ontology> There are very few objective truths that can be proved without assumption. Talking about the objective nature of reality quickly gets into a discussion of which axioms you'd like to accept and which you cannot accept - most people are happy with basic assumptions like 'my senses are not lying to me' and 'I can reason about tomorrow from yesterday's data', which are fundamentally believed or not believed on the same level at which we are asked to believe in God.
I say this only because it's an important point in a physical scientist's education when they realise that they are not in the business of finding the objective truth. To unpack that - everything runs off axioms, you can never be certain of any result to arbitrary precision, you can never measure the entire universe, you can never have a perfect theory, yours is not the only model that fits the data, there's always a worse model, there's probably a better model, and on top of all that there is no *objective reason*, no reason that you can derive from any other result, why tomorrow should behave the same as today. (Yesterday behaved the same as today? Pah. Coincidence.)
bodily resurrection> For me, God's existence must be an axiom, assumed a priori. I cannot prove it; in fact, trying to prove it is literally as easy and as difficult as proving that the sensory impulses I interpret as the existence of an outside world are not falsified. To the believer, no proof is necessary; to the unbeliever, no proof is sufficient.
So I think it's possibly dangerous to preach concerning the historical Jesus in a conversion context: you run the risk of conflating in the new or prospective Christian's mind the idea of the historical man and the living God. It is quite literally immaterial to my belief whether there is evidence that Jesus was physically raised from the dead, because I believe (and we are hoping that new converts believe, yes?) via the action of the Holy Spirit today.
I shall leave aside the argument that asks whether the acceptance of biblical literality and historicity is a requirement for Christian faith.
What evidence is one looking for, anyway? What would make one go 'well, I wasn't sure whether Jesus was resurrected, but now I have made this measurement and I am convinced that He was'?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not a Christian because I became convinced in the historical existence of Christ, and I'd be very surprised to find anyone who was. I'm a Christian because I cannot disbelieve in God; one of my fundamental ontological assumptions is that there is a God. I'm not sure how one convinces people, teaches people to change the way they think in that way. I'm really not sure that I'd start from (or even include at all) trying to convince them of the historical literality of the Bible.
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Date: 2012-01-15 04:11 pm (UTC)From:ontology> There are very few objective truths that can be proved without assumption. Talking about the objective nature of reality quickly gets into a discussion of which axioms you'd like to accept and which you cannot accept - most people are happy with basic assumptions like 'my senses are not lying to me' and 'I can reason about tomorrow from yesterday's data', which are fundamentally believed or not believed on the same level at which we are asked to believe in God.
I say this only because it's an important point in a physical scientist's education when they realise that they are not in the business of finding the objective truth. To unpack that - everything runs off axioms, you can never be certain of any result to arbitrary precision, you can never measure the entire universe, you can never have a perfect theory, yours is not the only model that fits the data, there's always a worse model, there's probably a better model, and on top of all that there is no *objective reason*, no reason that you can derive from any other result, why tomorrow should behave the same as today. (Yesterday behaved the same as today? Pah. Coincidence.)
bodily resurrection>
For me, God's existence must be an axiom, assumed a priori. I cannot prove it; in fact, trying to prove it is literally as easy and as difficult as proving that the sensory impulses I interpret as the existence of an outside world are not falsified. To the believer, no proof is necessary; to the unbeliever, no proof is sufficient.
So I think it's possibly dangerous to preach concerning the historical Jesus in a conversion context: you run the risk of conflating in the new or prospective Christian's mind the idea of the historical man and the living God. It is quite literally immaterial to my belief whether there is evidence that Jesus was physically raised from the dead, because I believe (and we are hoping that new converts believe, yes?) via the action of the Holy Spirit today.
I shall leave aside the argument that asks whether the acceptance of biblical literality and historicity is a requirement for Christian faith.
What evidence is one looking for, anyway? What would make one go 'well, I wasn't sure whether Jesus was resurrected, but now I have made this measurement and I am convinced that He was'?
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not a Christian because I became convinced in the historical existence of Christ, and I'd be very surprised to find anyone who was. I'm a Christian because I cannot disbelieve in God; one of my fundamental ontological assumptions is that there is a God. I'm not sure how one convinces people, teaches people to change the way they think in that way. I'm really not sure that I'd start from (or even include at all) trying to convince them of the historical literality of the Bible.