Paul was not there when Jesus died and supposedly rose from the dead.
Entertaining! Forget about his experience of the risen Chrst.
Oh or are you going to delete that experience. Okay find I delete the experience of all data gathered by scientists if a: it is not repeatable ( there go all the forensic sciences) and if it is not representative of modern knowledge.
Newton should be thrown out due to the fact he was ignorant of quantum mechanics. Genius, pure genius.
Sounds like you may have read to much Hume and his circular arguments against miricales due to his presumption of naturalism.
The reason Paul converted was because of a personal experience he had which was unverified by anyone and, as far as we can tell, a product of his imagination. His personal experience has no greater weight to it than anyone else's personal experience. For example, if you read the book "Autobiography of a Yogi", you will see many similar stories to Paul. The yogi 'meets' his resurrected guru in the flesh years after the guru had died. Do you believe his testimony also? Why or why not?
Correct, but it does have weight. And if ones detractors (the Jewish leaders of Jesus' day) don't challenge the facts of Jesus' miracles or his claims, if he has over 500 witnesses to his being risen, then the alternative hypothesis that explains those will have to hold up.
Now one can not reasonably explain the willingness of the disciples to go to their deaths in services of a story about Jesus they knew to be a lie.
These are very compelling witnesses.
Your method seeks to poison the wells to ALLhistorical witnesses, and ALL EXPERIENCE, which destroys all of history including science but if we accept your epistemology would couldn't possibly find any metaphysical cause as your method would yield a false negative.
There is no consistent methodology employed by Christians to weed out the charlatans from the truth-tellers.
Acts consistently presents a minimal facts case of Jesus' life, miracles and claims to be God, all attested to by his enemies followed by claims of a resurection easily disproved by the religious leaders of the day, by producing a body.
Acts 2,13-19, gospels. So I think you may be completely unfamiliar with the facts here.
What makes the Bible reliable but other holy or miraculous texts unreliable?
this is a long evidentiary discussion in and of it self. No need for the Gish gallop, let us focus on the method of how went undrstand historical arguments and data fairest before we change the subject.
No intellectual jiggery-pokery should be required to convince me something exists.
Hmm does light have wave and particle properties?
Does the expansion of space cause gravity?
It seems to build out an ontological account of those existing forces there is more than a little jiggery-pokery (not sure why someone defending philosophical naturalism would say this given the about of questionable jiggery-pokery involved in giving that account).
Does the moon exist? Yes, I can see it in the sky at a specific time and place. Anyone else following the same methodology w
not a student of philosophy? Ever heard of modernism? What about a false analogy? You can't even prove the reality of the past, other minds, and an external world. Science relies on those assumptions and more. I'm not anti-science but you keep on assuming the only things that exists are material which will leave you with a 2500 year-old problem of answering the question what is the first cause of material, since it can't be material and there can't be an infinite causal regress.
If you "seek" to understand the limits of scientific naturalism, in terms of knowledge, and then the circularity of Hume regarding miracles, your "seeking," might allow you an unbiased examination of the evidence. Best of luck gain that knowledge.
