Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence! 

The fallacy lies in the subjective nature of the word extraordinary to the individual. One might fight the beauty of Mount Rushmore to be extraordinary, while another views it as an unimpressive tribute to a few dead presidents. 

If someone for instance thought it was an extraordinary claim that humans built the pyramids, they may apply a higher demand of proof to overcome their belief in an advanced alien civilization coming to aid ancient man, whom they believe could not possibly achieve what they deem an impossible structure for humanity to accomplish on their own. 

What about the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth? Don't the majority of dead people stay dead? Are we being asked to believe that out of all the people who remain in their grave we are just supposed to accept that the laws of nature were violated for the same of this one Man? 

If God exists however, does it seem extraordinary that the Creator of the laws of nature could violate those laws of nature if He desires? Belief in God is grounded in logical reasoning and if thus rational and so with the assumption of a God powerful enough to bring the universe into existence, it does not seem extraordinary then that the same God would have no problem bringing a dead man back to life. 

Supposing He did bring Jesus of Nazareth back to life from the dead, what kind of evidence do you suppose we should expect? 

Imagine a man dying in front of you, in a third world country in a culture that does not immediately dispose of the corpses for two days and by the end of the first day, the smell and signs of death are evident to everyone as they prepare for the ritual they have done a thousand times over, experts in knowing what death is. Two days in, as they prepare the final burial ritual he suddenly springs back to life before your eyes, to the amazement of you and everyone in the village as he tells an amazing tale of the afterlife. 

Now whether his tale is a result of electrical activity in his brain making sense of his experience from an unknown phenomena which science can not explain or his tale is true is debatable, but the evidence that would convince you of this extraordinary claim is simply not very extraordinary and in fact based on the ordinary evidence of information received by your senses and the confirmation of your fellow eye witnessness. 

What evidence would be left behind if such an event happened 2,000 years ago? Nothing more than some written accounts that happened to survive the passage of time, with perhaps some people mocking the claim… Which is precisely what we see in history for Jesus of Nazareth, evidence we would expect if a Man died in front of a group of people and appeared alive to that same group. 

So the extraordinary claim only would require ordinary evidence and thus the fallacy is shown, but I invite the skeptic to consider one final thought. 

Nothing always produces nothing and quantum fluctuations in a vacuum are defined as something, that is, the quantum vacuum is a thing. 

Nothing can simply be defined as “no thing” and thus you do not believe the claim the universe came from nothing iti be an extraordinary claim, but I on the other hand find such a claim extraordinary! 

A universe from nothing? I demand evidence that nothing can produce anything at all! 

All known experience shows us that something can not come from nothing and yet you are asking me in this one particular case to grant an exception to the universe, believing that at one point the normal laws of physics do not apply and universes can spring into existence without a cause? The Leibniz cosmological argument would be well studied for your potential objections. 

If you claim the Theist is unreasonable for believing the laws of nature were suspended in the case of Jesus of Nazareth, then you are equally unreasonable for believing that suspended laws of physics can bring about a universe, a pretty extraordinary claim that by your own shifting of the goal post, requires extraordinary evidence. 

The reality is much more simple. 

Claims simply require sufficient evidence and we have exactly what we should expect if a Man named Jesus, claiming to be God, died 2,000 years ago and rose from the dead. History screams with sufficient evidence, the historical reality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the Son of God. 

Atheistic Moral Frameworks fail philisophically to critique God

Imagine a society of sentient ant-like beings on a distant world in a galaxy beyond our reach. Evolutionarily, they developed the sense that the only ethical way to kill their food, is for the organism they captured to be facing to the left, while two of the insectoids stab it in the most “merciful” key places. Imagine another society of these creatures of a slightly different variation who believe they exact same places should be stabbed, however, the organism must be placed to the right instead. These two cultures of insectoids have debates on the moral ethical practices of his best to prepare their food, based on the moral intuitions they developed over millions of years. 

At one point in their past, a common ancestor decided to split pathways, one going to the left of a river and the other to the right and found a food source that tended to gravitate towards the side of the river. As a result, brain mechanisms developed that compelled these organisms to stay towards a particular bend of the river and a sense of danger for departing too far to the opposite direction. Eventually, as structures of planning and future reasoning developed, dads that decided to venture too far off from the side of the river were considered immoral for not providing a stable future for their children by staying close to the river. 

Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will—or in the metaphorical roots of evolution or any other part of the framework of the Universe. In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Ethics is produced by evolution but is not justified by it because, like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance.…Unlike Macbeth’s dagger, ethics is a shared illusion of the human race.

Michael Ruse and Edward O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Ethics,” in Philosophy of Biology, ed. Michael Ruse (New York: Macmillan, 198

Consider now serial killers such as Albert Fish who would kill children and eat their body parts. 

If you are anything like I am, your moral intuitions revolt at such an individual and seek nothing more than to put a man as evil as this behind bars due to the injustice and cruelty he afflicted on innocent children, but this begs the question in the first premise. 

Is our moral aversion based on biologically ingrained adaptations alone? My intuition tells me that such acts are unspeakable and objectively evil, that some things must never been done, where there are no justifications for such a behavior, but is this simply because somewhere in my evolutionary past, it was ingrained that children equal survival which causes my sense to flare up? 

What if however a different set of events directed the course of humanities evolutionary history and we all involved the instincts of Albert Fish? 

Would it still be wrong? 

If, for instance, to take an extreme case, men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, or any other social animal, would in our supposed case gain, as it appears to me, some feeling of right and wrong, or a conscience.

Charles Darwin Descent of Man

The question then becomes one of moral intuition and those moral intuitions could have been different, then how would it be possible to prove the atheists moral intuition in regards to God's character (that He is a moral monster) is correct, when if it were shaped differently, would praise Him as morally virtuous? 

Thus it seems the Theist and Atheist debate is reduced to which side of the river your ancestors developed on like our imaginary insectoids. Ifour moral intuition then is a result of a series of evolutionary adaptations for survival, it can not be an objective ground for discerning the moral correctness of actions. 

The point isn't to say there could not be an Objective morality, but rather that our subjective intuitions are not a viable grounds to judge moral actions as they were designed for survival and not detecting right or wrong. 

The Skeptical Case for the Resurrection

The Skeptical Case for The Resurrection of Jesus from Nazareth 

Preface:

I want to warn anyone reading this book that what I am going to present, may challenge those who have faith and some of my arguments, taken by skeptics to use against believers in attempts to shake their religious convictions. If you are not prepared to question the foundations of your beliefs, my writings are not for you as it is not my desire for you to abandon Christianity, however I do hope if you choose to continue you will read until the end. My purpose in writing this is for a very specific type of mind, one that is constantly questioning what they think about the world around them, that needs a satisfactory answer to the problems that plague their mind, whose need to understand the world around them is insatiable and to whom surface level answers are never enough, as they seek to reduce everything to its constituent parts. If this is you, then I invite you to continue on as we attempt to answer if we should take Jesus of Nazareth seriously. I will be offering naturalistic explanations for spiritual phenomena found in the gospels, through the lens of modern findings in neuroscience (to the best of my ability as a non-expert), that may cast doubt on the reality of religious experience. I want to point out that I do understand the limitations of my educational background and I make no pretensions to be anything other than what I truly am. I will undoubtedly rely on the experts at various points throughout this endeavor, however I believe my strength will be my relatability to anyone who is deeply interested in this question.  Those who constantly weed through the arguments, hearing out two well thought out cases from both sides of the debate and working through whom they believe to be most convincing while constructing arguments of their own will certainly be able to find some enjoyment thinking through the issues with me. 

Imagine a scenario where you have a brain tumor and two well respected neurosurgeons in their field, offer very two very different approaches for your treatment. It would ultimately be up to you to decide which treatment is best for you, despite your limited knowledge on the topic (assuming you are not a neurosurgeon of course) as you think through the arguments presented by minds more knowledgeable than you are. My perspective on writing this book will be of the patient or of the audience member coming home after watching a William Lane Craig and Bart Erhman debate to think through the arguments. I take the role of the friend helping you work through which surgery is best or the person sitting next to you in the debate, in the after discussion telling you who I thought was more  and interested in your pushback as we search for the truth together. I will criticize both sides in an attempt to arrive at the truth of the question, “Did God Raise Jesus of Nazareth from the Dead?” It is my joy to have you be apart of this journey .