Evidence for God from Science

Gman wrote:About Christ's history, of course we could go into the Bible and find that Christ showed himself to over 500 witnesses (1 Corinthians 15: 5-8), or firstly women (Luke 24:10, a weak source in those days) but it wasn't just Josephus who talked about Jesus. Others are the following...

1. Cornelius Tacitus (AD 55-120). A Roman historian that recorded references to Christ. The most important one is that found in the Annals, which also mentions Pontius Pilate as Christ's persecutor.

2. Gaius Suetonius Tranquillas (AD 117-138). Another Roman historian that recorded references to Christ. Recorded the riots which broke between the Jews and Romans in the year AD 49 during the investigation of Christ claims.

3. Thallus (AD 52). Historian that references a darkness and earthquake that occurred during Christ's crucifixion, referenced by Julius Africanus.

4. Pliny the Younger (AD 61—112). Roman author that mentions the spread of early Christianity to pagan temples and includes early Christian practices.

5. Emperor Trajan (AD 53-117). Gave some of the first Roman views about early Christianity and corrective actions towards Christians.

6. Emperor Hadrian (AD 117-138). Early judgments towards Christians.

7. The Talmud, Sanhedrin 43a (AD 70-200). Explicitly states that Jesus was killed on the eve of the Jewish Passover. 40 days prior he was going to be stoned for sorcery but was later hung (presumably on the cross).

8. Toledoth Jesu (2nd Century?). Anti-Christian document that records what happened to Christ's body after his death.

9. Lucian (2 Century). Greek satirist who recorded the early practices and facts of the Christians.

10. Mara Bar-Serapion (1st and 3rd Century). Ancient manuscript that records Christ as a wise “king” of the Jews.

11. Gnostic sources:
a. The Gospel of Truth (AD 135-160).
b. The Apocryphon of John (AD 120-130).
c. The Gospel of Thomas (AD 140-200).
d. The Treatise On Resurrection (2nd Century)

12. Lost Works:
a. Acts of Pontius Pilate (AD 150).
b. Phlegon (AD 80).

Not sure if this is what you wanted however...

There are also the Christian creeds that are prior to the NT manuscripts (granted they are recorded in the NT), but still it appears to be another witness. One I think being 1John 4:2 "By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God." I also thought that the Roman aqueducts/catacombs or whatever they were called contained early Christian drawings as well. Nice list.

Dazed and Confused wrote: There are also the Christian creeds that are prior to the NT manuscripts (granted they are recorded in the NT), but still it appears to be another witness. One I think being 1John 4:2 "By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God." I also thought that the Roman aqueducts/catacombs or whatever they were called contained early Christian drawings as well. Nice list.

Thanks.. Even stranger were the recordings in the Talmuds around 30 AD before the destruction of the temple (right after Christ's death). One is that the western light on the Menorah (next to the holy of holies) went out for the same period of forty years.. Another during that same period for 40 years the temple doors would open by themselves at night. Both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds state this.. Interesting huh?

Kurieuo wrote:

hatsoff wrote:

DannyM wrote:So you once believed in Christ but now don't?

Correct.

Was your belief in Christ something you had come to on your own or was it by default- by birth?

Neither. I was born into a Christian family, and was raised in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. However, my belief was my own---not an empty profession. I was extremely enthusiastic to learn more about Christ and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and so I read a little bit of Christian history, beginning with Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History. I was eager to learn why the LCMS taught what it did, and studied Scripture diligently. I was a big fan of 1 Corinthians, back when I was a teenager---and I suppose I still am, in a different way.

My family shared my enthusiasm. My brother, for instance, went off to St. Louis and was ordained into the LCMS. He spent the next several years pastoring a church in Florida. My parents sent me to a private LCMS school for grades K-8, and were heavily involved in our particular church, St. John in Wheaton, IL. But we each had our own motivations. I was always more concerned with the philosophical side of Christianity, for instance, whereas my parents were interested mostly in Christian living, and my brother in correctness of doctrine.

But anyway, that's probably more information than was needed. Hopefully it includes what you were looking for.

Not sure if this has been covered, but what was the turning point in your life away from Christianity?

Hatsoff,

Thank you for being so candid. I've highlighted Kurieuo's question to you because I was going to ask you the same question. What turned you away from your belief? Was it a specific thing or was it gradual?

Kurieuo wrote:Not sure if this has been covered, but what was the turning point in your life away from Christianity?

DannyM wrote:Thank you for being so candid. I've highlighted Kurieuo's question to you because I was going to ask you the same question. What turned you away from your belief? Was it a specific thing or was it gradual?

Well, it was a long and complicated internal process. I can only begin to describe it here, but I will do what I can.

Regarding your question, in one sense it was quite gradual. In another sense, though, there was a specific moment of conscious acceptance where I finally admitted to myself that I did not believe in all that Christianity stuff. Allow me to elaborate:

There were several important factors that led to my eventual rejection of Christ. One of them is as follows: When I was a teenager, my parents and some of the congregants at my church told me that we cannot prove God, but that we must have faith. I misinterpreted this* as meaning that there is no objectively rational reason to believe in God, much less the Christian God. At the same time, though, I had an unwavering (initially) conviction that God was real, and that his Holy Spirit was at work in the church. So, I turned to the Scriptures, and misinterpreted them, too. I concluded from a few comments by Paul, in particular Ep 2:8, that belief in God is itself is a gift from the Holy Spirit. In other words, the Holy Spirit, I reasoned, must be at work in me, causing me to believe in the saving power of Christ. I came to understand that the Holy Spirit was believing for me, and through me.

In fact, the Holy Spirit did a lot of things, I thought. When I honored God by obeying my parents, that obedience wasn't my own work---for I only have a sinful nature, and nothing capable of good (Ro 1, 7)---but rather the Holy Spirit working through me, as it worked through Paul before me. Similarly, when I honored Jesus by believing in His atoning Sacrifice, and calling on Him for guidance, that was really the Holy Spirit working through me to believe in and call on Him. It could not possibly have been my own doing, I thought, because I was a horrible person in whom nothing good lived, and who deserved the just punishment of eternal torture in Hades for my earthly crimes, and those of my ancestors back to Adam.

Now, at this point I may have you thinking that I was somehow setting myself up for an emotional breakdown by piling up guilt. However, let me assure you that it wasn't like that. I did feel extremely guilty, to be sure, and that took an emotional toll on me. But I wasn't consumed by it. For the most part, I was a happy person, taking comfort in the miraculously generous gift of Salvation offered to me by God through his son Jesus Christ, and his minister the Holy Spirit. I have explained my view of the Holy Spirit's role in my behavior to help you understand how I saw Him working to help me believe in Jesus.

So, what was my problem, then, if not guilt? Well, in short, my problem was doubt. I couldn't help but recognize that the doctrines of Christianity were completely unsupported by the evidence. Perhaps more seriously, it was extremely easy for me to see why people thought Christianity wasn't true, because when I read narrative Scripture such as Genesis and Exodus, I could imagine how those stories might have sprung up in superstitious and uneducated populations. For a long while I didn't let these doubts get to me, because, after all, everyone has doubts, and that's just our sinful nature rearing its ugly head. I trusted the Holy Spirit to protect me, and keep me a believer. The ancient Hebrews weren't superstitious, I told myself. They were God's chosen people, and the Bible was the inspired Word of God. But the doubts returned time and again, increasing in frequency as the years rolled on.

And indeed it was those doubts, I think, which led most directly to my eventual loss of faith. It became progressively more difficult for me to justify my belief. Doctrine told me that the Holy Spirit was working in me, but by age 20 I could find no evidence of this. I stopped attending church regularly, and even though I still prayed and studied Scripture seriously, my trust in God began to wane significantly. It just didn't make sense. Why was God not clearly present? Why was there no good evidence for his existence? Why was my religion just one of numerous such religions lacking empirical support?

But despite these snowballing doubts, I remained committed to Christianity. I still believed in God---just not as strongly as I had as a teenager. This persistence of belief was due to my intense fear of death. I did not want to simply wink out of existence when my body failed me. The thought of that terrified me, and I clung to the hope of Jesus Christ to rescue me from that fate. In the end, though, even that fear could not keep me from acknowledging the irrationality of believing in the Christian religion. So, one day, at age 22, I consciously admitted to myself that I could no longer claim to be a Christian, because my doubts had grown so much that by then they outweighed my belief.

So now hopefully you have a better idea of what I mean when I say that it was gradual in one sense and sudden in another. The doubts had welled up very slowly at first, and more quickly in the end. But it was a long, drawn out process---the culmination of which was a single moment where I confessed to myself that I was no longer a Christian.

And that was that. Over the next few years I continued to study Christian doctrine and history, and I also became interested in philosophy. At age 22, just after losing my faith, I called myself an agnostic (and later a "weak" atheist). By age 27 I had learned enough about philosophy to actively deny the existence of God, and since then I have been a strong atheist.

I hope my story was not too boring. Remember, though, that I said it was a complicated process. This is an extremely digested version of what happened. But I think the above paragraphs capture the most important elements of my theological journey, as it were.


*- As it turns out, they didn't mean what I thought they meant. In later conversations with my parents, for example, they insisted that we can know God through personal experience, and through creation. But at the time, I misunderstood them to mean that we must have blind faith if we are to have faith at all.

hatsoff wrote:

Fürstentum Liechtenstein wrote:This is the same faith that a mafia boss may have, going to church on Sundays and managing a prostitution ring the rest of the week.

Well, I didn't run any prostitution rings. Those mistakes which I did make, I felt terribly guilty about them. But I also learned from them, and as a result, I am happy to report that nowadays I make fewer of them.

Mistakes or not - nice guy or bad guy - you'll still roast for eternity because you're an unbeliever.

It seems that your doctrinal convictions somehow prevent you from taking my word for it when I say that I had a sincere belief in the saving power of Christ. You are certainly welcome to your own religious beliefs, of course, but I cannot condone them.

I'm only going by what the Bible says. If you had been Christ's, you would not now be lost. Apostasy is a characteristic of those who once professed to be Christians but who have fallen away. Your original profession was a fraud, so good a fraud that you apparently were not even aware of it yourself. Your heart was never circumcised by God; I know this because no one whose heart is renewed can become apostate.

I freely acknowledge that I have never experienced any spiritual rebirth or divine realignment. I do not believe in such things.

OK. You may not believe in spiritual rebirth but I have experienced it (circumcision of the heart); and I know that there is no going back. Impossible. I know this and the Bible confirms that this is so.

FL

Fürstentum Liechtenstein wrote:Mistakes or not - nice guy or bad guy - you'll still roast for eternity because you're an unbeliever.

You say "nice guy or bad guy," as if it's up in the air, but that's not really what you believe, is it? No doubt you think that I deserve to be tortured eternally. According to the Bible, it must be the case that I am a wretched, filthy human being.

You aren't alone, either. If I let this kind of thing offend me, then I'm going to have an awful time living in American society, where such beliefs are commonplace, and where even when they are not shared, they are often expected to be respected.

well, we are all deserving of wrath....you aren't alone there....

Thanks Hatsoff. Certainly a position that deserves some thought by the members of this board, before we just go off with half cocked, knee jerk reactions. "You were this." "You weren't that."

What is funny, is parts of your testimony are similar to mine. But there are some key differences. I too had to deal with parents and teachers who confused me, and lead me astray.
I too have looked to philosophy. But this in fact strenghened the case for me, that God "Is."
I too had questions. (I don't use the word doubt) And I pursued study to get answers for these. Some I have found satisafactory answers. Some, I am still searching, or trying to understand.

But one thing I can not deny, is the personal encounter and conversion, I experienced. I would assume it is safe to say, that you never had a specific personal conversion experience? I understand you had things you believed in. Not questioning that. But from what I gather, it was the object of your faith that seems to be confused. Obviously, it was the supernatural accounts in the scriptures that you could not reconcile in your own mind.

Also, it is pretty obvious (I'm going by your testimony) that your road to unbelief was littered with wrong teaching, or poor comprehension. Interesting stuff. I'm going to continue to give it prayerful thought.

Hatsoff, do you mind my asking what Christian apologetics books you have read? You said you became interetsed in philosophy but you didn't really specifically mention that you tried to examine the Bible with good material.

zoegirl wrote:Hatsoff, do you mind my asking what Christian apologetics books you have read? You said you became interetsed in philosophy but you didn't really specifically mention that you tried to examine the Bible with good material.

I have never encountered apologetics I would consider to be "good material." However, I have read much of Swinburne's Resurrection of God Incarnate (2003) and Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument (1979), as well as Robin Collins' fine-tuning argument from The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (2009). I've also familiarized myself with a few apologetics papers (e.g. Leftow's "A Modal Cosmological Argument," 1988, and Plantinga's "Naturalism Defeated," 1994). I find multiple serious flaws in all these works. That said, I do have high hopes for Wallace's Reinventing Jesus, which I plan to read if I can ever find a library that carries it.

I'm really more interested in Christian history than apologetics and theology. When I say that I'm also interested in philosophy, I'm referring primarily to secular philosophy, especially the mind-body problem, and to a lesser extent epistemology and metaethics.

jlay wrote:Also, it is pretty obvious (I'm going by your testimony) that your road to unbelief was littered with wrong teaching, or poor comprehension.

I would say much of both.

zoegirl wrote:well, we are all deserving of wrath....you aren't alone there....

Indeed, and I know that few Christians harbor ill will towards non-Christians. In fact, in my real-life experience, the Christians I've met have been, for the most part, very loving people with kind and caring attitudes towards all others, high and low. I regard these Christians as role models for myself.

However, this all stands in stark contrast to my online experience, where I regularly encounter venomous and vitriolic Christians of the worst sort. What drives their condescension and hostility? I suspect they take their doctrines of sin and the Holy Spirit very seriously, and so their view of others is colored by them. But whatever the cause, the result is quite plain.

hatsoff wrote:

zoegirl wrote:well, we are all deserving of wrath....you aren't alone there....

Indeed, and I know that few Christians harbor ill will towards non-Christians. In fact, in my real-life experience, the Christians I've met have been, for the most part, very loving people with kind and caring attitudes towards all others, high and low. I regard these Christians as role models for myself.

However, this all stands in stark contrast to my online experience, where I regularly encounter venomous and vitriolic Christians of the worst sort. What drives their condescension and hostility? I suspect they take their doctrines of sin and the Holy Spirit very seriously, and so their view of others is colored by them. But whatever the cause, the result is quite plain.

Ah the high and mighty, steer clear of them. I would suspect they're driven by pride rather than sound doctrine.

Hatsoff,

What would you say to us proposing (any of the readers can do so) several apologetics books and you reading through them?

hatsoff wrote: There were several important factors that led to my eventual rejection of Christ. One of them is as follows: When I was a teenager, my parents and some of the congregants at my church told me that we cannot prove God, but that we must have faith. I misinterpreted this* as meaning that there is no objectively rational reason to believe in God, much less the Christian God. At the same time, though, I had an unwavering (initially) conviction that God was real, and that his Holy Spirit was at work in the church. So, I turned to the Scriptures, and misinterpreted them, too. I concluded from a few comments by Paul, in particular Ep 2:8, that belief in God is itself is a gift from the Holy Spirit. In other words, the Holy Spirit, I reasoned, must be at work in me, causing me to believe in the saving power of Christ. I came to understand that the Holy Spirit was believing for me, and through me.

Faith is a very broad term... And that doesn't mean it cannot hang on any physical evidence.. I need physical evidence to believe sometimes too..

hatsoff wrote:In fact, the Holy Spirit did a lot of things, I thought. When I honored God by obeying my parents, that obedience wasn't my own work---for I only have a sinful nature, and nothing capable of good (Ro 1, 7)---but rather the Holy Spirit working through me, as it worked through Paul before me. Similarly, when I honored Jesus by believing in His atoning Sacrifice, and calling on Him for guidance, that was really the Holy Spirit working through me to believe in and call on Him. It could not possibly have been my own doing, I thought, because I was a horrible person in whom nothing good lived, and who deserved the just punishment of eternal torture in Hades for my earthly crimes, and those of my ancestors back to Adam.

It 's not that you are a horrible person.. But we all fail at some point of "perfect" love. That is what sin is.. Imperfect love. The only real person that was perfect in his love was Jesus.

So, it's not that we are bad people, but we are not perfect in love.. If we want to be "accurate" with ourselves, then that is most likely how we will best understand ourselves. Not that we have a "good" image of ourselves, but an accurate one..

Does that make sense?

hatsoff wrote:Now, at this point I may have you thinking that I was somehow setting myself up for an emotional breakdown by piling up guilt. However, let me assure you that it wasn't like that. I did feel extremely guilty, to be sure, and that took an emotional toll on me. But I wasn't consumed by it. For the most part, I was a happy person, taking comfort in the miraculously generous gift of Salvation offered to me by God through his son Jesus Christ, and his minister the Holy Spirit. I have explained my view of the Holy Spirit's role in my behavior to help you understand how I saw Him working to help me believe in Jesus.

So, what was my problem, then, if not guilt? Well, in short, my problem was doubt. I couldn't help but recognize that the doctrines of Christianity were completely unsupported by the evidence. Perhaps more seriously, it was extremely easy for me to see why people thought Christianity wasn't true, because when I read narrative Scripture such as Genesis and Exodus, I could imagine how those stories might have sprung up in superstitious and uneducated populations. For a long while I didn't let these doubts get to me, because, after all, everyone has doubts, and that's just our sinful nature rearing its ugly head. I trusted the Holy Spirit to protect me, and keep me a believer. The ancient Hebrews weren't superstitious, I told myself. They were God's chosen people, and the Bible was the inspired Word of God. But the doubts returned time and again, increasing in frequency as the years rolled on.

And indeed it was those doubts, I think, which led most directly to my eventual loss of faith. It became progressively more difficult for me to justify my belief. Doctrine told me that the Holy Spirit was working in me, but by age 20 I could find no evidence of this. I stopped attending church regularly, and even though I still prayed and studied Scripture seriously, my trust in God began to wane significantly. It just didn't make sense. Why was God not clearly present? Why was there no good evidence for his existence? Why was my religion just one of numerous such religions lacking empirical support?

Doubts are fine... I still have my own. It's what makes us human.

But if we look at faith as a table with only one leg, that table will probably fall. In other words the more legs (beliefs) we have for our belief table the stronger it will stand. This is one thing where the godandscience web site might help..

Do you have any specific questions about creation or Genesis?

hatsoff wrote:But despite these snowballing doubts, I remained committed to Christianity. I still believed in God---just not as strongly as I had as a teenager. This persistence of belief was due to my intense fear of death. I did not want to simply wink out of existence when my body failed me. The thought of that terrified me, and I clung to the hope of Jesus Christ to rescue me from that fate. In the end, though, even that fear could not keep me from acknowledging the irrationality of believing in the Christian religion. So, one day, at age 22, I consciously admitted to myself that I could no longer claim to be a Christian, because my doubts had grown so much that by then they outweighed my belief.

If you could be more specific about your doubts, we might be able to help.. Could you list them for us?

Thanks.

hatsoff wrote:So now hopefully you have a better idea of what I mean when I say that it was gradual in one sense and sudden in another. The doubts had welled up very slowly at first, and more quickly in the end. But it was a long, drawn out process---the culmination of which was a single moment where I confessed to myself that I was no longer a Christian.

And that was that. Over the next few years I continued to study Christian doctrine and history, and I also became interested in philosophy. At age 22, just after losing my faith, I called myself an agnostic (and later a "weak" atheist). By age 27 I had learned enough about philosophy to actively deny the existence of God, and since then I have been a strong atheist.

I hope my story was not too boring. Remember, though, that I said it was a complicated process. This is an extremely digested version of what happened. But I think the above paragraphs capture the most important elements of my theological journey, as it were.

*- As it turns out, they didn't mean what I thought they meant. In later conversations with my parents, for example, they insisted that we can know God through personal experience, and through creation. But at the time, I misunderstood them to mean that we must have blind faith if we are to have faith at all.

No problem at all Hat.. Back in the 80's I ran away from Christianity too. But now I'm back and feeling strong.. Thank you for being upfront with us.