Thursday, March 17, 2005
Need Proof?

Life isn't all about obtaining certainty. But at least some people won't accept a worldview until they're drowned with 'reasons to believe'.

Here are a few reasons/data/arguments listed by Glenn Miller why the case for the Christian faith isn't going to die out too soon:

  1. The resurrection of Christ
  2. The miracles of Christ (i.e. specific, in-context, purposeful)
  3. The very character and words of Christ
  4. The self-understanding of Christ
  5. The very super-human complexity of Christ's life and words
  6. The changed lives of the apostles
  7. The explosive growth of the early church, in a very hostile environment
  8. The conversion of skeptics/enemies (e.g. Thomas, Saul/Paul)
  9. The radically new, yet balanced ethics of the young church.
  10. The messianic prophecies (e.g. birthplace of Jesus, nature of death)
  11. The "regular" prophecies (e.g. specific predicted international events in OT prophets)
  12. The miraculous birth of Israel from Egypt
  13. The miraculous continued existence of Israel as a people though history
  14. The miracles in the OT (i.e. specific, in-context, purposeful)
  15. The advanced character of the Mosaic Law (both content and argumentation)
  16. The practical impossibility of alternative explanations for the above.
  17. The practical impossibility of consistent atheism: the meaning, purpose, value of life.
  18. Evidence for immortality of the soul
  19. The argument from change
  20. The argument from Efficient Causality
  21. The argument from Time and Contingency
  22. The argument from degrees of perfection
  23. The argument from error-detection-standard
  24. The argument from the definition of the Problem of Evil
  25. The Design argument
  26. The Kalam argument (e.g. whatever begins to exist has a cause)
  27. The argument from contingency
  28. The argument from the world as an interacting whole (e.g. "uni-verse")
  29. The argument from miracles (general form)
  30. The argument from the existence of consciousness
  31. The argument from truth (requiring an eternal mind)
  32. Argument from the origin of the idea of God
  33. Ontological argument (various forms)
  34. The Moral Argument
  35. The argument from conscience
  36. The argument from desire for the Ultimate and eternal
  37. The argument from aesthetic experience or beauty
  38. The argument from religious experience
  39. The common consent argument
  40. The argument from the character of human language
  41. The argument from predictability of natural law
  42. The presuppositional argument concerning knowledge
  43. The self-consistency of the system
  44. The predictive power of God's moral instructions in the Bible
  45. The survival of the scriptures in history
  46. Answered prayer and changed lives.

Posted at 03:04 pm by alwynlau

Posted by Derek L. @ 03/18/2005 04:16 AM PST
I think religion doesn't "belief". A man who doesn't "believe" will never "believe" even if inundated with logical reasons. He has already set up psychological barriers that will prevent him from accepting any new data contrary to his current belief set.

Allow me to play Devil's advocate.

Let's say, for the moment, that you are presented incontestible proof that Jesus was not a divine being in human form. Maybe a memo from the Romans that unequivocally state that Jesus was never crucified, never flogged etc, and it was all just an elaborate setup for his "resurrection". Now remember here, I'm not attacking the Christian faith, just using this as a (rather extreme) example of human psychology.

So anyway, if the crucifixtion never took place, then Jesus never died, and thus he never was resurrected, which calls into question that whole business of the 2nd/3rd coming of the Christ.

If you got such information, would you accept it as the truth? I could throw all the scientific data at you to prove that Jesus was never crucified, and I could provide you reams of analysis and facts and figures.

But at the end of the day, you would not believe it because you have been building your fundamental core beliefs since young, and to acknowledge that everything you thought is wrong, is a monumentally difficult undertaking.

We have real live examples from history. What? The world revolves around the sun? Heresy! Execute the fool!

Conclusion: Reality has little bearing on the human belief system and people will believe what they want to believe, and actively reject all evidence contrary to their belief system.
 

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