3 ms·
Why not either? For both the Christian and the Atheist, honest scholarship is inseparable from their beliefs. It's hard to imagine either changing their beliefs
by amatthew 8y ago
Why not either? For both the Christian and the Atheist, honest scholarship is inseparable from their beliefs. It's hard to imagine either changing their beliefs from the evidence they could find.
The consequences of being able to prove with certainty either that Jesus existed and is who Christians claim him to be, or did not exist or was not divine would have tremendous consequences on the lives of hundreds of millions people who do not ascribe to the proven belief.
They could say "I am intellectually honest and will change my beliefs depending on the evidence," but we both know that 1. Concrete evidence strong enough to convince someone to change their beliefs, beyond what is already known, likely does not exist. And 2. Their current beliefs already match their known evidence so any additional information is unlikely to radically change their beliefs, only be accounted for and integrated into their current belief system.
I'm not trying to say all scholarship is biased or we shouldn't believe anything. In all likelihood, most people are not deliberately lying or falsifying anything.
What does that mean about which scholarship to trust? I have no idea.
- jkaplowitz 8y agoHere's the difference: Christians (ignoring some defunct or very rare forms) have it as an article of faith that Jesus was a real historical human who was also divine. Atheists would deny that Jesus or anyone else was God, but there is nothing about atheism that is opposed to duly considering possibly trustworthy evidence that the Jesus whom Christians believe on faith was/is God may have indeed existed as a real historical human. At the same time, unlike (for example) Muslims who believe Jesus was a human prophet but not himself divine, atheists don't have any specific belief about Jesus's human historical reality at all. If the evidence shows that he was made up by combining bits of multiple people's teachings, atheism is unaffected. Therefore, an atheist's writing about this question is, all things being equal, more likely to neutrally consider all the available the secular observable facts about the question, without influence from religious motivations, than a Christian's. However, that italicized precondition is usually false. Real writers vary in their approach to scientific and historical rigor, being imperfect humans themselves and not abstractions. So an individual Christian could well be a more trustworthy source on this than an individual atheist, or vice versa.
- 1over137 8y agoamatthew: by definition, being Christian means one believes Jesus existed. How does one objectively consider the non-existence of Jesus if one has already arrived at a conclusion? That's some serious cognitive dissonance.
- amatthew 8y agoYeah, I agree with you there. I was trying to make a point closer to what jkaplowitz above mentioned in their last three paragraphs.