Okay, so I am having this discussion in the comments section of a previous post about the Virgin Birth of Christ with "Singring," one of our resident skeptics (we keep a few here as pets). Now when you utter the expression "Virgin Birth" to a skeptic, they react like a vampire who has been shown a cross: they half cover their face with their red cape, cringe, foam at the mouth, and scowl, saying, "I vill refute zis vile beleef!"
Singring, who worships at the altar of empirical science, is very practiced at this routine.
In any case, this being the Advent season and all, I thought the discussion relevant enough to bring out on the main page for discussion. I thought we could address each particular topic, one at a time. I might even split up the posts to dedicate one to each topic to make it a little more manageable.
The discussion started when Singring said, "So are you saying that you, as a Christian, believe in the virgin birth? You believe that a woman who never had sex was impregnated miraculously by God?"
To which I answered: "Precisely," this belief having been a fundamental part of the Christian Creed since, oh, I don't know, about the 4th century. But this belief, it turns out, is at odds with the secular creed, which proclaims ".. and was NOT incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, since we believe, on the basis of a metaphysical principle which we deny having, that miracles cannot happen ..."
Singring, who worships at the altar of empirical science, is very practiced at this routine.
In any case, this being the Advent season and all, I thought the discussion relevant enough to bring out on the main page for discussion. I thought we could address each particular topic, one at a time. I might even split up the posts to dedicate one to each topic to make it a little more manageable.
The discussion started when Singring said, "So are you saying that you, as a Christian, believe in the virgin birth? You believe that a woman who never had sex was impregnated miraculously by God?"
To which I answered: "Precisely," this belief having been a fundamental part of the Christian Creed since, oh, I don't know, about the 4th century. But this belief, it turns out, is at odds with the secular creed, which proclaims ".. and was NOT incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, since we believe, on the basis of a metaphysical principle which we deny having, that miracles cannot happen ..."
And at this point of course, Singring went into his vampire routine.
Now he has come forth with is first set of actual arguments, which, to give him credit, he usually does after the first shock of hearing somebody actually say that they believe something that people, not sharing his metaphysical presuppositions, have, in fact, believed for thousands of years (and which hundreds of millions, if not billions, still do today).
If you want to see all his arguments, you can go to the comments section of the post. But we'll take them all up eventually. But for the time being lets address his first one. Here it is:
The documents we have containing this testimony (empirical evidence) clearly indicate that the authors lived dozens of years after the death of Jesus and did not even speak his language. They were Greeks and certainly were not direct eye-witnesses to the events. It is highly doubtful they even had contact with any actual eye-witnesses.It would be interesting to apply this to all historical documents to see what we get. In fact, one wonders how many historical events we currently take for granted that we will now have to call into question, since many (if not most) are based on writings written by people who lived not only dozens of years after the events they relate, but hundreds--and didn't witness the events they relate and didn't even have contact with any witnesses--not to mention not speaking the language they speak.
As it happens, the New Testament documents have less of a problem in these areas than just about any other ancient documents. The number of manuscripts, their historical proximity to the events--and the access to witnesses is better than just about any document of ancient history.
If we can't accept the reliability of the New Testament documents, then we're going to have to dump most of what we know about the ancient world.
Go Singring.
