Talcara said:
Actually, we should expect many, many records to be written about this amazing event by all types of people, particularly from those in the 500 that He appeared to if it happened.
And many were written. At one point a bishop in the early church reported that over 400 different gospels were circulating in his diocese. But many of these gospels were of poor quality and heretical tendencies. That is why the church established the canon of the NT--choosing only 4 out of the many gospels as authoritative.
And not only did they choose only these four; they destroyed as many copies as possible of those not chosen. That is why we have very few copies of non-canonical gospels.
So the fact remains, that you turn your back on science and believe out of
blind faith that the resurrection occurred.
Congrats, you're one step closer to becoming a creationist.
Just so you know, that was a joke and not meant to be taken literally...
Good thing it's a joke, because belief in the resurrection is not a matter of blind faith, but of rational faith based on the testimony of the apostles.
You also mentioned that "the resurrection is an example of a miracle - when the normal rules don't apply" to quote you. Is not creation as described in Genesis "an example of a miracle - when the normal rules don't apply"? Dust generally doesn't become man and plants generally just don't "come forth" from the ground without pre-existing seeds being planted. Similarly, animals and birds just don't generally appear "ex-nihlio". Stars and so on just don't "appear" in different colours and types.
In a large sense, creation is miracle. But we also know from Genesis that God did not bring creation into being in its completed form, but in a state described as "emptiness and formless". It would seem that God's essential creative act was to create the fundamental particles, forces and physical properties of energy and then to order it into discrete forms.
There is no necessity for the ongoing process of ordering the universe, to violate natural laws, since the natural laws were created for this very purpose. Natural laws describe the effect of the properties given to the material world which God did indeed produce miraculously ex nihilo.
Now to deal with the issue of scientific evidence:
Actually, science doesn't tell us anything that you assert it does. Your interpretation of the scientific evidence tells you that it can't. The evidence itself is indifferent and can't speak. All evidence must be interpreted by people for any sense and knowledge to be derived from it. These interpretations are generally based on what the person viewing/testing, etc, etc, intially believes or presupposes.
What you are forgetting is that science is a public activity. Either that, or you are assuming that all scientists initially believe or pre-suppose exactly the same thing. And that this has been true for the last two to three centuries.
This is not the case. When geological studies were first getting started on a systematic basis, many Christians were very attracted to it. A good many were clergy, such as the Rev. Asa Gray, or people with deep Christian conviction (such as Hugh Miller, the editor of the monthly magazine of the newly-established Free Church of Scotland). Some were uniformitarians, such as Dr. James Hutton, and others were catastrophists, such as Baron Georges Cuvier and his protege, Louis Agassiz.
These were the people who established that the earth was very old, old beyond any imagining. They did not come to that conclusion because they wished to dispute scripture, but because they had no other way to explain the facts they were discovering. Just how does one explain stratigraphy (discovered by Nicolas Steno over 300 years ago) in a young earth framework? Just how does one explain an angular non-conformity (first explained by James Hutton) in a young-earth framework? Just how does one explain faunal succession (discovered by William Smith in the 1830s) in a young-earth framework? Just how does one explain fossilization in a young-earth framework?
By 1835, it was well-established, mostly by Christians studying geology and paleontology, that the earth is at least hundreds of millions of years old and that the flood could not have been global in extent. And this was done without reference to evolution or to radiometric dating -- both of which were discovered independently and at later dates.
Individuals do have biases and preconceptions which can lead to mistaken interpretations. But because science is a public activity, individuals have to justify their interpretations to their peers---peers who do not share the same biases and pre-suppositions. And when we add the element of time to the equation---when we consider the differences in bias and pre-supposition between a 19th century Christian catastrophist like Cuvier and a 21st century agnostic paleontologist like Niles Eldredge--how does it come about that they agree on the age of the earth? Or at least agree that it is much, much older that 6,000 years?
There has to be something in the evidence itself that leads to this mutual conclusion by two people of such different backgrounds and theological persuasions--not to mention the hundreds of thousands of geologists who have come to the same conclusion.
You claim the evidence can be interpreted differently. Show me how Steno, and Hutton and Cuvier and Agassiz and Smith could have come to different conclusions given the same observations.
On the other hand, science not only tells us that a 6 day creation 6000 years ago could not happen, it also tell us that it DID NOT HAPPEN. A 6 day creation 6000 years ago would leave evidence that would could check. That evidence does not exist - in fact evidence exists that could not exist if the Genesis story were literally true.
It was on Intelligent Design. What they failed to note and understand is that ID proponents generally believe in evolutionary theory - they just believe that a God was neccessary in kick starting it.
Apparently you don't know the difference between Intelligent Design (as promoted by the Discovery Institute) and theistic evolution. ID does not believe in just a "kick-start" to evolution. It holds there are many instances of processes and even organs which cannot have evolved and which must have been generated through the direct intervention of an intelligent designer.
The scientific method cannot be applied to historical events. I can go into this a little deeper if you want.
This only indicates your ignorance about science. All of forensic science is applied to historical events and is used daily in medicine, in courts of law, in archeology and many other fields which creationists do not dispute. Any event of the past which leaves evidence in the present can be studied scientifically.
The radiometric dating methods are based on fallible assumptions
They are based on the results of thousands of experiments with radio-active decay which have proved the methods are reliable when used correctly. The fact that different radiometric tests corroborate each other and are also corroborated by non-radiometric measures is an indication of their accuracy. What is the probability of several independent measuring mechanisms all coming to the same incorrect date?
Think about that. There are an infinite number of ways to be wrong. But for each measuring tool, there is only one way to be right. Did you know that one way of detecting plagiarism is to analyze errors? When two or more students make different errors on exams, one can conclude they are each making their own mistakes. But when they are making the same errors, plagiarism is suspected. People who put out directories, normally include some false entries in order to detect violation of copyright!
If radiometry and other measures were unreliable, we would expect that the errors in them would lead to a variety of different contradictory dates. But instead we get consistent results across a number of different measuring tools. This points to one conclusion: the dates are accurate.
that have been shown time and time again to be flawed, particularly when radio-active carbon has been found in rocks supposedly millions of years old!
In connection with radio-active materials such as uranium, where radio-active carbon is one of the decay products. This is not C-14 from the atmosphere, which is used in C-14 dating.
It is not definitive proof,
Since science is evidence-based, it never claims to provide definitive proof. What science offers are reliable models that are consistent with observations in the natural world given the evidence available today. It makes no promises about how the picture will change as new evidence is discovered. It can say, however, what has been definitively proven false. Such as a 6,000 year old earth.
The only argument--the only one--for a young earth, that is not falsified by science, is that God created the earth a few thousand years ago, but made it look billions of years old. And that argument can stand only because there is no way to falsify it, so it is not a scientific argument. And it cannot be tied to any one time either. It is just as reasonable to say 6 years, or even 6 minutes ago as 6,000 years ago.
You assume all the things such as how much daughter element there was originally, that it is a closed system, and so on, and then you get a date based on those assumptions. You then claim that you've proven an old Earth. See the circular reasoning behind it coming through yet?
Creationists assume a lot of "assumptions" when the fact is those "assumptions" are really observations or conclusions from observations.
The fossils themselves do not "prove" evolution.
See above, re "proof". Even if you were right, the fossils are far from the only evidence for evolution. There is much other evidence and stronger evidence that supports evolution. Darwin personally held the geographical distribution of species to be a much stronger support for evolution. And today we can also measure the consistency of fossil distribution with ancient plate tectonic movement. For example, South America, like Australia, used to be populated by marsupial, not placental mammals. Today, most marsupials have disappeared from South America, and a few, like the oppossum have migrated to North America. These changes occurred when the two American continents were joined by the Panamanian land bridge.
If species were created separately, and at much the same time, there is no reason there would not be placental mammals in South America along with marsupials. Nor any reason why placental mammals should start appearing there just when a means of travel came into existence.
Of course, the huge new field of evidence for evolution is DNA analysis. This was totally unknown to the 19th and early 20th century. But now there are many lineages which can be traced via genetic information. And what is interesting is that they corroborate each other and also the relationships which were deduced from anatomical analysis. Again, independent lines of evidence converging on the same result. A twin-nested hierarchy of relationships that can only be explained by common ancestry. Nothing else provides this pattern of symmetry. Especially not intelligent design.
In fact, there is so much evidence for evolution in so many fields that Richard Dawkins claims in
The Ancestor's Tale, we have sufficient evidence to substantiate evolution without any fossils at all. As it happens, we do have fossils, and that evidence agrees with all the other evidence.
And there are literally thousands of fossil transitional forms.
[Just so you know, that was a joke with a touch or reality added into the mix.]
