You took me seriously, so I will take you seriously.
This is where I'm going to have to ask for evidence. What makes you so sure that the word about him changed 400 years after his death? The dating in liberal circles for when the gospels were originally written is around 60 AD for Mark, 70 AD for Matthew/Luke, and 80-90 AD for John. We have fragments of said writings dating back to the early second century, and a complete copy of the new testament from as early as third/fourth century (don't quite remember which).
Bah. There have been many cognitive psychology experiments which have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that a) humans are the least trustworthy witnesses you could possibly draw upon and their testimony is almost worthless
[1][2] and that b),from a neurological standpoint, basically every time we access a memory we rewrite it as we think of it, and c) any forces influencing us while we are accessing the memory can directly influence how the memory turns out
3. This is simply something you must accept as being true. Without any evidence beyond human testimony (which was admittedly actually written down between
40 to 50 years after the events they describe), you have very little evidence at all that your
model of reality is accurate to any precision at all.
You make an interesting point here, that I'd like to draw attention to. Yes, Jesus (as described in the New Testament) commanded incredible power, as the various miracles He performed show. However, the paradoxical part about his nature is that He was fully God and yet fully man. Nowhere better is this illustrated than with the crucifixion itself, where he dies an extraordinarily painful death, despite being fully God, and therefore fully able to escape. So, in line with your analogy above, I'd like to ask, is Jesus, who could have summoned twelve legions of angels to defend himself, less virtuous because he sacrificed his life for an entire world full of people?
No, he is not less virtuous for it. I am simply saying that it is not
evidence of virtue. It's an easy choice to make! Your painful death vs the eternal, infinite fate of every human being, past and future? It would suck to have to make the choice, but I'd wager that there would be quite a few humans on earth, some relatively large percentage, who would be willing to make that choice as well. Choose to die so that every single human who ever existed didn't have to be in infinite pain for all of eternity? (And knowing you'll get resurrected 3 days later?) No, it isn't evidence either way that he had
virtue worthy of God. He had already shown more virtue in actions like leading a sinless life, or healing the sick (even though it was easy with his magical powers). Those simple actions revealed more virtue than making this easy, obvious choice. I would do the same in his position, and I am not a particularly virtuous person.
However, it would take a truly virtuous person to go to the Cross and die, if he
couldn't just call down an Angel army at any time, if he
didn't know he was going to be resurrected 3 days later, if he
weren't a perfect, sinless human being, if the cost of not doing so
weren't the infinite fate of every human ever, but instead the cost was something like
fewer people will be inspired by you. That would take a truly, truly virtuous person.
This comes back down to the issue of evidence. You're claiming that the story changed over the years, but what exactly makes you so sure? What do you have that points to the disciples lying, of Jesus being a mere man?
The data which shows that it is almost impossible for people to accurately remember things 40 years after they happen
[1], especially if they have talked about them a lot
[2], and particularly in settings where you are trying to persuade someone of something.
You're half right, and half wrong. Yes, Jesus is quite literally perfect, and us being sinners, we can never live up to that level. However, our response is NOT to just keep on doing bad things and asking God to forgive us so we can keep on sinning. See, God's grace isn't just a "Get out of jail free" card, but also the power to change ourselves, to resist sin.
To draw a parallel, imagine yourself as a father, with a toddler who's just learning to walk. You'd pick him up whenever he falls down, offer encouragement, and help him along the way, would you not? However, would you carry him everywhere he goes, doing everything for him? No, because the child needs to learn to walk on his own.
Similarly, God is our heavenly Father, teaching us how to walk spiritually. His grace picks us up when we fall and sets us back on the right path, but we still need to do the walking ourselves. And like any child, the Christian's goal is to be like his Father, to be as close to perfect as he can possibly be. Yes, actually reaching perfection is impossible in this life... but it won't be in the next, and in the meantime we can make progress towards that goal.
When does His Grace pick us up when we fall? As far as I can see, there are no consequences for sin beyond having to confess. God knows how human psychology works. He knows that basically 100% of what we do is determined by small, immediate positive and negative feedback. Why would he not have there be an immediate minor punishment for sin, and an immediate minor reward for virtue? For if he had done so,
we would no longer have sin! That's how the human brain works.
Anyway, I've talked some about the theology and asked you for your evidence, so it's only fair that I mention the evidence behind Christianity.
If you've ever been in a court of law (or at least read up on one), you know that eyewitness testimony is a major factor in any case. There's other kinds of evidence, certainly (fingerprints, blood tests, and of course circumstantial evidence), but eyewitness testimony is still a major factor, and can determine a case on its own in the absence of any other evidence.
The same logic applies here. Due to the timeframe being 2000 years ago, we can't exactly take a video of Jesus performing a miracle and hold it up to various scientific tests, but we can take the eyewitness testimony of what people said and wrote about Him, and apply it to various historical tests.
Eyewitness testimony is
inaccurate and wrong more often than it is right. Google "reliability of eyewitness testimony" and read ANY LINK to find out how humans rewrite their memories every time they imagine them, adding new details based on suggestibility. Read about how humans fail to take into account base rates when examining eyewitness testimony. Read about how human brains are
terrible, terrible witnesses in every possible meaning of the word.
A good example of this was an experiment conducted by Kahneman, detailed in his book
Thinking, Fast and Slow
:
Kahneman said:
A cab was involved in a hit and run accident at night. Two cab companies, the Green and the Blue, operate in the city. You are given the following data:
- 85% of the cabs in the city are Green and 15% are Blue.
- a witness identified the cab as Blue. The court tested the reliability of the witness under the same circumstances that existed on the night of the accident and concluded that the witness correctly identified each one of the two colors 80% of the time and failed 20% of the time.
What is the probability that the cab involved in the accident was Blue rather than Green?
In this example, it seems like there's an 80% chance that the cab was Blue, and a 20% chance that the cab was Green, since witnesses are correct 80% of the time. But this is failing to take into account the prior probability of the cab's color. First, we start out thinking that there's an 85% chance that the cab was Green and 15% that the cab was Blue, since we don't have any better information. Later, we find the evidence of the eye witness testimony, which we are 80% confident of. This evidence doesn't
replacethe prior odds, it simply updates it. If A is the event of the delinquent being Green, and B is the event of the delinquent being Blue, and C is the event that the witness correctly identified the cab, and the notation P(A|C) means "The probability of A, given the new evidence C" whereas P(A) means "The probability of A, without counting new evidence C", then:
P(A|C)/P(B|C) = (P(C|A) * P(A))/(P(C|B) * P(B)))
= (.8 * .15)/(.2 * .8)
= 12/17
Since P(A|C) + P(B|C) must equal 1, it follows that
P(B|C) = 12 / (12 + 17) = roughly 41%.
Which means that, even given the eyewitness testimony, there's only a 41% chance that the cab was Blue, and a 59% chance that the cab was Green.
So eyewitness accounts, even ones which are
known to be 80% accurate, still don't overcome the prior probability odds of the base ratio of cabs.
If we look at Christian miracles the same way, first we must consider the base probability of miracles being explained as natural phenomenon and not an act of divine intervention, and then compare that to the eyewitness testimony.
I'll be conservative and say that the eyewitness testimony of the gospels has a 99% chance of being accurate, even though I personally doubt it's higher than 50%.
Would you be willing to say that the probability of the testimony of the gospels being accurate is 99%? No? Alright, let's say 99.9%.
How many times have people claimed miracles and then were shown to either be mistaken, a fraud, or some natural and 'scientific' explanation was found? Well, since
every single claim of a miracle that we've been able to test was found to not be a miracle, the probability of a miracle being genuine is very low (not impossible, we might just have not run enough tests).
If we've investigated 10,000 miraculous claims, and all 10,000 were shown to not be miracles, then at best, the prior odds of a miraculous claim being genuine is 1/10,001, or .009%. Since P(A|C) + P(B|C) = 1, this means that the prior odds of a miraculous claim being nonsupernatural is 99.991%
If we say that C is the event of the testimony of the gospels being accurate (99.9%), A is the event of a miracle being genuine, and B is the event of a miracle being explained without invoking supernatural causality, then:
P(A|C)/P(B|C) = (P(C|A) * P(A)) / (P(C|B) * P(B))
(Probability of true miracles, given the new evidence of the gospels) / (Probability of false miracles, given the new evidence of the gospels) = (Probability of the gospels testimony, assuming the miracles were false * probability of miracle being false) / (Probability of the gospels testimony, assuming the miracles were true * probability of a miracle being genuine)
= (.1% * 99.991%) / (99.9% * .009%)
= (9.991%) / 89.91%)
= 11%
This means that if we've investigated 10,000 miracles and found them all to be false, and we assume the testimony of the gospels is 99.9% accurate, then there's only an 11% chance that Jesus worked miracles. (Needless to say, because of the Symmetric Property, we would get the same answer if we started with the evidence of the gospels and then updated on the evidence of the testing of miraculous claims, instead of the other way around.)
That is how to properly update on evidence. If you want to argue that Jesus performed miracles, the proper way to do so would be to show evidence that more than 1/10,000 claimed miracles are true miracles, or that the testimony of the gospels is more than 99.9% accurate. But you cannot argue with the math. Admittedly I pulled these numbers out of thin air, but the point of doing a Bayesian calculation on evidence isn't that when you're done you get the
exact right answer. The point is that the process of doing the Bayesian update forces you to assign subjective weight to all of the evidence, and decide what you should actually believe based on how much subjective weight you give each piece of evidence.
I personally believe that the ratio of true miracles to false miracles is MUCH lower than 1:10,000, and that the probability of the gospels being accurate is MUCH, MUCH, MUUUUCH lower than 99.9%, and therefore when I do a Bayesian update I get a probability MUCH LOWER than 11% that Jesus worked true miracles. So if you want to actually convince me of Jesus's divinity, you'll have to convince me that true miracles happen MUCH more often than 1/10,001, or that the accuracy of the gospels is MUCH HIGHER than 99.9%.
And keep in mind that there is more evidence to consider. For instance, a hypothesis which cannot accurately describe the
exact mechanism by which supernatural intervention happens is worth less than a theory which
does explain the exact mechanism by which a supposed miracle happens. Why? Because such a theory can be used to make predictions about how reality will work, and if such predictions are then shown to be wrong, then the theory is falsified. Whereas a theory which
anticipates more possible outcomes is less falsifiable, since it could explain more possible outcomes. The more narrow your predictions, the better your theory,
until one of your predictions is wrong.
Your hypothesis is that events in the universe happen because of the will of God. What sort of predictions can you make with that? If you win the lottery, then it means that the will of God was for you to win the lottery. If you lose the lottery, it means that the will of God was for you to lose the lottery. Your theory explains each outcome equally well: it doesn't
focus your
anticipation onto a single outcome, which means that you cannot use any particular outcome as being evidence for or against the theory. On the other hand, my theory, which says that events in the universe happen because of the known natural laws of physics,
doesn't explain each outcome equally well. It predicts that certain events will happen with a larger probability than other events; it
focuses my
subjective anticipation onto one particular outcome. This means that I can use it to make predictions, and if my predictions are shown to be wrong, this is
evidence against the theory, whereas if my predictions are shown to be right, this is
evidence supporting the theory.
For a theory to make a prediction, it must focus its prediction-mass onto a certain set of outcomes. If you can equally well explain
any outcome, your theory has
no predictive power. The Laws of Probability state that if you have a
strong anticipation of seeing
weak evidence for your theory, then you must equally have a
weak anticipation of seeing
strong evidence against your theory. But a theory which
could not have predicted in advance a specific outcome with a larger anticipation than the anticipation of
any other outcome, cannot count the observation of that specific outcome as evidence that supports the theory
over a theory which focused
more of its anticipation on that particular outcome.
My theory, that of natural law, says that an apple will fall to the ground every single time you drop it. Just as every time I drop an apple, I subjectively have a
strong anticipation of seeing
weak evidence supporting my theory (the apple drops to the ground), I must also subjectively have a
weak anticipation of seeing
strong evidence rejecting my theory (the apple flies up into the sky).
Your theory of God's Will cannot make such specific predictions. Does the apple fall to the ground? God willed it to do so. Does the apple fall to the sky? God willed it to do so. You surely anticipate the outcome of 'falling to the ground' with a larger probability than 'flying to the sky', but your theory could still
explain the outcome of 'flying to the sky'. This means that it is hard to make testable predictions of outcomes using your theory. One prediction your theory makes is that Jesus will one day return to Earth in the Second Coming. Your theory spreads your anticipation of this event happening over many, many days. It cannot predict which day it will happen, and so you give each day a very small probability, with the sum of the probability of all days adding up to 1. Each day that goes by without the event of the second coming is
very weak evidence against the theory.
My theory, on the other hand, predicts that the second coming will
never happen, and therefore each day which goes by without the event of the second coming is
very weak evidence supporting my theory.
There is a lot of evidence out there, and there are a lot of ways in which humans interpret evidence, but there is only one way to actually properly interpret evidence: Bayesian probability theory. If one theory assigns a certain outcome 99% chance of happening, and another theory assigns a certain outcome 98% chance of happening, and the outcome happens, then that is
weak evidence for the first theory over the second theory. This is just how the universe workse. Absence of evidence
is evidence of absence, just very weak evidence.
But all of that weak evidence all points in the same direction, and when you add it all together, it starts looking pretty strong.
The first thing I'd like to ask of you here is to admit the supernatural as a possibility. Now, of course a healthy skepticism is important, so I should explain what I mean by that. In short, if people are claiming a miracle or such, then I wouldn't believe them right away. Instead, I'd go through every possible natural explanation to see if any of them fit, or at least seemed plausible. If every last natural explanation ends up being completely ridiculous, only then do I consider their claims of it being a true miracle.
So for instance, if some guy named Joe claimed to have healed a paralytic merely by looking at them, then I'd check the person's medical records to verify he was indeed paralyzed. Then I'd of course check the former paralytic himself, verifying that he could walk and run like a normal person when Joe was nowhere near. In addition, I'd ask Joe to repeat the miracle in a controlled environment, checking to see if he'd developed some special medicine or other therapy explainable by science. However, if all of these checks came up empty... if I could tie him to a chair in a remote laboratory, bring in someone that he'd never seen before and that I personally knew was paralyzed, and said person immediately started dancing around as soon as he looked at him, THEN and only then would I conclude he was telling the truth and it was a legitimate miracle.
The important thing is for the model of the universe you have to be able to describe how phenomenon actually occurs. A technical description is important. I agree that the above experiment would be strong evidence for Joe having some sort of power to heal paralytics, but I cannot conceive of the
mechanism by which he can do so. Does he shoot out little nanites from his eyes which enter the body and repair the damage? Do his eyes perhaps reflect light in a different way, causing the photons to transform into a before-unseen paralytic-healing-particle? If so, what is the
exact mechanism which allows this particle to heal paralytics?
The problem with miracles is that you can't play connect-the-dots from each mechanic to next mechanic, explaining the sequence of causality, starting with the circumstances of reality and ending with the paralytic being healed. At some point, something either has to happen without being physically caused to happen, or else it is perfectly explainable by science (since we can explain all of the causal steps as to how it happens) and it isn't a miracle.
Now, with this in mind, the chance of an event happening without cause is so low that it is almost certainly more likely that a vast conspiracy faked the medical records. Why? Because
we have never witnessed an uncaused event in this history of science. Every supernatural claim ended up either being perfectly natural, or a fraud. From a Bayesian perspective, this is incredible evidence for the nonexistence of uncaused events (supernaturalism). However, I play fair with the evidence. As I have an
extremely strong anticipation of seeing additional
extremely weak evidence favoring reductionistic materialism, I also have an
extremely weak anticipation of seeing
extremely strong evidence against materialism, i.e. witnessing an uncaused event. And if I see such evidence, then I will update my model of the universe to include events which could happen without cause (although, I admit, I cannot quite conceive of how such a universe would work).
So, logic tells us that there are five possibilities regarding the disciples and their claims about Jesus.
1. They were telling the truth. (aka: Christianity is true)
2. They were lying.
3. They were honestly mistaken.
4. They were insane.
5. Their claims were later misinterpreted.
I'll go through these in reverse order. The possibility of the disciples claims being misinterpreted is next to zero, simply because by historical standards, the New Testament is the most reliable ancient text on the planet. A 400 year gap is typical when it comes to the time between ancient events and the first documents about them, but the gospels are a mere 30-60 years after Jesus's death (and possibly less.) Additionally, the sheer number of ancient copies we have of the Bible is also incredible. We have literally thousands of copies of the new testament from the first millenium, many of which date within 500 years of Jesus's death (apologies for being a bit vague on hard figures, but I'm writing this from memory.) The next best ancient text in this regard is Homer's Illiad, which was effectively the greek Bible... and clocks in at a mere 500 copies, many of which are just fragments.
...I regret to inform you that with the ridiculous amounts of confirmation bias, positive bias, brutal ignorance of how the human mind works, and of every other way in which humans decide what to believe based not on evidence but on desire, in this paragraph, I have decided that this debate isn't worth my time. If you want to learn the above things, I suggest you read E T Jaynes' "Heuristics and Biases", Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow", and Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" and "The Sequences", the latter two of which are available on the internet at
http://www.hpmor.com and
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences respectively.
---
Getting back on track, my original question was meant to be: Regardless of what actually happened, do Christians believe that their story of Christs's life reveals a more virtuous Christ, than does the picture I've painted? And if so, what does 'virtue' mean to them?
