I want to understand your correctly, so I will go paragraph by paragraph.
Regarding your summary, yes you have articulated my views well. Of the options, I think you can reasonably know that Jesus was baptised by John the Baptist, and that he was executed by the Romans, so of course he was indeed born in the first place!
There is no better news than that Jesus, the literal Son of God, became a man so as to pay the penalty for man's waywardness so that man could be restored to friendship with his creator. There is no story like it. It goes against so much of what our natural minds think that it bears a mark of originality and authenticity. True, some myths talk of gods who sacrifice themselves on mankind's behalf, but these myths invariably show the sacrificial god as doing so in opposition to a higher power, for which he suffers the penalty of death for his own rebelliousness. In Jesus' case, he colluded with God in a plan to become a man himself so that he could suffer man's penalty, not his own, so that God could remain truly just in forgiving the wrongdoing of mankind (which deserved and required punishment), since the price for man's wrongdoing was fully paid.
You will understand me not being very impressed with this story, given that it's not reasonable to say there was ever a time of only two humans, or indeed talking snakes. The whole proposition strikes me as immoral.
B. If you doubt eyewitness testimony, ... I don't know what to say. How can you believe anything: a news report, the findings of a court which are based on testimony, a scientific report which is based on testimony? Even scientific data is offered by testimony and should be confirmed by repeatable experiments whose findings are also presented by way of testimony. Thus, scientific understanding is based on the testimony of multiple witnesses. The facts of Jesus' death and resurrection are confirmed by multiple eyewitnesses, more than can confirm the existence of Homer, Socrates or, probably, Confucius. I would recommend a read of "Evidence that demands a verdict" by Josh McDowell for a fuller response.
The difficulty is that we don't have any eyewitness testimony. If anyone saw Jesus and wrote about it then that writing remains missing today. I've not studied Confucius much but I agree with the problem of historicity and I think it is unlikely that Homer and Socrates were real people. But Jesus was, and the synoptic gospels have many hallmarks of historical fiction: Jesus was the guy they had in mind when writing, but the stories are mostly made up to satisfy prophecy (and so perhaps justify political claims).
C. I don't know where you stand on the topic of evolution, but I have much less trouble believing that God, who designed DNA in the first place, could impregnate a virgin, than to believe that the unimaginably complex processes of life could have formed themselves accidentally no matter how long a time period you use--and the clock is ticking and it is becoming ever clearer that the past did not stretch out indefinitely and was shorter than would even reasonably allow for such "accidents" to occur. The theory of spontaneous generation was disproved by Pasteur at about the same time that Darwin was formulating his hypotheses. Why people did not connect the dots, I have no idea. But the idea of life arising from mud puddles persisted. Of course, in fairness, they knew nothing of the complexity of DNA replication.
Well you are clearly an articulate person, and serious about your arguments, so I would answer your recommendation of Mere Christianity with one of my own: beg borrow steal? a copy of
The Blind Watchmaker, and allow Richard Dawkins to make his case for how random mutations, selected by the realities of living in a natural environment, actually does provide the ratchet mechanism that can build complexity. We are used to complex organisation breaking down all the time if left to itself without our input, but look at mountains: they grow to spectacular heights through natural tectonic collisions, even though most of the time we see stuff not rising, but naturally falling under gravity. The Himalayas are 'only' a few tens of millions of years old, but natural selection has had a hundred times longer at ratcheting-up the complexity of life. I know Dawkins is the arch atheist, but evolution has been his day job for a long time now. Chapter two, which describes the technology that bats use to navigate, is gripping reading for the curious.
As we understand more about DNA, and it's continuing witness among us, we are gradually seeing confirmation of biblical accounts. At the moment, DNA origins seem to agree with the general part of the world the Bible described: i.e. the Middle East and North East Africa. I don't doubt that unbiased further investigation will produce further confirmation of biblical accounts. Of course, finding unbiased investigators who are not pushing their own agenda are always rare.
The origins of DNA itself is a large problem. Really it isn't yet known how DNA and RNA came to be the 'molecules of life'. They certainly didn't just pop up right at the start, they clearly took a long time to emerge and become the digital coding system for all life. You might be referring to the origins of modern humans, which as you suggest is in East Africa.
But if there were never only two people, how can you account for the appearance of multiple people at once? Did they arise simultaneously at different places? Then how could they interbreed? Did they come by spacecraft? Then I have the same question, just a different locale.
The problem actually is how you name things! We originated as a whole population of hominids that were constantly changing as a population, and so you just have to pick a point in that constant change and call one side of it 'homo erectus' and the other side of it 'homo sapiens', us. Where you place the point is a bit arbitrary. And that same idea applies backwards and backwards over all that constant change. A nice example is 'ring species', worth a look on Wikipedia. If you have made it down to just two humans, regardless of how much frantic breeding you might do, your species is extinct. Anyway, just imagine how uncomfortable 'Adam and Eve' would have been to have to be infected with every parasite that lives only on humans!
2. Without reference to a higher authority it is impossible to have concepts of right or wrong, good or evil. C. S. Lewis dealt with this question much better than I can here. But without an external reference point, what I consider good could be bad to you and vice versa. There would also be no way to decide which opinion is better, yet both cannot be equally valid unless we are never to have contact. The moment we interact, our differing ideas of morality will inevitably cause conflict and conflict will likely harm one or both of us.
Within ourselves, I believe we all realize at some level that we have not always acted as we should, often by way of unexamined responses to circumstances or people. Often we have learned these responses from interaction with other people or by observation of other people. This is one vector for the transmission of sin from generation to generation.
You will appreciate that I don't know what you mean by the word sin. But here's something interesting: I know what you mean by right and wrong. And I think the situation you describe for the case there is no 'higher authority' is pretty much what we see on earth today. But since we are all the same species with the same ancestry, our shared morality comes from our shared DNA, shaped by those whose DNA gave them the best traits for thriving in a tribal community, and so those are the traits that exist in the human population today.
From another angle, we are discovering that some choices we make affect our DNA. These changes will then be passed on to our offspring. So, here is another vector for how sin or it's consequences can be passed from generation to generation.
You would have to say what you mean by sin, and perhaps give a specific example for me to understand what you mean here.
A. How can you decide whether I am decent or not without a point of reference? What defines decency?
Well, how can I know you are decent without knowing you personally, or having discussed much of anything with you online? It is a matter of probability: the vast majority of people are decent so it's very likely you are too. As for decent, I'll grant you it's not well-defined, but let's say it means qualities shown by civil discourse and intentions of goodwill towards other people, and not the opposites.
If I make my own decisions about what is right and wrong, we end up with the problem I described above.
Not if we have a shared conscious coded in DNA, and also a tendency to work together for the common good because that is the best way for our species to thrive, and our genes to be passed on (after all the genes that make people good at getting on with others will be the successful ones in a social species).
B. It seems extremely odd that ancient mankind all over the world believed in some form of higher power. Only recently, historically speaking, has the concept of God been rejected. And yet we, in our enlightenment, cannot figure out how those ancient idiots could have erected such edifices as the walls of Cuzco, all our engineering expertise and machinery notwithstanding. Either the ancients had capable minds, like our own, or our minds have evolved beyond theirs. Then, why can we not, with our evolved minds, understand how they accomplished such building feats? All our machines cannot hope to lift such massive blocks of stone, much less fit them so precisely. I believe we vastly underestimate the understanding of the ancients, and our hubris in this is to our detriment.
Are you saying that the ability to do engineering is not consistent with believing in gods? It is true that on average atheists have at least a 5-point IQ advantage over religious believers, but of course there are many very intelligent people who have god belief. I think there are all sorts of reasons why this is, and it is a very interesting question to study why people believe things that are
prima facie absurd.
Stuart
