AN (copy to CED minus your personal info)
[Graphic: Blaise Pascal]
----- Original Message -----
From: AN
To: Stephen E. Jones
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 5:48 PM
Subject: Re: Where does Cyrenius fit into your harmonization of the Matthew & Luke nativity stories?
>Stephen,
>
>Barnett is a very reasonable historian from what you quote, but how does he deal with the strong possibility that Publius Sulpicius (not L.) Quirinius was governor of Galatia in 5-3BC when he was putting down the Homonadensians near Pisidian Antioch ? The governor of Syria played no role in this area.
>
>AN
As my last post pointed out, the Greek text of Luke 2:2 does not say that Quirinius (i.e.Publius Sulpicius Quirinius) was the Governor of Syria (it says "governing" in the original, not "Governor"). A further post in the pipeline (which will be part #3) will make that clearer.
I should have included what I usually write in my responses to private messages that I respond to on my blog, e.g. "Re: Would Jesus stoop to quotemining? #1":
"Please don't interpret this as an invitation to debate this issue-it isn't. As I have explained many times before: 1) it is my long-standing policy not to get involved in private discussions on creation/evolution/design issues; and 2) after more than a decade (1994-2005) of publicly debating evolutionists on Internet discussion groups, I closed down my own Internet discussion group in order to post to my blog and write my book "Problems of Evolution" (and more recently to take a ~1-year detour classify my ~10,000 online quotes into an `Evolution Quotes Book'). So this is almost certainly my first and last response to you."
The reason is that after 10+ years of debating `sceptics' (so-called) like yourself, I got absolutely nowhere. In the end I concluded that nothing I could say would make any difference to them, since they suffered from "invincible ignorance":
"There does remain, nonetheless, a cast of mind which seems peculiarly closed to evidence. When confronted with such a mind, one feels helpless, for no amount of evidence seems to be clinching. Frequently the facts are simply ignored or brushed aside as somehow deceptive, and the principles are reaffirmed in unshakable conviction. One seems confronted with what has been called `invincible ignorance.'" (Fearnside W.W. & Holther W.B., "Fallacy the Counterfeit of Argument," Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs NJ, 1959, 25th printing, p.113)
and I ceased wasting my time trying to convince the unconvincible.
Maybe you are the rare exception, and there is some evidence that I could supply (i.e. I can't arrange personal appearances of God, which all the `sceptics' I have debated, responded to my question, "what evidence would you accept?"!) that would convince you that Christianity is true (which it is). But I no longer have the time to find out.
As Jesus wisely observed, "If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets [i.e. their personal materialistic-naturalistic philosophy rules out in advance that the Bible is God's supernatural revelation to man], they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead":
Luke 16:19-31 (NIV) " 19 There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. 20At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores 21and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores. 22"The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. 23In hell, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. 24So he called to him, `Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.' 25"But Abraham replied, `Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. 26And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.' 27"He answered, `Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, 28for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.' 29"Abraham replied, `They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.' 30" `No, father Abraham,' he said, `but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.' 31"He said to him, `If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.' "
In the end if you are an atheist, Pascal's Wager applies between us, i.e. if I am right that Christianity is true you will eventually find out that I was right, but if you are right that atheism is true, neither of us will find out that you were right:
"But assuming, as most atheists do, that in an atheistic world death is the end of any human's existence, there will at best be only a finite number of benefits, or moments of benefit, to be derived from the wager against God, and this is significant. For when we consider the benefits to be derived from the Christian wager if it turns out to be right, we find something very different. The promise of eternal life, everlasting blissful communion with God and with those other fellow creatures who love God, is at the heart of the Christian faith. If Christianity turns out to be true, then anyone who has sincerely lived in a Christian way, relating himself to God as the Christian faith instructs, will find that he has been issued into a qualitatively superior form of life, consonant with the deepest truths about ultimate reality, a form of life that will be enjoyed, literally, forever. If the Christian wager proves to be right, will the Christian enjoy the experience of satisfaction to be derived from finding out decisively that he is right? Even such staunch critics as Norwood Russell Hanson seem to acknowledge that the answer is `Yes.' A range of experiences can easily be imagined that would preclude any reasonable doubts about what the outcome is if the Christian God does exist. So the Christian can have the satisfaction of finding that he was right. Moreover, if he loses the bet over whether there is a God, he will not be forced to face his error. For if there is no God and no existence beyond the moment of death, he can never have an experience beyond death that will disappoint. And if we were right in what we said about the atheist's inability on either side of the grave to enjoy an experience of finding out decisively that he is right, the same points will apply to the religious wagerer's finding out that he himself has been wrong. The disappointment of a decisive disproof is not to be dreaded. For the religious wager, it cannot materialize. Here we have an interesting asymmetry, an interesting difference, between the two wagers. In fact we may even have a symmetrical asymmetry. The Christian wagerer can experience the profound satisfaction of discovering for sure that he was right, and he cannot experience the terrible disappointment of finding out for certain that he was wrong. The atheist, on the contrary, cannot experience any satisfaction from a discovery that he was right, and, moreover, can, according to the claims of the alternative, Christian theology, experience the terrible regret of discovering that he was wrong - that he lived his life in ignorance and disregard of the deepest truths of reality. Christian theology speaks of judgment, and it speaks of worse. Whatever is meant, it is plausible to suppose that it includes at least this sort of realization. So, in an important sense, we can say that for atheism there is a final no-satisfaction guarantee, whereas for theism, there is a final no-dissatisfaction guarantee. ... Even if we are unable to quantify more precisely the various factors to be considered in this wager, we can see what the outcome will be. Atheism brings with it, at best, only a finite expectation, whereas Christian theism carries with it an infinite Expected Value. No disparity could possibly be greater. Therefore, says Pascal, a rational gambler will bet on God." (Morris, T.V., "Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life," Eerdmans: Grand Rapids MI, 1992, pp.121-122. Emphasis original).
So goodbye and please don't send me any more private messages. Thanks. If you persist (as I suspect you might, since just as I was about to send this, you peppered me with yet another post:
----- Original Message -----
From: AN
To: Stephen E. Jones
Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 7:56 PM
Subject: Re: Where does Cyrenius fit into your harmonization of the Matthew & Luke nativity stories?
>Stephen,
>
>Cappadocia became a Roman province in AD17 under Tiberius !
>
>AN
without waiting to read my response to your last one), I will set my Mailwasher to bounce your posts back unread.
[...]
Stephen E. Jones, BSc (Biol)
`Evolution Quotes Book'
Posts
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