I was going to put this into words, but Wayne Jackson has already done it in a far better fashion than I can. His article is short and sweet.
Referring to the historical records of Jesus’ life and the New Testament accounts of the Gospel in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; Wayne Jackson presents the question,
“How do skeptics address these historical records? Generally speaking, they assert that the New Testament writers fabricated the accounts. The writers knew that Jesus did not do these things; they simply invented the stories.
Will this charge stand up in the light of logical inquiry? Let us think about it for a moment.
Logically speaking, either there is existence after death or there is not…”
This is an exert from the middle of this article “A Problem No Skeptic Can Explain”. Click here to read this concise article.
Seeing God's Breath 
Well, here I am again. I’ll try to elaborate on what I think about the meaning of life.
I’m struck from your comment that you mention needing to be remembered or needing a lasting impression on the world to feel purpose. I would be interested to know why it is that religion helps you in this regard? Is the hole filled in by the knowledge that God, at least, will remember you or is it bypassed by the fact that your life will essentially continue forever in a different form? It doesn’t seem to matter here on earth what we believe, we still get forgotten eventually, but I am curious how this need for recognition is filled by belief. To me it seems to just bypass the question by assuming everlasting life. The hole is never filled, the road just goes around it.
I take comfort in the fact that I am small in the grand scheme of things. I’m a part of possibly one of the greatest things in the universe, Life. Although statistically there are probably other places which contain life they are still the vast minority in the universe. I find the process amazing, the ability of life to recycle everything, the ability to colonize nearly every environment. On the grand scale I’m in awe, and somewhat humbled, that this process includes me, and in some ways I will always be here. I will always be here in the same way that the cereal I ate this morning is part of me by the end of the day. The cycle is incredible. I can think of nothing more humbling than realizing that I am not quite as important as I think I am.
And what is religion for anyway, it is either there to mollify this feeling and make us feel bigger, or it is there to awe us into feeling small enough to feel we must love others. I’m at peace with feeling small, I feel like I’m doing my part. Being small makes you realize how much we need others, how much we need to love and help others. If we don’t there is noone else out there to love or help us. Our lives only matter to one another, so we’d better make them last and weave ourselves together as tightly as possible. The universe certainly won’t groan if an asteroid boils the ocean and extinguishes our species, but if we stick together with some love and tenacity that doesn’t have to happen. We are lucky enough with our intellect not to be bound by the whims of fate quite as much as other animals, but we need each other to make it work.
This grand need to come together informs me on the micro scale as well. Of course I would like recognition and to have my name mentioned through the eons, but I’d rather it were mentioned like Buddha, as a unifier of people, rather than like Attila the Hun or Julius Ceasar as conquerers and dividers. I want my children and friends to have a wonderful future. I want to see what we can acheive and hope that they will continue the effort when I’m gone. I am genuinely excited by our technological advances and hopeful that we won’t be blinded by our sucess in other areas to our dire failures in others. Sure, I’d like to be able to see it like a fly on the wall after I’m gone, but just like moving to a new home you leave some things behind that you can’t come back to. In the same way that you grieve that, you grieve the moment that you have to die. But, it doesn’t scare me, or worry me. The world will go on without me just fine. Even if heaven exists there is no coming back to catch up, so you must be at peace with what you’ve done at the end anyway.
I hope that my contribution will be a good one. I hope that I can use my skills and my mind to further our knowledge and solve some of the pressing problems of our time. I also hope that the bricks I lay will be a good foundation for those that follow me. In order to best do this I must learn to work with people, to love them despite their faults and my own. I must do my best to enable people rather than bring them down. I must be a teacher and bring out the best in people by making them think. I must expect the same of myself and challenge myself to do the best I can at learning and challenging my beliefs. I cannot rest easy since my time is finite. I must find enough time to be happy and make others happy since I don’t have an eternity of bliss ahead of me to look forward too.
In coming to grips with my mortality and deciding what it is I want to accomplish in my life I have begun to fill in the hole that I mentioned above. I haven’t gone around it, I’ve just decided that the meaning of my life is implicit in my actions and depends on future generations for fullfillment. I must trust that my accomplishments will help future generations, but I have an entire lifetime to be sure I’m on the right path.
This isn’t to say that religious people can’t, or don’t, fill in that hole. The values I stated above are universal to nearly every religion and culture there is. People love, share, heal, teach, and comfort each other all over the world. What religion promises is eternal life (or nearly perpetual life in the case of eastern religions). The pitfall in that, for me, is that this does not equate to filling the hole. You still die, you still can’t come back, and you might be wrong. In fact, I might be wrong.
There is always a chance that your belief is wrong, that you’ve misjudged your senses and believe an untruth. After all, according to the top two religions in the world a majority of the world has misjudged and will not be granted everlasting life. Such is the nature of exclusivity I guess. But if you misjudged, if your senses failed you here on earth as they so often do, would you plead forgiveness to a God that didn’t want you to begin with, or would you be at peace knowing that you did all you could using the best tools you had at your disposal. That you tried to understand and better your world without relying too heavily on your own flawed senses and psychology? Would it be worth it to prostrate yourself to a God you never believed in on earth, simply to fill the hole you didn’t fill while you were there.
After all, faith is just faith. I have faith that my ball glove will catch the fly ball before it hits my face, but I might be wrong, and have been once before. I’d rather spend my time studying the ball and making sure my mitt lacing is secure than focus on what I can’t control.
The point to me is that you fill your life to the best of your ability with doing good for others and yourself. If you can do that, you’ve succeeded and you will be remembered for a while. You can die knowing that you’ve done your part in the biggest game we know of. What more could you really ask for aside from a chance to succeed and feel you’ve helped someone else. Anything else is just a gift to be accepted in good faith if it comes to that.
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Racheal,
Excellent question. I will elaborate some tomorrow I hope. I’m just heading home to my 2 year old and, as you may know, 2 year olds don’t allow dallying to post on a blog. I do not take offense, I think it is an excellent question. If you’d like you can look at some of my recent blog posts, I deal with that issue a bit in one or two if I remember correctly. Just click on my name above.
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That’s a rather self centred view of life. Our lives, in the grand scheme of things, don’t mean a great deal at all. Yes, I could die right now and I’d be remembered for a while and then forgotten … just as has happened to every single human being that has died before us.
But why should we be remembered? It does the species no good but what we do during our lives, remembered or not, that is what is important. Make the world a better place for future generations, for your children and grand children, for complete strangers. That’s the real legacy someone can leave behind and it does not matter one jot if you’re remembered for it or not.
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Jens: I have to ask, what motivates you in life? Some may point to things they have accomplished, some may point to all those they they have helped, maybe they would even point to making the world a better place because they were here. But, when life, specifically your life, is said and done, what will matter then? Does it ever make you wonder, what if this is really it? I go into oblivion, people may remember me for awhile but will eventually forget me. And, no matter what I accomplished in life, whether good or evil (or maybe you don’t believe in good and evil), it won’t matter because I will cease to exist. It just seems like a depressing way to live. I mean, some would say that since they only get this life, live it up. But, after awhile, it seems that no matter what you do there will be this empty feeling, like something still missing from the purpose of your life. I am not an atheist nor a skeptic, but I have wanted to honsetly ask this of someone who is. Please do not take offense.
Rachael
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“I question creationists, to be honest, because I hold reason to be superior to superstition.”
I hope you didn’t quote this as proof of questioning the honesty of Creationists. You do understand the use of commas to seperate ideas in a sentence, correct? ‘to be honest’ refers to me, the speaker, and noone else.
“Everyone of the negative questions were to prove that you did have evidence against them, and therefore to say that the Christian is not true you would have to have evidence against it,”
You really don’t understand how logic works do you? Read this about negative proof and mabye you will begin to understand how using this retorical trick goes completely against rational argument. http://tinyurl.com/awm4n
It relates directly to our differences I think. You believe the burden of proof is in the hands of the others to disprove God, while logic would dictate that you cannot believe something without first proving it’s existance empiricaly. You could appeal to a reversed burden of proof, as the article states, based upon having two competing explanations which cannot be confirmed by observation. However, you realize that an empirical link must be made before you can do this. However, there is no empirical evidence to base this upon. Even if that reversed burden of proof were accepted the best way to make an inference is to use Occams Razor. Since atheism makes no assumptions while religion makes assumptions of how God acts Occams razor would fall on the side of atheism. Still nothing is proven.
I don’t mind that you believe what you do, what I mind is that you represent it as logical, scientific fact while appealing to negative proof. You can either prove your beliefs using positive proof and consider it scientiically proven, or you can call it belief. You can’t have it both ways.
I buy your argument that if the world was created then science is of the world. It is a tautological truth. However, do you then abondon scientific questioning and resort to belief in scripture when the scientific evidence goes against that? That is the question that you didn’t answer. You sidestepped it with a tautology. Do you think that Creationism of any stripe holds up to the laws of scientific inquiry and should thus be taught in science class? It is a seperate question whether or not it should be taught on it’s own merits, but being taught in science class means you accept it as legitimate science on sciences terms. Do you?
I look forward to you showing corroborative evidence of the scriptures. In particular I am interested in coroboration of a historical Jesus and corroboration of his miracles. I have not come across any.
“Can you prove that order comes from no order apart from the order of created living things?” was to be rhetorical, but I mistyped, so exclude “living”. This was to point back to everything you see in the Universe and its order, is either order by chance or order by the mind that set these laws in order.”
Now you’ve really got me confused. First, removing living then creates the tautology you made above, that all created things are created. By extension they must be ordered or creation wouldn’t make sense as a method to create humans. You again create the preposition of negative proof that I must prove that created things were not created. Remember, if you appeal to logic you must attempt positive proof to extend your hypothesis. Second, the burden of proof is on you to show that creation is more logical than “accident” as you call it.
Then you talk about “order by chance”? Doesn’t that preclude your entire argument if order can be by “chance”. Mabye your language is just unclear and I’m misunderstanding what you mean.
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You misunderstood most of what I wrote before. A little was my fault. I don’t think I clarified it enough for you.
Much of the Bible’s history is corroborated by other sources that would be consider hostile especially the existence of Jesus and that there is the corroborative evidence of the Bible in 20,700+ of NT manuscripts and other sources from the 1st century to the 15th. This is far surpassing all other historical written sources. This is mostly base information, so I won’t have to keep backtracking.
When you speak of nature, you do realize that we believe it was created by God and the science thereof is of God. Science is essential to God since He created it and also authored the Scriptures. Pointing out the order life only aids the Creationist. The major separation between the evolutionist and the creationist is the origin of life in which evolution and creation are theories in science and both deserve equal presentation outside of religion. Belief in God is not belief in religion just ask a Deist.
Everyone of the negative questions were to prove that you did have evidence against them, and therefore to say that the Christian is not true you would have to have evidence against it, which could be the proof of something contradicting Scripture like proving the natural origin of life.
I did not know that you were ignorant of factual corroborative evidence outside of the Bible. I assumed since you’ve studied Christianity a little that you would have been familiar. That’s my mistake. I’ll have to go to a more basic level.
I appreciate your examples of natural order for which the Creationists would claim were created by God. None of your laws are excluded, but the origin of life from evolution. I understand that the theory of evolution is a made up many chances whether you want to call them that or not. So, prions can develop, so what? There’s has still been no scientist to have created life in the lab.
My question of “Can you prove that order comes from no order apart from the order of created living things?” was to be rhetorical, but I mistyped, so exclude “living”. This was to point back to everything you see in the Universe and its order, is either order by chance or order by the mind that set these laws in order.
You’re absolutely wrong about the empty tomb and Jesus’ existence. I’m working on a post regarding the predictions of Christ that are affirmed historically by hostile witnesses. I think it a shame that many Creationists will present predictions that may or not be written after the fact.
You do know that the Bible is made up of 66 separate books and it is in itself corroborative. The New Testament consists of 27 books written by 7 different people. Yeah, I certainly don’t agree with your dismissal of the Scriptural foreknowledge though I don’t remember you showing any of them to be false though the seed one was questionable. This is still a great evidence in proving God and His revelation that contradicts the origin of life according to evolutionists.
You may have the last words.
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“I question creationists, to be honest, because I hold reason to be superior to superstition.”
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Can you point me to the quote where I question the honesty of Creationists? I have looked and can’t find it in my post.
My implicit question in that paragraph, which I will now make explicit, is this: Do creationists think that creation is equal to scientific inquiry? Is creation science and thus should be taught in science class? If so, can you explain how it is on equal footing?
I obviously hit a nerve. Sorry, that was not my intent at all.
Here is my beef with your response. You say that your faith is based on empirical and rational inquiry but your arguments presuppose the truth of scripture. Let me quote you:
“The Scriptures describe God as being a Spirit…”
So, the only way you know that my view of God is “messed up” is based on an uncorroborated text? If you aren’t even basing this on historical corroboration how can you call this rational questioning of your faith? Where is the corroboration, the controls outside of your faith?
Have I personally tested every scientific law? First, there are very few, second, yes I have tested most of them, as has anyone who has taken a full load of science classes in highschool. The laws of relativity are harder to test in a science lab, however, numerous experiments have shown them to be true. Furthermore they have been corroborated by other scientists using different teqniques, in differnt place, at differnt times. Would you deny that scientific evidence?
This quote gets me, it doesn’t make sense to me at all.
“…but he knew exactly what to believe and what was the authority of the Faith…”
if he knew “what to believe” then implicitly he also know what not to believe, am I correct? So, by limiting my mind to what a Christian “should believe” I will be enlightened? Isn’t that the same as excluding anything that the Bible doesn’t tell me?
Since the parts of the Bible that are relevant to being a Christian and not a Jew are not corroborated outside the New Testament why would I limit myself in “what to believe” based on uncorroborated evidence? You already know that there are rational arguments against almost all of your Biblical Foreknowledge so internal corroboration is not an option.
How can believing in an uncorroborated text simply because you know “what to believe” be construed as examining your faith in the light of logic?
My point about spiritual feelings was not that there is proo agaist them, but that there is no proof they are not simply psychological. You must prove that they are linked to God. You cannot prove a negative as you state, “Can you empirically disprove out “spiritual feelings”?”. You should know this is a logical fallacy if you do indeed believe in questioning your belief using logic.
Also, you make the mistake that so many do pointing to complexity in the world and saying it was created by “accident”. The idea of evolution is a process, not an accident. Energy input can be used to displace the effects of entropy. Thus the complexity we see is not a sudden accident, it comes over time as things evolve to be better at taking energy and displacing entropy with it.
Can I prove that order comes from no order outside of the effect of living things, yes I can. Throw some iron filings on a table. They are arranged at random, correct? Now place a magnet near them. What do you see? The filings have ordered themselves along the energitic fields of the magnet. Energy input has reduced entropy and created organization. Going further I can show how a random mix of atoms or molecules can be formed into nonrandom forms without human input. Place a catalytic substance into a substrate containing two ypes of molecules or atoms which would not otherwise bind. The catalyst lowers the activation energy to the point that the binding reaction occurs at ambeint temperature. You suddenly can create a long string of complex molecules by binding them based on catalyzed bonds, thus creating less entropy than was there before and ordering the environment. All without human interaction. If one of those catalyzed reagents is able to catalyze itself you can create a reaction which will be selfsustaining, reducing the entropy of it’s surroundings until there is no more energy available or no more substrates. If the molecules invovled ar carbon based then each catalytic reaction creates what amounts to protien chains. If one happens to fold in a way that is self catalyzing it suddenly could become a prion, able to reproduce itself using the other protien chains floating around it. Since the protien chains are not all the same some will be broken up by UV radiation and some will not. Those that survive will continue this process and only the most UV resistant will survive. They will continue to become more complex using the means above as larger molecules are less succeptible to breaks in their bonds due to multiple hydrogen bonds holding them together. Ooops, not only did I show that order can be created from disorder without living things, but I started to show how non-living things could evolve to be living. Sorry, my bad.
Finally, you ask me to prove that Jesus did not exist. This is the second time you’ve asked me to prove a negative. How can I prove he existed when he only shows up in Christian religious texts. Just because there is no other proof than the Bible that he existed does not prove that he existed. The same can be said of the empty tomb. Who cares when the NT was written, is it factual and can you prove it without resorting to citing the NT to prove your point? I’ve already argued agaist your “foreknowlege” so you’ll have to enlighten me as to the facts of these propheses and point to corroborating evidence of them. The rest of your laundry list is again asking me to prove a negative, you should know better than to appeal to that logical fallacy if you base your faith on logic.
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Would your questioning of the honesty of Creationists include the writers of the Bible?
I don’t think your empirical definition of life would refer to God, since He is someone beyond the science of the natural world though not outside of it. I’ve tested it all on an equal scale as much as I can and I have studied other faiths including atheism. I am confident in the Truth.
Your whole concept of God is messed up. Do you think He is a white bearded man floating around in the sky? The Scriptures describe God as being a Spirit and one is neither below the principles of morals nor (as the Creator) above of the principles of morals. In other words, love is not greater than God nor did God create love, but He is love. The same goes for truth, justice, peace, joy, knowledge, reason/logic, and so on. I really don’t think that you have ever thought about the concept of God beyond being the Creator. Christians are following God as they follow love, truth, justice, and so on.
My faith is rational and empirical like yours. Though I haven’t proved the existence of Abraham Lincoln empirically, I know that he existed by corroboration. Yes, I know that history is can be tested. Don’t treat me like an idiot. You come off in this way as arrogant rather than usually you sound confident. Have you tested every scientific law for which this Universe is based? No. You admit that you need corroboration.
The fact that you do not understand the Christian Faith is the whole point. You don’t know what to believe about it, and therefore you cannot understand it to even have faith. I think you don’t want to understand it. I know an atheist who sat down to read the Bible to prove it wrong. He read it 4 times in one year. After reading it, he was not converted until years later, but he knew exactly what to believe and what was the authority of the Faith, which is not the Pope, or any church leaders, or “Spirit” feelings and movings within men, but the Bible and only it. He knew how to think like a Christian and he knew what Christians actually knew what they believed. He planned to write a book on the stupidity of the Bible, but he wasn’t able since there was not enough material.
See, you say it again that Christians including me have put our life outside of rational thought. You don’t know anything about religion, but you continue to judge it. How about using empirical testing to understand Christians and their Faith before judging it? Evidence is essential to the Christian Faith (Heb. 11:1).
“I honestly don’t understand how one can give up a whole part of your life and put it far away from the reach of logic that way, knowing how powerful logic is in bettering the human condition.” What? Your arrogance abounds since we poor superstitious people have “spiritual feelings are not just aberrations of psychology or the culmination of years of selection in a social species which gives them the need to come together socially”. Can you empirically disprove out “spiritual feelings”?
One of my arguments does come from religion, but the other 2 do not. So what if all of mine come from religion? That does not disprove them. You see a row of books stacked in alphabetical on a shelf and you believe that someone put them in order. But, then you see the order of every living thing in the Universe from DNA to its operation in its environment and you see an accident. That’s rational? Outside of the basic natural state of things, you recognize order from a mind, a person, unless you don’t like that person, then you must believe that order can come from accidents. Is that logical? Can you prove that order comes from no order apart from the order of created living things?
“Would you give up your faith if evidence was presented that proved it to be false? What would that evidence be?” Sure for real evidence. Prove that Jesus did not exist. That there was no empty tomb. That the New Testament was not written in the 1st century. That the Bible does not contain hundreds of fulfilled prophesies. That reasoning should be abandoned. That the Bible was written by those who did not believe what they wrote. That there isn’t a spiritual world beyond this natural one. That love, truth, and justice do not exist.
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I question creationists, to be honest, because I hold reason to be superior to superstition. Creationists (and now ID’ers) would like creation tought as science, with the assumption that reason is used in creating their narrative. I don’t see any reason used in basing ones creation narrative on faith so I resent the fact that they have decided that creation equals science. I also honestly have a hard time understanding how one can base the meaning of their life on faith, or on pleasing some higher being. Most of the wonder of life to me is discovering my world. If you base your meaning on faith you no longer have a need to question as much about the why or how of your world, it is answered for you. The only questioning you need to do is on the things that you decide not to accept from religious teaching. It seems to me like being spoon fed.
You say that you test all things, but do you test them on an equal scale? How can you say you are testing them if you cannot overturn your faith. Being that it is not anchored in anything other than faith it really can’t be subject to reason. All your arguments for religion come from a basis of religion so it isn’t suprising that they come back supporting it. Corroboration, or controls outside your experiment, are very important to science yet I see very few corroborating evidences for any of the faiths. Would you give up your faith if evidence was presented that proved it to be false? What would that evidence be? As I’ve said, I’m open to that possibility but being a part of a religion kindof precludes that doesn’t it?
I have tried to interpret things from a religious perspective. I honestly don’t understand how one can give up a whole part of your life and put it far away from the reach of logic that way, knowing how powerful logic is in bettering the human condition.
As for data. A fact isn’t a fact until you can epirically test it, so yes all facts are testable. I have not come across any history that I completely believe which has not been corroborated. Can you run a scientific test on history, yes. You can do archeaology, paleontology or other physical science. You can also use corroboration. Obviously history is recorded by people and contains flaws but corroboration and correlation is powerful in its ability to show a preponderance of evidence.
In order to live one must make assumptions. The eye and brain make them constantly as you can see if you check out the post I just put up on magic. However, one can minimize those assumptions in areas that matter to your life by using empirical, rational tools to compensate for the flaws in our senses. How can you be sure that your spiritual feelings are not just abherations of psychology or the culmination of years of selection in a social species which gives them the need to come together socially? Without testing how can you ever know? I think that putting any part of my life outside the realm of rational thought is kindof ridiculous.
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