I just finished reading Atwill’s book, and to be fair to Atwill, the “gentle Jesus meek and mild” would be the Roman plan to subvert militant messianic Judaism resistance of Roman occupation, but “coming with a sword” Jesus would be a metaphor for Caesar Titus Flavius’ military campaign in the First Jewish-Roman War. He argues that the creation of Christianity was primarily to domesticate Judaism as a religion into a form which would accept Roman rule, but also secondarily to fool followers of Jesus into worshiping Titus as a god by proxy.
Yes, this is having it both ways.
The book is full of interesting ideas, particularly if you are previously familiar with the Gospel study, and some are convincing to me, but others don’t really stand up to much critical analysis.
Except that there is a lot of evidence for the latter. The last part has both scientific evidence and empirical evidence. Hundreds of years of observing the universe with various instruments has shown that there was something that happened. Cosmic background radiation exists. The universe exists. We can see stars and galaxies. We know their movement. We can SEE them. We don’t know everything about why things are moving the way they do. Thus theories. Dark matter. Dark energy. Those are essentially place holders until experimentation can prove or disprove them. The Higgs boson was a theory until we were able to recreate the energy needed to replicate that part of the beginning of the universe. These things are very real. We don’t need to place a special layer above all of this and call it god. It’s just not necessary.
Did Buddha exist? Maybe. Did a Jesus exist? Probably not. Did Moses exist? No. The whole Moses brought the Jews out of bondage is a silly story. Looking for evidence of Jesus or Moses or the Ark of the Covenant is all crap. The bible is a bunch of stories to keep the bronze age people in line. If you read the bible and follow it you are already damned to hell. Because you don’t follow it word for word. If you don’t stone adulterers you’re screwed. And please don’t give me that Jesus changed all that crap. Because he never existed. It’s like arguing if the Hulk was grey or green. He was gray at the beginning. Now he’s green. And forget all that grey stuff.
I am always fascinated by otherwise intelligent people that believe in a god. Why? Why add more complexity to an already wonderful universe?
And BTW they are noticing that there might be other universes right next to ours. There are cold spots in the universe that may very well be our bubble universe impinging upon the others around us. How’s that for fucking amazing? Google it. I’m not making this up. Try science. Fantasy didn’t create us. Physics did.
Yeah, but how come physics? There’s still a hell of a mystery here - not necesssarily solved by “God-inventing mules, with their incurably commonplace minds” (as Aleister Crowley quipped), but it’s still there, and you can see how people could believe in God prior to science, quite easily. As Kant showed “it’s always been like this” is no more easily conceivable than “it started some time in the distant past”.
That was more what i was getting at by lumping the ‘Big Bang’ into this religious topic. In the last decade we’ve seen ‘Expansion’ and ‘String Theory’ and ‘Inflation’, which are all very interesting and compelling, but we still don’t know why, why did the universe start and how exactly? How can all this matter we ‘see’ around us come out of nothing (seemingly). For me at that point our study of science is really not that different from the more philosophical questions of faith, heck they might even be related? We just do not (can not?) know empirically. So we will just have to wait and see how much of all that science can uncover.
To put it another way i don’t see science and religion as mutually exclusive. In a way they are just different methods trying to do the same thing, to ‘understand’ the world around us. In the ancient historical context one has been very fundamental to the foundation of human societies, and in the more modern context so has science. This is not to say i’m with the church of scientology or any other ‘snake-oil’ type organisation, but as a student of both ancient religions and the sciences, i certainly can appreciate what both have given to the ‘human experience’, both positive and negative.
Zak, I guess we’ve had this discussion before. God is not needed. And I’ll try to explain why. So the Big Bang or whatever was caused by a God that has always existed. How long did this God exist? What created it? Why did it decide to create something else? I posit a Greater God. It created the God that everyone worships that created the Universe. Why are we not singing the praises of that Greater God? People say that God has always existed. But as others say, the Universe can’t just have happened out of nothing. But then there has to be, according to the Bible, a Creator Creator. Otherwise things don’t just appear out of nothing. Right?
This is just silly. As an equation I cross out all of the God God Gods.
Now we are back to the simplest question. How did the universe begin? Gods not needed. the question is already hard. Why complicate it?
You overlook that the universe has a property God does not: it’s moving. That naturally leads to the question: moved by what? The creator posited as an answer to that question is not material and doesn’t possess any property which necessitates any further links in the causal chain.
Something being created out of nothing doesn’t violate the laws of physics. Given infinite time, anything that is possible will happen. We all know the old saw “‘Given enough time’ a monkey can type out the works of Shakespeare.” Scientists have actually calculated the odds of this happening - and those odds are less than a single person winning the lottery every week for 39,000 years. But with infinite time, not only will that monkey type the works of Shakespeare, it will be done so repeatedly. So yes, as freaky as the big bang is, it can happen from nothing.
The larger point is that because something is not understand does not mean a God is responsible. Throughout human history many things unknown were attributed to God, but come to find out, a reasoned and rational explanation could be found after all. Right now science doesn’t understand dark matter or dark energy or black holes or why the theory of relativity breaks down at the quantum level or parallel universes or or or. But scientist don’t rely on faith for an answer. They continue to observe and experiment. And that’s how religion is different. “God exists” is faith, and nothing more.
I know the monkeys-Shakespeare thing is supposed to be a joke about random string generation, but it’s also a joke about evolution, right? (i.e. Shakespeare’s works are essentially the product of a “room” full of “monkeys”). I can never tell which way it’s intended.
In my opinion, the problem is that humans perceive time as infinite in two directions. After all, every moment of our existence had moment that preceded it, so we assume this must propagate backwards endlessly.
But another possibility, consistent with general relativity, is that time does not exist unless space exists, and space doesn’t exist unless matter exists. So there is no point to asking “What preceded the Big Bang?”, because that’s when time starts. And if nothing precedes it, then it has no cause.
In effect, it’s sort of like asking “How was Gordon Freeman’s childhood?” He doesn’t have one. When Half-Life starts, Gordon is an adult and the story proceeds forward from his opening scene, potentially endlessly. That doesn’t mean you can rewind the story endlessly backwards.
I’m partial to the ‘big freeze’ hypothesis of cosmology and a sort of endless loop of creation. Here in a nutshell.
What happens after this is speculative. It is possible that a Big Rip event may occur far off into the future. Also, the universe may enter a second inflationary epoch, or, assuming that the current vacuum state is a false vacuum, the vacuum may decay into a lower-energy state.[31]
Finally, the universe may settle into this state forever, achieving true heat death.
Presumably, extreme low-energy states imply that localized quantum events become major macroscopic phenomena rather than negligible microscopic events because the smallest perturbations make the biggest difference in this era, so there is no telling what may happen to space or time. It is perceived that the laws of “macro-physics” will break down, and the laws of “quantum-physics” will prevail.[7]
The universe should avoid heat death within an infinite amount of time, by spontaneous entropy decrease, either through quantum effects or a Poincare recurrence. Quantum tunnelling should produce a new Big Bang in roughly 10^{10^{56}} years.[32] A Poincare recurrence should generate a new Big Bang the size of the currently observable universe in 10^{10^{10^{10^{2.08}}}} years. Finally, a Poincaré recurrence should occur for the entire Universe, observable or not, assuming Linde’s chaotic inflationary model with an inflaton whose mass is 10−6 Planck masses, in 10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{1.1}}}}} years.
That’s not nothing though. It presupposes the existence of a universe governed by laws, and the existence of time.
Logical sequence is distinct from temporal sequence. For example, let’s say a baseball team scores its tenth run in a row in the final match of a tournament. The following happens: Their score increments by one, they win the inning, they win the game, and they win the tournament. No event precedes another temporally, but it’s still obvious how the causes precede their effects logically. So you’re right to note that nothing can precede the universe temporally, but that doesn’t address the philosophical question of its cause at all.
This is as bogus as the other people’s arguments. Your “logical sequence” is only “logical” because it’s constructed under the rules of a universe which is temporal.
Nothing knowably exists outside of the rules of the universe and the subsequent imposition of the universe’s laws of “correct”. That’s the principal reason that it’s absurd to decide that an omnipotent extrauniversal anthropomorphosized creator is any more absured than an omnipotent extrauniversal set of governing equations. We have no idea if the laws that are posited from within a universe transcend outwards of the universe, or if we’re missing some crucial bit of understanding because we can’t look at our logical constructs from, say, a multi-universal basis.
All we really know is we have a set of universal constants under which this universe is consistent the way it’s understood to some degree. To the best of my knowledge there are known contradictions under different sets of universal constants (the knowable unknowns) and little to no speculation, even, about whether the same sets of universal constants would be required in an extrauniversal “universe”. (Note: Not the same values, but the same set of constants. Perhaps there is another universe with entirely different laws under which the speed of light isn’t constant. Or one where gravity varies as 1/r^2. We can’t conceive of those places being correct because the entirety of our rational structure is devoted to understanding -this- universe. Even if we consider other places that aren’t in the set of “this universe” we do so from logic that’s predicated within the laws of “this universe”.)
Just to be clear, i’m not a creationist (certainly not even a member of an organised practicing religion). However what if this is all just an experiment in some persons Petri dish? It’s certainly a possible option (even a scientific one).
So while i won’t ever be burning witches or shooting heretics for any one faith (as i understand the fallacy of that religious dogma), i can’t see the science to completely disprove the guy and the petri dish in the universe ‘out there’. If there is one, then fine, if not then fine also.
Your example is a series of analytic propositions. They are non-temporal because they proceed by definition: the tournament winner is defined as the winner of the most games, defined by earning the most points, etc.
Without a temporal element, you have not explained how the the team won the tournament. You simply describe what that means.
Uh, you are mistaken here, or at least, you are most certainly in a very tiny minority compared to the majority of actual historians.
Pretty much everyone agrees that Jesus existed as a human being. You can dispute his divinity, but really no mainstream historians actually dispute the existence of the man Jesus.
When it comes to Moses, you’re going much further back into history, and there is much less in terms of conclusiveness regarding whether or not he was an actual person.
But Jesus? The Christ Myth Theory has been effectively refuted, and isn’t a theory held by anyone other than fringe historians. Most historians agree that Jesus was a jew from Galilee, and that certain events, like his crucifixion are historical fact at this point.
You seem to be extending the lack of evidence regarding certain supernatural claims, like being raised from the dead and stuff, to certain basic things which are effectively known to have actually happened (as well as we can know things that happened 2000 years ago).
Saying Jesus existed but wasn’t divine and only the reasonable bits of his story are true is a bit like saying that Shakespeare existed but only wrote two or three of his plays.
Saying Jesus didn’t exist is a bit like saying Shakespeare didn’t exist: a fringe position held by a minuscule fraction of scholars. I think you’re reading a little too much into Timex’s comment—Jesus-the-mythical-figure is not a mainstream position. Saying anything more specific than that is a lot more arguable.
