MJDuncan1982
Member
gop_jeff said:OK, I'm tangenting on this.
You say that knowing something requires omniscience - knowing everything. That is false. Knowing everything requires knowing all somethings, but knowing something does not require knowing all somethings. To put it a bit more plainly: assume there are 100 facts to be known in the universe. To know one of these facts does not necessitate knowing the other 99. You can know one of them without the knowledge of the others.
Is our knowledge limited? Absolutely. Will the human race ever attain any kind of omniscience? Absoulutey not. I have no illusions about that. But you can't just say out of hand that one can never know a truth. I can know that 2+2=4 without knowing the volume of the universe or whether it's moral to masturbate.
Now, to get back to the larger point, I think it's fine for people to question history. But when the overwhelming evidence points to a certain conclusion, then those same skeptics should embrace the conclusion that the facts point to. In the case of this thread, if there are four biographies of Jesus by four different people, plus a religion based on the life teachings of this person (not to mention His death and resurrection), plus mentions of this person in other historical records (i.e. Josephus, the Jewish historian of the late 1st century), then the overwhelming facts dictate that Jesus did, in fact, exist.
Excuse me I mispoke/didn't clarify.
When I used the word "omniscience" I was referring to the quality that is usually attributed to God. It seems that an infinite being is the only thing that can truly KNOW anything. Therefore, what was implied in my statement is that if you KNOW one thing than you have the quality attributed to God because that is what is require to know.
And knowledge (100%) is in fact unattainable to man. There is nothing you can say you know because it all depends upon your senses which are fallible. Even something as simple as 2+2=4. How do you know that is true? I took a course in college on the Philosophy of Mathematics dealing with that exact question. It is much trickier than it appears. Most people say they know that equation is true based on a heap of empirical data accumulated over the years. However, anything empirical is again dependent solely on our senses.
God could be tricking our senses everytime.
For all practical purposes though 2+2 is 4. It reaches a level of certainty a hair shy of pure knowledge, say 99.99% which is good enough for me.
But when it comes to pure knowledge, that is something that is unattainable to any human being regarding anything.
And as far as evidence for Jesus:
The term overwhelming is subjective. If I have thirty documents that say 1747 was the year of American Independence and one saying it was 1776 then the overwhelming evidence is that it was 1747. For me to believe something without much question it needs to reach the threshold that 2+2=4 does (99%). Old stories from a dozen people does not meet that standard.
I do believe he existed but the evidence is far from convincing that it is something we should accept without hesitation.
As rational, fallible beings, admitting the chance of error is important. Plus, what better way to validate the claim Jesus existed than seeing this movie and rebutting every argument made?