There’s a theist over on the channel, as usual, making all kinds of accusations and pretty much following the standard religious party line. You know, “I’m not here to debate” and “we have evidence!” and all that.
I was thinking about where he was going to go next. These people are almost always very predictable. I’ve already tentatively taken on faith and the Bible, although there’s plenty of work still to do if he decides to go that way, but I was also wondering how long it would be before he reached “we have eyewitnesses!”
That’s what I want to talk about today.
It reminded me of a video that I did recently, the second part of a 2-parter, where Carpenter’s Desk had a conversation with J. Warner Wallace and Wallace tried to pretend that eyewitnesses were reliable. You can go here to see what I’m talking about if you’d like. However, I was thinking of a different take on it, especially when you get to the courtroom, which is something that J-Dubs likes to do, with the realization that the most rational way to look at the entire courtroom drama is as two opposing teams of actors, trying to con their jury-audience.
If you think about it, that’s really what’s going on. One lawyer or team or lawyers is there to prove the defendant guilty. The other is there to get them off. It doesn’t really matter if they’re actually innocent, their team doesn’t get paid the big bucks unless they get them out of prison. You’d hope that the prosecution cares about whether their guilty verdict is accurate or not, but I think we all know that’s not always the case.
Therefore, each side calls an array of supporting actors, called witnesses, to get up and tell and often carefully-curated story that supports the narrative that the lawyers want to tell. You’d hope that someone actually gives a damn about the truth, but I think we see tons of evidence that’s not necessarily true.
At the end, the jury, the people in the audience, they get to vote on which side did the best job. One side is only trying to tell a story that the defendant committed the crime and the other only cares if they can provide doubt so their client walks out the door. Truth is often entirely irrelevant to the process.
This is why eyewitnesses aren’t really relevant. We know the stories change depending on the questions asked and the questions asked vary depending on intent. The prosecution doesn’t want the witness to say anything that clears the defendant and the defense doesn’t want the witness to say anything that incriminates them. Truth is inconvenient to their job performance. Both get paid and get professional accolades based on whether they win or lose. Nobody is really trying to get to the truth, for the sake of getting to the truth.
That’s what we see in the Bible as well. First off, we don’t have any demonstrable eyewitnesses to anything. These are stories, told decades after the supposed facts. Nobody knows who wrote any of it, even Paul, since we don’t have any independent evidence on who Paul even was. Paul might have been a preacher, but that doesn’t give any of his claims any verifiable validity. He said he saw a spirit Jesus. How do we prove that actually happened? We can’t.
It’s why we only take the parts that we can prove out of the Homeric Epics and ignore the crazy stories of gods and goddesses. The religious don’t like that much. They don’t want to do that. It says something in a book that they like, it’s just got to be true because that gets them where they desperately want to go!
Too bad it doesn’t work that way.
Matthew 27 “The veil of the temple tore in two from top to bottom, and the earth quaked, and the rocks were rent, and the tombs were opened, and many bodies of holy men who had fallen asleep were raised, and coming out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection they entered into the holy city and appeared to many.”
None of the other Gospels or ANY source from the entire ancient world reports anything like this. No one does nor any other historian or writer of that place or period. Somehow all the people, all those who could write, all the rabbis of Jerusalem, failed to notice any rock splitting earthquake, or a huge hoard of walking dead wandering the city, or any of the numerous empty tombs they left behind.
There also had to have been thousands of witnesses to so devastating an earthquake, and hundreds of witnesses to the hoard of resurrected dead and yet we have no way to fact check any of that.
What should a reasonable person think given the “evidence.” (A story in a book). What is more likely, I am reading a fact sheet or mythology?
Could it be that Christianity was just a natural product of its time and culture, because that also predicts a great deal more than the reverse? It explains why Christianity shares so many things in common with the religions of its day (—from various Jewish sects to all the pagan mystery cults in that part of the world, at that time), including notions that would seem strange in any other cultural context yet were common at the time, like incarnation, resurrection, blood sacrifice, and vicarious atonement.
Even the idea of a God having a son makes no sense, except then, under the Roman Empire, when many gods were believed to have sons. Christianity thus looks like an ordinary product of its time, not a supernatural miracle from a universal God.
As you well know, evidence is the only way to differentiate faith claims, because all claims are true by faith. Faith proves anything and everything. Only evidence that scales with the claims (more extraordinary evidence needed for more extraordinary claims) can differentiate between them.
Honestly, what’s the difference between an immaterial, undetectable, unknowable, non-demonstrable, non-objective God and no God at all? This type of God disables ALL our reality checks because this God is simply morphing and user defined. Faith proves all Gods, so Faith can prove none of them. God means anything you want it to mean, so it is meaningless.
What is commendable about believing these most extraordinary claims on completely insufficient evidence? The evidence needs to scale with the claims. Again, these are the most extraordinary assertions in the universe (people rising from the dead!) with nothing but feelings to cash them out.
All of the early Christian stories are just what we’d expect to see from a Hellenized Jewish culture, just like what existed at the time. The whole story of Jesus was influenced by the Egyptian stories of Osiris and Isis. Christians who understand any of that are desperate to sweep it under the rug and pretend to be unique and special, but none of it is. The New Testament is exactly what we’d expect to see, given the situation at the time. There is nothing demonstrably supernatural about it. Current Christians just want to believe it for emotional reasons.
It’s still stupid.
―Absolutely 💯%✔