“AS” strikes again
The 16-year-old who wrote to us with many proofs of god, featured a few posts below, has replied via e-mail. I wanted to share the reply, and my response, interspersed below:
well, to reply to you very first paragraph, lol.. does George washington exist? well, you know he does in fact exist because of documents, and history books. You know, he said MANY quotes, JUST like Jesus did.
No, it’s not “just like Jesus,” because Jesus never wrote anything himself that we know of. We have no autographs. And we have no records of Jesus supplied to us by reliable eye-witness, contemporary authors. So, it’s not “just like” what we have for Jesus when it comes to George Washington. The mountain of records available for the existence of George Washington, and the specific records by contemporary peer sources for his actions during his lifetime, and his personal correspondences, make George a historic person, where Jesus becomes more myth than man. And when we’re given events that sound even a bit “iffy” about George, we don’t accept them as accurate. So “he never told a lie” is discarded as myth. And with Jesus, so many of the claims about his life are outlandish, far beyond “he never told a lie,” that we have to reject quite a lot of what is recorded about him by even the second-hand sources. So, it’s not comparable at all.
how can you believe one side of history, like George washington, when you don’t believe in the history side about Jesus, doesn’t make sense AT ALL.
Because I already explained that history rests on evidence available—realizing that what we claim to “know” must be supported by what we can actually reasonably support. With Jesus, again, not one reliable contemporary eye-witness account. That means what we have are stories about stories. That’s not the best to work with in trying to piece together facts. The “historic” Jesus that is put forward by historians is nothing like the Jesus recorded in the Bible. I am willing to accept that there may have been a rabbi upon whom these myths were based, since this is expert opinion. I never said I think Jesus never existed. But I reject the miracle claims (as do serious historians), the same way I would reject them about Washington—or about Homer’s claims as I explained already earlier. I accept “Jesus” historically, with all the same requirements I apply to claims of all other historic persons.
expert? lol, who’s to determine an expert?? we could all be dummies here on the Earth. While some are smarter than others, I don’t think that term was correct, noone is completly 100% an expert on things, if they were we’d all have the answers.
If my sink breaks, I don’t call a heart surgeon. Would you? There are men and women who have devoted their lives to the study of specific areas of history. It has nothing to do with being smarter. It’s about them having access to the best evidence and information available—that the rest of us will likely never see. And also the fact they’ve studied these areas of history to a far greater extent than the lay population. That makes them better qualified to comment on the issue than you or I.
To claim nobody is any more expert in a historic opinion than anyone else is not reasonable. And to claim, then, that we can’t accept anyone’s explanations, even the most educated people in the field of history—as being “the most” trustworthy—undermines your own views as much as anyone else’s: If you can’t trust anyone—why trust the people who wrote and produced your Bible and told you it was about a god? If we have to put our trust in anyone—why would anyone assert it wouldn’t be the people who are best informed in any given area of study? Again, if you’re going to say that your beliefs don’t have to stack up to evidence or expert opinions, then why are we even talking about this? What is your method of determining if your beliefs are likely to be true or not, if you reject evidence and expert explanations of that evidence? What do you trust in that case, and why do you trust it?
And who said you have to know anything 100 percent? I’m saying that if you care whether or not your beliefs are likely to be true—then you will align your beliefs to the best evidence available and the most educated explanations of that evidence.
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