Dan

Ask yourself, what is the strict scientific definition of a test? Archeology and Paleontology make informed and intelligent speculations about the past, but by the rigorous standards of the scientific test that's all they are, informed speculation. When we look at the stars we are looking at light that is reaching us now from the past, so you may have a point that past events from light years away are observable and therefor testable, but it is required that they be far distant for that to be true. No matter how large the delta of our now is, anything outside of it (and in close range) is no longer observable and therefor no longer testable. Engineers make projections about the future and design accordingly, but that is not the same as directly observing it. We are often wrong. In fact it is standard engineering practice to modify old designs based on data collected in the present.

Let's all do a little honest self assessment. Am I being any more argumentative that anyone here? This board it titled "Debate and Dialog" and that is precisely what I (and everyone else here) am doing. If you really wanted to hear familiar arguments from sources you already agreed with you would be on another board. I am here to argue for the reality of the Christian God as presented in the canonical gospels and to attest to joy, peace, and comforts attendant to knowledge of him. A lot of people think this attitude comes part and parcel with suspending my intellect and adopting a judgmental attitude. Part of what I do here is to demonstrate that at least for me, neither of these notions is true. I wrote in another post that for the sake of reaching the lost Christ is prepared to engage them on any level and if demonstrating a capacity for intellectual wrangling on the part of his adherents is what it takes that is what he will do. If some of what I am arguing here is starting to bite then all I can do is quote the proverbs "faithful are the wounds of a friend". I am not here to try to force anyone here to be what I am, but to convince them of what (and who) I know.

If it's not testable, it may as well not be there. Hmm.. What about the past? What about the future? Strictly speaking, neither are testable in the present, and yet both weight heavily on how we conduct ourselves. We put a lot of trust in our memories and artifacts from the past as indicators of what took place but we have no real proof that they are accurate. We have even less evidence of an approaching future, but we all set aside a significant chunk of our resources in anticipation of it.

It seems to me that you are taking the possibility of variations from the original manuscripts to the earliest extant complete manuscripts as proof that it happened. Your assertion that nothing in the new gospels ever presented Christ as a sacrifice almost requires it given the witness of John the Baptist who several times referred to Jesus as the "lamb of God". The acceptance by Rome of Christianity as it's official religion is recognized by the vast majority of scholars on the subject as the transition from antiquity, the era of the early church, to the medieval era. See "The Cambridge Ancient History" for confirmation of this assertion.

The manuscripts that went into the new testement were essentially unchanged for the 200 years or more from the time they were written to the time they were compiled into the bible. There were no alterations to suit the politics of the era. There were some disputes over what went into the cannon, but the majority of what constituted the new testament had already largely been settled on by the time of the compilation. I take issue with your assertion that the history of how the Quran was put together is better documented than the bible. That MIGHT be true of the old testament whose origins date back over many thousands of years. But the process that went into forming the new testament is very well documented. See https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/the-biblical-canon/ It is really an unfair comparison anyway. The Bible was written by multiple authors over several thousand years and represents the collective wisdom and history of a correspondingly old tradition. The Quran was written by one individual in a comparative fraction of time and represents the theological input of one man.

I do not write off the magnitude of importance of science in large philosophical questions. By it's own admission science can only inform us about the testable. Is it such a great intellectual leap to acknowledge that much of what makes our existence significant is untestable? Either with current or projected instrumentation? I assert and I assert strongly that much of what is joyful and comforting about the universe is unknowable by the scientific method. Has it ever occurred to you that the apparent indifference in your attitudes towards some of the bigger questions posed on this board is rooted in a dispair of ever knowing the answers by the techniques that you have restricted yourself to acknowledging? I don't write that to hurt but to prod. Christ came to meet our needs on every level, physical, intellectual and spiritual. If you are primarily a man of intellect then engage him on that level and just see if he doesn't wind up filling your entire being, every aspect, with his satisfying and sustaining person.

It is an undeniable fact that once Christianity was granted State sanction it lost much of it's identification with the oppressed and in a manner of a century or so was guilty of collusion with oppressors every bit as pernicious as the oppressing Pagan Romans had been. I grieve this truth. It is an albatross that the church must wear around it's neck until the end of time. But any unbiased reading of the new testament will reveal that Christ and the apostles knew this would happen. We get our expression "wolf in sheep's clothing" from passages warning against these individuals. Maybe you find the concept of an eternal Hell a little more easy to swallow when the Bible talks of the fate of these pretenders. Perhaps you will find some comfort for your anger over these crimes by reading a paper I wrote on the subject of the oppressing church. See https://www.scribd.com/document/421495943/The-two-beasts-of-Revelation-Identified?

An excellent question. If all we are is just atoms banging into each other then you are right, concepts like right and wrong have no meaning. The classic question to the materialist, "whence come your notions of human rights"? But if we are complex biological machinery for the housing and outworking of the will of a soul then concepts like personal injury and sin become meaningful. I do not know where the boundaries between the supernatural and the natural are in a human. The supernatural part of us is certainly the part that rebelled against God and got us into this mess in the first place, but I expect the results of our rebellion were pretty thoroughgoing and that our biology inclines us towards abusive behavior every bit as much as our current soul does. I guess I take that the position that the soul is not independent of cause and effect, but that the causes and effects that it is subject to are not part of the natural order. It is not only man that has a supernatural aspect, there are other beings and agents that operate almost exclusively in that realm. God is not the only one, but he is the omnipotent one.

The bible was written by humans, but unless we discover some earlier versions of the manuscripts that contain variations from the current texts, it has remained essentially unchanged for 1900 years. See https://www.quora.com/Has-the-Quran-ever-changed-over-time?share=1 for information about the evolution of the Quran over time. Maybe this is significant to you and maybe it isn't.

I believe the claims and promises of Christ and his Church are true. The fundamentals of the faith came recommended to my by reliable sources and the research I have done into the matter have largely born them out. I say largely, because I was raised in a dispensationalist church and after a brief period of rebellion have embraced the reformed faith. I do not have adequate knowledge of my brain to tell you what properties of it motivate me to be an apologist, but I can tell you that I am NOT motivated by any desire to browbeat behavior that I find uncomfortable out of other people. The fate of the elect is GLORIOUS! We are not going to be subject to the deficient and malformed in the world that our savior is preparing for us, but we will spend eternity enjoying each others company and God's, who we will see face to face in all his holy awesomeness. What individual with a shred of compassion for his neighbor would not want him or her to partake in this? If there were an aspect of myself that was responsible for this attitude that I could isolate and mass produce I would put it into the drinking water.

I do not maintain that I am a mini God. I do maintain that there is an aspect to myself and all people that is supernatural and not necessarily subject to the laws of physics. I am a duelist and I speculate that my soul operates by different rules than my physical body. It will certainly survive this life and pass into the next. I concede that this is not a testable hypothesis. But the strictly testable aspects of our lives are not adequate to meet our psychological or even physical needs. In fact most of what we believe about the behavior of others in our lives is taken on an assertion on their part, perhaps qualified by past behavior or a recommendation from a reliable source, but taken without testable proof non the less. That is foundation of my attitude towards the Church and the Word, and both attest to the existence of a supernatural soul. What research and reasoning I have done tends to re-enforce my belief, but ultimately it comes recommended by reliable sources.

I did the research and Kellerman is absolutely right. Apparently my ideas about imbalanced suicide bombers is old propaganda. My red faced apologies. However, the research does indicate that the faith of the bombers has very little to do with their actions. The consensus opinion is that they are motivated by a desire for revenge and retaliation seated in a sense of humiliation so strong that they are prepared to sacrifice their own lives just to hurt their oppressor. I maintain that this is a far cry from the early Church's motivation to endure martyrdom at the hands of their oppressors for the sake of maintaining fidelity to Christ. Their motives did not require lashing out at those hurting them.

OK, first lets address the distinction you make between the movement Jesus initiated and your implied co-option of the movement by "Pauline" followers. You have not stated it explicitly, but you have strongly implied that Christ founded a legitimate sect within Judaism that Paul subsequently hijacked for his own purposes. Rather than address that suspicion I will leave it out there for you to confirm or modify. I also assert that there is a great difference between enduring personal persecution for one's faith and going out and committing murder/suicide for it. Please, ask uncle Google about what I assert about the mental condition of the typical "Islamic" suicide bomber and those who put them up to it. For that matter you can also query the web about the growth of the church during it's early years. I assert that any period of the Church prior to it's period if Imperial acceptance and sanction was early, as they were still a persecuted minority until then. In fact the greatest persecution the Church ever experienced, the effort by Diocletian to completely stamp it out, did not take place until around CE 285. There are some with my tradition that consider this persecution "the great tribulation" prophesied by John in Revelation.

Come now, even the atheist acknowledges that he or she is capable of thoughts or actions that are harmful to him or her self or others. It doesn't take a religious authority to convince us that there is something amiss in our makeup that could be improved upon, hence the variety the mental health councilors and self help programs. Christianity just acknowledges what an individual is going to be forced to admit eventually anyway, our wills are not powerful enough to significantly improve upon what we are. This condition of man coupled with the love of an almighty God is what motivated Christ's ministry. He uses the church to confirm the bad news about what we are, something the intellectually honest about us already suspected anyway, but then assures us, trust me, believe in my work, and I will carry you through this life and into another one where you will not be held accountable for what you were, but will be given new natures that are no longer capable of self or other hurt and will delight in my presence and the presence of each other. The Church that stays true to this message will be used of God to comfort and transform even the vilest of sinners.

I will repeat here what I posted in one of your earlier threads. Islamic suicide bombers are recruited from the imbalanced population of that faith (look it up) and those who do the recruiting are deeply resented by the mainstream of that culture. The early Church had it's mentally challenged I am sure, but it was for the most part made up of and led by people in their right minds who had been convinced by apostolic witness of the truth of Christ's claims.

I do not assert that our minds and our wills are at 100% liberty. In fact that would be undesirable. Our minds need the mitigating influence of prior experience to weed out the thoughts and actions that we know from instruction and experience are harmful. What I do maintain is that our thoughts and actions are not 100% determined by our genetics and our past experience. That too would be disadvantageous in that it would not allow for innovation. That is, we could not acquire new knowledge unless it was already latent within us or had been promulgated by someone else in whom it was also latent.

You're getting the cart before the horse. Do you think people act for the most part in their own self interest? If my beliefs are groundless then there is no self interest in holding them or trying to convince others of their veracity and if I have a shred of intellect they will eventually dissipate. As far as the the suicide bombers go, ask anyone familiar with the practice and they will tell you that sane Muslims do not participate in it. The people who put others up to this form of suicide recruit from the imbalanced members of that religion and are deeply resented by the mainstream of the population. And the assertion that the early church was tiny until Rome got on board is flat out wrong. Look it up. By AD 300 Christians were almost a plurality in the Roman empire. That and the acceptance of the legitimacy of Paul's witness was almost universal throughout the early church. My belief may seem funny to you, but it is rooted in historical fact and consistent philosophy.

The created order is a reference to the entire physical existence, matter, energy, and whatever else we may discover. You may have misspoken, but under the current theory of the beginning of the universe there was nothing, no gases, no substance, not even space or time prior to the big bang. It is all postulated to have erupted from a dimensionless singularity, with any cause prior to it unknowable because it existed out side the realm of measurable reality. Most (if not all) theoretical physicists will tell you we cannot postulate anything prior to it because nothing that we can observe through any instrumentation, current or proposed, has any property that it acquired prior to it. Most Christians I know delight in the assimilation of new knowledge, we are not threatened by it. There have always been schools of though in orthodox Christianity that believed in an ancient earth. But science is not a panacea. The universe is much bigger than we are and it is always in flux. We do not know everything there is to know about the universe's beginning or even our own and you should let go of the notion that we ever will. I have constructed an argument for the belief in a divine sentience in the free will thread that you may find interesting. Check it out.

Hi. By now I have a reputation on this board as an apologist and I suppose that is accurate. However, that does not mean that I condone everything that was done in the name of Christianity or even the Church itself at every point in history. I sense on this board a beef with the established Church, somewhat in this country and particularly with the Church in it's medieval manifestation. I share that beef. I make a sharp distinction between the Church under pagan Rome and the Church post Constantine, during which it was transformed into an organ of the State. I have been in discussions in other threads over the reliability of the accounts of Christ's ministry and that of the early Church contained in the new testament. The thrust of the skeptics arguments is that the authors of the new testament wildly embellished Jesus' ministry and role because they wanted to justify the continuance of the movement he initiated. That might be a plausible argument if the early Church enjoyed the same public acceptance and government endorsement in the first three hundred years of it's existence that it did after Constantine co-opted the Church to prop up his government. It did not. Christians under pagan Rome were essentially a despised minority that drew largely from slaves and the lower classes. Espousing the cause of Christ was definitely not a quick path to public approval or security and often meant giving up whatever status one had. There were no fat Bishops or powerful Popes during this period. If you were a Church leader you were automatically under suspicion of fomenting sedition against the empire. There was no material benefit to be gained by artificially preserving this movement if it wasn't true. In fact it is a testament to the accuracy of the new testament that it predicted persecution of it's adherents if they were truly faithful to a full commitment to the Lordship of Christ. It wasn't until after Rome threw in the towel and made Christianity the official religion of the empire, ushering in the medieval era and all the abuses by the Church attendant to it, that being a Christian became socially and materially acceptable. I suspect that it is this Church that the skeptics here find so repulsive. I am with you on this. But I suspect you are making the mistake of mapping the lies and abuses of that period back onto the apostles. Don't do that. For the most part the leadership of Constantine's Church would have bolted and ran back to the idol worship of old Rome before signing up to the social and spiritual rigors required of the first century Church. Read some of the extra biblical accounts of the first century Church and what they endured if you want proof of the guts and integrity of these people. There is no way they could have endured it if they even suspected the apostolic witness of lies or even error. Continuing in this vein I acknowledge that the modern Church is also guilty of enjoying material benefit from alliance with the State or it's organs. I am appalled at the degree to which the white evangelical Church has allowed itself to be slipped into the back pocket of the Republican party, and I am equally appalled at the degree to which the black urban church has become a mouthpiece for the Democratic party. As a potential believer you have every right to reject either of these organizations because they have fallen into the heresy of works based rightousness of their respective political alliances. If you find this argument in any way convincing then I encourage you to seek out a church that preaches salvation by faith in the atoning death and resurrection of Christ the son of God. It is there that you will find the same spirit at work that preserved the early Church during the bad old days when we did not enjoy the freedoms and protections that we do now.

There is no such thing as unfree sentience, that is the thrust of my assertion. Now if you believe in such a thing as unfree sentience then your position is correct, the two are entirely unrelated. But I will repeat the challenge, how can an unfree sentience produce steady improvement in the sciences? If there is such a thing as an unfree sentience does that imply that all our recent knowledge was preprogrammed into us and we are just regurgitating things we already knew from the beginning? Is there a preordained limit on what we will discover? Of course I accept that our sentience is profoundly affected by our biology and past experiences. An artist studies the work of the masters and must work with his or her medium, but that doesn't mean that the art is not original or significant. As far as where our sentience goes when we are under anesthetic, inactive does not imply non-existent. A computer is capable of swapping out code and data it does not need while it is working on another problem or inactive, but the information is right there for it to recall when the situation demands it.

Let's examine this. Apparently the choice is between free will and bound will. What is the difference between bound will and determinism? Almost by definition a bound will cannot act outside it's predetermined (whether by design or input) course of action. It is as predetermined as dropping a rock. Free will implies something outside the realm of everyday physics that can influence an agents course of action taken, subject to the limits of power available to the agent. The only thing I have ever experienced with this property is sentience. If you are aware of something else with this property I would be interested to hear what it is. My point is it is impossible to directly observe individual external evidences of sentience, any behavior can be attributed to some sort of conditioned response or inherited predisposition. But speaking for myself, I do have internal evidence of sentience. I am self aware, and I am aware of myself forming ideas and planning courses of action that are outside the realm of what can be accounted for by prior experience. If you look at the history of mankind, you can also see collective evidence of sentience. How do you account for the steady progression of the arts and sciences except by a free intellect observing the environment and forming testable theories of it's explanation? If this is not evidence of an intellectually free sentience I don't know what is. The point of my argument was that if I can sense sentience in myself it requires little external evidence to posit sentience in other people, and by extension it does not require a complete revelation of God's being or his handiwork for me to posit his existence and sentience.

The concept of free will begs the question, what is the nature of sentience? A deep question indeed. Is pain real? Pleasure? Compasion? Hate? Some of these questions cannot be addresses by the traditional scientific method. I certainly think I feel these things, but the evidence is all internal. I assert that the fact that we only have internal evidences for sentience does not make them any less real. The issue is if we only accept the internal evidence for our own sentience without extrapolating sentience in other beings we end up with a society of sociopaths. Lets just say that for me, the same dynamic that compels me to accept sentience in other humans without the same internal evidence compels me to accept divine sentience based on external evidence in the existing order without the internal witness that only God has.

You are basically making the argument that the authors of the gospels and new testament were acting out of selfish motives when they "made up" the parts of the account attesting to Christ's divinity and his resurrection. OK. What was there motive? Did they have anything to gain by establishing a new sect that was despised by the existing Jewish authorities? Persecuted by the Romans? That called upon it's leadership to take upon itself the role of servants? Don't look at the status that the current or medieval church enjoys or enjoyed, look at what the founder of the faith enduring. These guys were NOT princes of a comfortable organization, this can be attested to by completely extra biblical sources that I suspect you accept. You are arguing that the early fathers were the authors and beneficiaries of a mass delusion. Why, WHY would they do this? Now, if you want to argue that a legitimate movement was later co-opted by exploiting personalities (Constantine *cough* Constantine) there I am with you. THAT is a topic I would love to engage with you on another thread. I am asking you to view the legitimacy of the early church through the lenses of the believers of the oppressed church, not the opera glasses of the later, co-opted state church which you have a legitimate beef with.

Now THAT is an excellent counter arguement. The answer to it is that we know from the evidence that the created order has a beginning, accepted? If you think about it event time itself didn't exist before the current order was brought into being. Do you accept the assertion that every effect has a cause? If so, then if there is any activity at all in the universe then there has to be a preceding cause. This implies the existence of a series of antecedent causes stretching back into infinity, unless you believe in a first cause that had no antecedent. THAT is very difficult to justify based on the evidence. The classic argument then is that God is and is the author of all antecedent cause and that by observed necessity he must be have existed at all points past in order for there to be any current reality at all. That is my justification for a creating God. Please review the arguments for God withholding himself from the created order for my arguments for the Christian God.

To argue for a necessity of a creating God on the basis of the evidence of a staggeringly improbable universe is not an admission of insufficient intelligence on my or anybody else's part. An archealogist posits a great deal about the past on the basis of the survival of just a few artifacts, I am sure you find that science intellectually defensible. To maintain that an intelligent six year old could argue against it is an unsubstantiated assertion. I assert that maintaining it was all the result of "blind luck" is more a lack of intelligent investigation than at least acknowledging that something extraordinary must account for it, something with an intelligence capable of envisaging an order that is far beyond mine or yours. My original post used teleology to justify the existence of God. Consider the arguments about the current apparent unapproachable nature of God to establish his Christian nature.