Why Wouldn't Every Claim be Sufficient Evidence?

Are Claims Evidence? · Why Wouldn't Every Claim be Sufficient Evidence? · Visual Experience is Prima Facie Evidence · Relevant Expert?

Previous essay was written after 2 minutes 51 seconds into a video by Joe Schmid. Here we stop again, at 30:01.

The claim is not evidence. And if it were, then why wouldn't every claim be sufficient for you to accept it?

Matt Dillahunty seems to lack a nuance between "no evidence" and "evidence as strong as to constitute a sufficient proof" ...

In context, why wouldn't I believe a friend stating he had gone to another galaxy in a space ship and come back?

If a very honest friend made such a claim, and didn't specify he had himself driven the spaceship, I would presume abduction by aliens, and I would presume the real story is demons showed him things which weren't true.

Real sense information to him, but from faked stimuli.

But if he did specify to building the spaceship and driving it, the friend would need to answer on points where his credibility would break down:

• why did no one see you building things in the garage?
• how did the speed work?
• how with such a speed did you avoid getting the spaceship perforated at the first collision with simple dust?

I wouldn't ask this kind of question about the Ascension, because it wasn't a spaceship and because the omnipotence of God, by definition, is a sufficient answer to the other two problems. But I would ask it about the spaceship, because it's definitionally human technology and so, definitionally, not divine omnipotence.

And, in general, I would not ask the question "how did God acquire omnipotence in a universe otherwise determined only by finite powers in vectors" etc. because that question would not be adressing the God that the miracle is being referred to. The more appropriate question is "how did the universe come to be determined by finite powers in vectors, given that God is omnipotent?" and the question would first ask "is the universe in general only determined by finite powers" (no, God's omnipotence is involved every day-and-night) and second "insofar as that is partially true, it's because wanted it and being omnipotent, He had no problem in having it."

This means that the only question I find relevant for the Ascension is, do we have sufficient testimonial evidence?

With a sufficient number of people who knew Jesus sufficiently well ...

Until the day on which, giving commandments by the Holy Ghost to the apostles whom he had chosen, he was taken up To whom also he shewed himself alive after his passion, by many proofs, for forty days appearing to them, and speaking of the kingdom of God
[Acts Of Apostles 1:2-3]

[The detailed account of what they saw and heard]

And when they were come in, they went up into an upper room, where abode Peter and John, James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James of Alpheus, and Simon Zelotes, and Jude the brother of James
[Acts Of Apostles 1:13]

... we can rule out "simple mistake" including the version "hallucination" ... with supernatural healings, we can also rule out that they were deceived by demons. And with the fact of this being a claim, and not an entertainment story, we can rule out "entertainment stories can invent anything" (from Peter Parker getting genes from a spider to his working on Daily Bugle).

The only two remaining questions are:

• Is it possible they deceived their audience?
• Is it possible this was invented as a later deception?

Both hypotheses can be infirmed.

Deceived people may die as martyrs for things they have been deceived to believing, but deceivers don't die as martyrs for things they know to be deceptions, because they were behind the deceptions.

A Christian movement that originally didn't contain any of this would not have accepted a new story as what they had always remembered. On this issue, I take issue with C. J. Cornthwaite who pretends that this was all invented in the Second Century.

Now, I believe him, the earliest evidence he has found and there is for the book of Acts being cited by some early Christian writer is indeed in the Second Century. But given the brevity of First Century information other than Bible books (for which he grants some Pauline Epistles and Apocalypse to be First Century), the absence of citation of Acts is not remarkably significant. Clement has no more need to cite it than St. Paul has when writing to the same Corinthian Church earlier, since most of it is irrelevant or already known to the recipients. Revelation or Apocalypse only for two churches, Ephesus and Smyrna, coincides with Churches Paul founded. Wait, Acts doesn't mention Smyrna. Make it Ephesus and Thyatira. However, Acts doesn't show in detail how the Church of Thyatira was founded, it gives as prequel two baptised households, Lydia's and the Centurion's, after which Paul and Silas are expelled before founding any actual Church. Colossians mentions Laodicea, in a context making it probable that Laodicea was at this time just one housechurch, that of Nymphas, while the main Church was as yet in Colossae. None of the seven Churches is given much text, so citations of or coincidences with Acts would not be expected. Absence of evidence is only evidence of absence if presence of evidence would be a logical expectation from reality of sth.

In other words, his observation gives me no ground on which to criticise the historicity of Acts. Which leaves us with the general probability, a community doesn't cease to believe in its remembered origins in order to instead adopt a new-old and newly invented one.

The story of Acts was not tacked onto Christianity in the Second Century. Just as Sacrifice of the Mass was not tacked onto Christianity in the time of Constantine.

Hans Georg Lundahl
ut supra