the witnesses and make them change what they said?” That’s ludicrous. Whether it is dismissable (in the sense of not believable) or not depends on many things, that’s why we talk of a ‘body of evidence’ where all of the available information is considered together and a conclusion is reached.
The question though was not ‘What is the veracity of the claim that Jesus was resurrected?’, but rather “What evidence is there that Jesus was resurrected?” There is most certainly evidence. Widespread belief in something is actually pretty strong evidence. If someone asked me for evidence that the city of Dhaka existed and I said, “Of course it exists, everyone that I have ever talked to believes it to exist.” then that’s pretty strong evidence that Dhaka exists. It’s not definitive or conclusive, there are many explanations for why a large group of people might believe Dhaka to exist when it doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean that wide spread belief is not evidence at all. Quite honestly, wide spread belief is the evidence (read that as “information that points to the truth of a claim”) that we tend to use most when forming our own beliefs. When people tell me that Flight 370 crashed, I don’t go tracking down the whisper chain until I find an original source and then verify it against flight records and next of kin. I consider it true because everyone else around me considers it true. Again, that’s not conclusive, but it’s certainly evidence.
Belief is what happens after you weigh the available evidence - and even a sufficiently large population of people that ‘believe’ something does not make it a fact.
for the fight example - there is physical evidence of the altercation - property damage, physical injuries, etc. The eyewittness accounts will help to formulate a case against 1 or more of the participants - but if those accounts are not backed up by the physical evidence, then they will not count - they will be dismissed - no matter how hard one (or many of them) believe it. THe farther away from an event one gets, the less reliable any given ‘eye witness’ will be.
Here, you are attempting to use as “weak evidence” second hand belief as such - that is not evidence - it is belief.
Now - we are talking about evidence for the resurection of jesus - as it is an extra-ordinary event (we’re not talking about believing I saw a cat in the road that no one else saw) - its going to require extra-ordinary evidence to go with it- 2000 year old 2nd hand accounts of someone believing something to be so is simply not going to cut it - its not even in the category of ‘weak evidence’ - its not evidence at all.
We now have evidence that I am a talking helicopter.
Have you heard the Good Word about Gandalf? He died and was resurrected! It has been written of, and many people have witnessed it. Okay, they mostly have witnessed depictions and retellings of it, but that’s pretty much the same thing.
Have you ever heard the expression, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”?
None of the examples you used are extra ordinary circumstances, i.e. people get stabbed & planes crash. Therefore, the bar for evidence is lower. Now, if you want to make the claim that someone came back from the dead, and indeed that graves opened up all over the place and living people visited with their dead relatives, then you’re going to need more than some 2000 year old set of stories passed on by word of mouth and hand written and re-written and translated by less than objective (or even fact checked) scribes.
Yes, that is evidence. If someone says to you “I am something.” that is evidence that they are that something. It is not conclusive. In this case, I am inclined to doubt you since you are speaking facetiously and while I think that a helicopter could probably have an AI convincing enough to write that statement, I don’t see why someone would program it to do so. If there were a court case regarding a helicopter whose AI spazzed out and hurt someone that was hooked up to the web at your IP address, this statement could be entered as evidence. Again, not particularly compelling evidence, but certainly evidence.
How do you know I’m speaking facetiously? How do you know the people who wrote the bible were speaking literally? Or truthfully? Or from first-hand or even second-hand accounts? Did those people they were quoting have agendas?
The writings of the bible are evidence -nay, proof- that somebody at some point wrote down the words in the bible. (If you’re reading it in english that person was a translator.) It is not evidence that the account is factual or reliable.
I don’t see why someone would make an extraordinary claim of coming back from the dead, but there you have it - someone did and many continued to repeat it for 2000 years. Does that make it anymore true? No. But plenty of people take it on Faith.
In contrast, here is another extraordinary claim:
I don’t see why a single photon going through a double slit would make a wave distribution pattern. Makes no sense. But as many times as you want to repeat the experiment, the evidence is there for anyone to see. It’s not a matter of opinion or a story about something that allegedly happened once a long time ago, never to be seen again, but taught to be accepted on faith.
No. They aren’t extraordinary evidence. The question was does evidence exist. The answer is that yes evidence exists. It is decent evidence and probably evidence that requires a response, but not anywhere near conclusive evidence and certainly not proof. If something approximating objective proof existed, then the whole world would be Christian and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
Again, what we have compelling and fairly conclusive evidence for is that there was a religious leader named Jesus tooling about Judea, he said some things, he was crucified and within roughly 20 years of this event a large number of people who were acquainted with either him or people who knew him believed him to be resurrected. Those particular claims are pretty set in stone and unchallenged by any but the extreme fringe.
Does a large number of people believing in the resurrection 20 years after the fact equal evidence of the resurrection? Yes, it does. It is information pointing toward the truth of the claim. Period. That’s what it is. It is definitionally evidence. Is this evidence proof of the resurrection? Of course not. There are many reasonable explanations other than the event actually occurring that could account for it. Is it strong evidence? I guess that depends on what you mean by strong and how stuck you are in your presuppositions. I think that it’s strong enough that it deserves a rebuttal. If a large group of people believe something, I think that you at least need to have an explanation as to why they are incorrect. I’m not sure it requires an incredibly robust rebuttal since it is a pretty far-out claim, but likening it to our UFO example above, if I were to walk into a town and everyone there believed that a group of of their fellow townspeople saw a UFO, I think the response, “No they didn’t” isn’t enough and probably a more robust explanation as to why they are wrong is warranted (street lights, experimental aircraft, weather balloon, etc.), but I guess others could be satisfied with simply saying “Nope.”
You’re playing fast and loose with the definition of the word “evidence”. There is certainly plenty of “evidence” that Christians believe in the resurrection of Christ. There is however no evidence that it actually happened if all we have to go on are ancient, subjective, contradictory sources.
I have no idea about what you believe or its sincerity. I only have your statement. I would consider your statement evidence of the claim. If other people talked to you as though you were a hellicopter, I would consider that evidence that you believed that claim and possibly evidence that they too believed it. I would probably look at the way in which you speak to see whether the claim was serious or not. I would take into account what I know about you and your trustworthiness. I would likely weigh it with other evidence for that claim. Right now, all I really have is some words on a screen since I don’t know you and have interacted with you very little. Those words appear to me to pass the Turing test and right now I don’t believe that an AI is capable of truly passing the Turing test. This is evidence against your claim. I also believe that if someone were to develop an AI capable of passing the Turing Test, they would be unlikely to place it in a helicopter at this juncture. I would weigh the evidence for the claim and the evidence against the claim and in this case I would come out on the side of against.
Okay, here’s a rebuttal – considering the extraordinary nature of the claim, it’s far more likely that either the claims about witnesses are mistaken (whether due to human error or deliberate deception), or the claims about witnesses are true, but the witnesses themselves were mistaken (whether due to human error or deliberate deception), than that the claims about witnesses are true, and the witnesses themselves were correct in their claims of what they witnessed.
It’d be the same for any extraordinary claim of supernatural occurrence. There’s a possibility that some supernatural event has happened somewhere, some time. But for any individual supernatural claim, without extraordinary evidence beyond simple witness testimony (even multiple witnesses), then science and logic will tell us that it’s far more likely that the witnesses were mistaken or being untruthful than that their claim is correct.
What if 20 years from now, someone told you that he knew somebody who claimed to be a helicopter and that there were others to whom the same claim was made and they all agreed that there was in fact someone very much alive who claimed he was a helicopter. But he’s dead now. Crashed somewhere in the desert. Nobody knows where. But he certainly must have been a helicopter because he crashed and died.