Just had another “fun” debate with a theist over “evidence” and it’s really clear that they have no clue what they’re talking about. Oh, he claimed to be knowledgeable about modern historical methods, but clearly, that wasn’t how it worked out.

So let’s dive into it. This was hysterical to watch.

I don’t remember exactly how it started, but we wound up talking about the existence of Jesus. As expected, they started to quote religious believers, saying “everyone believes Jesus was real!” Really? Not quite. It was yet another  case of the religious trying to poison the well, as if that’s any surprise.

Of course, I had to clarify my position. I’m not saying that I think Jesus didn’t exist, I just haven’t been convinced that he did. It’s the same position that I have on  the existence of gods. What would it take to convince me of any of it? Evidence.

Oh, but we have evidence, I was told. Tacitus talked about Jesus and he trusts that Tacitus would have done his due diligence!

I don’t care who you trust, that’s not evidence. Evidence is what we  can look at today. Just because you assume that Tacitus would have had access to existing Roman records, that doesn’t mean that there were existing Roman records. That’s an assertion, not evidence.

Tacitus wasn’t even around when Jesus supposedly was. He wasn’t born until 56 CE. Therefore, he has no first-hand experience at all with an actual Jesus. He’s reporting what the early Christians had to say. Nowhere does he say “I went and looked at the Roman records”. That’s just an assertion because the religious have nothing else. What  you want to be true is only true when you can verify that it is with… EVIDENCE! Not evidence that you think could have existed once upon a time, but evidence that we can directly validate today.

The religious just don’t have any of that.

We can just take their methods and apply it to anything else under the sun. The Roswell crash in 1947. Hardly anyone even remembered it until Stanton Friedman interviewed retired lieutenant colonel Jesse Marcel in 1978 and started making a big deal about Marcel’s military record. Surely he would have had all kinds of access to the truth, right? Except this is 30 years later, pretty much what happened in the case of Jesus, and you’re relying on memories from the past and the stories that Friedman, a professional “ufologist” cooked up in his head and was looking for confirmation on.

People have been saying for years “he would have known, right?” That doesn’t mean that he did. Just because he might have had access to certain things, that doesn’t mean he did have access to those things, that he accurately remembered any of those things or that he could produce corroboration that any of those things happened.

That’s where confirmation bias becomes such a problem because these are people who are looking for specific answers, not looking for demonstrable truth. Of course, the second that I brought all of this up, our theist went scampering off into the darkness, screaming “you won’t accept anything!” behind him. No, I won’t accept mere assertion in place of demonstrable fact. I pointed out what you were doing wrong. He didn’t like that and off he went, crying all the way.

This is pretty much how every interaction with the religious goes. They really want to believe, they think that their interpretation of claims makes those claims reliable and therefore, their beliefs are justified. It just doesn’t work that way. They do not have the necessary corroboration to make a skeptic think that it happened as described. I’m not saying that it didn’t, but I haven’t been convinced that it did.

They have to do better, but sadly, none of them can.