“Which gets bandied around so often that Einstein…” (AJP)

No one claimed that Einstein believed in a personal God, he wasn’t an atheist.

When asked directly if he believed in God, Einstein always insisted he did, and explained it once this way:

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books...The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books... That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.”
http://www.time.com/time/2007/einstein/16.html

The link “Origin of the Universe” is to dispel the myth of the atheist that being a scientist leads to atheism.

“…god isn’t actually a good explanation due the violation of Occam’s razor”(AJP)

Wrong again of AJP to appeal to Occam’s razor

“Occam’s razor cannot help toward a rational decision between competing explanations of the same empirical facts. One problem in formulating an explicit general principle is that complexity and simplicity are perspective notions whose meaning depends on the context of application and the user’s prior understanding. In the absence of an objective criterion for simplicity and complexity, Occam’s razor itself does not support an objective epistemology.”

The burden of proof is on AJ Philips to show that the person of Jesus Christ is a myth.

Consider the following proposition by Jesus Christ before he was crucified.

And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations.(Matthew 24:14)

Jesus was killed and had 11 uneducated disciples. What are the chances of the gospel being preached in all the world when all they had was promise of the Spirit? They are allowed only to use love and no violence or armed struggle.

Today there are an estimated 2 to 3 billion Christians found in all parts of the world. The proposition by Jesus is indeed true. It is difficult to explain away the amount of evidence.

@Pericles

My apologies - I did not read the quote carefully enough to realise you were referring to Hannam and not Dickson (though they do argue the same points).In any case, comparing his site to the KKK and then posting completely irrelevant quotes from the KKK which say nothing like what Hannam says (he's not even American!) is absolutely spurious. Come on, play the argument.

>"I was not asking for specific references. I was simply noting that they did not exist. "

yes, and implying that such non-existence was an argument against historicity, which Dickson argues is a false methodology.

>"Nor did I ignore those available. Merely pointing out that there is no mention in them, anywhere, of the three dozen supposed miracles that apparently underpin Jesus' authority in the eyes of Christian believers."

In saying that there's no mention of miracles in the sources available simply falsely excludes the canonical sources. See the interview with Prof. Hagner that I posted. In any case, the issue here is not about miracles, it's about historicity of a person, and the non-canonical sources do attest to that.

@McReal
>"Is the proposition "that there are no surviving Roman records" an absolute one for all Roman records, or just in relation to the proposition that "there are no surviving Roman records" about Jesus?"

Dickson also points out:
"No doubt there were ‘many missives’ between Palestine and Rome during the governorship of Pontius Pilate (AD 26-36) but, as I pointed out in my response to his article, if Gaffney has found one, there are thousands of historians waiting to read it! The reality is, not one such document has survived.

But leaving aside Gaffney’s gaffs, even if we did possess some correspondence between Jerusalem and Rome during this period, should we expect to find a mention of Jesus in them? Perhaps. History does sometimes throw up unpredictably detailed information, as the letter of Dionysius illustrates. But history is rarely obedient to expectations. I suspect that even if we were to find a batch of letters between Pilate and Tiberius for the very year of Jesus’ death (AD 30), historians would not expect to find mention of him. There were thousands of Jewish trouble-makers in this period, and thousands of executions too; the chance of any one of them appearing in such randomly discovered correspondence is very small."
http://www.publicchristianity.com/jesusevidence2.html

>"The reference to "only highly parochial Roman historians" seems to be deflection."

No - it's simply pointing out that the claim that there were heaps of historians who should have written about him is inaccurate.

Cont...

Cont...
>"As far as "Jesus made a very small splash while he was alive" - that suggests what he did does not match the claims of what he did - claims I have made in previous post on this thread that have not been addressed (eg the post-resurrection period and events)."

You you seem to be confused between talking about the claims about him and talking about his historicity. I think that is somewhat telling - one really wonders if your refusal to accept the evidence that nearly all historians find sufficient is because you don't like the claim about him. But while they are related, the two are not the same issue.

Saying that he made a small splash in terms of the issues that ancient historians were interested in is not to say that his claims must be false, either, or that we don't know about the unlikely birth of the church, for example.

Which claims do you feel have not been addressed?

>"It is interesting that John Dickson has also proposed the canonical gospels are 4 separate biographies, which denies their common source and the fact they allegedly only record the last there years of Jesus' life, and virtually nothing of his earlier life."

He does? Where?

The common source is only partial btw, and what does it matter that they deal predominantly with his ministry? Let's not anachronistically read what we might expect in a modern biography onto the texts (I would argue that the gospels are quasi-biographies. Edwin Judge argues that they are actually a unique kind of literature in the ancient world - though that is not to say they are reliable; indeed, he argues that the gospel writers in fact began the trend towards the modern historical method, showing very strong signs of having done their research)

Thanks Chrys, for your well written article.

You have helped to confirm what I always thought was the atheist's problem: when their heart overflows with thankfulness, they don't know who to thank.

Depends how you look at it, AndrewFinden.

>>In any case, comparing his site to the KKK and then posting completely irrelevant quotes from the KKK which say nothing like what Hannam says (he's not even American!) is absolutely spurious.<<

The site you led me to was - I am sure you will be the first to admit - solely intended as an information source for people who are already devout Christians, intent upon "refuting the myth that Jesus never existed". It contains nothing of any significant weight, certainly insufficient to persuade even the most gullible non-believer.

My reference to the KKK site was in the same spirit: unlikely, I would have thought, to recruit new members. But a source of reinforcement for existing believers.

You yourself provided the reason for the fragility of your site's evidence.

>>In saying that there's no mention of miracles in the sources available simply falsely excludes the canonical sources.<<

That's pretty circular, isn't it. If you believe that the "canonical sources" have any validity, then they have indeed been "falsely excluded". To anyone looking for any form of corroboration of the material in the "canonical sources, it is meaningless.

>>In any case, the issue here is not about miracles, it's about historicity of a person, and the non-canonical sources do attest to that.<<

Surely the issue is the totality of Jesus' life, not just the possibility that he may have existed, since it is the rationale behind an entire religion.

If you were to subtract the miracles from the man, what exactly are you left with?

Religiously speaking, that is.