The fact that you weren’t broadly skeptical makes more sense. Your profile is a little misleading, then, because you tout yourself as a former “Skeptic,” which you capitalize, and that’s a technical term. You were never a Skeptic in general, by your admission. But I understand the convention in Christian circles is to emphasize and even exaggerate the born-again experience. Anyway, it’s none of my business.
The main problem here is that you don’t seem to know what you’re talking about. You ask me to explain to you how philosophy undermines Christianity and the Bible’s reliability. But that’s what many of my hundreds of articles are for. It’s a life’s work to try to understand these things, and you want me to explain it to you in a Medium comment.
I can tell you don’t know about epistemology, from how you’re using the word “explanation,” and I can tell you don’t know much about science or cosmology, from how you’re assuming the universe was always as complex as it is now. (The universe evolved from simpler forms, just like life did.) And I can tell you don’t know about the modern, historical-critical method of studying the Bible, from your tribal reaction to that method and from your insistence on the most naïve view of the gospels’ authorship.
How on earth do you know that the first-century Christians accepted that eyewitnesses wrote three of the gospels? John is anonymous just like the other three gospels are. The apostle John would have been a simple fisherman, whereas the gospel of John is written in fine Greek and with a sophisticated Gnostic theology. No one knows who wrote those gospels, and even if the gospels had been signed, there was an ancient practice of writing in the name of a more important person. If the gospels were written by eyewitnesses, why weren’t they written in first person? Why didn’t the authors report explicitly their memories and private experiences with Jesus? Why didn’t they say something like the following?
“Here’s what Jesus said to me, and then I told him this and that, and he laughed at my foolishness. Then we went down the hill, and I was third in line. It was an especially hot day, and I remember that I tripped on a rock, and Jesus helped me get to my feet. Oh, and here’s a description of what Jesus looked like, which I can give because I saw him many times. Oh, and notice how I’m writing from the perspective of an ancient, barely literate fisherman. And see how I’m writing while the events I witnessed are still fresh in my head, rather than waiting for decades until after 70 CE when the gospels were written. Oh, and notice how I have no need to copy from others because I was an eyewitness who would naturally want to tell it like I personally saw it, whereas Matthew and Luke copy and alter Mark.”
The evidence for Jesus’s existence isn’t overwhelming. I’ve written three articles on it, although I don’t claim to be an expert historian. The fact that you think Richard Dawkins’s opinion on the matter should be decisive shows again that you don’t know what you’re talking about here. Dawkins is a biologist, not a Bible scholar. Have a look at Richard Carrier’s book, “On the Historicity of Jesus,” or see his many debates and other YouTube videos on the historicity question.
But none of that matters because you were mixing up evidence for Jesus’s historical existence with evidence for the truth of Christianity’s miracle claims or for its pious view of Jesus’s identity. Those are separate matters.
I’ll just say that it’s impudent to expect to understand how the universe came into being. We’re only clever primates after all, and we evolved ultimately from wormlike critters and from single-celled organisms. It’s amazing that we can understand as much as we can, but it’s possible that some problems are beyond our comprehension. The best we can do is to look for clues in nature and to come up with scientific models to explain the evidence at hand. And we can supplement those models with philosophical speculations and analyses.
If you think “God did it” is such an impressive alternative explanation of how the universe came into being, take that “explanation” to the science or philosophy department of any secular institution of higher learning and see what happens.
You say I haven’t shown why Christianity’s miracle claims are false. Again, I write articles on these topics, so I don’t have to squeeze my answers into short comments. I wrote a detailed, two-part criticism of Willliam Lane Craig’s argument for Jesus’s resurrection. I wrote an article about miracle claims in general, and I’ve written lots of other articles on Christianity. You can see a categorized list of them at the top of my Medium homepage (see the last link below).
But just take the point about Isaiah 53. Yes, Isaiah came before the gospels. So what’s more likely, that Jesus’s life independently and miraculously fulfilled those predictions about the suffering servant? Or that the gospel authors made up the details of the story, having read and been inspired by Isaiah, to make their protagonist seem more important, because they were writing theological propaganda, not a neutral historical report?
Matthew helpfully adds the scriptural references, so we even know they were cribbing from the Hebrew scriptures. We also know they were using the flawed Septuagint because Matthew’s virgin birth narrative is based on a mistranslation of Isaiah 7:14 (“parthenos” for “almah,” which could have been “bethulah”).
By the way, if you read the whole of Isaiah, you’ll find that the author of that book identifies the suffering servant as Israel (41:8-9; 44:1, 21; 49:3; 53:8).
https://benjamincain8.medium.com/a-trove-of-my-philosophical-writings-236e8187d4d0
