Rosenthal accepts the skeptic’s framing too quickly:
Trust = evidence calibrated by outcomes.
Faith = commitment regardless of outcome.
That definition is too thin.
Biblical faith is not “belief regardless of outcome.” It is trust grounded in the character of the one trusted.
That is different.
A child trusts a good father not because the child can falsify every future action, but because the father has shown himself faithful. That trust is not irrational. It is relational.
I agree that beliefs should not be protected from evidence. But I think the trust/faith distinction here is too narrow.
Faith is not “commitment regardless of outcome.” That is closer to stubbornness.
Biblical faith is trust in a person whose character has proven reliable.
That means faith is not opposed to evidence. It is built from remembered faithfulness, tested relationship, and lived encounter. Abraham trusts because God has called. Israel trusts because God has delivered. The disciples trust because they have seen, followed, failed, been restored, and encountered Christ.
So the issue is not faith versus trust.
The issue is what kind of trust we are talking about.
Scientific trust is often calibrated by repeatable outcomes. Personal trust is calibrated by character across time. Covenant trust is deeper still: it is confidence in the faithfulness of God, even when the immediate outcome is not what we expected.
That does not make faith evidence-proof. It means the evidence is not merely archaeological, textual, or empirical. It is also relational, moral, historical, and existential.
So I would not say Christianity is true because the Bible is falsifiable in the same way a lab hypothesis is falsifiable. I would say Christianity invites trust because its witness coheres across text, history, experience, conscience, and the person of Christ.
Faith is not belief without evidence.
Faith is trust that survives because the object of trust has proven faithful.
As the author thanks Shannon, I don’t understand your dismissal. Shannon added to AC’s position. You have nothing to “use” against anyone with it. Why is your intent such?
I don't think the author was claiming trust and faith were different, but used the "enemy's definition" to prove their argument false. It is a rhetorical move in conversation and literature.
Shannon, thank you, this is a careful objection and it deserves a careful answer. It contains three errors, and naming them plainly is the clearest way I can honour the care you took.
The first concerns what was being defined. My definition of faith is universal: it describes the structure of any commitment held regardless of outcome, wherever that structure appears, in religion, in politics, in a man's view of himself. You have answered it with a definition of biblical faith in particular, relational trust grounded in the proven character of the one trusted, and you have treated the particular as though it overturned the general. It does not. A universal claim is not refuted by producing one member of the category and declaring it richer than the category allows. Biblical faith, as you describe it, sits squarely inside my definition. To answer a definition of faith as such with a definition of one faith in particular is to move the question to the side rather than to meet it.
The second, and the graver one, concerns the structure you call covenant trust. You arrange trust in tiers, the scientific, the personal, and above them the covenant, trust in the faithfulness of God that survives even when the immediate outcome disappoints, and you place biblical faith upon that highest rung as a superior kind. But that structure is not superior, nor is it special. It is the ordinary structure of all human reliance, and it is everywhere, and a great deal of the time it is misplaced. The devout follower trusts that his religious leaders are honest and caring, grounded in their proven character, and congregations have been betrayed by such leaders without number. The parent trusts the child's teacher to do no harm, and sometimes the teacher harms. The citizen trusts the police to do the work rightly, and sometimes they do not. Each of these is trust grounded in proven character and held through uncertainty, which is to say each is exactly your covenant trust, and each is, often enough, catastrophically wrong...
Disclaimer - I’m not a voice for Christian matters, and it’s been a while since I’ve actually stepped foot in a church but I’ll break it down so you don’t misunderstand me.
You say your definition is universal. But universal according to whom? The biblical concept of faith was never defined as commitment regardless of outcome. It was defined as trust, fidelity, and faithfulness within a relationship. Before treating biblical faith as a special case of your universal category, you would first need to show that your category captures what Scripture means by faith better than Scripture’s own usage does. You don’t
Your response is sophisticated, but it does not actually address the Christian claim. It subtly changes the meaning of “faith” midway through the argument.
You treat the structure of trust and the ground of trust as if they are the same thing.
They are not.
A congregation trusting an abusive pastor and Abraham trusting God may share a formal structure: trust extended under uncertainty. But Christianity has never claimed that the form of trust guarantees its truth.
The entire biblical question is:
Who is being trusted?
The object matters.
Your argument says:
Since false trust and true trust can have the same structure, structure cannot distinguish them.
That’s true.
But Christianity never says structure distinguishes them. Christianity says the character of God distinguishes them. Your argument is a bit like saying:
A fake dollar and a genuine dollar share the same shape. Therefore shape cannot determine authenticity.
Correct.
But nobody thought shape determined authenticity. Authenticity depends on origin. Likewise, biblical faith is not:
Trust because trust itself is virtuous.
Biblical faith is:
Trust because God is faithful.
Those are completely different claims.
Your deeper mistake appears here:
“Only outcome distinguishes the trust that was kept from the trust that was broken.”
That is actually not how Christianity understands faithfulness.
Consider Job.
From an outcome perspective:
* children dead,
* wealth gone,
* health destroyed.
The outcomes are terrible. Yet the biblical narrative explicitly presents Job’s trust as justified.
Why?
Because the standard is not immediate outcome. It is fidelity to a reality believed to be deeper than immediate circumstance. Likewise:
* Abraham receives promises before fulfillment.
* Israel wanders forty years.
* The disciples watch Christ crucified.
If outcome alone were the criterion, each moment would count as evidence against trust.
Christian faith has always operated on a different level:
not “Did this particular event go the way I wanted?”
but “Has God proven faithful across the whole story?”
That is a radically different epistemology than the one you, Mr critic is using.
The most important error, though, is this sentence:
“Whether a given trust was warranted is a separate question the structure cannot answer, and it can be answered by one thing only, which is outcome.”
That is simply false.
We evaluate trustworthiness all the time by things other than outcomes:
* character,
* integrity,
* motives,
* consistency,
* testimony,
* history,
* sacrifice.
Imagine a friend who keeps a promise but betrays everyone around him.
Good outcome.
Bad character.
Or a friend who fails because circumstances overwhelm him while remaining honest and faithful.
Bad outcome.
Good character.
Humans distinguish those cases immediately.
Christianity does too.
The biblical claim is not:
God is trustworthy because believers got the outcomes they wanted.
The biblical claim is:
God is trustworthy because God’s character is faithful.
The resurrection itself is presented as the vindication of that claim, not its definition.
...That is the flaw at the centre. You have described a form and smuggled a verdict into it. Trust grounded in proven character, surviving when the outcome disappoints, describes the congregation that trusted the predator as faithfully as it describes Abraham. The form is identical in the trust that is honoured and the trust that is betrayed. Therefore the form cannot be the thing that makes the trust well placed, because the very same form is present when it is most badly placed. Whether a given trust was warranted is a separate question the structure cannot answer, and it can be answered by one thing only, which is outcome, the measure you dismissed as too thin.
And this is the third error, which closes the matter. To distinguish Abraham's trust as the trustworthy one, whilst the identically structured trust of every other devotion is reckoned misplaced, you must reach past the shared form to something that distinguishes them. The structure will not do it, for the structure is common to all. Only outcome distinguishes the trust that was kept from the trust that was broken. So even to name the covenant instance as the reliable one, you have had to borrow the very definition of trust you called too thin, and to certify your highest rung by the measure you placed on the lowest.
So the distinction was never faith the word against trust the word, and I never rested it there. It was a distinction of rule: does the commitment revise upon outcome, or hold regardless of it? Your tiers do not erase that line; they conceal it, until one asks why one trust was honoured and another betrayed, whereupon outcome returns as the only answer. Earned trust itself, once matured, can persist through a thing later found untrue, held across the discovery rather than dissolved by it, which is the faith structure surfacing inside the trust you offered as its alternative. The definition stands, and stands the stronger for having been widened against it and held.
The Christian claim is not that faith survives because outcomes always confirm it. It is that faith survives because the character of God is believed to remain faithful even when immediate outcomes are confusing, painful, or apparently contradictory.
That gets to the actual category error in your reply. You successfully criticized a claim I wasn’t making. The Christian position is not that trust itself is self-validating; it’s that faith is trust grounded in a particular understanding of God’s character.
Shannon, I think we have arrived at the end, because your last two sentences have given me my whole answer, and they have given it in your words rather than mine.
You write that faith survives because the character of God is believed to remain faithful even when immediate outcomes are confusing, painful, or apparently contradictory. Read that again slowly. Belief held to remain faithful when the outcome contradicts it is commitment regardless of outcome. That is the definition you called too thin, stated here in full and offered to me as its refutation. You have not corrected my account of faith. You have restated it and assigned it to Christianity, as though naming the owner changed the thing owned.
One word in your sentence carries the entire matter, and it is believed. Trust has no need of that word, because trust reads the outcome and adjusts to it. Faith requires it, because faith holds the belief across the outcome that tells against it. The word marks the very gap I have been pointing to all along, the distance between what the result shows and what the believer continues to hold. You have named that gap and called it the character of God.
On the category error with which you charge me, I grant at once that I never argued trust is self-validating, and neither of us needs to defend a claim neither of us made. But the understanding of God's character you offer in its stead is not a third thing standing beside outcome and structure. It is a belief held about the object, and a belief can answer to only one of two masters: the outcome that revises it, which is trust, or the commitment that survives it, which is faith. Your own clause, even when outcomes are contradictory, has already placed it with the second. You have put your understanding of God's character in the faith bin with your own hand, and then objected that I found it there.
I will leave it where you have left it, with thanks. You have argued in good faith throughout, and the disagreement between us is now clear rather than confused, which is the most two honest people can ask of an exchange. The definition holds, not because I defend it, but because every attempt to replace it has had to use it.
It’s not my job to correct what you think faith is. I never approached you or engaged with you about anything. My original response was about Rosenthal accepting your framing too soon and I have zero doubt that he did now.
You actually didn’t read or understand what I presented. You’re too busy, in my opinion, listening to respond instead of trying to understand what I’m saying but it’s not surprising.
I don’t even think you actually know what you’re responding with.
“Trust has no need of the word believe, because trust reads the outcome and adjusts to it.”
That’s simply not how trust works.
Trust necessarily contains belief.
If I trust a surgeon, I believe the surgeon is competent.
If I trust my wife, I believe she is faithful.
If I trust a friend, I believe he is honest.
Remove the belief and trust disappears.
Trust is not beliefless. Trust is belief embodied in relationship.
The real question is what is being believed.
You keep acting as though the Christian is believing a proposition despite outcomes.
But the Christian claim is different.
The Christian believes:
God is faithful.
That belief then grounds trust.
And importantly, that belief is not the same thing as believing every event will immediately look good to me.
Those are completely different beliefs.
You probably won’t even notice the hidden assumption in your sentence?:
“Trust reads the outcome and adjusts to it.”
Fine.
But which outcome?
Job’s friends read the outcome.
Their conclusion:
Job suffers therefore God has abandoned him.
Wrong.
The disciples read the outcome of the crucifixion.
Their conclusion:
Jesus failed.
Wrong.
The crowd read the outcome of Calvary.
Their conclusion:
The Messiah was defeated.
Wrong.
Christianity is full of examples where reading the immediate outcome produces the wrong interpretation.
So Christians don’t distrust outcomes.
They distrust their own ability to perfectly interpret outcomes.
That’s a huge difference.
The deeper issue that you don’t seem to understand is that trust always contains an act of belief because we never possess complete information.
If trust only existed after certainty, trust would never be necessary.
Imagine telling a spouse:
“I don’t believe you’re faithful. I just trust you.”
The sentence is nonsense.
Trust presupposes belief.
Likewise:
“I don’t believe this bridge will hold. I just trust it.”
Also nonsense.
Trust is a form of belief expressed in action.
The biblical definition is even stronger.
The Greek word pistis is often translated as faith, but it also carries the sense of:
faithfulness
loyalty
fidelity
trustworthiness
In the ancient world it was often used in covenantal and relational contexts.
It is not merely:
holding an idea in your head.
It is:
entrusting yourself to someone.
That’s why Christians speak of believing in Christ, not merely believing that Christ exists.
Even demons believe that God exists.
The distinction is trust, allegiance, and fidelity.
Shannon, I think this ends here, and it ends on a single point that leaves no room to move.
You have given the matter two names, and the two names are right. There is believing in and there is believing that. Keep them separate for a moment and look at what each one is.
Believing-in is holding to someone or something when the outcome has turned against it. That is faith. It is the word at the centre of my whole argument, and you have named it precisely.
Believing-that is holding something true on the evidence, and letting go when the evidence withdraws. That is trust. Not a thing trust contains, but trust itself, wearing the word belief for the occasion.
So your two names are my two names. Believing-in is faith. Believing-that is trust under a different label. You have not found a third thing that dissolves the distinction. You have restated the distinction in your own vocabulary and presented the restatement as a refutation of it.
This is why your strongest line proves nothing. You said, remove the belief and trust disappears. Of course it does. The belief you are removing is believing that, and believing that is trust. You have taken trust away from itself and shown me that nothing is left. A thing always vanishes when you subtract it from itself. That is not a discovery about trust. It is the shape of a circle.
And your own example seals it, because you drew the line yourself and then crossed it. You said the faithful believe in Christ, whilst even the demons believe that God exists. There it is, in your own hand. The demons have believing that, the bare reading of a fact, and it saves them nothing. The faithful have the believing in kind, the commitment that holds regardless of the fact. You told me the two are different in kind, which is the whole of what I have said, and then you spent the rest of the reply insisting they are one.
There is no version of this where believing-in and believing-that are the same act. One bends to the evidence and one does not. That single difference is the entire distinction, and it does not depend on what either of us calls the two sides. Name them as you like. You may not place them in one box and call the difference between them gone, because the difference is not in the names. It is in whether the belief moves when the outcome turns.
That is the entire matter, and it was never really about the word. It was about whether a belief lets the outcome move it. The belief you are defending, by your own account, does not. You may call that whatever you wish. I have only shown that it is not the same act as the belief that does.
This was great. I’m not Christian but find the bible to be fairly compelling. However, I was never able to believe in a virgin birth nor rising from the dead. Most of the bible I can accept but not those two things. But that has never really lessened my appreciation for Jesus’ message. If his body were to be discovered I would still appreciate the book and its overall messages.
I don’t buy into the whole ‘virgin’ thing either & I’m an ardent Christian with a degree in theology. Maybe a poor translation (I think it should be ‘maiden’ or something) cos someone’s obsessed with Mary not having shagged Joseph. I think there’s at least an argument & literary support for the resurrection, but it’s not a big deal for me because I very much DO believe in the Incarnation. That’s the biggie for humanity imho. And it makes such sense it takes my breath away. Can I prove it? Not a shit show in hell. But it’s hard for it to not be true & ultimately almost everything requires a certain level of faith and that’s where I hang my hat. For what it’s worth. Take care.
Any chance you could share your thoughts on the argument for the resurrection? I'd love to hear about the Incarnation too. I'm a curious cat Just Boris.
Check out "The Case for Christ." It's an easy read and covers the history-based arguments for the resurrection as well as some of the archeological arguments listed here. It glosses over many interesting details for the sake of brevity, and it doesn't cover genuine problems with secondary concepts like demonology, but it's a great introduction.
People talk about this a lot. I’m not really sure why because it’s in the text. That’s why people believe it. I know a lot of people go into the Old Testament and the prophecies and all of that regarding the virgin. Josh McDowell makes the point that the virginity or lack thereof would not cancel out Christ as both fully God and fully man, but both Mary and Joseph’s accounts grapple with this reality. Mary asks the angel how this can be when she hasn’t known a man? The angel says nothing is impossible with God, and goes on to explain how the Holy Spirit will come upon her and she will be with child.
Joseph is also planning to put Mary away quietly until the angel tells him in a dream that her child is conceived by the Holy Spirit, and He will save people from their sins.
The virginity is part of both of their accounts—not vital—according to Josh McDowell , but most people believe it because it’s the account of the two people who would know.
I think some people don’t believe that Mary was a virgin after Jesus was born. This seems to be a matter of Christian tradition. Some people believe Jesus‘s brothers were actually her stepchildren and others believe Jesus was the oldest, and the brothers came after him. Mary is honored because she is the mother of Christ and he fulfills the Commandment to honor your father and mother. Either way, she is still the mother of Christ.
Beautifully expressed, thanks AC. Considering these kinds of facts, no-one can say that the Bible doesn't deserve our serious attention - as an historical record, at least. Where people go from there is, of course, up to them, but at least they can't say it's all nonsense and fairy stories.
The attribution is noted and appreciated. The standard was offered in good faith and you have applied it in good faith. That is the only kind of exchange worth having.
The concessions are real and they matter. Clearing the junk before making the case is the Aquinas method and it is the right one. The transmission argument stands as stated: decentralised dispersal across rival communities who could not coordinate alterations is exactly the structural guarantee that produces verifiable uniformity. The contrast with the Uthmanic process holds and I have said so from the beginning. The archaeological density argument is also real: the pattern of vindication across Hittites, David, Pilate, and the Pool of Siloam is genuine and directional. The checks kept cashing. None of that is disputed here.
But the vindication record runs in one direction only on the peripheral historical claims. The central miraculous events on which the entire theological structure depends tell a different story.
The Exodus is the foundational act of the Hebrew covenant. Without it there is no law, no covenant, no subsequent theological architecture. The Egyptian record contains no trace of an Israelite slave population at the scale the text describes. No plague sequence. No mass departure. The Sinai contains no archaeological footprint of a forty-year migration of hundreds of thousands of people: no campsites at the named locations, no refuse deposits, no graves in the quantities a population of that size would leave across four decades. These are not arguments from silence in the ordinary sense. They are positive findings from a region and a period that has been extensively excavated, in which the expected traces of such a migration are simply absent...
Before i write the next response to you my delightfully skeptical friend. I'm curious, what would you accept as evidence? Bearing in mind what flimsy evidence most historians accept as fact for other historical events. You want the evidence from Joseph in Egypt to Cannon?
Greetings, my dear friend. Wishing you to be well.
The same standard I applied to the Hittites, to Pilate, to Siloam, to David. Documentary attestation, archaeological correlation, independent corroboration at the confidence level the claim requires. I accepted all of them. The bar is not hostility dressed as method.
On Joseph: the question is correctly formed and I will take it seriously. If the Egyptian record produces a dateable figure matching the narrative role, that counts in favour. If it forecloses the possibility at the period required, that counts against. Either finding is acceptable. The tradition survives either result, because Joseph is scaffolding. He is not load-bearing in the way the Exodus is, and the Exodus is not load-bearing in the way the resurrection is. The tradition has a hierarchy of claims, and the evidential pressure distributes accordingly.
On flimsy evidence: historians do not accept flimsy evidence. They accept evidence at the confidence level the record warrants, and they calibrate the claim to match. When the record is fragmentary, the claim is held tentatively. When the record is silent, absence is registered as absence, not as confirmation. When the record actively contradicts what the text requires, that is a different category entirely. Jericho is in the third category. The text requires a walled, occupied city at a datable period. Tell es-Sultan shows neither at that period. The destruction layer that exists predates the requirement by centuries. That is not historians accepting flimsy evidence for an ancient event. That is the record contradicting a specific claim at the specific point where the claim is checkable.
The standard has not moved. It was the same standard that vindicated the Hittites. It is the same standard that found Jericho wanting. Apply it to Joseph with equal precision and I will follow wherever the record leads.
Have you heard of David Rohl or the documentary movie series “Patterns of Evidence” with Tim Mahoney? The pattern is real. The dating is controversial.
Brandon, I have not watched the series, but I have read about Rohl's chronology and Mahoney's films, and about why the claims are contested, and that reading is enough to say where the difficulty lies. The recommendation is a fair one to make, so let me take it seriously rather than dismiss it.
Your two sentences are the whole matter, and you have stated them with more precision than you may intend: the pattern is real, the dating is controversial. Hold those together, because they cannot be separated, and the second governs the first. Rohl's correspondences between the Egyptian record and the biblical figures do not sit in the evidence independently of his chronology; they are produced by it. The New Chronology lowers the Egyptian dates by as much as three centuries, and it is precisely that lowering that slides the figures into alignment. Remove the redating and the pattern dissolves; keep the redating and you have assumed the thing the pattern was meant to show. This is the plain shape of an ad hoc adjustment: the chronology is not derived independently and then found to agree with the narrative, it is moved until it agrees, and the agreement is then presented as though it had been discovered. The correspondence is not corroboration of the revision. It is the revision, read forward.
This is why the dating cannot be set to one side as a separate quarrel amongst specialists whilst the pattern stands on its own. The pattern has no existence apart from the dating. A correlation manufactured by adjusting the calendar until the names meet is not independent attestation; it is the conclusion wearing the costume of evidence. Academic Egyptology has not rejected Rohl out of hostility, and I do not raise the rejection as an argument from authority. I raise it because the mainstream chronology is anchored to fixed points that the revision must unfix to do its work, and the cost of unfixing them is paid elsewhere in the record. Name the casualties plainly. To slide the figures into place Rohl must abandon the standard identification of the biblical Shishak with Shoshenq the First, whose campaign is dated near 925 before Christ in step with the Hebrew kings, and substitute Ramesses the Second, moved forward some three centuries. He must then rewrite the synchronism between Egypt and Assyria carried in the Amarna letters, inventing a second Ashur-uballit for whom the record gives no independent warrant, which in turn collides with the Assyrian eponym lists that are themselves pinned by the solar eclipse of 763 before Christ. He must also reread the Sothic date in the Ebers Papyrus, the rising of Sirius in the ninth year of Amenhotep the First, on which a fixed point of the conventional calendar rests. Each move is required by the redating, and each is paid for in a synchronism that previously reconciled and now does not. The alignment is not had for free; it is purchased by unsettling every synchronism to which the date was formerly tied.
This is the same standard I set in the comment you are answering, and it applies here with equal force and in both directions: documentary attestation, archaeological correlation, independent corroboration at the confidence level the claim requires. Rohl and Mahoney do not fail that standard because the verdict was decided in advance against them. They fail it because the corroboration is not independent. The chronology was moved to produce the match, and a match produced by moving the chronology corroborates nothing but the willingness to move it.
I hold this symmetrically, and that is the part worth saying plainly. If the Egyptian record one day yields a dateable figure in the narrative role, on the conventional chronology and without the calendar being bent to receive him, that counts in favour, and I would say so. The discipline is not a wall against the conclusion. It is a refusal to accept a conclusion that has been built into its own premises. And notice what the redating does not touch. It runs backward from a fixed anchor in the seventh century before Christ and leaves everything after it untouched, which is why the first-century events sit entirely beyond its reach. Pilate, the prefecture confirmed by the Caesarea inscription, the synchronism with the reign of Tiberius, the broad dating of the crucifixion, none of these requires a calendar to be moved; they are attested on the chronology as it stands. That is the whole asymmetry in one image. The Christian claim at its load-bearing point already has the corroboration at the period the claim requires, and needs no surgery to obtain it; the Exodus case obtains its corroboration only by the surgery. The thing Rohl must manufacture for the one is the thing the other possesses for free. The pattern is real, you are right; but a pattern is only evidence when something outside it holds it in place, and here the only thing holding it in place is the dating you have already granted is in dispute.
Jericho is more direct. The text requires a walled, inhabited city destroyed by Joshua at a datable point in the Israelite entry into Canaan. The excavations at Tell es-Sultan show that Jericho was not occupied, and had no walls to collapse, at the period the text requires. The destruction layer that exists dates to centuries before the relevant period. The check did not cash.
You acknowledged this yourself: no clear archaeological footprint for the Exodus, unresolved tension on Jericho. You named it honestly and then moved past it. But the Exodus and the conquest are not peripheral historical details in the category of Hittites or Pilate. They are the load-bearing events. Hittites existing confirms that the text knows its world. The Exodus not leaving a trace in that world is a different order of problem.
On the Paul falsifiability argument: Paul did name the conditions of his own disconfirmation. That is a genuine and serious move. But the body argument assumes a located, identified individual whose burial site could in principle be known. That assumption is not established.
No Roman census record confirms a birth in Bethlehem or anywhere else. No civic record, no administrative document, no contemporary documentary trace places Jesus of Nazareth as a dateable resident of a dateable location during his lifetime. The two birth narratives in Matthew and Luke contradict each other on the genealogy, the mechanism of arrival in Bethlehem, and the subsequent movements of the family. They agree on Bethlehem only, and Bethlehem was the theologically required location for a Davidic messiah, which gave both authors a strong motive to place the birth there regardless of historical fact. Luke’s census under Quirinius, which the narrative requires, is historically incompatible with Herod’s reign, which the narrative also requires. Quirinius governed Syria from approximately 6 CE. Herod died in 4 BCE. Both cannot be true simultaneously...
Paul’s own language in 1 Corinthians 15 does not settle this. He lists appearances but describes no empty tomb. The empty tomb tradition enters the record with Mark, written approximately four decades after the crucifixion. The Greek word Paul uses for the appearances, ophthe, is the same word used elsewhere in the New Testament for visionary encounters. His account is consistent with a spiritual or visionary experience as well as a physical one.
And the empty tomb itself is not evidence that a man rose. It is evidence that a tomb was found without a body in it, which is consistent with a body moved, a body taken, a body laid elsewhere, or a grave misremembered. An absence of remains is precisely an absence of remains. To read it as a presence, to take the missing body as proof of a living one, is to do with the tomb exactly what the hiddenness doctrine does with God: to convert a thing not found into a thing confirmed. Absence read as presence, in both directions.
On the selection question, which the essay does not address: the dispersal argument secures the transmission of the books that were chosen. It does not address the mechanism by which those books were chosen over the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Epistle of Barnabas. The dispersal argument applies after the selection was made. It does not reach the question of how the selection was made, by what criteria, and whether those criteria were applied evidentially or institutionally.
The transmission is verifiable. The selection was not.
A book that keeps making falsifiable bets and keeps winning them has earned the right to be examined on the one bet still open. Agreed. The examination is ongoing. The one bet still open is the one no shovel will settle. The conditions Paul named for settling it expired with the first century. And the figure whose body the bet required was never documented well enough, in his own lifetime, to have made the tomb findable in the first place.
One further exhibit the falsifiability standard demands, offered not as an argument of equivalence but as a demonstration of pattern.
Joseph Smith claimed in 1823 to receive golden tablets from the angel Moroni in upstate New York. Eleven witnesses signed affidavits attesting to their existence. The tablets were returned to Moroni and have never been examined by an independent party. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now numbers some seventeen million members. The Book of Mormon is not an ancient document complicated by two millennia of attrition. It was produced in 1830 in a literate society with courts, newspapers, and administrative records. The archaeological record of pre-Columbian America contains no trace of the civilisations it describes. The anachronisms are extensive and datable: horses, steel, wheat, and barley appear in the text for periods in which none of these existed in the Americas.
This is not a claim that Christianity and Mormonism are equivalent in content, history, or theological weight. It is a demonstration of how religious formations begin: a founding figure, a small group of committed witnesses, a miraculous event whose physical evidence is unavailable, and a movement that survives and grows. This pattern is as old as human history. It is the ordinary structural signature of sectarian origin, not the exclusive property of any tradition. It has repeated across every culture and every century for which we have records.
The question the falsifiability standard requires is not whether the pattern exists in both cases, which it plainly does, but what principle distinguishes the witnesses to the golden tablets from the witnesses to the risen Jesus. That principle needs to be stated explicitly. Without it, the standard is being applied to the texts one already doubts and withheld from the texts one already accepts.
Before the shroud, observe what the request itself concedes. "Without just pointing to the 1988 carbon dating" attempts to disqualify the single strongest item of evidence by instruction rather than by refutation. That is not a debating constraint; it is an admission. One does not request that the dispositive evidence be excluded unless one already suspects its destination. The equivalent manoeuvre would be "explain the age of the earth without reference to radiometric dating." The evidence you wish excluded is precisely the evidence that decides the matter, and three independent laboratories, at Oxford, Zurich, and Arizona, returned a concordant result of roughly 1260 to 1390, which coincides with the cloth's first documented appearance in France in the 1350s. I will not exclude it, because honesty does not permit the exclusion of the very thing that answers the question.
Now the question "how was the image formed," which contains the actual error. You are reasoning that an unresolved mechanism is itself evidence for a supernatural one. It is not. "We cannot at present specify the technique" does not entail "therefore no technique existed." That is the argument from ignorance, and it is the same structure the original exhibit was constructed to expose: a gap in current explanation converted into positive proof of a preferred conclusion. A missing answer is a missing answer. It is not a different answer in disguise. The burthen does not invert because a sceptic lacks a complete reconstruction, any more than an unsolved cold case demonstrates that the murderer was a ghost. And the gap is narrower than you suggest. A fourteenth-century report from Bishop Pierre d'Arcis to the Avignon papacy recorded that a local artist had confessed to the cloth's manufacture. Contact and bas-relief methods available to medieval hands have reproduced the principal features. "Not fully settled in every detail" is a great distance from "miraculous," and only the former is true...
...There is also the matter of proportion, which the argument never confronts. You are asking me to credit a being capable of authoring physical law, whose chosen demonstration is then a faint impression on linen, sited in fourteenth-century France, of a quality medieval hands could approximate, and surviving in precisely the ambiguous condition that permits six centuries of inconclusive dispute. That is not the manner in which power announces itself. It is the manner in which a forgery behaves. A being who orders the cosmos does not authenticate himself with a mark that a confessing artist could rival. The defence requires a deity whose evidentiary trace is indistinguishable from the absence of one, which is the self-erasing god the original comment already described.
Here, then, is the response that requires no carbon dating whatsoever, which I offer so that you cannot allege any reliance upon the evidence you forbade. Grant the entire premise. Grant an image whose every detail remains unexplained. It still does not answer the comment it addresses. The exhibit concerned witness testimony and mass adherence, and whether either tracks truth. The shroud belongs to a different category of evidence, and it cuts against you within that category, because it is among the most thoroughly examined relics in existence and the examination indicated inauthenticity. The Book of Mormon case turned on evidence withheld from inspection. The shroud is the opposite instance: evidence submitted to inspection, which then failed. You have selected the one object that confirms the standard rather than refuting it. So I will conclude by restoring the burthen to its proper place. State the observation that would alter your conviction. If three concordant laboratory results would not, then the shroud does not function as evidence for you. It functions as a conviction already held, in search of permission for its own continuance.
So, you obviously assume the carbon dating was valid. The DeArcis letter has not proved anything. Do a bit more AI generated research then try again. How was the image formed? See if you can answer in a paragraph or less.
Like the honest hedging. But the meat isn't there. Also wanted to add that the Jewish faith (and the following abrahamic faiths as well) are not "trust me bro". The Israelites accepted the Torah and the faith after being miraculously saved from Egypt, in a way they couldn't deny the presence of an involved deity. After that was established, trust is requested of them. After I graduated from university, I'm not supposed to go through all the tests again, when anyone asks me to prove I'm proficient. I've got a diploma, and Jews have so many commandments for remembering our exodus.
And regarding falsifiability, we have prophecies. This war was prophesized, the return of the Jewish people to Israel was prophesized (and given an exact year by Vilna Gaon), and the state of the world today has been prophesized (end of tractate Sotah).
It says there that the house of assembly will be turned to a house of prostitution (see epstein files), the fruit will be abundant and affordability will decrease, the enemies of a man will be the ones living in his house (the collapse of the traditional family), and the truth will become herded (nobody agrees on anything, everyone is divided). Written two millennia ago.
First off, genuinely great exchange, both of you. The manuscript stuff, Jericho, the Quirinius mess, the ophthe debate, the canon question. All real, all worth knowing, all argued in good faith (pun fully intended). But I think you're both standing on a foundation neither of you tested, and it's sitting right there in HT's opening line: trust is calibrated by evidence and revised by outcome, faith is commitment regardless of outcome.
That distinction is the whole game. Rosenthal spends the essay trying to move the Bible from the "faith" bin into the "trust" bin, like trust is the grown-ups' table. HT, to his credit, never lets that slide on the resurrection. He keeps faith right where the framing put it.
Here's my issue. I don't think faith and trust are actually separable like that. They're more like conjoined twins than opposite ends of a spectrum. Just because something's verifiable doesn't mean our interpretation of it is accurate. And just because something's taken on faith doesn't make it false. Science is full of stuff held with near-religious certainty that's still, technically, theory. Macro-evolution, the Big Bang. People say those get revised by outcome same as trust in a bridge, but it's revision within a lens that's already assumed true. The lens itself rarely gets touched. That's a different thing than standing on its own merits.
Which is why, as fascinating as this exchange is, I think it's mostly arguing the symptom and skipping past the disease. Jericho's walls, the census timeline, whether ophthe means vision or flesh and bone, none of that is fake or unimportant. But it's all still evidence, and evidence requires interpretation. Every fact either of you cited got filtered through a lens before it became an argument. Nobody gets to look at raw, uninterpreted reality. We're all staring through glass, darkly.
So is it possible I'm wrong about all this? Sure, to the exact same extent it's possible either of you is wrong. But that doesn't mean we can all be equally right. If "right" can mean whatever anyone wants, the word stops meaning anything. There has to be a standard, something real and independent of any of our cloudy lenses, even if none of us sees it perfectly. What each of us believes that standard actually is, that's where our faith lives. Not in the minutiae. In the standard.
I think that's basically what Jesus was on about too. He never says "have perfect knowledge that I am who I claim." He says have faith, over and over, like a chorus stuck on repeat. Faith the size of a mustard seed. "Oh ye of little faith." And he ties it to where your treasure is, because that's the real diagnostic. Not what you'd claim to believe if someone asked you on the spot, but what you're actually oriented toward when nobody's grading you. Two people can hold identical beliefs about the resurrection and have completely different treasures.
And here's where I think the Bible does something genuinely different in mechanism, not just tone. Genesis 3 doesn't just describe pride as the human condition and leave it there with no origin. It gives a cause. The first lie is "you can be like God," you can be your own final court of appeal, don't trust what you've been told, go verify it yourself. That's a pretty good description of the move both of you are making, honestly. HT trusting what he can personally verify, Rosenthal trying to earn Scripture that same verification. Both still playing the verify-it-yourself game.
So here's where I land, for what it's worth. I think you're both arguing from faith too, you just haven't framed it that way out loud. Mine's in that book, and in the standard it points toward, however dimly I see it through my own glass. From the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks. I'd be curious whether either of you would push back on that, or whether, once it's said plainly, it's something you'd both basically agree with and just hadn't stopped to say.
Chris, this is the most searching objection the thread has drawn, and it deserves a careful answer rather than a quick one. You are pressing on the one distinction upon which the whole exchange rests, so let me defend it where it holds and concede it where you are right.
Begin with the concession, because you have earned it. You are correct that faith and trust are not strangers who never meet. They convert into each other. A thing may begin in faith and become trust as the evidence arrives; a trust may harden into faith when its holder quietly stops revising. I would put it more strongly than you did: trust can derive from faith, and often does. But notice that conversion is not fusion. That two things turn into each other is possible only because they are two; water and ice are the same substance in different states, and the difference between the states is the whole of what matters when you are deciding whether to walk across the river. The distinction was never that the two cannot share a mind. It was a distinction of rule. Trust revises on outcome. Faith holds regardless of outcome. Conjoined twins are still two people, and the question is only ever which one is steering.
On the science, I must correct the matter of fact, because here the objection rests on a picture that is not accurate. You say macro-evolution and the Big Bang are revised only within an assumed lens, that the lens itself is never touched. The opposite is the case, and it is checkable. The Big Bang did not adjust its inner workings to fit what was already seen; it predicted what had not yet been seen, and waited. The cosmic microwave background was predicted in 1948 and discovered, by accident, in 1965, seventeen years after the prediction and by men who were not looking for it. The theory also predicted the precise ratio of hydrogen to helium forged in the first minutes, and the abundance of deuterium, and here is the part that should give the lens-objection pause: the density of ordinary matter inferred from the deuterium left over from the first three minutes agrees, to one per cent, with the density inferred from the microwave background released four hundred thousand years later, by entirely independent physics. Two windows onto the early universe, opened by different instruments, reading conditions separated by four hundred thousand years, and they converge. A lens merely assuming its own conclusion cannot do that. It is the mark of a frame exposed to refutation that it makes a risky prediction which the world is free to falsify, and does not.
The same answers your division of evolution. You grant micro-evolution and withhold macro, but there is no mechanism in the biology that permits the small change and forbids its accumulation; macro-evolution is micro-evolution given the one ingredient you have not granted, which is time. The line you have drawn is not a line the science contains. And the molecular record could have broken the theory and did not: the tree of descent drawn from anatomy long before DNA could have been contradicted by the genes, and in the event the genes confirmed it. That is a lens held open to its own undoing...
...Now the deepest point, and the one where I think you have proved my case without intending as much. You argue that all evidence must pass through interpretation, that no one sees raw reality, that we peer through glass darkly, and you take this to show that everyone is finally running on faith. But ask the question your own argument invites: how does anyone ever discover that an interpretation was wrong? Only by outcome. The very fact that a misreading can be detected, corrected, overturned by what later refuses to fit it, is the entire mechanism of trust, and it is precisely the thing faith does not have, on the definition you cited at the top of your reply, the one you took from my own words, that trust is calibrated by evidence and revised by outcome whilst faith is commitment regardless of outcome. A commitment held regardless of outcome cannot be corrected by outcome; that is what the word regardless means, and it is my word, the one you quoted. So when you say our interpretations are fallible and revisable, you have not described faith. You have described trust, and described it exactly. The glass may be dark, but the proof that we sometimes see through it wrongly is that we later catch the error, and catching the error is the calibration you are arguing does not exist. You reached for faith and named its opposite.
Last, the pride. You credit Genesis with giving the diagnosis its origin, the serpent's offer that one may be as God and judge for oneself. It is a profound passage and I do not diminish it. But the recognition that overreaching self-sufficiency is the characteristic human ruin is older than that text and wider than the tradition that carries it. The Greeks named it hubris and built their tragedies upon it, the arrogance that summons nemesis; the older wisdom literatures of the Near East had already set pride at the head of the vices before the Hebrew scriptures gave it the serpent and the garden. Genesis gave pride a story, and a very great one. It did not give it its first sighting. This is the same point I made elsewhere in this exchange and I hold it consistently: the instinct is older than the institution that later claims to have authored it, and crediting the institution with the authorship is the recurring error, whether the institution is Christianity, the Enlightenment, or any other.
So I will answer your closing question plainly, since you asked it plainly. You suggest we are all arguing from faith and have merely declined to say so. I do not think that is right, and the reason is the one that has run through every point I have made here. To verify, to keep available the condition under which one would revise, to let the outcome correct the interpretation, is not faith wearing a secular coat. It is the refusal of the one thing that defines faith, which is commitment regardless of outcome. You have relabelled the checking disposition faith, so that everyone proves to possess it; but a word that now covers both the man who revises and the man who will not revise has stopped marking the only difference that matters. I am not playing the verify-it-yourself game as a hidden act of faith. I am declining faith, in the precise sense my own line gave the word, the line you quoted, and keeping the part that answers to evidence. That is not the same treasure in a different coat. It is a different treasure.
Honest Trap - Thanks for engaging. Your answer was well argued, and I'd like to offer the same respect of conceding where I agree and clearing up some things I feel might have been miscommunicated on my part.
The question isn't whether or not science is falsifiable. It's whether the facts are interpreted through a preconceived lens or not - and I would present that they are. In earlier days, science was widely viewed by scientists as more of an expression of God, whereas now the lens is a presupposition that there is no God. I'm not contesting falsifiability. I'm contesting lens, and the categorization of faith vs. science because science is still making faith claims based on the lens.
I think you've answered an argument I wasn't making, though. You said, "catching the error is the calibration you are arguing does not exist". I never argued that, at least, not intentionally. Catching an error and having an imperfect lens from which errors must naturally flow are two different things. I wasn't saying interpretations are faith because they're revisable. I was saying the lens shading those interpretations is the faith commitment — and that lens, yours, mine, everyone's, isn't what gets revised when an interpretation gets corrected, but merely the interpretation in question. That's the thing that was never on the table in your debate. That's the symptom over the disease I was referring to.
As for the big bang and micro/macroevolution position, I'll address these together because I think they're codependent. I think your science and logic hold on the evolutionary front. However, this is still interpretation of evidence through a lens. Your lens, in an admittedly oversimplified version, and correct me if I’m wrong, is at its core, "In the beginning nothing became everything. Then, rain fell on rocks and sprouted life." I say this because even in the cosmological argument of the beginning being basically an "unstable nothingness", where did that instability come from? True nothingness can't be unstable because nothing exists from which to define instability, and if something exists by which to define instability, where did that come from? More to the point when did it arrive, where did it arrive, and what was it? This is crucial because in order for our universe to exist, time, space, and matter had to all come into existence simultaneously. In short, it raises more questions than it answers.
My lens, however, says, "In the beginning a being from outside, and therefore not constrained by our universe, created our universe and everything in it." We're not so much contesting each other's evidences because neither I nor Rosenthal were contesting their existence. We're contesting catalyst in relation to the interpretation of the evidence, and that's the faith claim on both sides of the argument. The difference I see is that one admits it's a faith claim while the other denies it.
I see this like two roads. The road you've been walking on is full of evidence "proving" you're walking in the "right" direction. You come to a fork in the road and the sign reads "Science" pointing one direction, and "Faith" pointing the other. Both signs have explanations of the road you've already walked, but they come to different "locations", or conclusions. Agnostics just sit there and camp out, as if not making a decision wasn't in itself a decision, lol. It's incumbent upon each of us to make our decision and we do that through our individual lens. At some point, it seems to me, we have to acknowledge just how finite and limited we are in understanding the totality of everything and place our faith in something bigger. That "something bigger" is our "god". Even the perceived absence of a god makes us "god" in our own life. People groups the world over throughout history worshipped wood and stone carvings, so why would self-worship be any less “worship”? Ultimately, that's what theists struggle against. So, I'm not trying to be reductive when I say, faith or science - both are roads to a god. We have to choose which one is the right one based on the evidence...
And finally the trust/faith issue. It seems I wasn't clear, maybe. I wasn't saying they're the same word or concept. They are their own concepts and have their own definitions, but they’re not merely that binary. What I was clumsily trying to say is that they're inextricably linked - like conjoined twins. They don't exist without each other. There is no trust without faith. Water and ice are still H2O and we can't have either without those molecules. In the same way those molecules are bonded, so are these two concepts. We simply must have faith in order to take the first steps toward allowing a scenario where trust can be built. We must have water to make ice. It could be faith in the external which we then study and test to build trust, or we could have faith in our ability to handle the external, whatever that might be, until it proves trustworthy.
To use your analogy; faith gets you to the bridge. But once you're testing the bridge, trust would seem to be steering - trust based on the evidence that the bridge is stable enough to support weight. It could be argued, however, that you're using faith in each step that the bridge will continue to support weight as you make your way to the most vulnerable mid section of the bridge - faith that there are no weaknesses in any spots. In that case, which one is really behind the wheel?
In fairness, there are still some objections I can see popping up. For instance:
1. Science doesn't assume God doesn't exist, it just brackets the question because supernatural explanations aren't testable by the method.
2. Calling reason or the scientific method a "god" is equivocation, stretching the word until it loses meaning. My wood-and-stone point partially answers this already, but you’re precise enough to press it.
3. Yes, we're finite, which is exactly why we should proportion belief to evidence rather than filling the gaps with faith.
4. I never addressed your hierarchy of claims — that Joseph isn't load-bearing the way Exodus is, Exodus isn't load-bearing the way the resurrection is. This is a structural point sitting unanswered from your very first reply and I’d like to address it.
In one way or another, I think you’ve asked/stated the first three in your reply, and I feel like I’ve responded to them above, however, I’ll summarize here. The fourth is interesting and I’m sorry I didn’t address it before.
1. If God exists, then creation was possibly the most "natural" explanation. What's more natural than the One who created nature itself?
2. Science, reason, god... I thought we weren't playing word games, lol. What I mean is that anything taking supreme importance in one’s life becomes “god”. It doesn’t have to be any more religious, metaphysical, or supernatural than that.
3. This is why theists seek a source - something that knows because we simply can't. It just isn't possible for our brains to contain it all, and it never will be – at least not in any foreseeable future. We both fill the gaps with faith. It just seems like you fill the gaps with faith that science will someday have an answer and I have faith that God already is the answer.
4. Structure depends on an "if-then" foundation. The lens again. If God, then the Bible. Not portions of the Bible, not this story can be authenticated and this one can’t. If God, then the Bible – period – full stop. If science only, then no Bible because no God.
A couple of other things I’d like to speak to directly are what you said concerning the Adam and Eve story, and also your statement, "that is not the same treasure in a different coat, it is a different treasure". In fairness, I’d like to defend my position by saying that I never made the assertions you claim I did. I merely stated that the Bible is the only book with an origin story for pride. All other religions treat it as an “uh-huh” – a given. That essentially means that we’ve always been this way. There was no “fall”. There was no “before” where we weren’t selfish and prideful, and therefore nothing to be saved from and no need for a Savior. The Bible differs in that way. The “go verify it yourself” point I was making has two prongs – one physical and one spiritual.
1. Physical or corporeal – We rely on our own judgement and the judgement of other fallible human beings for what we “know” even though we’ve proven ourselves wrong over and over again. Given that, and according to your own definitions, we don’t trust ourselves, we have faith in ourselves because despite being consistently wrong we continue to rely on our own limited ability to reason accurately.
2. This is the origin of knowledge of the “self” as autonomous, and what ensued was pride. What the Bible describes prior to this is harmony – with God, with nature, with each other. What came after was discord through self-reliance instead of harmony.
As for your treasure statement, let me first clarify – the “treasure” in question is merely where our heart is. It’s the question touched on earlier of who or what is our “god”. That said, and more to your point, I think, you asserted "a commitment to keeping everything revisable” was your position. Is that revisable, or is it “a commitment held regardless of outcome [which therefore] cannot be corrected by outcome”?
Sorry, one more thing that got me. You asked and answered a question – “how does anyone ever discover that an interpretation was wrong? Only by outcome.” The outcome is data, fact, “evidence”. Therefore, we could be looking at the same outcome and come to different conclusions about it. That’s not to say outcomes aren’t important, but that they’re just more information being interpreted through the same lens that caused our initial mistake. By your model, we can never trust our conclusions because they never address the core issue – the lens by which we see the thing.
I’ll stop here because I feel a sermon coming on, haha! Of course, I could be misunderstanding and arguing against something you're not saying, too. I've done that before, haha. Great response, though! Thank you!
Chris, I will be brief, because most of this rests on a single claim that is not accurate, and once it is corrected the rest follows.
You say the modern scientific lens is the presupposition that there is no God, and that conclusions drawn through it are therefore faith claims wearing a secular coat. That is not what the method does, and you said the accurate version yourself earlier in this very thread: science brackets the supernatural because it is untestable, not because it has discounted it. Those are different acts. Bracketing a question one cannot test is not the same as answering it in the negative, and a method that declines to test what it cannot test conceals no denial. It has merely declined to pretend to a verdict it has no instrument to reach.
And here is the part that undoes the lens objection at its root. Proper scientific work is not performed to confirm the lens. It is performed to break the hypothesis. The whole discipline is built upon the attempt to prove the present account wrong: you state what the world should show if the idea is true, then you go looking for the case that would falsify it, and the idea survives only for as long as the world refuses to supply that case. A lens held in order to protect itself does the opposite; it searches for confirmation and averts its gaze from the disconfirming case. So the charge has the mechanism backwards. The thing you are describing, an interpretation shielded from the evidence that would overturn it, is the very posture science is constructed to forbid, and the posture faith, by the definition you quoted from me, is content to keep.
And consider who has been doing the testing. For more than a century the people most determined to break these theories have been the believers themselves. Creationists have laboured, with conviction and considerable resources, to falsify the age of the Earth, the radiometric methods that measure it, the deep age of the cosmos, and evolution by descent. Whole institutions exist for the purpose. They have brought every challenge they could devise against the dating of rocks and the succession of the fossil record, precisely because the conclusions trouble a prior commitment. This is the falsification process you say does not occur, conducted in plain sight by those with the strongest motive to make it succeed, and the theories have survived the assault. A lens merely protecting itself is not subjected to a century of determined attack by its opponents and left standing. It is the mark of an account answerable to evidence that it can be assaulted in earnest and not fall.
And mark which instrument they must reach for to mount the attack. To dispute the age of a rock the creationist employs the mass spectrometer; to dispute the age of the cosmos he employs the telescope and the measured rate of decay; to dispute descent he employs the gene sequencer. He attacks the conclusions of the science with the very tools the science built, because there exist no others; one cannot step outside the apparatus to strike at it and must borrow it to land the blow at all. And this is fatal to the claim that the conclusions are mere artifacts of an atheist lens. Were that so, the instruments built under that lens would not work, and yet he stakes his case upon their working, trusting the reading when he hopes it will tell against the theory and distrusting only the readings that do not. A man does not measure with a ruler he believes records nothing but the bias of the one who holds it. The moment he raises the instrument to his eye, he has granted that it measures the world and not the measurer, which is the whole of what I have been saying...
...As for the metaphysical claim, the being outside the universe who leaves no testable trace within it, I will not relitigate it, because we settled it earlier in my exchange with Rosenthal and the answer has not changed. It cannot be tested, because it is untestable; and a claim that no possible observation could confirm or disconfirm is not a rival interpretation competing with a scientific one on the same ground. It is a claim of a different kind, one that sits forever beyond the reach of the test, which is precisely why the method brackets it rather than ruling upon it. That is not the method confessing a faith. It is the method observing its own boundary.
The rest of what you raise, the origin of the instability, the fork in the road, the treasure, I leave where it stands, because each turns upon the same misplaced premise, that a method which revises on outcome and a commitment which holds regardless of outcome are doing the same thing under different names. They are not, and the difference is the only point I have ever been making.
An interesting read but a few questions. If a future historian unearths the story of Spiderman and notes it is set is a real city of New York does that mean we should grant any credence to the story? Of course not. Also what are we to make of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke that claim different rulers were in charge? Matthew says it was Herod who died in 4 BCE and Luke says it was Quirinius in 6 CE. It can’t be both. And what about all the Bible characters who lived for centuries? Or the exodus, which seems to either be an invention or a material exaggeration? The bible indicates several million Israelites were on the move at one time yet there is no trace of such a large and sustained migration.
The Spider-Man comparison is mine, and I am glad to see it travelling, though you have inverted its purpose. I did not offer it to show that a real setting lends credence to a story. I offered it to demonstrate the reverse. The boroughs are real, the bridges are real, the spade in the year 3024 would confirm every street. None of that raises the probability that a man was bitten by a radioactive spider by the breadth of a hair. Accurate scaffolding is precisely what a skilled fiction and a true account would share, which is why it cannot distinguish them. Your “of course not” is my thesis, not a correction of it. We occupy the same side of that line.
Where your questions bite, and bite hard, is elsewhere. Rosenthal does not anchor his case in verisimilitude. He concedes that point himself, repeatedly. His real claim is that the text possesses an unbroken record of vindication, never once falsified by the spade, and that this record earns the central miraculous claim the right to be examined. The census under Quirinius against Herod, and the absent material trace of a several-million-strong migration, are not peripheral objections to that claim. They are the counterexamples to its single load-bearing premise. A record that is not in fact unbroken cannot perform the work of converting faith into a track record.
The deeper mechanism merits a name. The book is maximally checkable in its scaffold and structurally uncheckable in exactly the claim that requires faith. “Produce the body” resembles a falsification condition, yet a condition unmeetable the moment of its utterance, and unmeetable still, is the signature of the unfalsifiable in the costume of the falsifiable. That inversion, the borrowing of the checkable scaffold to launder the uncheckable structure, is the mechanism I have traced through this entire exchange. The full argument resides at The Honest Trap, should it interest you. You have already perceived the seam. The whole garment merits your attention.
May you reference the sources? I am deeply curious about the history of Christianity, Islam, and everything in between- but I am also a skeptic. If you have any advice for sources, I would really appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction. Best, -Aletheia
One of the things that makes me wonder, if the whole thing was made up, and those on the inside new it, why would they risk being fed to lions, crucifixions, stonings, being burned alive and many many other not so fun ways to die. It took hundreds of years before Christianity reached an institutional level where Caesars and kings could say they were Christian to protect it at a governmental level.
“It’s a belief you arrived at by deciding, and then defended against the world.”
Well, a small anecdote might be of interest: I have two grandsons. No amount of “evidence”, no logical argument, no sophistry, could convince me that they don’t exist. I didn’t *decide* to believe that they exist — I personally experienced it.
I have experienced, and now experience, the Divine Presence. I don’t have to defend it — I *know*, and am not interested in debating it any more than I am interested in debating the existence of my grandsons. I can’t be convinced that I have not experienced that which I know I did and continue to do. And I don’t need anyone else’s validation in that.
Now someone may say “you’re making it up”. Others may say “you’re delusional”. That’s fine, I’m not the belief police. I gain nothing from convincing anyone else that either my grandsons or the Heavenly Father exist. If you had experienced them as I have, you would know, just as I do, that their existence is plainly obvious.
The Acts Seminar Acts and Christian Beginnings: The Acts Seminar Report is a significant scholarly work that challenges traditional views of the biblical Book of Acts as a historical document, while other books, such as Craig Keener's multi-volume commentary, are considered the best comprehensive resources for a detailed, historical-critical study of the text.
Literary Fiction: The author of Acts acted as an epic storyteller, modeling the text on classical Greek literature (like Homer) and creating fictional characters and symbolic names to serve ideological goals.
Great piece but no…
Rosenthal accepts the skeptic’s framing too quickly:
Trust = evidence calibrated by outcomes.
Faith = commitment regardless of outcome.
That definition is too thin.
Biblical faith is not “belief regardless of outcome.” It is trust grounded in the character of the one trusted.
That is different.
A child trusts a good father not because the child can falsify every future action, but because the father has shown himself faithful. That trust is not irrational. It is relational.
I agree that beliefs should not be protected from evidence. But I think the trust/faith distinction here is too narrow.
Faith is not “commitment regardless of outcome.” That is closer to stubbornness.
Biblical faith is trust in a person whose character has proven reliable.
That means faith is not opposed to evidence. It is built from remembered faithfulness, tested relationship, and lived encounter. Abraham trusts because God has called. Israel trusts because God has delivered. The disciples trust because they have seen, followed, failed, been restored, and encountered Christ.
So the issue is not faith versus trust.
The issue is what kind of trust we are talking about.
Scientific trust is often calibrated by repeatable outcomes. Personal trust is calibrated by character across time. Covenant trust is deeper still: it is confidence in the faithfulness of God, even when the immediate outcome is not what we expected.
That does not make faith evidence-proof. It means the evidence is not merely archaeological, textual, or empirical. It is also relational, moral, historical, and existential.
So I would not say Christianity is true because the Bible is falsifiable in the same way a lab hypothesis is falsifiable. I would say Christianity invites trust because its witness coheres across text, history, experience, conscience, and the person of Christ.
Faith is not belief without evidence.
Faith is trust that survives because the object of trust has proven faithful.
Well said and well reasoned Shannon! Thank you for this.
No argument here, Shannon, but I think AC was meeting Honest where Honest was at, and did it very well.
Thanks for this, AC, it gives me something to pass on to someone whom I answered the way Shannon did, just less eloquently.
As the author thanks Shannon, I don’t understand your dismissal. Shannon added to AC’s position. You have nothing to “use” against anyone with it. Why is your intent such?
???
I don't think the author was claiming trust and faith were different, but used the "enemy's definition" to prove their argument false. It is a rhetorical move in conversation and literature.
Excellent!
Shannon, thank you, this is a careful objection and it deserves a careful answer. It contains three errors, and naming them plainly is the clearest way I can honour the care you took.
The first concerns what was being defined. My definition of faith is universal: it describes the structure of any commitment held regardless of outcome, wherever that structure appears, in religion, in politics, in a man's view of himself. You have answered it with a definition of biblical faith in particular, relational trust grounded in the proven character of the one trusted, and you have treated the particular as though it overturned the general. It does not. A universal claim is not refuted by producing one member of the category and declaring it richer than the category allows. Biblical faith, as you describe it, sits squarely inside my definition. To answer a definition of faith as such with a definition of one faith in particular is to move the question to the side rather than to meet it.
The second, and the graver one, concerns the structure you call covenant trust. You arrange trust in tiers, the scientific, the personal, and above them the covenant, trust in the faithfulness of God that survives even when the immediate outcome disappoints, and you place biblical faith upon that highest rung as a superior kind. But that structure is not superior, nor is it special. It is the ordinary structure of all human reliance, and it is everywhere, and a great deal of the time it is misplaced. The devout follower trusts that his religious leaders are honest and caring, grounded in their proven character, and congregations have been betrayed by such leaders without number. The parent trusts the child's teacher to do no harm, and sometimes the teacher harms. The citizen trusts the police to do the work rightly, and sometimes they do not. Each of these is trust grounded in proven character and held through uncertainty, which is to say each is exactly your covenant trust, and each is, often enough, catastrophically wrong...
Nice try but no…
Disclaimer - I’m not a voice for Christian matters, and it’s been a while since I’ve actually stepped foot in a church but I’ll break it down so you don’t misunderstand me.
You say your definition is universal. But universal according to whom? The biblical concept of faith was never defined as commitment regardless of outcome. It was defined as trust, fidelity, and faithfulness within a relationship. Before treating biblical faith as a special case of your universal category, you would first need to show that your category captures what Scripture means by faith better than Scripture’s own usage does. You don’t
Your response is sophisticated, but it does not actually address the Christian claim. It subtly changes the meaning of “faith” midway through the argument.
You treat the structure of trust and the ground of trust as if they are the same thing.
They are not.
A congregation trusting an abusive pastor and Abraham trusting God may share a formal structure: trust extended under uncertainty. But Christianity has never claimed that the form of trust guarantees its truth.
The entire biblical question is:
Who is being trusted?
The object matters.
Your argument says:
Since false trust and true trust can have the same structure, structure cannot distinguish them.
That’s true.
But Christianity never says structure distinguishes them. Christianity says the character of God distinguishes them. Your argument is a bit like saying:
A fake dollar and a genuine dollar share the same shape. Therefore shape cannot determine authenticity.
Correct.
But nobody thought shape determined authenticity. Authenticity depends on origin. Likewise, biblical faith is not:
Trust because trust itself is virtuous.
Biblical faith is:
Trust because God is faithful.
Those are completely different claims.
Your deeper mistake appears here:
“Only outcome distinguishes the trust that was kept from the trust that was broken.”
That is actually not how Christianity understands faithfulness.
Consider Job.
From an outcome perspective:
* children dead,
* wealth gone,
* health destroyed.
The outcomes are terrible. Yet the biblical narrative explicitly presents Job’s trust as justified.
Why?
Because the standard is not immediate outcome. It is fidelity to a reality believed to be deeper than immediate circumstance. Likewise:
* Abraham receives promises before fulfillment.
* Israel wanders forty years.
* The disciples watch Christ crucified.
If outcome alone were the criterion, each moment would count as evidence against trust.
Christian faith has always operated on a different level:
not “Did this particular event go the way I wanted?”
but “Has God proven faithful across the whole story?”
That is a radically different epistemology than the one you, Mr critic is using.
The most important error, though, is this sentence:
“Whether a given trust was warranted is a separate question the structure cannot answer, and it can be answered by one thing only, which is outcome.”
That is simply false.
We evaluate trustworthiness all the time by things other than outcomes:
* character,
* integrity,
* motives,
* consistency,
* testimony,
* history,
* sacrifice.
Imagine a friend who keeps a promise but betrays everyone around him.
Good outcome.
Bad character.
Or a friend who fails because circumstances overwhelm him while remaining honest and faithful.
Bad outcome.
Good character.
Humans distinguish those cases immediately.
Christianity does too.
The biblical claim is not:
God is trustworthy because believers got the outcomes they wanted.
The biblical claim is:
God is trustworthy because God’s character is faithful.
The resurrection itself is presented as the vindication of that claim, not its definition.
And one more thing.. Your pastor example actually strengthens my point.
You’re treating the pastor as if the pastor is the object of Christian faith. But Christianity explicitly denies that.
A pastor is not God.
A church is not God.
A denomination is not God.
A Christian’s faith is not ultimately placed in any of those things.
The entire Bible repeatedly warns against placing ultimate trust in human beings.
Jeremiah says:
“Cursed is the one who trusts in man.”
Jesus warns about false teachers.
Paul warns about false apostles.
Peter warns about false shepherds.
John warns believers to test the spirits.
The New Testament assumes that leaders can fail.
In fact, it predicts they will.
So when you say:
“People trusted religious leaders and were betrayed.”
The Christian response is:
“Yes. Scripture warned us that could happen.”
That isn’t evidence against biblical faith.
It’s evidence that people sometimes place faith where Scripture says they shouldn’t.
The failure of a pastor does not demonstrate the failure of God any more than the failure of a doctor demonstrates the failure of medicine.
The pastor is judged by God, not the other way around.
...That is the flaw at the centre. You have described a form and smuggled a verdict into it. Trust grounded in proven character, surviving when the outcome disappoints, describes the congregation that trusted the predator as faithfully as it describes Abraham. The form is identical in the trust that is honoured and the trust that is betrayed. Therefore the form cannot be the thing that makes the trust well placed, because the very same form is present when it is most badly placed. Whether a given trust was warranted is a separate question the structure cannot answer, and it can be answered by one thing only, which is outcome, the measure you dismissed as too thin.
And this is the third error, which closes the matter. To distinguish Abraham's trust as the trustworthy one, whilst the identically structured trust of every other devotion is reckoned misplaced, you must reach past the shared form to something that distinguishes them. The structure will not do it, for the structure is common to all. Only outcome distinguishes the trust that was kept from the trust that was broken. So even to name the covenant instance as the reliable one, you have had to borrow the very definition of trust you called too thin, and to certify your highest rung by the measure you placed on the lowest.
So the distinction was never faith the word against trust the word, and I never rested it there. It was a distinction of rule: does the commitment revise upon outcome, or hold regardless of it? Your tiers do not erase that line; they conceal it, until one asks why one trust was honoured and another betrayed, whereupon outcome returns as the only answer. Earned trust itself, once matured, can persist through a thing later found untrue, held across the discovery rather than dissolved by it, which is the faith structure surfacing inside the trust you offered as its alternative. The definition stands, and stands the stronger for having been widened against it and held.
The Christian claim is not that faith survives because outcomes always confirm it. It is that faith survives because the character of God is believed to remain faithful even when immediate outcomes are confusing, painful, or apparently contradictory.
That gets to the actual category error in your reply. You successfully criticized a claim I wasn’t making. The Christian position is not that trust itself is self-validating; it’s that faith is trust grounded in a particular understanding of God’s character.
I hope that helps.
Shannon, I think we have arrived at the end, because your last two sentences have given me my whole answer, and they have given it in your words rather than mine.
You write that faith survives because the character of God is believed to remain faithful even when immediate outcomes are confusing, painful, or apparently contradictory. Read that again slowly. Belief held to remain faithful when the outcome contradicts it is commitment regardless of outcome. That is the definition you called too thin, stated here in full and offered to me as its refutation. You have not corrected my account of faith. You have restated it and assigned it to Christianity, as though naming the owner changed the thing owned.
One word in your sentence carries the entire matter, and it is believed. Trust has no need of that word, because trust reads the outcome and adjusts to it. Faith requires it, because faith holds the belief across the outcome that tells against it. The word marks the very gap I have been pointing to all along, the distance between what the result shows and what the believer continues to hold. You have named that gap and called it the character of God.
On the category error with which you charge me, I grant at once that I never argued trust is self-validating, and neither of us needs to defend a claim neither of us made. But the understanding of God's character you offer in its stead is not a third thing standing beside outcome and structure. It is a belief held about the object, and a belief can answer to only one of two masters: the outcome that revises it, which is trust, or the commitment that survives it, which is faith. Your own clause, even when outcomes are contradictory, has already placed it with the second. You have put your understanding of God's character in the faith bin with your own hand, and then objected that I found it there.
I will leave it where you have left it, with thanks. You have argued in good faith throughout, and the disagreement between us is now clear rather than confused, which is the most two honest people can ask of an exchange. The definition holds, not because I defend it, but because every attempt to replace it has had to use it.
What are you talking about?
It’s not my job to correct what you think faith is. I never approached you or engaged with you about anything. My original response was about Rosenthal accepting your framing too soon and I have zero doubt that he did now.
You actually didn’t read or understand what I presented. You’re too busy, in my opinion, listening to respond instead of trying to understand what I’m saying but it’s not surprising.
I don’t even think you actually know what you’re responding with.
“Trust has no need of the word believe, because trust reads the outcome and adjusts to it.”
That’s simply not how trust works.
Trust necessarily contains belief.
If I trust a surgeon, I believe the surgeon is competent.
If I trust my wife, I believe she is faithful.
If I trust a friend, I believe he is honest.
Remove the belief and trust disappears.
Trust is not beliefless. Trust is belief embodied in relationship.
The real question is what is being believed.
You keep acting as though the Christian is believing a proposition despite outcomes.
But the Christian claim is different.
The Christian believes:
God is faithful.
That belief then grounds trust.
And importantly, that belief is not the same thing as believing every event will immediately look good to me.
Those are completely different beliefs.
You probably won’t even notice the hidden assumption in your sentence?:
“Trust reads the outcome and adjusts to it.”
Fine.
But which outcome?
Job’s friends read the outcome.
Their conclusion:
Job suffers therefore God has abandoned him.
Wrong.
The disciples read the outcome of the crucifixion.
Their conclusion:
Jesus failed.
Wrong.
The crowd read the outcome of Calvary.
Their conclusion:
The Messiah was defeated.
Wrong.
Christianity is full of examples where reading the immediate outcome produces the wrong interpretation.
So Christians don’t distrust outcomes.
They distrust their own ability to perfectly interpret outcomes.
That’s a huge difference.
The deeper issue that you don’t seem to understand is that trust always contains an act of belief because we never possess complete information.
If trust only existed after certainty, trust would never be necessary.
Imagine telling a spouse:
“I don’t believe you’re faithful. I just trust you.”
The sentence is nonsense.
Trust presupposes belief.
Likewise:
“I don’t believe this bridge will hold. I just trust it.”
Also nonsense.
Trust is a form of belief expressed in action.
The biblical definition is even stronger.
The Greek word pistis is often translated as faith, but it also carries the sense of:
faithfulness
loyalty
fidelity
trustworthiness
In the ancient world it was often used in covenantal and relational contexts.
It is not merely:
holding an idea in your head.
It is:
entrusting yourself to someone.
That’s why Christians speak of believing in Christ, not merely believing that Christ exists.
Even demons believe that God exists.
The distinction is trust, allegiance, and fidelity.
Shannon, I think this ends here, and it ends on a single point that leaves no room to move.
You have given the matter two names, and the two names are right. There is believing in and there is believing that. Keep them separate for a moment and look at what each one is.
Believing-in is holding to someone or something when the outcome has turned against it. That is faith. It is the word at the centre of my whole argument, and you have named it precisely.
Believing-that is holding something true on the evidence, and letting go when the evidence withdraws. That is trust. Not a thing trust contains, but trust itself, wearing the word belief for the occasion.
So your two names are my two names. Believing-in is faith. Believing-that is trust under a different label. You have not found a third thing that dissolves the distinction. You have restated the distinction in your own vocabulary and presented the restatement as a refutation of it.
This is why your strongest line proves nothing. You said, remove the belief and trust disappears. Of course it does. The belief you are removing is believing that, and believing that is trust. You have taken trust away from itself and shown me that nothing is left. A thing always vanishes when you subtract it from itself. That is not a discovery about trust. It is the shape of a circle.
And your own example seals it, because you drew the line yourself and then crossed it. You said the faithful believe in Christ, whilst even the demons believe that God exists. There it is, in your own hand. The demons have believing that, the bare reading of a fact, and it saves them nothing. The faithful have the believing in kind, the commitment that holds regardless of the fact. You told me the two are different in kind, which is the whole of what I have said, and then you spent the rest of the reply insisting they are one.
There is no version of this where believing-in and believing-that are the same act. One bends to the evidence and one does not. That single difference is the entire distinction, and it does not depend on what either of us calls the two sides. Name them as you like. You may not place them in one box and call the difference between them gone, because the difference is not in the names. It is in whether the belief moves when the outcome turns.
That is the entire matter, and it was never really about the word. It was about whether a belief lets the outcome move it. The belief you are defending, by your own account, does not. You may call that whatever you wish. I have only shown that it is not the same act as the belief that does.
I hope it helps.
I liked this response to Honest Trap. Great piece. Thank you!
How fascinating to read you and the author of The Honest Trap side by side! It is rare to see erudite, civilized debate such as this.
This was great. I’m not Christian but find the bible to be fairly compelling. However, I was never able to believe in a virgin birth nor rising from the dead. Most of the bible I can accept but not those two things. But that has never really lessened my appreciation for Jesus’ message. If his body were to be discovered I would still appreciate the book and its overall messages.
I don’t buy into the whole ‘virgin’ thing either & I’m an ardent Christian with a degree in theology. Maybe a poor translation (I think it should be ‘maiden’ or something) cos someone’s obsessed with Mary not having shagged Joseph. I think there’s at least an argument & literary support for the resurrection, but it’s not a big deal for me because I very much DO believe in the Incarnation. That’s the biggie for humanity imho. And it makes such sense it takes my breath away. Can I prove it? Not a shit show in hell. But it’s hard for it to not be true & ultimately almost everything requires a certain level of faith and that’s where I hang my hat. For what it’s worth. Take care.
Any chance you could share your thoughts on the argument for the resurrection? I'd love to hear about the Incarnation too. I'm a curious cat Just Boris.
Thank you for the request. i will put it in the to do box.
Check out "The Case for Christ." It's an easy read and covers the history-based arguments for the resurrection as well as some of the archeological arguments listed here. It glosses over many interesting details for the sake of brevity, and it doesn't cover genuine problems with secondary concepts like demonology, but it's a great introduction.
People talk about this a lot. I’m not really sure why because it’s in the text. That’s why people believe it. I know a lot of people go into the Old Testament and the prophecies and all of that regarding the virgin. Josh McDowell makes the point that the virginity or lack thereof would not cancel out Christ as both fully God and fully man, but both Mary and Joseph’s accounts grapple with this reality. Mary asks the angel how this can be when she hasn’t known a man? The angel says nothing is impossible with God, and goes on to explain how the Holy Spirit will come upon her and she will be with child.
Joseph is also planning to put Mary away quietly until the angel tells him in a dream that her child is conceived by the Holy Spirit, and He will save people from their sins.
The virginity is part of both of their accounts—not vital—according to Josh McDowell , but most people believe it because it’s the account of the two people who would know.
I think some people don’t believe that Mary was a virgin after Jesus was born. This seems to be a matter of Christian tradition. Some people believe Jesus‘s brothers were actually her stepchildren and others believe Jesus was the oldest, and the brothers came after him. Mary is honored because she is the mother of Christ and he fulfills the Commandment to honor your father and mother. Either way, she is still the mother of Christ.
Beautifully expressed, thanks AC. Considering these kinds of facts, no-one can say that the Bible doesn't deserve our serious attention - as an historical record, at least. Where people go from there is, of course, up to them, but at least they can't say it's all nonsense and fairy stories.
Faith is not believing in something without evidence, it is choosing to believe in the evidence that is there.
That is called "confirmation bias"
The attribution is noted and appreciated. The standard was offered in good faith and you have applied it in good faith. That is the only kind of exchange worth having.
The concessions are real and they matter. Clearing the junk before making the case is the Aquinas method and it is the right one. The transmission argument stands as stated: decentralised dispersal across rival communities who could not coordinate alterations is exactly the structural guarantee that produces verifiable uniformity. The contrast with the Uthmanic process holds and I have said so from the beginning. The archaeological density argument is also real: the pattern of vindication across Hittites, David, Pilate, and the Pool of Siloam is genuine and directional. The checks kept cashing. None of that is disputed here.
But the vindication record runs in one direction only on the peripheral historical claims. The central miraculous events on which the entire theological structure depends tell a different story.
The Exodus is the foundational act of the Hebrew covenant. Without it there is no law, no covenant, no subsequent theological architecture. The Egyptian record contains no trace of an Israelite slave population at the scale the text describes. No plague sequence. No mass departure. The Sinai contains no archaeological footprint of a forty-year migration of hundreds of thousands of people: no campsites at the named locations, no refuse deposits, no graves in the quantities a population of that size would leave across four decades. These are not arguments from silence in the ordinary sense. They are positive findings from a region and a period that has been extensively excavated, in which the expected traces of such a migration are simply absent...
Before i write the next response to you my delightfully skeptical friend. I'm curious, what would you accept as evidence? Bearing in mind what flimsy evidence most historians accept as fact for other historical events. You want the evidence from Joseph in Egypt to Cannon?
Greetings, my dear friend. Wishing you to be well.
The same standard I applied to the Hittites, to Pilate, to Siloam, to David. Documentary attestation, archaeological correlation, independent corroboration at the confidence level the claim requires. I accepted all of them. The bar is not hostility dressed as method.
On Joseph: the question is correctly formed and I will take it seriously. If the Egyptian record produces a dateable figure matching the narrative role, that counts in favour. If it forecloses the possibility at the period required, that counts against. Either finding is acceptable. The tradition survives either result, because Joseph is scaffolding. He is not load-bearing in the way the Exodus is, and the Exodus is not load-bearing in the way the resurrection is. The tradition has a hierarchy of claims, and the evidential pressure distributes accordingly.
On flimsy evidence: historians do not accept flimsy evidence. They accept evidence at the confidence level the record warrants, and they calibrate the claim to match. When the record is fragmentary, the claim is held tentatively. When the record is silent, absence is registered as absence, not as confirmation. When the record actively contradicts what the text requires, that is a different category entirely. Jericho is in the third category. The text requires a walled, occupied city at a datable period. Tell es-Sultan shows neither at that period. The destruction layer that exists predates the requirement by centuries. That is not historians accepting flimsy evidence for an ancient event. That is the record contradicting a specific claim at the specific point where the claim is checkable.
The standard has not moved. It was the same standard that vindicated the Hittites. It is the same standard that found Jericho wanting. Apply it to Joseph with equal precision and I will follow wherever the record leads.
Have you heard of David Rohl or the documentary movie series “Patterns of Evidence” with Tim Mahoney? The pattern is real. The dating is controversial.
Brandon, I have not watched the series, but I have read about Rohl's chronology and Mahoney's films, and about why the claims are contested, and that reading is enough to say where the difficulty lies. The recommendation is a fair one to make, so let me take it seriously rather than dismiss it.
Your two sentences are the whole matter, and you have stated them with more precision than you may intend: the pattern is real, the dating is controversial. Hold those together, because they cannot be separated, and the second governs the first. Rohl's correspondences between the Egyptian record and the biblical figures do not sit in the evidence independently of his chronology; they are produced by it. The New Chronology lowers the Egyptian dates by as much as three centuries, and it is precisely that lowering that slides the figures into alignment. Remove the redating and the pattern dissolves; keep the redating and you have assumed the thing the pattern was meant to show. This is the plain shape of an ad hoc adjustment: the chronology is not derived independently and then found to agree with the narrative, it is moved until it agrees, and the agreement is then presented as though it had been discovered. The correspondence is not corroboration of the revision. It is the revision, read forward.
This is why the dating cannot be set to one side as a separate quarrel amongst specialists whilst the pattern stands on its own. The pattern has no existence apart from the dating. A correlation manufactured by adjusting the calendar until the names meet is not independent attestation; it is the conclusion wearing the costume of evidence. Academic Egyptology has not rejected Rohl out of hostility, and I do not raise the rejection as an argument from authority. I raise it because the mainstream chronology is anchored to fixed points that the revision must unfix to do its work, and the cost of unfixing them is paid elsewhere in the record. Name the casualties plainly. To slide the figures into place Rohl must abandon the standard identification of the biblical Shishak with Shoshenq the First, whose campaign is dated near 925 before Christ in step with the Hebrew kings, and substitute Ramesses the Second, moved forward some three centuries. He must then rewrite the synchronism between Egypt and Assyria carried in the Amarna letters, inventing a second Ashur-uballit for whom the record gives no independent warrant, which in turn collides with the Assyrian eponym lists that are themselves pinned by the solar eclipse of 763 before Christ. He must also reread the Sothic date in the Ebers Papyrus, the rising of Sirius in the ninth year of Amenhotep the First, on which a fixed point of the conventional calendar rests. Each move is required by the redating, and each is paid for in a synchronism that previously reconciled and now does not. The alignment is not had for free; it is purchased by unsettling every synchronism to which the date was formerly tied.
This is the same standard I set in the comment you are answering, and it applies here with equal force and in both directions: documentary attestation, archaeological correlation, independent corroboration at the confidence level the claim requires. Rohl and Mahoney do not fail that standard because the verdict was decided in advance against them. They fail it because the corroboration is not independent. The chronology was moved to produce the match, and a match produced by moving the chronology corroborates nothing but the willingness to move it.
I hold this symmetrically, and that is the part worth saying plainly. If the Egyptian record one day yields a dateable figure in the narrative role, on the conventional chronology and without the calendar being bent to receive him, that counts in favour, and I would say so. The discipline is not a wall against the conclusion. It is a refusal to accept a conclusion that has been built into its own premises. And notice what the redating does not touch. It runs backward from a fixed anchor in the seventh century before Christ and leaves everything after it untouched, which is why the first-century events sit entirely beyond its reach. Pilate, the prefecture confirmed by the Caesarea inscription, the synchronism with the reign of Tiberius, the broad dating of the crucifixion, none of these requires a calendar to be moved; they are attested on the chronology as it stands. That is the whole asymmetry in one image. The Christian claim at its load-bearing point already has the corroboration at the period the claim requires, and needs no surgery to obtain it; the Exodus case obtains its corroboration only by the surgery. The thing Rohl must manufacture for the one is the thing the other possesses for free. The pattern is real, you are right; but a pattern is only evidence when something outside it holds it in place, and here the only thing holding it in place is the dating you have already granted is in dispute.
Jericho is more direct. The text requires a walled, inhabited city destroyed by Joshua at a datable point in the Israelite entry into Canaan. The excavations at Tell es-Sultan show that Jericho was not occupied, and had no walls to collapse, at the period the text requires. The destruction layer that exists dates to centuries before the relevant period. The check did not cash.
You acknowledged this yourself: no clear archaeological footprint for the Exodus, unresolved tension on Jericho. You named it honestly and then moved past it. But the Exodus and the conquest are not peripheral historical details in the category of Hittites or Pilate. They are the load-bearing events. Hittites existing confirms that the text knows its world. The Exodus not leaving a trace in that world is a different order of problem.
On the Paul falsifiability argument: Paul did name the conditions of his own disconfirmation. That is a genuine and serious move. But the body argument assumes a located, identified individual whose burial site could in principle be known. That assumption is not established.
No Roman census record confirms a birth in Bethlehem or anywhere else. No civic record, no administrative document, no contemporary documentary trace places Jesus of Nazareth as a dateable resident of a dateable location during his lifetime. The two birth narratives in Matthew and Luke contradict each other on the genealogy, the mechanism of arrival in Bethlehem, and the subsequent movements of the family. They agree on Bethlehem only, and Bethlehem was the theologically required location for a Davidic messiah, which gave both authors a strong motive to place the birth there regardless of historical fact. Luke’s census under Quirinius, which the narrative requires, is historically incompatible with Herod’s reign, which the narrative also requires. Quirinius governed Syria from approximately 6 CE. Herod died in 4 BCE. Both cannot be true simultaneously...
Paul’s own language in 1 Corinthians 15 does not settle this. He lists appearances but describes no empty tomb. The empty tomb tradition enters the record with Mark, written approximately four decades after the crucifixion. The Greek word Paul uses for the appearances, ophthe, is the same word used elsewhere in the New Testament for visionary encounters. His account is consistent with a spiritual or visionary experience as well as a physical one.
And the empty tomb itself is not evidence that a man rose. It is evidence that a tomb was found without a body in it, which is consistent with a body moved, a body taken, a body laid elsewhere, or a grave misremembered. An absence of remains is precisely an absence of remains. To read it as a presence, to take the missing body as proof of a living one, is to do with the tomb exactly what the hiddenness doctrine does with God: to convert a thing not found into a thing confirmed. Absence read as presence, in both directions.
On the selection question, which the essay does not address: the dispersal argument secures the transmission of the books that were chosen. It does not address the mechanism by which those books were chosen over the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Epistle of Barnabas. The dispersal argument applies after the selection was made. It does not reach the question of how the selection was made, by what criteria, and whether those criteria were applied evidentially or institutionally.
The transmission is verifiable. The selection was not.
A book that keeps making falsifiable bets and keeps winning them has earned the right to be examined on the one bet still open. Agreed. The examination is ongoing. The one bet still open is the one no shovel will settle. The conditions Paul named for settling it expired with the first century. And the figure whose body the bet required was never documented well enough, in his own lifetime, to have made the tomb findable in the first place.
One further exhibit the falsifiability standard demands, offered not as an argument of equivalence but as a demonstration of pattern.
Joseph Smith claimed in 1823 to receive golden tablets from the angel Moroni in upstate New York. Eleven witnesses signed affidavits attesting to their existence. The tablets were returned to Moroni and have never been examined by an independent party. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints now numbers some seventeen million members. The Book of Mormon is not an ancient document complicated by two millennia of attrition. It was produced in 1830 in a literate society with courts, newspapers, and administrative records. The archaeological record of pre-Columbian America contains no trace of the civilisations it describes. The anachronisms are extensive and datable: horses, steel, wheat, and barley appear in the text for periods in which none of these existed in the Americas.
This is not a claim that Christianity and Mormonism are equivalent in content, history, or theological weight. It is a demonstration of how religious formations begin: a founding figure, a small group of committed witnesses, a miraculous event whose physical evidence is unavailable, and a movement that survives and grows. This pattern is as old as human history. It is the ordinary structural signature of sectarian origin, not the exclusive property of any tradition. It has repeated across every culture and every century for which we have records.
The question the falsifiability standard requires is not whether the pattern exists in both cases, which it plainly does, but what principle distinguishes the witnesses to the golden tablets from the witnesses to the risen Jesus. That principle needs to be stated explicitly. Without it, the standard is being applied to the texts one already doubts and withheld from the texts one already accepts.
It’s kinda funny how he does not reply, isn’t it?
Explain away the shroud of Turin without just pointing to the 1988 carbon dating. How was the image formed?
Before the shroud, observe what the request itself concedes. "Without just pointing to the 1988 carbon dating" attempts to disqualify the single strongest item of evidence by instruction rather than by refutation. That is not a debating constraint; it is an admission. One does not request that the dispositive evidence be excluded unless one already suspects its destination. The equivalent manoeuvre would be "explain the age of the earth without reference to radiometric dating." The evidence you wish excluded is precisely the evidence that decides the matter, and three independent laboratories, at Oxford, Zurich, and Arizona, returned a concordant result of roughly 1260 to 1390, which coincides with the cloth's first documented appearance in France in the 1350s. I will not exclude it, because honesty does not permit the exclusion of the very thing that answers the question.
Now the question "how was the image formed," which contains the actual error. You are reasoning that an unresolved mechanism is itself evidence for a supernatural one. It is not. "We cannot at present specify the technique" does not entail "therefore no technique existed." That is the argument from ignorance, and it is the same structure the original exhibit was constructed to expose: a gap in current explanation converted into positive proof of a preferred conclusion. A missing answer is a missing answer. It is not a different answer in disguise. The burthen does not invert because a sceptic lacks a complete reconstruction, any more than an unsolved cold case demonstrates that the murderer was a ghost. And the gap is narrower than you suggest. A fourteenth-century report from Bishop Pierre d'Arcis to the Avignon papacy recorded that a local artist had confessed to the cloth's manufacture. Contact and bas-relief methods available to medieval hands have reproduced the principal features. "Not fully settled in every detail" is a great distance from "miraculous," and only the former is true...
...There is also the matter of proportion, which the argument never confronts. You are asking me to credit a being capable of authoring physical law, whose chosen demonstration is then a faint impression on linen, sited in fourteenth-century France, of a quality medieval hands could approximate, and surviving in precisely the ambiguous condition that permits six centuries of inconclusive dispute. That is not the manner in which power announces itself. It is the manner in which a forgery behaves. A being who orders the cosmos does not authenticate himself with a mark that a confessing artist could rival. The defence requires a deity whose evidentiary trace is indistinguishable from the absence of one, which is the self-erasing god the original comment already described.
Here, then, is the response that requires no carbon dating whatsoever, which I offer so that you cannot allege any reliance upon the evidence you forbade. Grant the entire premise. Grant an image whose every detail remains unexplained. It still does not answer the comment it addresses. The exhibit concerned witness testimony and mass adherence, and whether either tracks truth. The shroud belongs to a different category of evidence, and it cuts against you within that category, because it is among the most thoroughly examined relics in existence and the examination indicated inauthenticity. The Book of Mormon case turned on evidence withheld from inspection. The shroud is the opposite instance: evidence submitted to inspection, which then failed. You have selected the one object that confirms the standard rather than refuting it. So I will conclude by restoring the burthen to its proper place. State the observation that would alter your conviction. If three concordant laboratory results would not, then the shroud does not function as evidence for you. It functions as a conviction already held, in search of permission for its own continuance.
So, you obviously assume the carbon dating was valid. The DeArcis letter has not proved anything. Do a bit more AI generated research then try again. How was the image formed? See if you can answer in a paragraph or less.
I love the final sentence🤔🧐⁉️❣️” Come let us reason together”, to us creatures from g-d creator… Thank you, A.C Rosenthal
Like the honest hedging. But the meat isn't there. Also wanted to add that the Jewish faith (and the following abrahamic faiths as well) are not "trust me bro". The Israelites accepted the Torah and the faith after being miraculously saved from Egypt, in a way they couldn't deny the presence of an involved deity. After that was established, trust is requested of them. After I graduated from university, I'm not supposed to go through all the tests again, when anyone asks me to prove I'm proficient. I've got a diploma, and Jews have so many commandments for remembering our exodus.
And regarding falsifiability, we have prophecies. This war was prophesized, the return of the Jewish people to Israel was prophesized (and given an exact year by Vilna Gaon), and the state of the world today has been prophesized (end of tractate Sotah).
It says there that the house of assembly will be turned to a house of prostitution (see epstein files), the fruit will be abundant and affordability will decrease, the enemies of a man will be the ones living in his house (the collapse of the traditional family), and the truth will become herded (nobody agrees on anything, everyone is divided). Written two millennia ago.
Well reasoned David. thank you for your comment.
First off, genuinely great exchange, both of you. The manuscript stuff, Jericho, the Quirinius mess, the ophthe debate, the canon question. All real, all worth knowing, all argued in good faith (pun fully intended). But I think you're both standing on a foundation neither of you tested, and it's sitting right there in HT's opening line: trust is calibrated by evidence and revised by outcome, faith is commitment regardless of outcome.
That distinction is the whole game. Rosenthal spends the essay trying to move the Bible from the "faith" bin into the "trust" bin, like trust is the grown-ups' table. HT, to his credit, never lets that slide on the resurrection. He keeps faith right where the framing put it.
Here's my issue. I don't think faith and trust are actually separable like that. They're more like conjoined twins than opposite ends of a spectrum. Just because something's verifiable doesn't mean our interpretation of it is accurate. And just because something's taken on faith doesn't make it false. Science is full of stuff held with near-religious certainty that's still, technically, theory. Macro-evolution, the Big Bang. People say those get revised by outcome same as trust in a bridge, but it's revision within a lens that's already assumed true. The lens itself rarely gets touched. That's a different thing than standing on its own merits.
Which is why, as fascinating as this exchange is, I think it's mostly arguing the symptom and skipping past the disease. Jericho's walls, the census timeline, whether ophthe means vision or flesh and bone, none of that is fake or unimportant. But it's all still evidence, and evidence requires interpretation. Every fact either of you cited got filtered through a lens before it became an argument. Nobody gets to look at raw, uninterpreted reality. We're all staring through glass, darkly.
So is it possible I'm wrong about all this? Sure, to the exact same extent it's possible either of you is wrong. But that doesn't mean we can all be equally right. If "right" can mean whatever anyone wants, the word stops meaning anything. There has to be a standard, something real and independent of any of our cloudy lenses, even if none of us sees it perfectly. What each of us believes that standard actually is, that's where our faith lives. Not in the minutiae. In the standard.
I think that's basically what Jesus was on about too. He never says "have perfect knowledge that I am who I claim." He says have faith, over and over, like a chorus stuck on repeat. Faith the size of a mustard seed. "Oh ye of little faith." And he ties it to where your treasure is, because that's the real diagnostic. Not what you'd claim to believe if someone asked you on the spot, but what you're actually oriented toward when nobody's grading you. Two people can hold identical beliefs about the resurrection and have completely different treasures.
And here's where I think the Bible does something genuinely different in mechanism, not just tone. Genesis 3 doesn't just describe pride as the human condition and leave it there with no origin. It gives a cause. The first lie is "you can be like God," you can be your own final court of appeal, don't trust what you've been told, go verify it yourself. That's a pretty good description of the move both of you are making, honestly. HT trusting what he can personally verify, Rosenthal trying to earn Scripture that same verification. Both still playing the verify-it-yourself game.
So here's where I land, for what it's worth. I think you're both arguing from faith too, you just haven't framed it that way out loud. Mine's in that book, and in the standard it points toward, however dimly I see it through my own glass. From the fullness of the heart, the mouth speaks. I'd be curious whether either of you would push back on that, or whether, once it's said plainly, it's something you'd both basically agree with and just hadn't stopped to say.
Chris, this is the most searching objection the thread has drawn, and it deserves a careful answer rather than a quick one. You are pressing on the one distinction upon which the whole exchange rests, so let me defend it where it holds and concede it where you are right.
Begin with the concession, because you have earned it. You are correct that faith and trust are not strangers who never meet. They convert into each other. A thing may begin in faith and become trust as the evidence arrives; a trust may harden into faith when its holder quietly stops revising. I would put it more strongly than you did: trust can derive from faith, and often does. But notice that conversion is not fusion. That two things turn into each other is possible only because they are two; water and ice are the same substance in different states, and the difference between the states is the whole of what matters when you are deciding whether to walk across the river. The distinction was never that the two cannot share a mind. It was a distinction of rule. Trust revises on outcome. Faith holds regardless of outcome. Conjoined twins are still two people, and the question is only ever which one is steering.
On the science, I must correct the matter of fact, because here the objection rests on a picture that is not accurate. You say macro-evolution and the Big Bang are revised only within an assumed lens, that the lens itself is never touched. The opposite is the case, and it is checkable. The Big Bang did not adjust its inner workings to fit what was already seen; it predicted what had not yet been seen, and waited. The cosmic microwave background was predicted in 1948 and discovered, by accident, in 1965, seventeen years after the prediction and by men who were not looking for it. The theory also predicted the precise ratio of hydrogen to helium forged in the first minutes, and the abundance of deuterium, and here is the part that should give the lens-objection pause: the density of ordinary matter inferred from the deuterium left over from the first three minutes agrees, to one per cent, with the density inferred from the microwave background released four hundred thousand years later, by entirely independent physics. Two windows onto the early universe, opened by different instruments, reading conditions separated by four hundred thousand years, and they converge. A lens merely assuming its own conclusion cannot do that. It is the mark of a frame exposed to refutation that it makes a risky prediction which the world is free to falsify, and does not.
The same answers your division of evolution. You grant micro-evolution and withhold macro, but there is no mechanism in the biology that permits the small change and forbids its accumulation; macro-evolution is micro-evolution given the one ingredient you have not granted, which is time. The line you have drawn is not a line the science contains. And the molecular record could have broken the theory and did not: the tree of descent drawn from anatomy long before DNA could have been contradicted by the genes, and in the event the genes confirmed it. That is a lens held open to its own undoing...
...Now the deepest point, and the one where I think you have proved my case without intending as much. You argue that all evidence must pass through interpretation, that no one sees raw reality, that we peer through glass darkly, and you take this to show that everyone is finally running on faith. But ask the question your own argument invites: how does anyone ever discover that an interpretation was wrong? Only by outcome. The very fact that a misreading can be detected, corrected, overturned by what later refuses to fit it, is the entire mechanism of trust, and it is precisely the thing faith does not have, on the definition you cited at the top of your reply, the one you took from my own words, that trust is calibrated by evidence and revised by outcome whilst faith is commitment regardless of outcome. A commitment held regardless of outcome cannot be corrected by outcome; that is what the word regardless means, and it is my word, the one you quoted. So when you say our interpretations are fallible and revisable, you have not described faith. You have described trust, and described it exactly. The glass may be dark, but the proof that we sometimes see through it wrongly is that we later catch the error, and catching the error is the calibration you are arguing does not exist. You reached for faith and named its opposite.
Last, the pride. You credit Genesis with giving the diagnosis its origin, the serpent's offer that one may be as God and judge for oneself. It is a profound passage and I do not diminish it. But the recognition that overreaching self-sufficiency is the characteristic human ruin is older than that text and wider than the tradition that carries it. The Greeks named it hubris and built their tragedies upon it, the arrogance that summons nemesis; the older wisdom literatures of the Near East had already set pride at the head of the vices before the Hebrew scriptures gave it the serpent and the garden. Genesis gave pride a story, and a very great one. It did not give it its first sighting. This is the same point I made elsewhere in this exchange and I hold it consistently: the instinct is older than the institution that later claims to have authored it, and crediting the institution with the authorship is the recurring error, whether the institution is Christianity, the Enlightenment, or any other.
So I will answer your closing question plainly, since you asked it plainly. You suggest we are all arguing from faith and have merely declined to say so. I do not think that is right, and the reason is the one that has run through every point I have made here. To verify, to keep available the condition under which one would revise, to let the outcome correct the interpretation, is not faith wearing a secular coat. It is the refusal of the one thing that defines faith, which is commitment regardless of outcome. You have relabelled the checking disposition faith, so that everyone proves to possess it; but a word that now covers both the man who revises and the man who will not revise has stopped marking the only difference that matters. I am not playing the verify-it-yourself game as a hidden act of faith. I am declining faith, in the precise sense my own line gave the word, the line you quoted, and keeping the part that answers to evidence. That is not the same treasure in a different coat. It is a different treasure.
Honest Trap - Thanks for engaging. Your answer was well argued, and I'd like to offer the same respect of conceding where I agree and clearing up some things I feel might have been miscommunicated on my part.
The question isn't whether or not science is falsifiable. It's whether the facts are interpreted through a preconceived lens or not - and I would present that they are. In earlier days, science was widely viewed by scientists as more of an expression of God, whereas now the lens is a presupposition that there is no God. I'm not contesting falsifiability. I'm contesting lens, and the categorization of faith vs. science because science is still making faith claims based on the lens.
I think you've answered an argument I wasn't making, though. You said, "catching the error is the calibration you are arguing does not exist". I never argued that, at least, not intentionally. Catching an error and having an imperfect lens from which errors must naturally flow are two different things. I wasn't saying interpretations are faith because they're revisable. I was saying the lens shading those interpretations is the faith commitment — and that lens, yours, mine, everyone's, isn't what gets revised when an interpretation gets corrected, but merely the interpretation in question. That's the thing that was never on the table in your debate. That's the symptom over the disease I was referring to.
As for the big bang and micro/macroevolution position, I'll address these together because I think they're codependent. I think your science and logic hold on the evolutionary front. However, this is still interpretation of evidence through a lens. Your lens, in an admittedly oversimplified version, and correct me if I’m wrong, is at its core, "In the beginning nothing became everything. Then, rain fell on rocks and sprouted life." I say this because even in the cosmological argument of the beginning being basically an "unstable nothingness", where did that instability come from? True nothingness can't be unstable because nothing exists from which to define instability, and if something exists by which to define instability, where did that come from? More to the point when did it arrive, where did it arrive, and what was it? This is crucial because in order for our universe to exist, time, space, and matter had to all come into existence simultaneously. In short, it raises more questions than it answers.
My lens, however, says, "In the beginning a being from outside, and therefore not constrained by our universe, created our universe and everything in it." We're not so much contesting each other's evidences because neither I nor Rosenthal were contesting their existence. We're contesting catalyst in relation to the interpretation of the evidence, and that's the faith claim on both sides of the argument. The difference I see is that one admits it's a faith claim while the other denies it.
I see this like two roads. The road you've been walking on is full of evidence "proving" you're walking in the "right" direction. You come to a fork in the road and the sign reads "Science" pointing one direction, and "Faith" pointing the other. Both signs have explanations of the road you've already walked, but they come to different "locations", or conclusions. Agnostics just sit there and camp out, as if not making a decision wasn't in itself a decision, lol. It's incumbent upon each of us to make our decision and we do that through our individual lens. At some point, it seems to me, we have to acknowledge just how finite and limited we are in understanding the totality of everything and place our faith in something bigger. That "something bigger" is our "god". Even the perceived absence of a god makes us "god" in our own life. People groups the world over throughout history worshipped wood and stone carvings, so why would self-worship be any less “worship”? Ultimately, that's what theists struggle against. So, I'm not trying to be reductive when I say, faith or science - both are roads to a god. We have to choose which one is the right one based on the evidence...
And finally the trust/faith issue. It seems I wasn't clear, maybe. I wasn't saying they're the same word or concept. They are their own concepts and have their own definitions, but they’re not merely that binary. What I was clumsily trying to say is that they're inextricably linked - like conjoined twins. They don't exist without each other. There is no trust without faith. Water and ice are still H2O and we can't have either without those molecules. In the same way those molecules are bonded, so are these two concepts. We simply must have faith in order to take the first steps toward allowing a scenario where trust can be built. We must have water to make ice. It could be faith in the external which we then study and test to build trust, or we could have faith in our ability to handle the external, whatever that might be, until it proves trustworthy.
To use your analogy; faith gets you to the bridge. But once you're testing the bridge, trust would seem to be steering - trust based on the evidence that the bridge is stable enough to support weight. It could be argued, however, that you're using faith in each step that the bridge will continue to support weight as you make your way to the most vulnerable mid section of the bridge - faith that there are no weaknesses in any spots. In that case, which one is really behind the wheel?
In fairness, there are still some objections I can see popping up. For instance:
1. Science doesn't assume God doesn't exist, it just brackets the question because supernatural explanations aren't testable by the method.
2. Calling reason or the scientific method a "god" is equivocation, stretching the word until it loses meaning. My wood-and-stone point partially answers this already, but you’re precise enough to press it.
3. Yes, we're finite, which is exactly why we should proportion belief to evidence rather than filling the gaps with faith.
4. I never addressed your hierarchy of claims — that Joseph isn't load-bearing the way Exodus is, Exodus isn't load-bearing the way the resurrection is. This is a structural point sitting unanswered from your very first reply and I’d like to address it.
In one way or another, I think you’ve asked/stated the first three in your reply, and I feel like I’ve responded to them above, however, I’ll summarize here. The fourth is interesting and I’m sorry I didn’t address it before.
1. If God exists, then creation was possibly the most "natural" explanation. What's more natural than the One who created nature itself?
2. Science, reason, god... I thought we weren't playing word games, lol. What I mean is that anything taking supreme importance in one’s life becomes “god”. It doesn’t have to be any more religious, metaphysical, or supernatural than that.
3. This is why theists seek a source - something that knows because we simply can't. It just isn't possible for our brains to contain it all, and it never will be – at least not in any foreseeable future. We both fill the gaps with faith. It just seems like you fill the gaps with faith that science will someday have an answer and I have faith that God already is the answer.
4. Structure depends on an "if-then" foundation. The lens again. If God, then the Bible. Not portions of the Bible, not this story can be authenticated and this one can’t. If God, then the Bible – period – full stop. If science only, then no Bible because no God.
A couple of other things I’d like to speak to directly are what you said concerning the Adam and Eve story, and also your statement, "that is not the same treasure in a different coat, it is a different treasure". In fairness, I’d like to defend my position by saying that I never made the assertions you claim I did. I merely stated that the Bible is the only book with an origin story for pride. All other religions treat it as an “uh-huh” – a given. That essentially means that we’ve always been this way. There was no “fall”. There was no “before” where we weren’t selfish and prideful, and therefore nothing to be saved from and no need for a Savior. The Bible differs in that way. The “go verify it yourself” point I was making has two prongs – one physical and one spiritual.
1. Physical or corporeal – We rely on our own judgement and the judgement of other fallible human beings for what we “know” even though we’ve proven ourselves wrong over and over again. Given that, and according to your own definitions, we don’t trust ourselves, we have faith in ourselves because despite being consistently wrong we continue to rely on our own limited ability to reason accurately.
2. This is the origin of knowledge of the “self” as autonomous, and what ensued was pride. What the Bible describes prior to this is harmony – with God, with nature, with each other. What came after was discord through self-reliance instead of harmony.
As for your treasure statement, let me first clarify – the “treasure” in question is merely where our heart is. It’s the question touched on earlier of who or what is our “god”. That said, and more to your point, I think, you asserted "a commitment to keeping everything revisable” was your position. Is that revisable, or is it “a commitment held regardless of outcome [which therefore] cannot be corrected by outcome”?
Sorry, one more thing that got me. You asked and answered a question – “how does anyone ever discover that an interpretation was wrong? Only by outcome.” The outcome is data, fact, “evidence”. Therefore, we could be looking at the same outcome and come to different conclusions about it. That’s not to say outcomes aren’t important, but that they’re just more information being interpreted through the same lens that caused our initial mistake. By your model, we can never trust our conclusions because they never address the core issue – the lens by which we see the thing.
I’ll stop here because I feel a sermon coming on, haha! Of course, I could be misunderstanding and arguing against something you're not saying, too. I've done that before, haha. Great response, though! Thank you!
Chris, I will be brief, because most of this rests on a single claim that is not accurate, and once it is corrected the rest follows.
You say the modern scientific lens is the presupposition that there is no God, and that conclusions drawn through it are therefore faith claims wearing a secular coat. That is not what the method does, and you said the accurate version yourself earlier in this very thread: science brackets the supernatural because it is untestable, not because it has discounted it. Those are different acts. Bracketing a question one cannot test is not the same as answering it in the negative, and a method that declines to test what it cannot test conceals no denial. It has merely declined to pretend to a verdict it has no instrument to reach.
And here is the part that undoes the lens objection at its root. Proper scientific work is not performed to confirm the lens. It is performed to break the hypothesis. The whole discipline is built upon the attempt to prove the present account wrong: you state what the world should show if the idea is true, then you go looking for the case that would falsify it, and the idea survives only for as long as the world refuses to supply that case. A lens held in order to protect itself does the opposite; it searches for confirmation and averts its gaze from the disconfirming case. So the charge has the mechanism backwards. The thing you are describing, an interpretation shielded from the evidence that would overturn it, is the very posture science is constructed to forbid, and the posture faith, by the definition you quoted from me, is content to keep.
And consider who has been doing the testing. For more than a century the people most determined to break these theories have been the believers themselves. Creationists have laboured, with conviction and considerable resources, to falsify the age of the Earth, the radiometric methods that measure it, the deep age of the cosmos, and evolution by descent. Whole institutions exist for the purpose. They have brought every challenge they could devise against the dating of rocks and the succession of the fossil record, precisely because the conclusions trouble a prior commitment. This is the falsification process you say does not occur, conducted in plain sight by those with the strongest motive to make it succeed, and the theories have survived the assault. A lens merely protecting itself is not subjected to a century of determined attack by its opponents and left standing. It is the mark of an account answerable to evidence that it can be assaulted in earnest and not fall.
And mark which instrument they must reach for to mount the attack. To dispute the age of a rock the creationist employs the mass spectrometer; to dispute the age of the cosmos he employs the telescope and the measured rate of decay; to dispute descent he employs the gene sequencer. He attacks the conclusions of the science with the very tools the science built, because there exist no others; one cannot step outside the apparatus to strike at it and must borrow it to land the blow at all. And this is fatal to the claim that the conclusions are mere artifacts of an atheist lens. Were that so, the instruments built under that lens would not work, and yet he stakes his case upon their working, trusting the reading when he hopes it will tell against the theory and distrusting only the readings that do not. A man does not measure with a ruler he believes records nothing but the bias of the one who holds it. The moment he raises the instrument to his eye, he has granted that it measures the world and not the measurer, which is the whole of what I have been saying...
...As for the metaphysical claim, the being outside the universe who leaves no testable trace within it, I will not relitigate it, because we settled it earlier in my exchange with Rosenthal and the answer has not changed. It cannot be tested, because it is untestable; and a claim that no possible observation could confirm or disconfirm is not a rival interpretation competing with a scientific one on the same ground. It is a claim of a different kind, one that sits forever beyond the reach of the test, which is precisely why the method brackets it rather than ruling upon it. That is not the method confessing a faith. It is the method observing its own boundary.
The rest of what you raise, the origin of the instability, the fork in the road, the treasure, I leave where it stands, because each turns upon the same misplaced premise, that a method which revises on outcome and a commitment which holds regardless of outcome are doing the same thing under different names. They are not, and the difference is the only point I have ever been making.
An interesting read but a few questions. If a future historian unearths the story of Spiderman and notes it is set is a real city of New York does that mean we should grant any credence to the story? Of course not. Also what are we to make of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke that claim different rulers were in charge? Matthew says it was Herod who died in 4 BCE and Luke says it was Quirinius in 6 CE. It can’t be both. And what about all the Bible characters who lived for centuries? Or the exodus, which seems to either be an invention or a material exaggeration? The bible indicates several million Israelites were on the move at one time yet there is no trace of such a large and sustained migration.
The Spider-Man comparison is mine, and I am glad to see it travelling, though you have inverted its purpose. I did not offer it to show that a real setting lends credence to a story. I offered it to demonstrate the reverse. The boroughs are real, the bridges are real, the spade in the year 3024 would confirm every street. None of that raises the probability that a man was bitten by a radioactive spider by the breadth of a hair. Accurate scaffolding is precisely what a skilled fiction and a true account would share, which is why it cannot distinguish them. Your “of course not” is my thesis, not a correction of it. We occupy the same side of that line.
Where your questions bite, and bite hard, is elsewhere. Rosenthal does not anchor his case in verisimilitude. He concedes that point himself, repeatedly. His real claim is that the text possesses an unbroken record of vindication, never once falsified by the spade, and that this record earns the central miraculous claim the right to be examined. The census under Quirinius against Herod, and the absent material trace of a several-million-strong migration, are not peripheral objections to that claim. They are the counterexamples to its single load-bearing premise. A record that is not in fact unbroken cannot perform the work of converting faith into a track record.
The deeper mechanism merits a name. The book is maximally checkable in its scaffold and structurally uncheckable in exactly the claim that requires faith. “Produce the body” resembles a falsification condition, yet a condition unmeetable the moment of its utterance, and unmeetable still, is the signature of the unfalsifiable in the costume of the falsifiable. That inversion, the borrowing of the checkable scaffold to launder the uncheckable structure, is the mechanism I have traced through this entire exchange. The full argument resides at The Honest Trap, should it interest you. You have already perceived the seam. The whole garment merits your attention.
May you reference the sources? I am deeply curious about the history of Christianity, Islam, and everything in between- but I am also a skeptic. If you have any advice for sources, I would really appreciate it if you could point me in the right direction. Best, -Aletheia
…or a testament to faith?
One of the things that makes me wonder, if the whole thing was made up, and those on the inside new it, why would they risk being fed to lions, crucifixions, stonings, being burned alive and many many other not so fun ways to die. It took hundreds of years before Christianity reached an institutional level where Caesars and kings could say they were Christian to protect it at a governmental level.
That’s a long time for a lie.
“It’s a belief you arrived at by deciding, and then defended against the world.”
Well, a small anecdote might be of interest: I have two grandsons. No amount of “evidence”, no logical argument, no sophistry, could convince me that they don’t exist. I didn’t *decide* to believe that they exist — I personally experienced it.
I have experienced, and now experience, the Divine Presence. I don’t have to defend it — I *know*, and am not interested in debating it any more than I am interested in debating the existence of my grandsons. I can’t be convinced that I have not experienced that which I know I did and continue to do. And I don’t need anyone else’s validation in that.
Now someone may say “you’re making it up”. Others may say “you’re delusional”. That’s fine, I’m not the belief police. I gain nothing from convincing anyone else that either my grandsons or the Heavenly Father exist. If you had experienced them as I have, you would know, just as I do, that their existence is plainly obvious.
The Acts Seminar Acts and Christian Beginnings: The Acts Seminar Report is a significant scholarly work that challenges traditional views of the biblical Book of Acts as a historical document, while other books, such as Craig Keener's multi-volume commentary, are considered the best comprehensive resources for a detailed, historical-critical study of the text.
Literary Fiction: The author of Acts acted as an epic storyteller, modeling the text on classical Greek literature (like Homer) and creating fictional characters and symbolic names to serve ideological goals.
Inconsistent with other books of the bible.
I am unfamiliar with that religion. I’m an author of “ The Prophet” ( modern day prophetic callings).
So many well informed people here. So interesting!
Any thing you recommend reading on contemporary Islam?