Why not Jesus?

What do they believe? What do you think? Talk about religion as it exists today.

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Peter Kirby
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Re: Why not Jesus?

Post by Peter Kirby »

Metacrock wrote:you still have not told me how I misrepresented your views or exactly what bothered you about it.
Sure. That's a reasonable request.

I did say:
Well, if anyone ever said anything along the lines of 'the evidence for Christianity is overwhelming,' they are wrong.
... in response to a query about how there can be a forum where a bunch of people skeptically and critically examine the scriptures. How is my comment relevant? It is relevant in that it might be surprising that there is such a forum, if the evidence truly were "overwhelming," as indeed some (various apologists) have actually claimed. Since the evidence does not rise to that kind of standard, the kind of standard on which something such as evolutionary biology is based (about which there is controversy anyway), then it is not surprising at all to find this kind of widespread and reasoned doubt or disagreement.

I did not say anything about this topic (or, generally, about exactly how weak, or strong, such evidence is):
Metacrock wrote:The evidence for Christianity is a lot stronger than you are willing to give it credit for being.
You have assumed something about how much credit is being given based on who was writing (in this case, me). The statement I made in this thread, however, did not make any such claim. That is a different claim, and it should (naturally) not be surprising if an atheist and a Christian theology student differed in their evaluation of the exact merits of the case.

I did not say anything about this topic either:
Metacrock wrote:They don't demand that arguments be overwhelming before they consider them
Great. But that has nothing to do with what I said. I did not suggest any such procedure.

The rest of what you've said in this thread in response to me is even further removed from the subject ostensibly at hand, which was my original terse statement, about which you don't even appear to disagree, when understood in its original sense. For someone who didn't actually take exception to that statement, you've found a lot of words to get in edgewise.
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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Re: Why not Jesus?

Post by Metacrock »

The rest of the stuff I will not answer life is short I am not wasting any more time on "I said you said." Here is the only the only thing I care to answer:
Pete:The rest of what you've said in this thread in response to me is even further removed from the subject ostensibly at hand, which was my original terse statement, about which you don't even appear to disagree, when understood in its original sense. For someone who didn't actually take exception to that statement, you've found a lot of words to get in edgewise
I assume you refer to the statement about the evidence is not overwhelming. I made a statement about why one should not put much stock in "overwhelming" evidence; because faith is more complex than just arguments in apologetics books. You wrote it off as "mealy mouthed" but I was serious about it. You are trying to get get back at me I'm not interested. What I am into is discussing why the evidence isn't stronger than it is and why that should not be construed as a weakness,
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Re: Why not Jesus?

Post by Peter Kirby »

We could just stop discussing the tangent (your tangent, for what it matters) altogether. Like you said, life is short. And, as I said, I'm not interested in doing anything more in this thread than defending what I actually wrote.
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Re: Why not Jesus?

Post by Metacrock »

Peter Kirby wrote:We could just stop discussing the tangent (your tangent, for what it matters) altogether. Like you said, life is short. And, as I said, I'm not interested in doing anything more in this thread than defending what I actually wrote.


I'm am here to have serious discussions because I want intellectual challenge, not to squabble. :mrgreen:
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Re: Why not Jesus?

Post by outhouse »

winningedge101 wrote: Are Christians justified in their belief?.
Not at all.

Why do you guys reject Jesus as God?
Because when we study ancient men who created gods, we see all of their errors. They made gods of mortal men, and claimed positive and good thoughts were not of your own nature in conscious thought. They believed every aspect of your mind was controlled by bad or good spirits.

One who always thought good and pure could be viewed as divinely inspired.

You guys are like the smart ones so if you guys are the ones studying these manuscripts and you still are not even convinced at all by Christ then why should I or any other Christian be?
You can keep he theism, and ditch the mythology and rhetoric, and you will actually find more value in the human origins of the religion


I want to be a Christian, but I want it to be an intellectual decision and not one derived on nothing but blind faith
The start with an unbiased mind, and study the real history and accept it. From there after a few years of study make another decision
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Re: Why not Jesus?

Post by outhouse »

Metacrock wrote:
Peter Kirby wrote:. The evidence for Christianity is a lot stronger than you are willing to give it credit for being.


Well that is not true in any part.

Your statement is factually a faith based one.

Their is no credible evidence for any god let alone an ancient Galilean turned into god magically after death.
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Re: Why not Jesus?

Post by winningedge101 »

Peter Kirby you are a Jesus mythicists right?
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Re: Why not Jesus?

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winningedge101 wrote:Peter Kirby you are a Jesus mythicists right?
No? But I am curious about the subject.
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Re: Why not Jesus?

Post by winningedge101 »

What do you think about Richard Carrrier's brand new book? I just got it in the mail.
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Re: Why not Jesus?

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winningedge101 wrote:What do you think about Richard Carrrier's brand new book? I just got it in the mail.
This thread has some of my thoughts:

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1397

Including this list of comments specifically regarding the "Bayesian" approach in the book:
1) Carrier uses a specific case, not the general case, of the relevant mathematical equations, and his use of the specific case contains the assumption of the conditional independence of the consequent probabilities being assigned. This is not only unjustified (and unexplored, in the second book anyway) but also, in some cases, seems clearly off (with the multiple points of data regarding statements of Paul being suggested here as an example where conditional independence does not obtain).

2) Carrier believes that he can "wash out" some of the insignificant hypotheses, like, for example, the general "school" of mythicism that stands in contradiction to Drews-Couchoud-Doherty (namely, Mead-Wells-Ellegard) on the interpretation of Paul, etc. This seems to be unjustifiable theoretically, and it also reduces some of the interest of the book, since he basically says very little that would be relevant to anyone considering whether one of these other hypotheses regarding the non-historicity of Jesus might be true (containing that discussion in a few pages).

3) Carrier proposes multiple reference classes for the construction of a prior (savior figures with significant names being one, the Rank-Raglan heroes being another). And he also says that it doesn't really matter whether you put something among the data for the prior probability or in relation to the consequents, as the results will be the same. So why doesn't Carrier put any of the other possible choices of a reference class for a prior into the calculation of the consequents? Here we think not only of his own suggestion (savior figures with significant names) but also at least one fairly obvious alternative (religious figures claimed to be founders of a school or tradition).

4) Carrier essentially encodes his beliefs about the margin of error involved in estimating the consequent probabilities by the spread between the "a fortiori" figures and his own best estimates: "This will produce a conclusion a fortiori, which you can assert with as high a confidence level as could ever be obtained on the available data--because any adjustment of your estimates toward what they truly are will then only make your conclusion even more certain." Unfortunately, while Carrier does allude to the language of a "confidence level," he assigns no numerical value to the statistical significance that he considers his conclusions "from strength" (a fortiori) to have. To use some common figures (for the likelihood that this ratio "or better in Carrier's favor" represents the objective probability), are they at the 68% confidence level, 95% confidence level, or 99.7% confidence level? While I understand the desire not to bog the reader down in more math, it is somewhat lamentable that the call for greater mathematical precision leaves to one side the mathematical tools for measuring uncertainty and imprecision. And, if anything is clear, there is uncertainty and imprecision in these conclusions.

5) If Carrier had used a mathematical measure of confidence levels, Carrier might have been able to overcome some of the difficulties in interpreting the final numerical results of all his labors and calculations. What does a 32.3% final outcome even mean? An interesting question from someone at the talk in Irvine was about whether one could consider the use of a p-value test of statistical significance of conclusions allowing the rejection of a null hypothesis (for a p-value below 0.05 or 0.01, typically). Carrier basically said that this doesn't apply because he's doing humanities work and not data-based statistical work. And this leads to another point...

6) Carrier never creates an experiment. While he's strong on criticizing existing method, and he is more-or-less okay as far as the theoretical modeling of his method goes, he never gives it the good old acid test, or even tries to (apart from incidental comments on how Socrates would be okay, e.g.). One way to view Carrier's computations is to view them as representing a "Naive Bayes' Classifier" (with some funky features being counted or classified, to be sure) leading to the identification of a figure as "historical" or "non-historical." Perhaps we could add more features to be counted (to the ones that Carrier considers) so that we could generalize the method. Then we could take real-world examples of people that we know existed (e.g., Joseph Smith), remove some key pieces of the data set that make the problem trivial and make the relevant features for consideration too radically different (like, say, anything written within the lifetime of the figure in question or 20 years after), and then test whether our method works out. We could do the same with people that we know did not exist (e.g., Superman). The classifier function results could have the False Positives and False Negatives counted, and we could also possibly get a better sense of how reliable the results are at a given level of "predicted" probability that a person existed or did not exist. For example, we might find that in reality, persons that are predicted to exist with 99.7% or greater expected probability only, in fact, existed in 17 out of 20 tests; this provides a check on whether our theory corresponds to the real world.

7) Of course, the experiment, the suggestion of generalization of features used for classification to be able to apply them to other claimed people in history, and the representation of uncertainty with statistical methods--all of these would practically require that the subjectivity be removed from the consequent probabilities and that some kind of countable or objectively classifiable data be used instead for these estimates. So there is the recurring problem that, even if you like the numbers as good guesses, their subjectivity gets in the way.

8) Not everyone likes the numbers as guesses.

9) Not all of the consequent probabilities that could be considered have been considered.

10) Evidence that bears on a relevant sub-problem (such as the beliefs of Paul) is treated as applying to the historicity of Jesus directly, when technically (technically, because discarding everything but his own "minimal mythicism" seems to allow this to slide, but that's its own problem...), technically, this should be its own variable. And, technically, we seem to be, therefore, constructing a kind of Bayesian network. Of course, that'd go beyond 6th grade math....

11) Using the 'odds form', while setting one or the other to 100%, can be confusing and possibly inhibits intuitions regarding events ("evidence") that are unlikely both on the hypothesis and its negation, by asking us only to consider the ratio but also to consider one as 100% likely (what if, for example, on deep reflection, we think they're 15% and 20% likely, respectively...giving a ratio of 3:4...would we necessarily realize that when using this shortcut? or might we underestimate the difference, setting them equal or with a ratio closer to 1:1?).
"... almost every critical biblical position was earlier advanced by skeptics." - Raymond Brown
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