Don Page is one of the world’s leading experts on theoretical gravitational physics and cosmology, as well as a previous guest-blogger around these parts. (There are more world experts in theoretical physics than there are people who have guest-blogged for me, so the latter category is arguably a greater honor.) He is also, somewhat unusually among cosmologists, an Evangelical Christian, and interested in the relationship between cosmology and religious belief.
Longtime readers may have noticed that I’m not very religious myself. But I’m always willing to engage with people with whom I disagree, if the conversation is substantive and proceeds in good faith. I may disagree with Don, but I’m always interested in what he has to say.
Recently Don watched the debate I had with William Lane Craig on “God and Cosmology.” I think these remarks from a devoted Christian who understands the cosmology very well will be of interest to people on either side of the debate.
Open letter to Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig:
I just ran across your debate at the 2014 Greer-Heard Forum, and greatly enjoyed listening to it. Since my own views are often a combination of one or the others of yours (though they also often differ from both of yours), I thought I would give some comments.
I tend to be skeptical of philosophical arguments for the existence of God, since I do not believe there are any that start with assumptions universally accepted. My own attempt at what I call the Optimal Argument for God (one, two, three, four), certainly makes assumptions that only a small fraction of people, and perhaps even only a small fraction of theists, believe in, such as my assumption that the world is the best possible. You know that well, Sean, from my provocative seminar at Caltech in November on “Cosmological Ontology and Epistemology” that included this argument at the end.
I mainly think philosophical arguments might be useful for motivating someone to think about theism in a new way and perhaps raise the prior probability someone might assign to theism. I do think that if one assigns theism not too low a prior probability, the historical evidence for the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus can lead to a posterior probability for theism (and for Jesus being the Son of God) being quite high. But if one thinks a priori that theism is extremely improbable, then the historical evidence for the Resurrection would be discounted and not lead to a high posterior probability for theism.
I tend to favor a Bayesian approach in which one assigns prior probabilities based on simplicity and then weights these by the likelihoods (the probabilities that different theories assign to our observations) to get, when the product is normalized by dividing by the sum of the products for all theories, the posterior probabilities for the theories. Of course, this is an idealized approach, since we don’t yet have _any_ plausible complete theory for the universe to calculate the conditional probability, given the theory, of any realistic observation.
For me, when I consider evidence from cosmology and physics, I find it remarkable that it seems consistent with all we know that the ultimate theory might be extremely simple and yet lead to sentient experiences such as ours. A Bayesian analysis with Occam’s razor to assign simpler theories higher prior probabilities would favor simpler theories, but the observations we do make preclude the simplest possible theories (such as the theory that nothing concrete exists, or the theory that all logically possible sentient experiences occur with equal probability, which would presumably make ours have zero probability in this theory if there are indeed an infinite number of logically possible sentient experiences). So it seems mysterious why the best theory of the universe (which we don’t have yet) may be extremely simple but yet not maximally simple. I don’t see that naturalism would explain this, though it could well accept it as a brute fact.
One might think that adding the hypothesis that the world (all that exists) includes God would make the theory for the entire world more complex, but it is not obvious that is the case, since it might be that God is even simpler than the universe, so that one would get a simpler explanation starting with God than starting with just the universe. But I agree with your point, Sean, that theism is not very well defined, since for a complete theory of a world that includes God, one would need to specify the nature of God.
For example, I have postulated that God loves mathematical elegance, as well as loving to create sentient beings, so something like this might explain both why the laws of physics, and the quantum state of the universe, and the rules for getting from those to the probabilities of observations, seem much simpler than they might have been, and why there are sentient experiences with a rather high degree of order. However, I admit there is a lot of logically possible variation on what God’s nature could be, so that it seems to me that at least we humans have to take that nature as a brute fact, analogous to the way naturalists would have to take the laws of physics and other aspects of the natural universe as brute facts. I don’t think either theism or naturalism solves this problem, so it seems to me rather a matter of faith which makes more progress toward solving it. That is, theism per se cannot deduce from purely a priori reasoning the full nature of God (e.g., when would He prefer to maintain elegant laws of physics, and when would He prefer to cure someone from cancer in a truly miraculous way that changes the laws of physics), and naturalism per se cannot deduce from purely a priori reasoning the full nature of the universe (e.g., what are the dynamical laws of physics, what are the boundary conditions, what are the rules for getting probabilities, etc.).
In view of these beliefs of mine, I am not convinced that most philosophical arguments for the existence of God are very persuasive. In particular, I am highly skeptical of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which I shall quote here from one of your slides, Bill:
- If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause
which brought the universe into existence. - The universe began to exist.
- Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the
universe into existence.
I do not believe that the first premise is metaphysically necessary, and I am also not at all sure that our universe had a beginning. (I do believe that the first premise is true in the actual world, since I do believe that God exists as a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence, but I do not see that this premise is true in all logically possible worlds.)
I agree with you, Sean, that we learn our ideas of causation from the lawfulness of nature and from the directionality of the second law of thermodynamics that lead to the commonsense view that causes precede their effects (or occur at the same time, if Bill insists). But then we have learned that the laws of physics are CPT invariant (essentially the same in each direction of time), so in a fundamental sense the future determines the past just as much as the past determines the future. I agree that just from our experience of the one-way causation we observe within the universe, which is just a merely effective description and not fundamental, we cannot logically derive the conclusion that the entire universe has a cause, since the effective unidirectional causation we commonly experience is something just within the universe and need not be extrapolated to a putative cause for the universe as a whole.
However, since to me the totality of data, including the historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus, is most simply explained by postulating that there is a God who is the Creator of the universe, I do believe by faith that God is indeed the cause of the universe (and indeed the ultimate Cause and Determiner of everything concrete, that is, everything not logically necessary, other than Himself—and I do believe, like Richard Swinburne, that God is concrete and not logically necessary, the ultimate brute fact). I have a hunch that God created a universe with apparent unidirectional causation in order to give His creatures some dim picture of the true causation that He has in relation to the universe He has created. But I do not see any metaphysical necessity in this.
(I have a similar hunch that God created us with the illusion of libertarian free will as a picture of the true freedom that He has, though it might be that if God does only what is best and if there is a unique best, one could object that even God does not have libertarian free will, but in any case I would believe that it would be better for God to do what is best than to have any putative libertarian free will, for which I see little value. Yet another hunch I have is that it is actually sentient experiences rather than created individual `persons’ that are fundamental, but God created our experiences to include beliefs that we are individual persons to give us a dim image of Him as the one true Person, or Persons in the Trinitarian perspective. However, this would take us too far afield from my points here.)
On the issue of whether our universe had a beginning, besides not believing that this is at all relevant to the issue of whether or not God exists, I agreed almost entirely with Sean’s points rather than yours, Bill, on this issue. We simply do not know whether or not our universe had a beginning, but there are certainly models, such as Sean’s with Jennifer Chen (hep-th/0410270 and gr-qc/0505037), that do not have a beginning. I myself have also favored a bounce model in which there is something like a quantum superposition of semiclassical spacetimes (though I don’t really think quantum theory gives probabilities for histories, just for sentient experiences), in most of which the universe contracts from past infinite time and then has a bounce to expand forever. In as much as these spacetimes are approximately classical throughout, there is a time in each that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity.
In this model, as in Sean’s, the coarse-grained entropy has a minimum at or near the time when the spatial volume is minimized (at the bounce), so that entropy increases in both directions away from the bounce. At times well away from the bounce, there is a strong arrow of time, so that in those regions if one defines the direction of time as the direction in which entropy increases, it is rather as if there are two expanding universes both coming out from the bounce. But it is erroneous to say that the bounce is a true beginning of time, since the structure of spacetime there (at least if there is an approximately classical spacetime there) has timelike curves going from a proper time of minus infinity through the bounce (say at proper time zero) and then to proper time of plus infinity. That is, there are worldlines that go through the bounce and have no beginning there, so it seems rather artificial to say the universe began at the bounce that is in the middle just because it happens to be when the entropy is minimized. I think Sean made this point very well in the debate.
In other words, in this model there is a time coordinate t on the spacetime (say the proper time t of a suitable collection of worldlines, such as timelike geodesics that are orthogonal to the extremal hypersurface of minimal spatial volume at the bounce, where one sets 
) that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity with no beginning (and no end). Well away from the bounce, there is a different thermodynamic time 
(increasing with increasing entropy) that for 
increases with 
but for 
decreases with (so there becomes more positive as becomes more negative). For example, if one said that is only defined for 
, say, one might have something like
the positive square root of one less than the square of . This thermodynamic time only has real values when the absolute value of the coordinate time , that is, 
, is no smaller than 1, and then increases with .
One might say that begins (at 
) at 
(for one universe that has growing as decreases from -1 to minus infinity) and at 
(for another universe that has growing as increases from +1 to plus infinity). But since the spacetime exists for all real , with respect to that time arising from general relativity there is no beginning and no end of this universe.
Bill, I think you also objected to a model like this by saying that it violates the second law (presumably in the sense that the coarse-grained entropy does not increase monotonically with for all real ). But if we exist for 
(or for 
; there would be no change to the overall behavior if were replaced with 
, since the laws are CPT invariant), then we would be in a region where the second law is observed to hold, with coarse-grained entropy increasing with 
(or with 
if ). A viable bounce model would have it so that it would be very difficult or impossible for us directly to observe the bounce region where the second law does not apply, so our observations would be in accord with the second law even though it does not apply for the entire universe. I think I objected to both of your probability estimates for various things regarding fine tuning. Probabilities depend on the theory or model, so without a definite model, one cannot claim that the probability for some feature like fine tuning is small. It was correct to list me among the people believing in fine tuning in the sense that I do believe that there are parameters that naively are far different from what one might expect (such as the cosmological constant), but I agreed with the sentiment of the woman questioner that there are not really probabilities in the absence of a model. Bill, you referred to using some “non-standard” probabilities, as if there is just one standard. But there isn’t. As Sean noted, there are models giving high probabilities for Boltzmann brain observations (which I think count strongly against such models) and other models giving low probabilities for them (which on this regard fits our ordered observations statistically). We don’t yet know the best model for avoiding Boltzmann brain domination (and, Sean, you know that I am skeptical of your recent ingenious model), though just because I am skeptical of this particular model does not imply that I believe that the problem is insoluble or gives evidence against a multiverse; in any case it seems also to be a problem that needs to be dealt with even in just single-universe models.
Sean, at one point your referred to some naive estimate of the very low probability of the flatness of the universe, but then you said that we now know the probability of flatness is very near unity. This is indeed true, as Stephen Hawking and I showed long ago (“How Probable Is Inflation?” Nuclear Physics B298, 789-809, 1988) when we used the canonical measure for classical universes, but one could get other probabilities by using other measures from other models.
In summary, I think the evidence from fine tuning is ambiguous, since the probabilities depend on the models. Whether or not the universe had a beginning also is ambiguous, and furthermore I don’t see that it has any relevance to the question of whether or not God exists, since the first premise of the Kalam cosmological argument is highly dubious metaphysically, depending on contingent intuitions we have developed from living in a universe with relatively simple laws of physics and with a strong thermodynamic arrow of time.
Nevertheless, in view of all the evidence, including both the elegance of the laws of physics, the existence of orderly sentient experiences, and the historical evidence, I do believe that God exists and think the world is actually simpler if it contains God than it would have been without God. So I do not agree with you, Sean, that naturalism is simpler than theism, though I can appreciate how you might view it that way.
Best wishes,
Don
This post on using Bayes’s, when no quantities are known, is very appropriate to the discussion. It is most likely incorrect to subjectively assign values to probability calculations.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-bayess-theorem-an/
“The importance of accurate data in quantitative modeling is central to the subject raised in the question: using Bayes’s theorem to calculate the probability of the existence of God. Scientific discussion of religion is a popular topic at present, with three new books arguing against theism and one, University of Oxford professor Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion, arguing specifically against the use of Bayes’s theorem for assigning a probability to God’s existence. (A Google news search for “Dawkins” turns up 1,890 news items at the time of this writing.) Arguments employing Bayes’s theorem calculate the probability of God given our experiences in the world (the existence of evil, religious experiences, etc.) and assign numbers to the likelihood of these facts given existence or nonexistence of God, as well as to the prior belief of God’s existence–the probability we would assign to the existence of God if we had no data from our experiences. Dawkins’s argument is not with the veracity of Bayes’s theorem itself, whose proof is direct and unassailable, but rather with the lack of data to put into this formula by those employing it to argue for the existence of God. The equation is perfectly accurate, but the numbers inserted are, to quote Dawkins, “not measured quantities but & personal judgments, turned into numbers for the sake of the exercise.””
“The source of this frustration is the unknown priors, p(A) and p(B). What does it mean to have prior belief about the probability of a mathematical model? Answering this question opens up a bitter internecine can of worms between “the Bayesians” and “the frequentists,” a mathematical gang war which is better not entered into here. To oversimplify, “Bayesian probability” is an interpretation of probability as the degree of belief in a hypothesis; “frequentist probabilityis an interpretation of probability as the frequency of a particular outcome in a large number of experimental trials. In the case of our original doctor, estimating the prior can mean the difference between more-than-likely and less-than-likely prognosis. In the case of model selection, particularly when two disputants have strong prior beliefs that are diametrically opposed (belief versus nonbelief), Bayes’s theorem can lead to more conflict than clarity.”
The problem is that most peoples minds are still so primitive that they still, in this day and age, practice beliefs and disbeliefs, and do so on a daily basis. They are just not capable of looking in the direction of the truth instead.
If you look toward truth, then the question concerning the existence of God is immediately answered. If you look toward truth, then the questions concerning the mysteriousness of quantum mechanics are answered in a minute. If you look toward truth, then the question concerning the basics of the mechanics of reality are answered in less than a second.
For instance, my parents pulled me out of school before I had a chance to receive any education in physics. But before that, back in grade 9, I had pointed out to my science teacher some peculiarities about “motion”. These peculiarities I had noticed due to me having looked in the direction of truth. The teacher then basically told me to sit down and shut up, because as far as he was concerned I did not know what the heck I was talking about. Years later, I returned to thinking about what I had said, what I had observed, and then proceeded to think about it over and over, and did so via a step by step analysis..
Eventually I figured out what sat beyond the peculiarities concerning “motion”, meaning I discovered the cause behind them. Using simple geometry, I then converted my new understandings into equations. Next I searched to see if what I had discovered could be found anywhere else, such as in the world of physics. It turned out that my equations were identical to the SR equations, and that I had acquired a full understanding of Special Relativity, and did so with no help other than from myself. The way in which I derived the SR equations, turned out to be 100% unique.
Anyhow, the point is that anyone who is capable of riding a bicycle for instance, is also capable of discovering SR on their own. It’s that simple, but is so, only if you look toward the truth and thus ignore any beliefs or disbeliefs.
Of course many dimwits, who meanwhile claimed that I was a dimwit, did not “BELIEVE” that I was capable of this. So I threw 9 mini Youtube videos together to show exactly how I did it. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKAwpEetJ-Q&list=PL3zkZRUI2IyBFAowlUivFbeBh-Mq7HdoQ
Don: “On the other hand, from what I have read, I have gathered that the likelihood of the Resurrection, given the data of what Jesus’ disciples are reported to have claimed to have seen, is much higher on the hypothesis of a God who might have resurrected Jesus than on the hypothesis that there was some natural explanation, such as some collusion among many of Jesus’ disciples.”
By the same token, should we now start believing in Bigfoot?
Don Page
Hume’s point, I think, is that we both gather evidence for the natural laws and receive testimony *empirically*. Empirically what we observe as uniform and unchanging we describe as natural law – Hume says the law is established by “a firm and unalterable experience”. Empirical testimony, while it can often be considered a proof for many things, cannot stand as proof against the proof of natural law, since natural law is just what has gone on and does go on all around us constantly, uniform and unchanging. Yet we all know someone who has lied to us. Even if we think we’ve seen a miracle, we would still have more often seen testimony that was faulty in some respect. That logic is inescapable, although Hume’s premises can be attacked. For example, one might question ‘Hume’s Fork’.
So citing the gospels and the undeniable success of the Christian Church is certainly excellent testimony, of a sort (it’s not completely clear to what it is testimony, however!). But even if it was unequivocally testimony to the god you believe in and Jesus Christ, it would still have a mountain to climb – the mountain of empirical evidence that testifies to the uniformity of nature. On the other hand the problems with testimonial evidence, whilst not disqualifying it, are well known.
This does not rule out miracles a priori, nor does it proclaim that natural law *is* uniform and unchanging; it simply observes the difficulty anyone should have, even theists imo, in thinking that *any* amount of testimonial evidence could overcome the evidence for natural law.
“Jesus” the Greek version of a traditional Jewish name (Joshua) was fairly common in that time and place. Josephus wrote about twenty different people named Jesus in his voluminous writings. So any reference would have to be specific enough to make it clear that he was referencing Jesus H. Christ. There are only two passages in the entirety of Josephus’ writings which are purported to do so.
One is widely believed to have been interpolated by a Christian scribe copying the text. It is even possible that the scribe was merely clarifying, not deliberately misleading. The other is uncertain, but was possibly a reference to a different Jesus.
Josephus was Jewish. He remained Jewish throughout his life. Any insinuation that he believed Jesus H. Christ was God is unfounded.
You will be a better person when you come to recognize the raging confirmation bias that runs rampant through your thought processes.
Reginald, you wrote:
Josephus was born 37 A.D. There is no way, absent a time machine, that he could have met Jesus H. Christ. Therefore, anything he wrote is at least second-hand information. And the passage in question was written after 90 A.D. Tacitus is even later.
Imagine if someone today, ~ age 50, wrote a book on John F. Kennedy. Would you accept this for a first-person account?
This is so filled with fallacies that it’s amazing you try to even go that route. Josephus never claimed that he met Jesus. So I have no clue where you get that from. Modern scholarship has acknowledged the authenticity of the reference in Book 20, Chapter 9, 1 of the Antiquities to Jesus. Josephus has also written about John the Baptist. Are you claiming that he met John or that John never existed?
The other reference to Jesus was in Book 18, Chapter 3, 3 of the Antiquities. The general scholarly view is that while the Testimonium Flavianum is most likely not authentic in its entirety, it is broadly agreed upon that it originally consisted of an authentic nucleus, which was then subject to Christian expansion/alteration.
You also somehow claim that just because Tacitus wrote about Jesus a number of years after the fact that it therefore is invalid. he also wrote about the death of Augustus and Roman history through 70 AD. Most of that before he was even born. Should all of that be discarded?
And what about historians that write today about the civil war? Should we ignore Ken Burns because he didn’t live during the time period in question?
You offer zero proof to support your contention that what Josephus or Tacitus wrote is invalid. Instead you resort to arguments that are false (claiming Josephus met Jesus) or completely invalid (someone not alive during the period in question).
Lessing, as quoted by John W. Loftus:
He goes on:
Of course, if the Christian God exists, there appears to be no reason why we should not see amputees healed, dead people raised and so on, even today. As Jesus says in John 14:12, “the person who believes in me will perform the miraculous deeds that I am doing, and will perform greater deeds than these, because I am going to the Father”. But we do not see Christians doing greater deeds than Jesus supposedly did. As Hume writes, “It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days. But it is nothing strange, I hope, that men should lie in all ages.”
Reginald
Good answer by John.
Also
So Josephus was Jewish? Born so, yes. So was Jesus. And at least 10 and probably all the disciples. And the apostle Paul. The New Testament was written by Jews. Today there are many Messianic Jews who believe Jesus is the Christ, Prof. David Block FRAS is one to whom I have spoken. I had a brief discussion with him about globular clusters, having recently seen Omega Centauri through a large Newtonian telescope. Christ, incidentally is a title, not a surname. It is Greek for ‘anointed one’ and has equivalence with the Hebrew word usually rendered ‘Messiah’.
Yes I’m aware that Josephus was prolific. And if you look through ‘Antiquities of the Jews’, you do see, as I said in my last response to you, a lot of detailed references to the Judea (southern kingdom of post-Solomon ancient Israel) of Jesus’ day, and Biblical history in general. These re-enforce my previous point that it is extremely hard to extricate Jesus from history/archaeology and still sound like you have reasonable judgement.
Paul Wright
“Since the truth of these miracles has completely ceased to be demonstrable by miracles still happening now, since they are no more than reports of miracles, I deny that they should bind me in the least to a faith in the other teachings of Christ.”
Fair point.
-I prayed for an American man who was supernaturally totally healed of a major knee injury. This was supernatural recreation; he had had a lot of tissue removed from the knee area, and at the time I prayed, an external surgical brace. I will see if he wants his details known if you wish. I have his e-mail.
-My wife prayed for a lady in the UK, while a district nurse, with a terminal multiple myeloma plus an attendant tissue disease diagnosis, 20 years ago. My wife’s role was palliative care. She has since had a stroke but I would think that her husband will verify the details, we are still in touch.
-I have met and spoken with the lady in this video. I met her in Dunchurch, England. She made it onto the front page of the UK ‘Daily Mail’. There were complete medical records.
http://www.cfan.org.uk/resources/story-jean-neil-miraculous-healing
A fair few more come to mind if you want them.
What exactly is a miracle anyway? If I fall from 22,000 feet and live is that a miracle? Alan Magee during WW2 did just that. Miracles may simply be things that happened to people that defy logic or can’t be explained. Using that definition then miracles certainly do exist even today.
What or who is behind it is based on your faith.
Josephus never met Jesus H. Christ. I am glad we are both in agreement on that. I don’t know why you would think I claimed otherwise, since I stated exactly the opposite. Tacitus also never met Jesus H. Christ.
Therefore, there works cannot be considered primary historical sources. If they wrote anything about Jesus H. Christ, it was hearsay. What they wrote is not high quality evidence for a historical Jesus H. Christ, it is only (if accepted as not an interpolation, etc.) evidence that they heard something about early Christianity.
BUT – early Christianity is not in question. A historical Jesus H. Christ was the question. And hearsay from a generation or two isn’t convincing evidence.
As for historians of today who write about the civil war, they cite their sources. If there are multiple competing sources, they explain how they attempted to vet those sources, and how they weighed the competing claims.
Apparently you failed completely to understand that I stated this earlier with my comments about a JFK book. Work on your reading comprehension.
Hi Simon, you’ll notice I chose my examples carefully: amputees and dead people. This is because these are cases where spontaneous healing or remission doesn’t just happen anyway, as far as I know. In these cases, healings triggered by Christians’ prayers, if they occurred, would be the only ones, and would be strong evidence that Christians have access to some power which nobody else does. Since we are told that Jesus raised Lazarus and Jairus’s daughter, these things shouldn’t be a problem for Christians who do greater works than Jesus, should they?
I think you’ve cited cases where people might do better than expected without being prayed for. Stephen Hawking is an example cited in a previous discussion on healing prayer: my ex, who qualified as medical doctor, wryly observes that “Doctors say that Hawking has a ‘rare, slowly progressive form of MND’, which is the medical way of saying ‘goodness, we have no idea why that happened’.”.
In those cases anecdotes won’t really do: you’d have to do a study of how people fare with and without prayer. When you do this, you find prayer has no effect. Since everyone loves Bayes on here, what’s going on is that raising the dead has a really lopsided likelihood ratio because it never happens on any other hypothesis, but we’d need to look at all 4 combinations of prayer vs healing in other cases to fairly evaluate the evidence, because we know that spontaneous remissions are a thing.
Glucab86 wrote (and many others seem to erroneously believe): “The historical Jesus starts almost invariably from the Gospel of Mark.”
Actually the first written references to Jesus are in the early letters of Paul, which predate the gospels.
What Rick says is correct that the first written references to Jesus are in Paul’s writings (the real ones, not the pseudepigraphic ones). The problem is that Paul doesn’t really tell us very much about the character of Jesus, and even he is at best a second-hand source since he admits that he never met the person when he was allegedly alive.
What this means is that the details really go back to Mark and the writings that depend on Mark. There’s really not much in Paul’s writings to hang your hat on (and to some degree the Jesus he paints, as far as it goes, is quite different from the character in the synoptics).
Bill Jefferys writes: “The problem is that Paul doesn’t really tell us very much about the character of Jesus, and even he is at best a second-hand source since he admits that he never met the person when he was allegedly alive.”
Though Paul (like James, Peter, John, other leaders in the early Christian church) did strongly believe that he had a direct encounter with Jesus post-crucifixion – this experience being the catalyst for his transformation from self-acknowledged zealous persecutor of early Christians to committed Christian himself. Of course, alternative explanations have been offered for Paul’s dramatic transformation (hallucinatory epileptic seizure, etc. )
Hi Rick, Yes, I put Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus up to some sort of brain fart. These are common (I personally know some people that have had them), and tend to be culturally informed (i.e., people raised in Hindu cultures tend to hallucinate Hindu deities, etc.). Again, it’s the simplest explanation, hence the most likely.
The evidence for a historical Jesus – someone who was alive – is quite good. You can debate all day about what he may or may not have accomplished; one of the Gospels (Mark) stops at his burial and does not mention a resurrection.
But the existence of a Jewish man who knew the scriptures well, called out the Establishment figures, got a lot of authority figures upset (who were concerned about their own power as well as how to get along/go along within an incredibly cruel and organized (Roman) empire)- is not implausible at all.
Plus the record of the Apostles and disciples spending their lives spreading the word, often dying for it; St Thomas journeyed to India and established the Church there (most people don’t realize that Indian Christianity is much older than the European edition)….. unlikely that he (and others) would decide to do this on a complete falsehood (ie, inventing a man who never existed).
Some will postulate that Jesus was delusional or had psychomotor siezures; that’s still completely different than claiming he never lived.
Somewhat similar, I don’t know if Hinduism is too old to have an originator, whereas evidence of Siddhartha (Buddha) as having lived is also fairly good.
Interesting read.
Of course, the final question that lies in all of physics and philosophy is the very basic “What on earth is physical reality and why does it exist” question, more generally phrased as, “Why is truth X instead of Y despite the fact that it is logically possible for it to be Y.”Many atheists fail to understand this and seem to think that somehow the laws of physics are freaking “Nothing” and that it’s a logical necessity for E=mc^2 instead of mc^3.
Now here’s my personal take on the question of, the “best of all possible world’s.”
To begin with, please first, whether you are an atheist or a christian, TRY to feel some EMPATHY for those suffering in the WORST of possible worlds. Now try and feel some empathy for the sobbing mother and the hard working child in the worst of all possible worlds. Feel it.
There might exist a universe which views are reality in the same way we view, go google, “some horrifying implications of the harry potter universe,” (without quotes), and you’ll get what I mean.
Some parts of our reality which resemble rational design:
1.Mathematical contests – there must exist aliens that are vastly better at math than us, the fact that we are on the same “time frame” convinces me that God exists, one would expect there to exist certain people with ultra-fast brains who can solve mathematical problems in 2-3 minutes…(Evolution is true?)
2.Nihilism and the death of God: the greater the enlightenment, the less the meaning.
3.Average IQ is just enough to function in society, too stupid to do anything else.
4.And much more…
Define a function F with the domain of conscious entities, that represents the “favorite universe” of a person X. If one were to find hypothetically as the “enlightenment of X” increases, that F(X) gets closer and closer to that of the real world, one can conclude that the favorite universe of god is that of the real world…
,Taylor
E=mc^3 is dimensionally incoherent.
A brute fact: A reasonable estimate is that, in the whole of human history, around 10 billion people have been christians. The head count for all human beings who have ever lived is over 100 billion (spontaneous abortions could double this). This does not seem like a coherent scheme to save humanity.
Hi Bill – briefly, on your: “I put Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus up to some sort of brain fart. These are common (I personally know some people that have had them), and tend to be culturally informed (i.e., people raised in Hindu cultures tend to hallucinate Hindu deities, etc.).”
This actually seems to highlight the very unusual nature of Paul’s experience. Whatever the cause of Paul’s experience, it couldn’t have been culturally informed. Paul was an exemplary monotheistic Jew at the time – on his way to Damascus to persecute some more of those heretical new Christians who believed in some weird sort of new “second” god who was recently human. His life-changing experience was of a person who was, up until that time, the farthest thing from being his deity. So I’m not sure the example of Hindus who hallucinate Hindu deities fits well as an applicable analogy for whatever was up with Paul.
“This actually seems to highlight the very unusual nature of Paul’s experience. Whatever the cause of Paul’s experience, it couldn’t have been culturally informed. ”
On the contrary, it was definitely culturally formed from his experience of Judaism. That is blindingly obvious.
Think “Messiah.” As a Jew, that was what Paul was expecting, and his brain fart pushed him over the edge to regard Jesus as Messiah, not only for Jews but also for gentiles.
@Collins:
Hinduism (correct name is Sanatana Dharma) is believed to be several thousand years old. It did not originate from any one prophet. Several sages doing yogic meditations had visions of the essentials of the main scriptures like Vedas and Upanishads. Before writing was discovered, these were transmitted verbally in Sanskrit language from teachers to students and parents to children. Buddhism arose as an offshoot of Hinduism between 6th and 4th century BCE in India. It then spread out in other Asian countries as an independent religion. But because of common origin it has many similarities to Hinduism.
There are legends about Jesus travelling to Kashmir (India) and staying there for several years. Some people ascribe this stay for some similarities in sayings in Christianity and Hinduism and similar birth stories (mid night and angels!) of Jesus Christ and Krishna.
My take on the use of Bayesian principles when you don’t have a reasonable basis for a prior is this: For any piece of evidence E, we can decide if E is evidence supporting a hypothesis H, or if it is undermining H, simply by looking at the likelihood ratio, independent of any prior we may have. (Naturally, this assumes we have a way to calculate, or at least estimate, the likelihood ratio.) So the Bayesian approach does have value even in the absence of priors.
After collecting a series of pieces of evidence E* = (E1, E2, E3, …, En), we can determine a combined likelihood ratio (p(E*|H)/p(E*|not H)). We hope, of course, that this ratio is either larger than the likelihood ratio of any single piece of evidence, or less than the likelihood ratio of any single piece — i.e., that all the pieces taken together point to a coherent “story”.
Now suppose we established at the outset a belief that “any prior odds between X:1 and 1:X could be considered reasonable, but not outside that range”. Pick the extreme least favored by the evidence and multiply (or divide) by the likelihood ratio, and we now have a lower (or upper) bound on our confidence for H.
I do agree that, when applied to deep philosophical questions, we have at best merely a tool for argumentation. But when we are looking at deep philosophical questions, is there really anything other than argumentation at our disposal?
Even those who don’t take the Bible literally and use the “but it’s just a metaphor” copout can’t explain how they determine (except by “faith”) what is a metaphor and what is to be taken literally. In the case of some of these claims, one must ask “a metaphor for what?” Also, some things don’t make any sense at all except if taken literally.