> Yes, I have
Sweet, then present your case. You said that resurrections have happened before. You mentioned Lazarus. Please show me that we have enough evidence to justify that resurrections have occurred. To be clear, the point of this isn't to talk about Jesus. I'm saying resurrections aren't even a thing we're aware happens. Other than this one disputed case, and I guess Lazarus for which we have almost nothing to go on, there doesn't seem to be much reason to believe resurrections happen.
> The evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is actually substantial, but for us 2000 years later, it's a cold case, so we have to look at it differently.
Yeah, we can't do anything about the evidence that they had back then. All we have is the evidence we have now.
> For Lazarus, we have no evidence except 1 account in 1 Gospel—virtually nothing to go on to confirm it.
Sounds pretty weak, right?
> As you did? What evidence did you give?
The 4 gospels, and how weak they are. Give me a summary of the evidence as you see it. Not the claims based on the evidence, but the evidence.
Describe the quality of evidence of the gospels and whatever else you want to bring up. What would this look like? Well, they were written decades after the event, we're not sure who wrote them, etc.
We have 4 texts. Describe how we got them. Like, are we super sure they're first hand accounts? That seems relevant. How long after the event were they written? Etc. Do you see what I'm asking for?
Don't say "the tomb was empty", say "we have texts that claim there was an empty tomb. We don't know who wrote them, we don't know this, we don't know that", but in your case I assume you might describe these things differently. I'm asking you to talk about the quality of the evidence that we have.
Is the question clear?
> The issue isn't someone else to blame, but rather can you rebut the claims?
actually, if you recall, we got here because you asked me to explain what I thought happened, and I said I don't know, that's not relevant, and you said "Of course it's relevant. How can you reject the resurrection if you have no case against it?". Then I pointed out that this isn't how it works. I gave the example of a defendant, we don't expect them to offer an alternative explanation in order to defend themselves. We don't say "if you want to prove your innocence then you need to go find the killer" or anything like that. Your response to that is "The issue isn't someone else to blame, but rather can you rebut the claims?".
Actually, that is the issue. The question at hand here is whether or not I need an alternate explanation in order to say believe in this explanation is unjustified. I do not. That's what we were talking about.
> That's correct. And I've given you evidence for my claims, but you've given me no evidence in reply, which leads me to the conclusion that you don't have enough evidence for your competing claim, which leads me to the conclusion that you've made a decision before examination of the evidence—the definition of bias.
What are you talking about? I haven't offered a competing claim. I have presented the evidence and it seems pretty weak. 4 gospels. That's it. I mean I'm open to there being more, I've asked you to present whatever evidence you want. But actually present evidence, not make claims based on that evidence.
> You must have been writing to someone else. You've given me no such summary, but I'd be glad to see it.
Here you go:
We've got 4 accounts, written decades after the event, they seem to plagiarize each other so its not even really 4 independent accounts, they conflict, we're not even sure who wrote them so we don't know if they're eye witness accounts anyway, the smallest scrap we have is from decades and decades after they were written.
That's my summary of the evidence. Oh, also, its not "decades and decades after they were written", its at least a hundred years. And its smaller than a cocktail napkin.
Do you dispute those points? Would you like to give a similar summary of the evidence? But notice what I'm doing. I'm actually talking about the things we have. We have text. And I describe the quality of those texts. That's what I'm asking you to do.
> You claim I've not given you anything ("Something you've yet to do"), but I did. Here it is again:
No no, I'm saying you're not answering the question I'm asking. That's not what I'm asking for. I'm asking for an evaluation of the actual evidence. Think about detectives. Instead of saying "we know the robber entered through the back door", which is what you're doing, I'm asking for "we found fingerprints of the robber on the back door door knob". The evidence, not the claims based on the evidence.