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I wonder what we believe today that those in the future will find laughable.
If you checked out of scholarship in the 80s, I can see why you would think so. That is a less defensible sentiment today. Fifty years ago, people got away with saying that King David is a myth, now we have his coins. Excavations have revealed architecture described in the New Testament that has been hidden since the 2nd century. Where it gets hazy is where you would expect it to be hazy - what archaeological evidence would you expect the Exodus to leave behind? There is some evidence, nothing conclusive, but I wouldn't expect there to be given the short time length of the event and the amount of evidence nomadic peoples typically leave behind.
But that doesn't hold many problems for the Traditional Catholic, as the traditional view has viewed the Joshua and Conquest in an allegorical sense. Joshua as a Christ figure, demonstrates the importance of eradicating evil entirely and giving it no quarter. A large part of reading the Bible is knowing what the genre is of the book you're reading.
To the Christian claims, the important thing to get historically accurate is the Gospels, and the Gospels were written in the genre of Ancient Biography. They at least tried to get it right, and there is increasing evidence that they were written early and by eyewitnesses..
All attempts to date the Gospel after AD 70 rely in the logic of, "Well, we know Jesus wasn't God, so He can't have predicted the fall of the Temple ahead of time (never mind there were other people predicting the fall of the Temple in the decade leading up to it,) and so the Gospels all had to be written after AD 70." And dating the Gospels before AD 70 is more like, "The Gospels tell their readers to do things at the Temple, and that is a weird prescription if the Temple is already destroyed. And Acts leads up the climatic trial of Paul in Rome but doesn't cover it, which would seem to indicate that it was completed before his execution. And look here, and look there, at all these weird coincidences that only make sense if they were written in the 50s and 60s."
Which proof do you think relies on actual infinity being logically contradictory? St. Thomas famously believed we couldn't prove the universe was finite through just philosophy, and his Cosmological argument does not require the universe to have had a beginning. Maybe you're most exposed to Kalam's argument, which is impossible to defend on pure philosophical grounds, though people try to defend it still with a combo of scientific evidence and philosophy.
Cute, however the world is not 6000 years old, Moses is a probably a fictional character and certainly not the author of the Deuteronomy, there was no widespread captivity in Egypt, etc etc
That where one scholar is going but not where scholarship in general is going, that would be the other direction. And no eyewitnessess, whoever wrote the cleansing of the temple probably didn't even have a passing familiarity with the temple, for example.
It doesn't matter when the prediction was made, it's that predictions only become relevant after they become true, it wouldn't have been written about. But beyond that it's how it's treated, as inevitable rather than a menace. And beyond that it's the lack of references to the gospels from other sources, consider how many times the authentic letters of Paul could have quoted Jesus from the gospels but didn't. That means they were written after.
The offering to the Temple was a big part of jewish religion, rabbis continued to debate the proper temple practices for centuries after the temple was destroyed under the assumption that it would soon be rebuilt. It is no surprise that christians, which at that point were a jewish sect, would do the same.
You should re-read the last chapter of Acts:
All versions of the cosmological argument and all of the five ways of St. Thomas.
Irrelevant.
Are you getting that from Ehrman or somewhere else?
Even with a "late" gMark date of 73ish, the author would have been in the temple as all male Jews were expected to travel to the Temple several times a year. Assuming the writer is older than 18, he would have familiarity with the Temple before its fall.
If you don't discount scholars just for being religious, arguments for early dating is becoming more acceptable. The arguments make sense. They made sense when critical historian Adolf von Harnack did the math in 1911, and they still make sense today. The historical investigation has the fatal flaw of needing to presuppose that nothing supernatural happened. If you approach without that presupposition, then the evidence points elsewhere.
I would not dispute that the letters of Paul were mostly written without the Gospels as reference. There are some parts of Paul's letters that have a certain rhyme with the Gospels, particularly in 1 Corinthians. But I think they were written separately, which isn't exactly a bad thing from an evidentiary-stand point. All that tells us is that the Gospels were not wide-spread reference material at the time Paul was writing and perhaps he did not have access to copies himself. He was an wandering preacher/tent maker. It's not the weirdest thing for him not to have had an extensive library.
Or it mattered because it was a warning to the Christians to flee Jerusalem for the hills, which they did. And not all the predictions came true by AD 80. And some things that would probably be critical details embedded in their memory, like that the Temple was melted to SLAG wasn't mentioned at all.
Yeah, and then Paul died. He died during Nero's reign, in AD 64/65. He arrived in Rome in AD 60. Acts ends saying, "He spent two years in Rome preaching." Then there is a gap of another couple years, and then Paul died. If Paul died before Acts was written, Luke would have included Paul's dramatic death. He did not, because Paul's dramatic death didn't happen for another two years.
Since gLuke is likely written before Acts, and Acts was likely written before AD 65, and gMark was written before gLuke unless you're crazy, gMark is older than AD 65. Give them each a couple years to write each book, and gMark is in the late 50s. Paul's letters were written in the 50s and the part of the 60s where he was alive, which goes to your point that he didn't have a copy of a Gospel to reference. It's all very nice and neat like the truth tends to be.
No they don't. This is just silly. If for the sake of argument we allowed that there could be an infinitely long hierarchical series— D actualized by C, which is in turn actualized by B, which is in turn actualized by A, and so on in infinity, there would still have to be a source of causal power outside the series to impart causal power to the whole. Consider a mirror which reflects the image of a face present in another mirror, which in turn reflects the image of a face present in another, and so on ad infinitum. Even if we allowed that there could be such a series of mirrors, there would still have to be something outside this infinite series— the face itself—which could impart the content of the image without having to derive it. What there could not be is only mirror images and never any actual face.
The argument does not rely on the non-existence of actual infinity.
I'm getting it from reading the thing.
The author of Mark wasn't a jew. What kind of line of argumentation is this? I'm bringing this as proof that the authors are far removed from the events and your response is "well, under the assumption that they are not far removed from the events this is impossible". You are making my point.
A prediction coming true is not supernatural, people predict things all the time. The problem is that correct predictions only become relevant after they become true. Suppose Mark was writing in the 50s, some guy said "the temple is going to be destroyed" 20+ years ago and it never happened, are you going to bring that up? And it's not just the prediction, it's how it's treated. You wouldn't write the parable of the fig tree if the destruction of the temple hadn't already happened: the jews have already failed to deliver and god has already punished them.
Or possibly because Paul dramatic death hadn't been invented yet. You are trusting sources written hundreds of years after the fact on this, farther from the facts than the most pessimistic estimates of acts. The ending of acts is truncated whichever way you look at it. Supposed it really was written while Paul was still in Rome you wouldn't say "it preached in rome for two years" you would also say "and he's still there" or "and he's now moved to spain" or "and then they arrested him again a second time".
What's causal power. Make me an example of causation. Feser makes arguments like this and I'm convinced that his idea of causation doesn't exist outside of his brain.
LIght travels at finite speed so at most there would have had to be, at some point, a face. But I don't think this is the case, I think there's actually nothing logically contradictory in an infinite series of mirrors you are tricking your brain into thinking there is because the brain thinks in aristotelian terms, with efficient and final causes, but those things don't exist. Suppose the universe was nothing but a single atom travelling forever at constant speed, is that impossible? Our brain wants to say no because everything that we experience moving is moved by something but actually there's nothing logically impossible in it. If the universe was nothing but an infinite series of mirrors reflecting a face infinitely in both directions that's just how it would be.
No, I'm not. Unless you hold to a later Mark date than most scholars today. And many scholars belive Mark was Jewish, such as William Arnal and Julie Galambush who are hardly Christian Fundamentalists.
Jesus is clear that is goal is to create a new Exodus and a new covenant. Will the Son of Man find faith when He returns? He came the first time, no faith, predicts destruction of the old practices. Establishes a new covenant, says he will return to see if it goes any better.
But just looking at events in the 40s, they match to the predictions better than the full Temple destruction? Atheist New Testament Scholar Maurice Casey argued that Jesus’s prophecy about the “abomination of desolation” where it does not belong is obviously a reference Caligula ordering a statue of himself be placed within the Temple around 39 CE. The portion about the destruction of the Temple is largely taken from Jeremiah 7, and Casey doesn’t see it as a reference to the historical destruction of the Temple by the Romans, but rather an eschatological threat of sorts about God destroying the Temple if it’s desecrated.
The ability to bring an effect into something else. Right now I do not have boiling water. If I were to fill a pot with water and put it on a stove and turn it on and heat made the water boil, all that chain of events was required to make the water boil. It's also clear that there was something about that chain of events that caused the water to boil, when otherwise the water would have stayed in my pipes without boiling. The heat of the stove had the causal power to change the water from liquid to gas.
I am not arguing that there is something logically contradictory in an infinite series of mirrors. The argument is, even with an infinite series of mirrors there would be no face if there was nothing imparting an image of a face.
Yes! The thing impossible isn't the speed of the atom, but the fact that the atom exists at all.
Mark is far removed from the events that he's narrating, either in time or in space or both. The belief that he was jewish is a minority position. Unfortunately like many things plagued by apologetics you can't even tell when some people are just mistaken or deliberately lying.
The water boils because of a transfer of energy not because of causal power.
The face is irrelevant? It's just light in some arbitrary pattern being reflected, are you saying that you can imagine infinite mirrors but not infinite light? That you can only imagine light in a pattern if there is something giving it that pattern (but the same isn't true of the atoms of mirrors)?
An infinite series of mirrors can exist but not a single atom? I'm not following. I don't find this persuasive at all, I think there's nothing impossible in imagining an universe comprised of a single atom.
If you think that this materially changes anything I said then I don't know how to reach you. Something had greater energy and it transferred this energy in the form of heat to the water. We can go deeper and talk about entropy and the average velocity of the molecules. I took Thermodynamics, too. The specifics doesn't change the fact that something acting outside the water caused it to heat up.
But there would be a reason why it's in one pattern instead of another. And mentioning light is actually more relevant to my argument! Because light is outside the infinite mirrors. There could be infinite mirrors and no face because no light! The infinity of the mirrors does not create an image.
An infinite series of mirrors cannot exist in reality, it's an analogy to the idea that claiming that an infinite amount of causes can explain itself. It cannot.
A single atom moving through space still needs an explanation. There are many things it could have been otherwise. For instance, the atom has a certain number of protons, electrons, and neutrons, but it would have been possible for it to have fewer or more. Why is it moving at this velocity and not another velocity? Why is there space for it to move in? A single atom has the potential to be something else, so something must have caused it to be as it is instead of in another way.
You're arguing for a kind of existential inertia, but that is a whole other can of worms than an argument for infinity.
I think it does change things because every time I've heard that argument it ends with "and that's why god needs to exist here and now" and you don't get there with energy transfers because once the energy is transferred the source doesn't need to continue existing.
I really don't know what you are even saying at this point. Usually these arguments are trying to prove the existence of god through a logical impossibility (i.e. non-existence of god is logically impossible thus god exists). I don't think there's anything logically impossible in the existence of an arbitrary arrangement of light, it doesn't need a cause.
I haven't laid out a proof for the existence of God here because I don't have the time to write one out. All I am doing is objecting to you saying that ALL proofs for God's existence rely on the non-existence of actual infinity. But based on what you're saying I'm not convinced you've understood a single proof in the slightest.
I'm going to try to write it out again without mirrors:
Imagine a circle of 100 robots facing each other. Each has a command to raise their hands if the robot next to them raises their hand first. Each robot starts with its hands down. After how many hours will every robot have its hands raised? They never will.
What if you made the circle bigger? 100,000 robots. 10^100 robots? Infinite robots? (Please understand, I am not implying that a universe of infinite robots is possible without God or anything like that. This is a thought experiment to demonstrate an aspect of a different argument.)
Just because there are infinite robots does not mean that they will all raise their hands with infinite time.
Now we come upon a circle where some robots have their arms up. We know that every robot is programed to not raise its hands until the one in front of it had its hands raised. What can we deduce from this?
Even if the robots had been there for an infinite length of time beforehand, the answer remains the same. There must have been something different from the chain of robots - like a robot that started off with raised hands.
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