As a reminder, Strainger gave the link, that the original Bible text does not refer to the “Red Sea” but the “sea of reeds”. Red Sea is mainly a King James interpretation.
As others have noted, the argument that “Oh, look,here are chariot wheels!” ain’t proof of nothin. My father killed a bear underneath this very tree, and the proof is: here’s the tree!
But, tell your friend that archaeologists have discovered in Ancient Egypt the bones of seven cows, that would date to time of Joseph and Pharoah’s dream. The problem is that they don’t know whether these are the seven fat cows or the seven thin cows.
I tried to fool my seven-year old with this one. I told him it was amazing that they found the bones of seven fat cows inside the bones of seven skinny cows.
He gave me a look that said “Oh, please!” and told me to stop trying to trick him.
We have zero evidence that the biblical Jesus existed. However, the authenticity of the other two characters you mention is better documented. End of hijack.
On the topic of dealing with someone who subscribes to silly beliefs, all I can recommend is patience. In the end, people will believe what they want to believe. IMO the best way to educate such a person is to
point out inconsistencies in their thinking
provide the necessary information required to analyse the problem
suggest alternative interpretations based on sound reasoning
and thus teach them to reason by themselves.
Having tried this approach and others countless times all I can say is that it’s easier said than done. It’s an uphill battle…
We don’t have any evidence of Jesus’s life? Ok, I was wrong. But why look for chariot wheels in the ocean when there’s still proof of Christ’s existence to be found? :rolleyes: It might, like this “discovery”, be debunked or shown not to be relevant to the existance of the Christian God, but it’s definately more convincing.
By which, of course, we can all assume you mean, “other than the Bible itself…”
This was my OP, so i hope I won’t get in trouble by indulging the hijack. The above statement is inconsistent with what I learned in Religion 101 (a course which, I might add, I dropped halfway through the semester – I don’t claim to be an expert…). It was my understanding that the gospels were written no more than 50-100 years after the events they depict, and that much of the non-miraculous content is regarded as likely to be real. Even if they are not corroborated by outside sources, the fact that someone or someones wrote this stuff down automatically makes the quantity of evidence non-zero, even if it is very little, and dubious at best. Lest you think my Religion professor had an agenda to validate the Bible, proof or no, I should mention that he described the authors of the gospels as “myth-makers.” Even so, his take was that they were exagerating an approximately true story to give it more seeming importance.
It seems to defy common sense that the course of human history could have been permanently altered by a person who was totally made up. Am I wrong, historians? Is there any reason to discount the gospels as source material on any level, simply by their inclusion in the Bible?
I am curious, in a non-confrontational way of course, of what this conficting evidence could possibly consist. What would constitute evidence for the non-existence of a person from two thousand years ago? Isn’t proving a negative of that nature a logical impossibility?
If a written account does not, by itself, count as evidence, why do we take seriously any historical documents? It sounds like the beef here is that this story only appears historically in one source, and that the source itself includes copious verifiably false information. That may be sufficient to discount it entirely, but I’m not so sure. Just as writing it down doesn’t make it true, distrusting the source doesn’t make it false.
I’m not saying the evidence for the existence of Jesus is compelling, I’m simply saying that it may be non-zero. The gospels may be uncorroborated, but there they are. Dismissing them outright sounds political, not historical.
My working theory is that this need to prove God’s existance empirically is a distinctly modern thing and an inevitable result of our over-all relience on science and the scientific method to prove things. You can’t teach someone to be sceptical everywhere else in life but not in regards to thier religion–some of it is going to slop over. If you are going to be skeptical of your religion but you are not gonna stop believing it, oyu have to preform some sort of mental gymnastics to make it all fit.
Also, remember that a great many devout crationists do take it all on faith, but we don’t here from them. They aren’t interested in this arguement. The smart ones, when told to “prove it!” by us logical types just say “I don’t have to. God is ineffable, neener neener”. And the conversation stops there. It is only the less intelligent debaters who get involved in these long arguments that they cannot win and which they don’t even need to have–claiming faith alone is a more compelling arguement than all the BS you find refuted on Talkorigins, and it leaves you looking alot more dignified.
As far as historical proof of Jesus goes, most serious historians I know do agree that there was a prophet Joshua ben Joseph, he did have some sort of following, and his teachings were probably more or less in line with those in the Gospels. The Gospel of John seems to have been written from a different source than the other three and so is coorboration of a sort: the four gospels are four different sources that happen to be bound together. The fact that there is not more documentation is not all that suprising–Jesus was one of many rabble rousers in an area famous for its rabble rousers. There are a great many other historical figures for which the hard evidence is equally scarce, but we don’t question thier very exisitance.
Furthmore, it is like the old “the Illiad was not written by Homer but by another man of the same name” thing–somebody inspired the early Apostles, and whatever that person’s name was, they were Jesus.
This is not necessarily true. In the Maya world, quite often only “good” events were recorded. “Good” events, like overthrowing a nearby city-state and getting slaves for sacrifice were overstated. Losses were either just glossed over or not mentioned altogether. Where kings or pharaohs are concerned you accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative.
Don’t get snippy, it’s a valid point. Science and Theology are two different fields, with different methods and different rules. Proving or disproving God with scientific method is impossible and pointless.
Proofs almost invariably amount to, “and since we can’t explain this phenomenon any other way, God must be responsible.” That’s a worthless model by any scientific standard, because even though it explains observations (sort of), it cannot be tested, used to predict further observations, or changed. Actually, I take that back. For some, the God model does change, as there are plently of people who believe the Bible to be allegory, but still believe in God. Still, that kind of change is a little like Ptolomy’s epicircles, in that it changes the details without questioning the underlying assumption.
Disproofs are even sillier, because any observation which contradicts the existence of God can be quite irrefutably shrugged off with, “that’s just what God wants you to see, and we don’t know why.” I could argue that God created the Universe this morning, over breakfast, and had the foresight to include complete sets of memories for each of us and tons of evidence that the Universe is, well, more than a day old. What are you gonna do with that? Is there any scientific evidence you could present that would contradict Creation as I have just defined it?
Do you know anyone whose belief or disbelief in God originally arose from some scientific argument? I have some good scientific rationales for my own belief (and yes, I do believe), DNA (violates entropy), free will (violates Newtonian causality), non-Euclidean geometry (exposes a fundamental but deeply hidden beauty in numbers), but these are just ways that I have learned to express what I always, on some level, felt was true. I would never attempt to go toe to toe with a hardcore atheist armed with this stuff, because it doesn’t prove anything. People use science to reinforce their own beliefs on this topic on both sides. Frankly, I think they’re missing the point.
Yes, Opus1, I would mind. Trying to draw me into an argument about this is exactly the kind of pointless behavior I described above. If it helps, I’ll stipulate to the following:
a) You have an excellent and irrefutable counter-argument to any statement I could make on this topic.
b) You are absolutely right.
c) You still didn’t change my position.
d) You will come away from this discussion frustrated by my stupidity or outright mental illness.
If it helps, I don’t mean any of this in a fringe lunatic creationist claptrap sort of way. I am satisfied that the recipe for life involves mixing up some promordial soup and letting it simmer for a long, long time. I am satisfied that I share common ancestors with my cat, and the spider that it just ate. Nevertheless, I can’t help it that when I look at a supermolecule, I see God (well, Gaia actually, but I’m sure we don’t want to go there today). I have zero interest in using that as a springboard to get you or anyone else to agree with me. In fact, if you look carefully, you’ll notice that I gave it as an example of things that I don’t say to support a position. Notice my use of the word “rationales” in lieu of “evidence.”
Okay, fair enough. But you should have stated your position more clearly in the first place. Something like “DNA (when I see it I can’t help but think that God made it)” would have been better than “DNA (violates entropy),” the latter of which is a scientific statement, rather than a personal belief.
DNA (violates what I consider to be the underlying aesthetic of entropy, which is that atoms are basically lazy and would rather form little bity molecules if left to their own devices, based on my undergraduate level understanding of physics [my degrees are in Music and Mathematics, non-scientist here], if not the actual physical law itself)
Violates entropy was easier to type. Sorry about that.