This is the thread to make the case for theism, but I would like to start with an opening statement.
I don’t think a case for theism can be made that wouldn’t also open the door for the existence of ghosts, extraterrestrials, leprechans, bigfoot, Muhammad, Krishna, and Zeus.
If you’d like to start the thread a different way, however, please feel free.
I’ve heard so many conflicting and vague versions of what God is that, upon reflection, I can’t come up with anything other than a supernatural entity with some unknowable purpose. Or a force, like the Star Wars one (which is really more naturalistic than God-like, IMO). That’s dissatisfying to me to the extent that I have a hard time finding the interest in a debate about it. Anyway, science has already provided us with natural explanations for so much that was formerly dubbed ‘supernatural,’ that it seems pointless to rely on the argument that at some point, science will hit the proverbial brick wall. Logic is probably a the only valid course to find God, since it already has the brick wall built in, lol. All you have to do is come up with a proposition and successfully defend it according to the rules and form. Which just makes the proposition itself God. It doesn’t address the truth value problem.
Along those lines, it’s not very satisfying to defend God’s existence only because it hasn’t been proven to the contrary. As Uccisore is fond of pointing out, those who believe God exists can still find evidence that supports their contention that God does exist. And then all we can do is take each piece of that evidence and reason it. Exhaustively, to our exhaustion…and not to a successful conclusion.
I also don’t find it reasonable to try to elucidate god’s ‘purpose’ or ‘will’ and then use that as the foundation for God’s existence. But Uccisore, you’ve gone down that path, care to venture down it again?
Assuming the challenge is to make a case for the actual existence of a divine entity and not the actual existence of belief in a divine entity, then I’d say one big problem I can see is that the choice comes down to “because of God” or “because it is as it is”. If ‘as it is’ means that it’s simply a fact of life that sentient beings will both suffer/die and cause others to suffer/die, then that’s not very satisfactory. Ontologically speaking, anyway. And neither is more rational than the other.
I’m also not convinced that “god is in the gaps” is a very good approach to proving god exists because, 1) those gaps seem to be narrowing, 2) there’s the logical problem in assuming that narrowing the gaps has anything to do with God really existing, and 3) if the narrowing hasn’t yet convinced theists, then further narrowing probably won’t, either. But assuming it’s about all we have, then how about the ‘gap’ of first cause, creation of the universe? Assuming there has to be one, we don’t (yet) have an explanation. Maybe someone can take that one…?
Just so you know, I do intend to hit this, I have a friend moving away this weekend, not doing anything overly brain-intensive probably for the next 24 hours or so.
First things first, let me say that my position is on Christianity, not ‘theism’. I don’t think theism abstracted from the particulars of a religion is a defensible position at all. So, that being said, my definition of God is rather general, and not really all that important.
Ingenium is right that there’s a difference between making a case for the actual existence of an entity, vs. justified belief in such. I’m no pragmatist, though, so the difference for me becomes a question of deduction vs. induction.
There’s also personal vs. social arguments. What justifies me to believe in God is not the same as what would justify another individual, or ‘everybody’. I’m not claiming subjectivity here, so much as I’m saying that the actual value of various bits of evidence will depend on one’s individual circumstances.
So, that being said, let me open this the same way as I did that thread not so long ago where I presented a case for theism. I’m expecting this will develop mostly through rebuttals, so I’m going to keep it brief here as an opening post. Ingenium, you should find most of this familiar, we sort of went over it not so long ago.
You have three main sources of confirmation of the truth of Christianity. Philosophical, Social/Historical, and Personal.
When I say philosophical, I mean that the claims of Christianity are not logically impossible or inductively incredible. So, there's [i]room[/i] for them. More than that, Christianity offers a coherent, deep system of thought that can be applied in a satisfying way to many of the 'big questions' of philosophy. This is the area I've studied the most, and a bigger portion of my personal belief relies on it.
The Social/Historical source relates to the existence of Christians in the world, past and present. In the present, a Christian finds himself in [i]good company. [/i] That is to say, a person need not feel as though he is taking part of an intellectually bankrupt enterprise. There is no reason a doctor, lawyer, mathematician, scientist, engineer, and so on can't be a Christian and still master their profession. Christianity is not like belief in Santa Clause, where a person is expected to abandon it when they get older, and it's not like Young Earth Creationism, where a person has to rail against all established modern wisdom in order to maintain it. So, a Christian can be comfortable knowing that he is making a choice perceived as intellectually permissible by society.
On the historical side, Christianity has historical backing for all it's central claims. People who deny that Jesus ever existed are only marginally more mainstream than Young Earth Creationists, and we have an unbroken line of history from Him, to His apostles, to people who were taught by His apostles, right through to the present day. There is no Dark Age in Christianity where the thread is dropped, history is silent and one has to [i]assume[/i] that things went well. A Christian can rest assured that there really was a John the Baptist- we know this as surely as we know any other facts from that time in history. The exception to this would be the supernatural claims. But this is a false exception- they are no less historically documented and accounted for than the rest of it, skepticism towards them comes purely from a [i]philosophical[/i] bias and not a historical one, and since, as I pointed out above, a fully supernatural Christianity offers a coherent, useful, viable philosophy, this need not be a major concern.
Last but certainly not least, are the Personal evidences. That is to say, actual occurrences in an individual's life that validate the Christian claims. The most obvious thing that comes to mind are supernatural events, such as communicating with God, or witnessing miracles. These things occur to many Christians on a daily basis, and are a large body of evidence in themselves. But in addition to this, are the experiences of Christian validation- having it proven to one through experience that living the way Christ and the Church Fathers suggested really leads to the fruits they described, or, encountering the testimony of others and what Christ has done in their lives, etc. This is at once the strongest and the weakest sort of evidence, since on the one hand it takes very little of it to produce a very confirmed believer, but at the same time, it's almost impossible to share with someone else without it becoming mere anecdote.
So, in my personal case, I am justified in being a Christian because Christianity represents a intellectually acceptable, deep and satisfying philosophy that answers important questions and creates a framework for understanding the universe, that does not require me to contradict the deliverances of other sources of knowledge in life. In addition to being acceptable, it is confirmed through personal encounters with God, the Church, and the benefits of the teachings thereof.
Christianity is, then, intellectually beneficial to believe, philosophically permissible to believe, and personally and experientially demonstrated as true. Theism of course is at the heart of Christianity, you can’t confirm one without the other. You can also see that if you try to confirm theism on it’s own without Christianity, you can only refer to the Philosophical leg of the evidence, and philosophy alone only makes theism one of several permissible things to believe, and probably not the best of them. I think something like an Occam’s Razor argument would work against purely philosophical theism.
Let’s… but first I’d like to say that aside from a few tiny points in your post, I have very little to argue against nor much to challange an explination for… You seem to be appealing to four different things to claim justification… the internal consistency of you’re belifs (which we can test) the demonstrated co-existence of the christian faith along-side science and other intellectual persuits, which I take to mean that they do not contradict eachother… The historical evidence for at least some of the bible’s characters and events, and finally the personal experiences that you have but cannot prove. While this is all well and good… the real question an atheist would pose a christain is not so much why the christian believes… but more in the way of why the atheist should… obviously the christian who appeals to personal revilation has already explained why he believes… now what needs to be determined is why this “personal” revilation of his should in fact be proof of an objective god and not just a subjective fiction of his own imagination… appealing to the existence of other christians and such only harms his case since not all of them believe what he does… in fact many believers are not christian at all… yet have nearly the same number of believers in their perticular faith… cults have been shown to emerge and gain a large number of devoted followers who sincerely believed… obviously a count of members has no baring on the objectivity of the matter… besides a vast majority of the worlds population is distinctly NOT christian, anyway…
Historically speaking… there seems to be a great deal of odd “coincidences” when one examins the bible with previously existing religions… bits and pieces seem to have been borrowed here and there… for example the vergin birth is not a just a christian myth… it’s an ancient egyption one and an even older myth from mesopotamia… the image of the son of god, with a crown of thorns… is not that far from Ra… the the sun god… oddly with a crown of thorns made of rays of light… even stranger still… easter was originally a fertility festival celibrated by the pegans long before christ… the bunny and egg is their little contribution to this annual event we now consider the resurrection of christ… There was never a great flood… genisis is wholly wrong we did not descend from adam and eve…
There are countless such examples to show that historically christianity holds no more water than any other myth… or religion. So again… if it must be proven as objective fact and not just a subjective one… history will prove no aid to the case for christianity…
We are left with philosophical justification… and personal revilation…
having said that…
I have only two questions…
how do YOU know there is a god? was it personal revilation that proved it? or something else?
Why should I (or anyone else for that matter) believe god exists anywhere other than inside our heads? or that he/she/it is more than an idea or concept?
Well, an atheist shouldn’t if he’s not in my position, or something like my position. When we talk about God, we’re talking about the existence of a particular entity, and so, evidence has to present to the individual. If the particular atheist doesn’t know about the philosophical and historical evidence, and has no evidence of the truth of the claims of Scripture themselves, then it sounds like they’re a justified atheist.
What I would say, though, is that there are a great deal of atheists who were theists, and who become atheists because of a denial of one of the things I’ve brought up. If a person becomes an atheist because they think belief in God is philosophically untenable, or because they thought religious people tend to be fools, or because they thought there was no evidence for the supernatural claims made, then that atheist is simply incorrect, and at the very least needs to ground his atheism better.
Well, personal revelation is just a small side of it, and even anecdotes add up after awhile. When you have recent historic events like the reopening of a monastery or whatever where literally hundreds of miraculous events are reported in the course of a couple days, that's something that goes beyond each person having a personal revelation. As far as believing that these things are just a subjective fiction of one's own imagination, if they happen to other people, the usefulness of that explanation is reduced, and don't forget the historical and philosophical legs of the defense- a person that experiences something like this has the support of 2,000 years of history of other people claiming the same thing, [i]and[/i] a coherent philosophy that allows for the possibility. We've already established that materialism cannot make any positive negative claims about what might exist beyond matter, so it's not as though materialism gives us some very good reason do doubt these things out of hand.
Sure, that’s true, but I bring it up because so many skeptics contradict it. If you let them, many critics of Christianity will treat you as though you’re an idiot or a witch-doctor- a lone believer in insane things that has to justify his bizarre claims to the ‘intelligent world’. So I’m bringing up my 'Christians in Good Company" argument mostly to refute this- a Christian doesn’t have to feel that way at all.
What you'll find is that most of these events in other religions are strictly mythical events that were never alleged to have happened to real people at a real time in history. The propose a 'mythical age' of sorts. Ra never preached in Cairo. Christ is the first, best verified [i]instantiation [/i] of several common threads running through major religions all over the world since the beginning.
Yes, but keep in mind that everybody knows this. That date was co-opted by the Church on purpose, and didn’t effect doctrine, and no Church (ok, maybe the unitarians) is going to give a sermon on the Christian significance of eggs and bunnies, because their isn’t any. Your more orthodox or hard-core believers are likely to abstain from that symbolism, not to indulge it in a greater way.
And you can find Church Fathers who taught this a thousand years before science had any ability to confirm one way or the other. It was not always the majority opinion, but nevertheless, one can take a more scientific approach to these things, and still be relying on the centuries old tradition of the original Church. Denying a global floor or a literal Adam and Eve doesn't require one to make up new rules to fit the times.
To the contrary. Jesus actually existed. That puts Christianity head and shoulders above all but a very few religious systems in the world.
Well, it was all the stuff I just said. Personal revelation in the context of a philosophy that aids in understanding the world, and in the company of a legacy of rational, serious minded people who interpreted similar experiences in the same way.
Because if one doesn’t have a previous allegiance to a positive denial of the supernatural (a claim you say materialism doesn’t make), then there is overwhelming evidence to suggest that it is so. A person who denies it could only be doing so from a position of a philosophical bias that requires them to do so, and we seem to agree that no such position is justified.
If you mean that you and Mad Man have agreed that neither of you want to make that claim, you should say that. However, you left the Materialism thread a too early to claim that it is “established”. If you’re going to use that as part of a justification of Christianity (by rejecting certain criticisms), you need to argue for it.
Let me try my hand at each of your sources in turn:
Philosophical:
If you’re going to claim that Christianity is not logically impossible, you need to be more specific. A part of Christianity is the belief in a god, and the attribute often ascribed to that god could easily make it logically impossible. Far from being “not really all that important”, one third (or one fourth, which I’ll speak about later) of your argument could fall depending how you understand god. Omnipotence, omniscience, and free will may be inconsitent. Omnipotence itself may be an incoherent concept.
And, as RC pointed out, a virgin giving birth is inductively incredible.
Social/Historical:
I think these should be separated, becasue they are really separate justifications.
Social:
Many people are Christian, of course, including many well-educated and thoughtful individuals. But in the ranks of acadamia, the percentage is clearly skewed towards non-belief. The American Academy of Sciences is nearly entirely atheist, and those with upper-level degrees in all fields are less likely to be religious. So, while it’s socialluy acceptable, society generally is not actually that well educated, and when you weight education, Christianity becomes a less acceptable intellectual position.
Historical:
What version of the Bible are you referring to as being an accurate historical depiction? Even in the cannonical gospels, there are numerous contradictions, both internally between the different cannonical accounts, and externally with other contemporary sources. Besides that, Christianity also accepts much of the old testament as an historical narative. Is it all metaphor, or are only the parts that have been clearly refuted to be interpreted as symbolic?
Personal:
I really like Jesus’ teaching on many things. I actually do my best to live by it, and it has done well for me. But I’m not religious, I don’t pray. I just think that Jesus made good points, and has a rationally tenable philosophy of compassion. Why should that count as evidence for the more supernatural claims of Christianity?
The personal ‘godly’ experiences, too, are not necessarily evidence for Christianity. You say that Christianity “does not require me to contradict the deliverances of other sources of knowledge in life,” but we have other more base sources of knowledge that indicate that such experiences are explainable in entirely natural terms. The ‘presence of god’ sensation is reproducible on command in a laboratory. Feelings of oneness can be incited by drug use. Prayer is similar to meditation, and studies into prayers effects in the world reveal that there is no such link. Basically, there are other explanations for these events, which only require sensory sources of knowledge. If you accept Occam’s Razor, then why shouldn’t the explanation that doesn’t need to posit an incredibly complex conscious entity with complete control over our lives, be rejected in favor of a theory that relies on senses you claim to acknowledge as valid?
The link Ucci gave is well worth reading. I think it does, actually, go a fair ways towards addressing some of the criticisms about Christianity borrowing from non-Christian traditions as a valid expression as opposed to just pilfering.
How interesting the statement that Jesus was an actual person and not a myth. The same is true of Mohammed. Both claimed to be in close contact with God, did they not? Islam claims continuity from Mohammed forward, and indeed, the quran has fewer ‘changes’ than the christian bible. So what happened? Was god asleep at the wheel? How did he allow two diametrically opposed religions to come into being, both claiming the way, the truth, and the light? Someone slipped up there.
As always, there is no way to disprove the possibility of a god. One can continually go behind and behind any form of knowing and declare “God did it.”
Regardless the justification efforts, one always has that ace-in-the-hole.
Religions, all of them, are like playing the lottery. Someone will win, and hey, it could happen. Ignoring the odds is part and parcel of any religion.
I agree with tentative. A sophisticated Muslim would say much the same about Islam as Uccisore has said about Christianity. Yet both cannot be true.
Uccisore, if you are just presenting why you personally believe in Christianity, then other religions may not enter the picture. But if you want to explain to us why we should believe, you have to explain why Christian critiques of other religions like Judaism and Islam are effective while the converse is not the case. Once you explain what’s incorrect or unconvincing in those other religions and their apologetics, I think we’ll see that the same criticisms apply to Christianity and its apologetics. Similarly, whatever criticisms you mount of Islam and Judaism will have inexhaustible defenses, just as Christians have inexhaustible defenses to every criticism leveled at them over the past 2000 years.
This is basically the Greek skeptic approach to reasoning about controversy: if contradictory conclusions can be reached by apparently valid arguments on either side, the arguments must need further investigation. I find that the critical Christian apologetics and historical claims tend to show serious fault if you examine them closely enough. The claims of biblical prophecy for Jesus’ coming, for example, look pretty silly when you examine the context of the prophecies and see how the Christians are inserting these esoteric meanings into a prophecy which was probably talking about something more immediate.
It can easily be described why I personally believe in astrology, the holy spirit, ghosts, or the extraterrestrial. I can tell you why I find the evidence to be sufficient.
This says nothing about whether or not it is true. If you are only presenting a case for why it is sufficient for you to believe it, then I think you could’ve said far less and accomplished the same thing, as many do.
I phrased it the way I did because Mad Man is who I was talking to. But, if you're saying I need to argue for materialism being unable to establish the non-existence of non-material things, then I have to ask why? If you think you can establish the non-existence of non-material things, then go ahead. That's an acceptable direction for this thread to go in. But I can easily say that at this point, I've seen no good a reason why a person is compelled to be a materialist, not the least of which because I'm suspicious of 'material' or 'physical' as being a valid category of objects in the first place.
Also, "could be impossible" is just a pessimistic way of saying 'possible', so I don't see your point about incoherence. Impossibility is another one of those things you'd have to demonstrate if you wanted to conclude it- but I have to warn you, I don't think it's possible to demonstrate the impossibility of a discrete entity, or to demonstrate the impossibility of a free being's actions on the grounds of it being against it's nature. I think those directions are just asking for trouble for the skeptic. This, though, is probably the direction the thread will go in, examining the philosophical likelihood of all these claims.
Not just the virgin birth, but all the miraculous claims of the New Testament, right?
All fields? You’re including engineers, writers, police detectives, therapists, artists, philosophers, theologians, social workers, teachers, lawyers and all other professions that require higher education, right? If you were just including scientists, I’d have to ask why, since there’s nothing about a scientist that makes his opinion on religion any more valuable than say, a judge or an architect.
That said, it wouldn’t surprise me if the percentage of religious people in academia was lower than that in the population in general, but it’s certainly not low enough that a religious person has to feel bad about their position. Like I told Mad Man P, this point is just for those skeptics who are tempted to treat theism dismissively.
Just like every other work of ancient history, yes, including the ones we take as reliable. Confliction between accounts is a sign of a true independent source, and a lack of collaboration. If the Gospels agreed on every little detail, you’d be arguing on the grounds that since they agree so much, they must actually all be plagiarized from the same document, and don’t count as independent witnesses, I suppose.
Because Jesus made those claims. Jesus prayed, Jesus was religious, and Jesus used such to ground his rationally tenable philosophy of compassion. Jesus presented no philosophy that can be abstracted from supernatural claims, so what you’re talking about doesn’t exist. Now, you can claim that Jesus was wrong in those claims, that’s fine. However, His general credibility as a teacher in what you do agree with, combined with a lack of a previous bias towards materialism, would add up to this being a good piece of evidence.
Nothing is necessarily evidence for anything, that’s one of the problems with evidential arguments.
Are you saying that brain events we can cause in a laboratory are not to be trusted outside the laboratory, or are you saying that if theism were true, the experience of the presence of God would have no reproducible brain event? Not sure what the thrust of this observation is yet.
"To be" interpreted as symbolic? That's necessary for your point to have any value, and that's what I'm telling you isn't true- they've been interpreted as symbolic ages before any scientist was able to confirm the fact. The implication that we interpret parts of the Old Testament as symbolic [i]now[/i] to avoid conflict with science is a false implication. That's actually a part of the personal revelation of God to me. I used to be troubled by the fact that I had to 'change' my understanding of Scriptures as science advanced, but I've since discovered that the oldest instances of Christianity had active interpretations that never caused the conflict in the first place- science has actually validated an older interpretation of Scripture than what I was using before.
Well, firstly because God isn’t ‘incredibly complex’, second, Occam’s is an ‘all else being equal’ kind of clause, and all else is not equal, and third, because the instances you cite would all still count as ‘reliance on the senses’ under your definition, whether there’s a God or not. If you want to twist ‘the senses’ so extremely that an experience of cosmic oneness delivered by eating magic mushrooms counts as ‘the senses’, then I don’t see we can’t keep on twisting to include such experiences caused by God.
How many books are you asking me to write, and how many would you be willing to read? If you're setting the standard of evidence such that one requires, at bare minimum, more information than could be gathered in a lifetime, then what do you want me to do?
I agree with you that the single biggest threat to the presentation I've made is from the validity of other religions. However, the single biggest threat to Christianity on these forums is atheism/materialism, so that's what my post relates to. One simply has to decide what 'enough' work to get done in an online discussion is. Establishing the viability of Christianity over and against materialism is itself WAY too big of a task for little old me, but I'm arrogant and stubborn enough to have at anyways. A sophisticated Muslim would say much the same things as me, specifically because atheism/materialism fails on the same grounds no matter who you are, and they'd criticize it the same way. The Christian and the Muslim share assumptions that the Christian and the atheist do not, and so a discussion between them would involve completely different factors.
I would consider a concession of “this needs further investigation” to be a phenomenal victory, considering the current close-mindedness of the typical skeptic with regards to these matters.
The above reads as though you’re asserting that your particular position on Christianity doesn’t include a definition of “God” with particular characteristics. Can that be correct? Or, can we assume that if it does have particulars, are they consistent with how God is addressed by the New Testament? Or, perhaps a better way to say it than ‘define’ is does your position include a description of God’s qualities? If so, then what are they? And do you have specific beliefs about Jesus or Jesus’ qualities? And what are they? How does the trinity fit into your position, if at all?
Which path shall we go down, then? I thought we’d try to agree that this discussion will focus only on the validity of Christianity as shown through logic and reason, not the mental occurence (or however you’d explain it) of ‘faith’ that must be applied to the supernatural. But that isn’t likely to last, lol, and I don’t think I’m going to be convinced in the ‘reasonableness’ of believing in the supernatural just because it all fits nicely into a coherent system. Although it seems (to my surprise) that’s where you’re going. Okayyyy…
Why? I have this niggling question that if this reality that God’s assumed to have created relies on thinking and evidence, then how can he, himself, be above or beyond it? In other words, why WOULDN’T he hold reason at the highest level?
How is that divorced from subjectivity? I’m not criticizing subjectivity or even claiming that it’s possible to be otherwise, mind you (although I have different ideas about it), but I’m just wondering how analyzing evidence through the filter of one’s individual circumstances is not subjectivity.
Yes, that was instructional, lol.
Rather than me listing claims that I’ve heard that aren’t relevent to what fuels your belief, can you instead offer up a listing of the ones that you’ve expolored and been unable to refute through reason? Doesn’t have to be exhaustive, just the most convincing ones for you.
What specific big questions?
You claim it’s ‘coherent’ but I’m curious (and this is not intended to be an insult)…and this question arose from reading the phrase ‘a bigger portion of my personal belief’…do you think it’s possible that you’re compartmentalizing because there’s simply no other way to do Christianity? I ask it seriously, because to me it’s a serious matter. The practice underlies one of the most compelling critiques I know of regarding accepting a belief that defies reason one way or the other: and that’s the necessary cutting-off or repressing of one’s line of inquiry at some point when a wall is hit. It’s of course not against the law to do this, but seems to me a compelling reason not to accept a religious or belief system that necessarily inhibits or restricts inquiry in any and all directions.
This smells of strawman, because society doesn’t necessarily perceive the choice as ‘intellectually’ permissible, but instead considers it based upon ‘faith’ or ‘belief’, neither of which requires any particular degree of demonstrated intellectual capacity. If a doctor or lawyer or rocket scientist ‘believes’ or ‘has faith’, society equates their belief with that of a ditchdigger or housewife. It isn’t a function of intellect or talent or demonstrated expertise in some field. Society (at least this one) broadly accepts faith in the supernatural exactly for what it is…that’s why we entertain stories of alien abductions, Bigfoot and gods. We don’t throw people in jail for what they believe to be true.
That a being named Jesus was alive at some time isn’t really what’s central about the claim of him, is it? Untold numbers of people can be verified through the usual evidentiary means (and from sources more reliable than the Bible, since it also contains a lot that is questiontable or contradictory) as having lived at some time in the past, but we don’t build relgions around them.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by “the philosophical bias” that underlies skepticism towards the supernatural? And why do you claim that skepticism toward the supernatural can’t be based on historical documentation?
Agreed. Anyway, supernatural claims are common to most religious belief systems. There’d be a lot less reason to call them ‘belief systems’ if I could walk all the way to Japan, for example. Such a system would be invalidated if it were to allow for skepticism or free inquiry to find rational explanations for those of its propoents that don’t appear rational, and, if none can be found, to discard them.
That’s fine as it goes and as far as it goes is simply that your standards are different from mine or other folks’. It doesn’t make a case for theism, it only makes a case that your standards put you in a particular place.
There are only anecdotal versions of ‘personal encounters with God’ and that there may be a lot of them can be just as reasonably attributed to be the product of cultural infusion, since the children of Christians in a Christian-influenced culture are indoctrinated within seconds after exiting the womb, just as the children raised by non-Christians in a non-Christian culture do not come up with these anecdotes. They can also be reasonably considered the product of meme-directed behavior, since the Christian story itself is set up to enforce belief in the presence of a being that one can communicate with in an extra-sensory way.
I don’t see how something only ‘personally and experientially demonstrated as true’ qualifies as ‘intellectually beneficial to believe’.
Which is why, IMO, discrediting one automatically rules out the other, although I agree that when you broaden it to ‘theism’, you broaden the scope of debate. But the structures of reason still apply.
If you want to convince people that a religion based on certain extraordinary historical events is true, you’ve got to delve into that history. It’s a messy business, I can attest, and probably more work than anyone around here is willing to do.
However, you can get a broad outline of what’s going on by reading popular articles and books from scholars on either side of the debate about Jesus’ life. From that you find out what the arguments and questions from one side are, how the other side answers them, whether they seem to be talking past each other, etc. and get an overall impression of the data and the reasoning done in the area.
This is basically what I’ve done over the past few years to investigate theism vs atheism. I’ve read articles on Christian apologetics websites, secular web, Islamic sites, Christian and atheist books, etc. From that reading I find that Christian apologetics about Jesus/miracles/resurrection generally ask us to assume way too much about the people surrounding Jesus that we don’t know. They insist that those people were faithful eyewitnesses who passed on only what they saw and not what they wanted to see or vaguely remembered. That no one would have mythologized Jesus’ plain historical life to fit their messianic/eschatological theories because there was too little time for a myth to develop and the people were just too darn nice and honest.
But these were people who thought that Jesus was the messiah bringing in the end times. When people think the end is coming they become capable a lot of crazy things, from killing themselves for UFOs to loving one another selflessly. Jesus was a great man, and people became so attached to him and his vision that they couldn’t accept his death like they did so many other messiahs. He had to live on, so they brought him back to life and made him God. Many biblical scholars have opinions like this, and it’s not because they rule out the supernatural due to philosophical bias. They actually think the evidence suggests it, or at least that it’s a reasonably likely alternative to the orthodox story.
The problem with my approach is that there’s a lot of garbage to filter out on both sides; that’s where it becomes important to have people with different biases and perspectives to bounce ideas and arguments off of.
Well that depends on who you want to talk to. Some people just don’t consider Christianity a live option, or it repulses them, so they look for an easy way to dismiss it. But for me, as an atheist who would like my Catholic family and friends to accept my atheism, I’m more interested in talking to religious people and coming to mutual understanding about our perspectives. I think in the end we will have to say that we both have reasonable interpretations of and beliefs about Christianity so we might as well accept that there isn’t a clear cut answer here, despite what polemicists on either side may say. I would consider that a phenomenal victory myself…