No, it’s really tough to get kicked out of here. I think spamming is the only bootable offense. If you would like a good response, I would humbly suggest a multiple-paragraph format for future comments. It’s a bit tedious to keep one’s place while reading one large, monolithic paragraph.

evolution and creation is all about philosophy

Creationism, in some forms, is ontology, a branch of philosophy. But in the form used by most modern creationists, it is theology. Evolution, on the other hand, is science. Then again, all of science is really natural philosophy. So in some sense, they are both philosophies, but they are from separate areas of philosophy. Note though ‘creationism’ as understood by modern practitioners, is theology, and thus religious. Also, as you point out, some areas of philosophy are more useful then others.

why do so many scientists like the discovery guys who have big degrees and credentials study and do so many experiments and stuff if they are STUPID or IDIOTS;

Answer: $$$. Okay, that may not be completely fair. Some of them are afraid that ‘pure’ evolution is incompatible with their highly cherished religious beliefs. Thus promoting creationism is an intellectual defense mechanism. A another possibility is ignorance: they simply don’t know all the information. This doesn’t make them stupid or idiots, just ill-informed.

Evolutionary biologists are only hostile to creationism if people insist that it is science. It is not, it is theology (or ontology if treated correctly). If the proponents of intelligent design wanted to introduce ID (sans all religious and anti-evolution elements) as part of a high school philosophy class, scientists wouldn’t be nearly as upset if at all. In fact, I first heard of creationism outside of church in a college philosophy course in the form of the Teleological Argument.

Hello J,

Please take your time. I’m going to be very busy for a while (I’m buying a house / moving this holiday month), so my responses may take a while. If work remains slow, I’ll be able to, but I can’t count on that.

i’ve been waiting for your response for quite a while now. Thanks for not leaving the discussion because i think it has been really fruitful. I am a little busy at the moment and will have to do a bit more research before giving a (hopefully) good response.

I actually found a day to catch my breath at work, so I can finally reply. I am going to have to cede the point to you. My knowledge on the subject is from actually discussions I had with a relative who was reading “Who Wrote the Bible” by Richard E. Friedman, who definitely is an expert on the subject. I accept it because I consider this particular relative a trustworthy source. But, since the knowledge is second hand and you don’t know my relative, I don’t expect you, or anyone else to accept it. I tried to gain first-hand knowledge via the web, but I couldn’t locate any trustworthy sources, as you pointed out. I’ll have to read the book myself if I am to speak on this topic with any authority. It seems that you have more first-hand exposure to the subject and will thus cede the point to you; at least until I can further educate myself.

To move the discussion forward, I ask you to respond to what I wrote in my last post:

“…the dates of the Gospels’ authorship are the least of their problems. Even if we can establish that one of them was definitely penned before 70 CE, there is still no guarantee that they were written by an eye-witness or that it presents a historical account as opposed to a biased account. Indeed, the internal contradictions are more damning evidence. The ones I listed are only a small sample of all the contradictions that give us reason do doubt their historical accuracy.”

I’ll also list the contradictions again here for your convenience:

1. According to Matthew 2:1 and Luke 1:5, Jesus was born during the ‘days of Herod the king’, who died in 4 BCE. But according to Luke 2:1, his birth took place while Cyrenius was governor of Syria, a post which he took in 6 CE, 8 years after Herod’s death.

2. Matthew 2:14 has Jesus, Mary, and Joseph traveling to Egypt after Jesus’ birth. Luke 2:39 has them going back to Nazareth.

3. Matthew 3:7-11 has John the Baptist baptizing the Pharisees, Luke 7:29-30 says the Pharisees rejecting the offer of his baptism.

4. In Matthew 8:5-8, Capernaum asked Jesus directly to help his servant, in Luke 7:1-7 he sent ‘Elders of the Jews’ to ask Jesus to help his servant.

“Now who was this author we call Luke? He was clearly not an eyewitness to Jesus’s life. But we discover an important fact about him from the book of Acts. Beginning in the sixteenth chapter of Acts, when Paul reaches Troas in modern-day Turkey, the author suddenly starts using the first-person plural: “we set sail from Troas to Samothrace,” “we remained in Philippi some days,” “as we were going to the place of prayer,” etc. The most obvious explanation is that the author had joined Paul on his evangelistic tour of the Mediterranean cities. In chapter 21 he accompanies Paul back to Palestine and finally to Jerusalem. What this means is that the author of Luke-Acts was in fact in first hand contact with the eyewitnesses of Jesus’s life and ministry in Jerusalem. Sceptical critics have done back-flips to try to avoid this conclusion. They say that the use of the first-person plural in Acts should not be taken literally; it’s just a literary device which is common in ancient sea voyage stories. Never mind that many of the passages in Acts are not about Paul’s sea voyage, but take place on land! The more important point is that this theory, when you check it out, turns out to be sheer fantasy.{4} There just was no literary device of sea voyages in the first person plural–the whole thing has been shown to be a scholarly fiction! There is no avoiding the conclusion that Luke-Acts was written by a traveling companion of Paul who had the opportunity to interview eyewitnesses to Jesus’s life while in Jerusalem. Who were some of these eyewitnesses? Perhaps we can get some clue by subtracting from the Gospel of Luke everything found in the other gospels and seeing what is peculiar to Luke. What you discover is that many of Luke’s peculiar narratives are connected to women who followed Jesus: people like Joanna and Susanna, and significantly, Mary, Jesus’s mother.

Was the author reliable in getting the facts straight? The book of Acts enables us to answer that question decisively. The book of Acts overlaps significantly with secular history of the ancient world, and the historical accuracy of Acts is indisputable. This has recently been demonstrated anew by Colin Hemer, a classical scholar who turned to New Testament studies, in his book The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. {5}Hemer goes through the book of Acts with a fine-toothed comb, pulling out a wealth of historical knowledge, ranging from what would have been common knowledge down to details which only a local person would know. Again and again Luke’s accuracy is demonstrated: from the sailings of the Alexandrian corn fleet to the coastal terrain of the Mediterranean islands to the peculiar titles of local officials, Luke gets it right. According to Professor Sherwin-White, “For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming. Any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd.”{6} The judgement of Sir William Ramsay, the world-famous archaeologist, still stands: “Luke is a historian of the first rank . . . . This author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.”{7} Given Luke’s care and demonstrated reliability as well as his contact with eyewitnesses within the first generation after the events, this author is trustworthy.”

I am very apologetic that i have not been able to respond much, i have been very busy. I can’t post too much right not but hopefully, perhaps tomorrow, i can say more.

I’ll talk about Luke first. I’m not exacly sure where you get the idea that Luke did not write Luke. Some positive evidence for why Luke did not write Luke would be appreciated. I’m really not sure where you are getting these sources from. Joseph Alward? Who is this? I tried to look him up to find some kind of credentials or something about him but could not find anything. Most of his articles are just posts or blogs or something. There is no indication of his information being correct that i can see.

There are many things that he assumes and does not think all the way through. For example, vague things like this “However, the evidence below suggests that the Lukan author was not the follower of Paul, who died around 67 AD. ” I don’t really see where he gets this notion from or what the “evidence” is.

Further, “The author of Luke addresses the “most excellent” Theophilus. The earliest record of a “Theophilus” is Theophilus of Antioch who was an early Christian patriarch who wrote around 180-185 AD2.”

This is absolutely proposterous. Even you admit the gospels were written at about 70 AD. There is no evdience whatseover of it being written THAT late. Christianity was becoming a world religious at that time. That part about Theophilus is absolutely a crazy piece. It’s like saying my friend named bob in this book i read is the only bob in the world.

I haven’t heard about (2), it’s a good point and I’ll address it last. Your other two defenses, however, a have fundamental logical flaw. They are circular arguments: you assume what you are trying to prove.

Your first assumption is that Luke wrote the book of Luke. Obviously, if we knew that Luke wrote that book, it would have been written before 70 CE. Since scholars largely agree thatLuke was not the author, we cannot assume what you are trying to prove.

Your second assumption is that Jesus could prophesize, presumable because of his divinity, which is ultimately what you are trying to prove. Again, it is much more likely that the ‘prophecy’ was added by the author after the sacking of the temple with the conscious purpose of adding ‘evidence’ for the divinity of Jesus. Furthermore, there is evidence that Jesus was not divine. If Jesus were God, all of his prophecies would come to pass. Yet, the one he made in Matthew 12:28, and Mark 9:1 that did not come to pass. In those verses, Jesus predicts his return and the end of the world to happen within some of his listeners’ lifetimes. 2000 years later, they’re all dead and the world is still here.

Indeed, the very fact that Luke doesn’t mention this prophecy suggests that the author knew it did not come true. This would mean it was written after the deaths of Jesus’ contemporaries, including Paul. Furthermore, the author probably did not even know Paul personally. If he did, why would Paul be ignorant of many of the central aspects of Jesus’ life that Luke was, somehow privy to? Not knowing Paul personally would explain why Paul’s death was not mentioned.

Anyway, the dates of the Gospels’ authorship are the least of their problems. Even if we can establish that one of them was definitely penned before 70 CE, there is still no guarantee that they were written by an eye-witness or that it presents a historical account as opposed to a biased account. Indeed, the internal contradictions are more damning evidence. The ones I listed are only a small sample of all the contradictions that give us reason do doubt their historical accuracy.

Finally I have found time to post a little bit. Just to let you know, your arguments are very good.

First, on when the gospels were written. There are two very important reasons that we can believe the Gospels were written before 70 AD.

We know that Acts and Luke were both written by luke and this is the main place we should look for the dating of the Gospels. We know the other gospels predate Luke and Acts. So when we look at the writtings of Luke, there are two reasons we can believe Luke and Acts were written before 70AD and possibly 60 AD. Thus if thiis is true, the other gospels were written earlier and give validity to the eye-witness accounts.

(1) There is no mention of the sacking of Jerusalem, which is in 70 AD. Luke would certainly have mentioned this in Acts when you look at all the historical information he gave in Acts.

(2)More importantly, Luke mentions no mentions of Paul’s death, which occured in 64 Ad. Luke would certainly have mentioned this because he tells basically everything else of Paul’s life and the other apostles deaths.

–On the razing of the temple-
You commit a mistake here. You have a presupposition that a prophesy is untrue so you write if off. This is not a good arguments when stricly talking about the historical accuracy of the gospels. Your point actually assists mine. The reason: I just demonstrated that we can have good reason to believe that that Acts was written before 70 AD, thus Mark was certainly before this. So this means that Christ REALLY DID prophesy about the temple and he was right.

I will write a short statement on biblical inconsistencies a little later.

But here is quite a good article on historical evidence for jesus and gospels.

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/rediscover2.html