When a religious person says they "believe" something, it means they operate as if it were true even though they have no evidence to indicate it as such (a.k.a. the god of the gaps).
When a scientist says they "believe" something, it means all evidence gathered so far indicates that it is true, but if more data comes in and a different conclusion is drawn, then the belief should be abandoned.
These are two entirely different concepts, but in English we tend to just say "believe". The scientific "belief" is more akin to a mathematical theorem: - if X, then Y - All data indicates X is probably true, so for now I believe Y. - New data indicates X is probably false, so I no longer believe Y.
And of course when you're engineering something, it's not that simple because you need contingencies. X may have a 99% chance of being true, but you still need to have a plan for for that 1% case.
None of this is something that religion considers whatsoever; with religion, a belief is true and anything contrary to that belief is considered false, even if that thing is a measurement of reality itself. There are still huge swaths of people who believe a person thousands of years ago was immaculately conceived, walked on water, turned water into wine, all things that you and I know are inconsistent with reality. But all contrary evidence simply doesn't matter, the "belief" remains. This is the antithesis of science.
All those things are completely consistent with reality. Every year there are virgin births[0] (not immaculate conceptions[1], which is a term specific to the birth of the Virgin Mary herself), water turning into wine[2], and people walking on water[3].
I think what you mean is, the specific details of those miracles, as described in the Bible, have not been observed since, and they would have required a succession of extremely improbable quantum events. No one disagrees with the notion that those events were scientifically unlikely, but unlikely events are still consistent with reality.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immaculate_Conception [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrigation [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowshoe
It's easy to make bold statements, but that definitely doesn't match what most historians, Christian and secular, claim. (And I believe several of your other claims have been largely discredited, even by secular historians.)
Bart Ehrman, a New Testament historian who is well known for his critical eye on this stuff (he was a Christian but later became an atheist), dates the NT books between 50 and 120 AD, and from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament, the latest date scholars give is 150 AD. Other scholars date the NT books from between 70 and 90 AD.
The 300 AD date you're referring to may be when the New Testament was approved as "canon" by the church. Again from that Wikipedia article:
> The earliest known complete list of the 27 books is found in a letter written by Athanasius, a 4th-century bishop of Alexandria, dated to 367 AD. The 27-book New Testament was first formally canonized during the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) in North Africa.
See also the first answer here: https://www.quora.com/Was-the-first-gospel-written-300-years... and https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/how-new-testament-w... which notes that:
> By the time of Justin Martyr (ca. 100-165 AD) and Irenaeus (ca. 130-202 AD) we find extensive quotations from New Testament books; while the First Letter of Clement, addressed to the church in Corinth, quotes Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians.
He is not known for any such thing. Ehrman's claims are all on the historical chain of evidence for the books, not whether the books are true accounts. I'm very familiar with his work. In fact, in his book "How Jesus Became God", he suggests that there's no evidence at all, historically speaking, that Jesus ever even claimed to be the Son of God or anything supernatural and that, if he did exist, he was just a preacher. Jesus was not mentioned by any of his contemporaries or the Romans at all and they kept excellent documentation of official events of their empire.
Either way, by your own admission, there were no eyewitnesses. If the books are dated 120 years after the birth of Jesus, then the people that wrote them were not around when those events occurred.
Also, your evidence is simply showing that the books existed. It doesn't prove or support the idea that the events in them were true. Your argument here is akin to saying that Ghostbusters is a true story because it takes place in NYC and that's a real city that exists now.
Quoting a book as evidence that the book is true is tautological.
I wasn't arguing that the books were true. I do believe that, but you'll note my reply above simply tries to show that your bold claim that "the earliest known manuscripts of any biblical text post-dates Jesus by 300 years" is widely discredited.
I didn't "admit there were no eyewitnesses" at all -- my response wasn't related to that. Overall it seems like your reply had very little to do with my response above?
>Other scholars date the NT books from between 70 and 90 AD.
Jesus lived to be 35 years old. Even if you take the most supportive version of this statement, the earliest NT book was written over 35 years after Jesus' supposed death and there's no evidence to support the idea that they were written between those dates. Even the Wikipedia link that you sent says that there's no evidence for it:
>The New Oxford Annotated Bible states, "Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus's life and teaching."
It's not true.
From this we can infer that Jesus had two X chromosomes, and was therefore a trans man.
We name people who overly act on this premisse as schizophrenics.
Is it possible that they happened to one of the billions of people who lived? Yes. Even more so if that person happens to be God incarnate who created the universe.
In fact, the chances of these highly unlikely events actually goes up if you consider the person claimed to be God and did miracles to demonstrate his divinity - highly unlikely events is the exact thing you would expect from someone proving to be God
That's circular reasoning. "I believe a extremely low probability event because that's what we should expect from the entity I believe in". If I go with that, I can create any weird belief.
Allegedly. No evidence to support this claim exists.
I believe Jesus was God because he claimed to be God. Also, the "unlikely events" (aka miracles) don't disprove he existed and was God.
Other people have claimed to be God, too. They were either lying or were crazy. Jesus was neither.
In practice religious (or spiritual) people are a rather diverse bunch and it's not all that helpful to paint with too broad of a brush.
I will point out that in at least Christian theology, "faith" and "trust" are basically synonyms. In the original Greek of the New Testament, it's literally the same word.
In that sense, making choices based on trust in God or making decisions based on trust in science are really fairly similar. And quite often they're not contradictory either.
For example, both science and scriptures say worrying is bad for you, so someone can try to minimize worry based on faith in science and faith in scripture simultaneously.
I'll also point out that a lot of the "scientific" objections to religions boil down to metaphysical disagreements about the nature of observation of the nature of a (notional, at least) deity. I put "scientific" in scare quotes because science itself only makes sense given some assumptions, like the axiom that it's reasonable to assume things do not exist until it's definitely proven they do. That's a valid opinion, but it's not scientific as such. Another common assumption is that a creator and a fossil record (for instance) are somehow incompatible. As if a creator can create the cosmos but a fossil record is a bit much somehow.
Anyway, I think folks would find each other more thoughtful and reasonable if they'd take some time to listen more. There are lots of misconceptions in all directions in these discussions.
That is not true. As I pointed out, belief in the unseen, with evidence, is very different from believing without evidence.
Check out this lecture for a more detailed and nuanced explanation[1]. It details some of the inherent limitations of science.
Is this what happened, though? Outside of the politicization of COVID, the majority of the conversation that was anywhere near this was more simply "if you are going to question the people who are providing evidence, you must provide evidence to the contrary". It wasn't that science was untouchable and the change in guidance proves that not only was that not the case but it was shown that science was not untouchable and regularly changed with new information so long as that information was backed by evidence.
Science is falsifiable - anything pushed forward by science has a way to be disproved built in (other wise it is not science). That's important because then you can update your worldview based on new evidence.
For the same to be true of religion - it must be falsifiable: it MUST have a way to disprove itself via experimentation... oh wait... the (Christian version) does...
Go do this test: "Kings 18:20-40": When you've soaked your bull in water and it doesn't magical catch fire by praying... I'll be waiting. (Or I'll be waiting video proof of the Christian god - that should be repeatable by many people... right?)
MAKE THE BULL CATCH FIRE WITH YOUR PRAYERS OR GTFO WITH YOUR NONSENSE
If I may reverse the burden of proof, and be equally unreasonable, let me say that if you think that there is no afterlife, then you should go kill yourself. You're going to die at some point anyway, and this way you'll get your answer right away. It's a 100% falsifiable position, but unfortunately very few people who have done the necessary experiment have been able to communicate their findings to the scientific community afterwards.
Why not? If a god has shown that they can intervene in the physical world we live in, why shouldn't we be able to test that?
> He cannot be questioned about what He does, but they will ˹all˺ be questioned.
I posted this lecture in another post, it's a good starting point: https://youtu.be/If3cNUixEBM
Let's do Luke 5:4-8
Jesus tells fishermen to cast their nets and catch 2 boat loads of fish. Before you discount this miracle, I'll point out that Simon believed Jesus was God after this - but watching Jesus heal people is Ch 4 didn't convince him.
Great. Now for the miracle. It's at the nearest grocery store. In the fish department.