Johnny Skeptic wrote:

Moreland has given us an excellent basis for this debate. Regarding “but to the unbiased observer, little doubt can be cast on the statement that archaeology has confirmed the historical reliability of the New Testament,” it is one thing to claim that a king named David once lived, but it is another thing entirely to attribute to him various actions that could only have been accomplished with the help of God. I could give many other examples, but suffice it to say that while secular claims have abounded throughout human history, claims of spectacular miracles have not. It is that marked infrequency that causes open minded people to be much more careful when evaluating secular claims, none of which have any eternal significance, and claims of Bible miracles, which Christians claim have eternal significance.

Moreland’s point (and it is a side point, not even one that he thinks is relevant to his argument) is that there has been a lot of work done in the area of archeology that has confirmed the reliability of the NT authors. There are dozens of books and thousands of magazine articles dealing with this issue.

I do agree that this massive amount of archeological finds do not tell what a certain person said or did at a certain time. But it does show that the authors were careful and accurate in what they wrote in the areas we can check. Believe me, if they had played willy-nilly with those facts, we would have no reason to believe anything they wrote about the rest. But since they were so careful about those facts, we can have more confidence in what they wrote in areas we can’t confirm as readily.

Regarding your comment about miracles, we must decide if we are to reach our conclusions about this subject by objective historical method or by subjective presupposition. For instance, the populations of many countries once believed that the world was flat. Their presuppositions led them to ridicule people like Columbus and his predecessors, even though the Greeks had proven that the world was round over a 1,800 years earlier. It is my opinion that we should take the advice of Joe Friday and stick to “the facts, just the facts.” What do you think?

Regards,

Brady

Round 5 - From Johnny

Brady wrote:

Moreland’s point (and it is a side point, not even one that he thinks is relevant to his argument) is that there has been a lot of work done in the area of archeology that has confirmed the reliability of the NT authors. There are dozens of books and thousands of magazine articles dealing with this issue.

Regarding the words “reliability of the NT authors,” are you referring to its reliability regarding secular claims or its reliability regarding claims of miracles? Whichever is the case, please cite a few examples. I am quite interested in Christians’ attempts to verify occurrences of miracles using archaeology. Biblical archaeology is very important to a good percentage of Christians, and as such we definitely need to discuss this topic in greater detail.

Brady continued:

I do agree that this massive amount of archeological finds do not tell what a certain person said or did at a certain time. But it does show that the authors were careful and accurate in what they wrote in the areas we can check. Believe me, if they had played willy-nilly with those facts, we would have no reason to believe anything they wrote about the rest. But since they were so careful about those facts, we can have more confidence in what they wrote in areas we can’t confirm as readily.

Again, I need to know exactly what some of those facts are.

Brady wrote:

Regarding your comment about miracles, we must decide if we are to reach our conclusions about this subject by objective historical method or by subjective presupposition. For instance, the populations of many countries once believed that the world was flat. Their presuppositions led them to ridicule people like Columbus and his predecessors, even though the Greeks had proven that the world was round over a 1,800 years earlier. It is my opinion that we should take the advice of Joe Friday and stick to “the facts, just the facts” and see where they lead. What do you think?

Everyone is guilty of subjective, inaccurate presupposition from time to time. During my life, I myself have been guilty of this many times. However, even given the possibility that miracles are possible, how can history reliably tell us which miracles occurred in which places at which times? Regarding the historical method of evaluating claims of miracles, many Christian apologists, including Glenn Miller, often prefer to cite various positive aftermaths following claims of spectacular miracles. The question is, there was no reasonably provable positive aftermath following the Resurrection during the first few decades after that claimed occurrence. Rodney Stark, Ph.D., sociology, wrote a book titled ‘The Rise of Christianity.’ In parts of the book, Stark estimated the size of the early Christian Church during various stages of its growth. He estimated that in 100 A.D., the Christian Church consisted of approximately 7,530 believers, or less than the size of four good size U.S. high schools. It seems to me that the best evidence of a positive aftermath would be the conversions of substantial numbers of people to Christianity during the first few decades following the Resurrection. Can you provide reasonable proof that such was the case?

Following are some excerpts from my essay at www.askepticalapproach.com.

“In a court trial, a group of Mafia members corroborating the testimony of another Mafia member would normally not be considered credible testimony. If in the year 1500 A.D., a jet plane from the future flew over the city of Rome in the daytime and was observed by hundreds of thousands of people with varying world views, everyone viewing the jet plane would have agreed that they had seen something spectacular and unexplained. Most of those people would have believed that they had observed a miraculous event, but fully 100% of them would have agreed that they had seen something spectacular and unexplained. What Christians lack regarding claims of Biblical miracles is testimonies of spectacular and unexplained events from people of varying world views.”

“One reason that so many people question occurrences of spectacular, observable miracles in the Bible is that we currently have no claims of spectacular, observable occurrences of miracles that take place in the presence of sizeable numbers of eyewitnesses who are unrelated parties, meaning people with different world views. People still eat chicken today, but where are the spectacular miracles? Christians blithely say, "Well, spectacular miracles occurred during Bible times, but they don't occur any more." Obviously they don't occur any more, but why should any sensible person believe that they ever occurred?”

“Christians often accuse skeptics of being predisposed against occurrences of miracles. Such accusations are not logically valid. Skeptics would be just as happy as anyone else if miracles were available to help humans. The problem for Christians is, they cannot reasonably prove the occurrence of even a single Biblical miracle. Even if occurrences of miracles are possible, Christians must still reasonably prove which miracles occurred in which places at which times. The simple truth is, Christians are predisposed towards believing in miracles because if they do not believe in miracles, they will not supposedly make it to heaven. Truly, as far as Christians are concerned, necessity is the mother of invention.”

Sincerely,

Johnny Skeptic