You might want to look into the Dead Sea Scrolls. At least one book of the OT is present (Isaiah, as it happens, the book most frequently cited as containing prophetic Christian material), 100% consistent with current versions, and about 150 years prior to Christ. For what it is worth.

That's nice. But it ain't the bible that so many christians cherish as their book of choice to follow.

Well, actually all Christians that I know of have Isaiah in the Old Testament. The point is that we have physical evidence that Isaiah existed centuries before the time of Jesus and Isaiah’s prophecies of Jesus are some of the most amazing and cherished among Christians. The “Dead Sea Scrolls” refers to thousands of manuscripts or portions of them that we discovered in the mid-20th century. They are the remains of a library belonging to a first-century Jewish sect that lived in the deserts by the Dead Sea. Much of what was found there was copies of Old Testament books of the Bible.

I'm going to address a few of your specifics here, as I am a legitimate actual scientist. I am a psychological researcher who abides by the scientific method, and so sound scientific reasoning is something that, yes, I have a great deal of faith in. That does not undermine it's legitimacy. Scientific research, combined with my faith in it's methods and results add to my assertions. You have faith alone, no scientific support. Point one for science.

Scientology is a self-help movement that thrives because of its secretiveness and claims of success. My guess is that it will die off when it ceases to be a fad among the Hollywood types.

I sure hope so. Many religions come and go, and few have enjoyed the fellowship of Christianity, but that does not mean that Christianity is the one true religion. That's a logical fallacy. Just because many agree, doesn't make it so. Many people believe that if you shave your hair, it will grow back thicker and darker. That is patently false. Thanks to physics, it puts across the perception of being thicker and darker, but it is not actually so. I would be happy to elaborate, but that is a discussion for another time.

Concerning Jesus, I’m not sure how you produce a resurrection of yourself after a Roman crucifixion.

Neither am I. I'm also not inclined to take the word of a book published long ago without any historical support aside from it's own text and other canonized texts as fact. How do I know that he was actually a)real, b)crucified, and c)risen?

First, you live your life each day by “faith” in countless ways. Even your trust in science is largely based on faith

Agreed. But it's not faith alone. It's faith and the results that come from experimentation.

unless you are a professional scientist who has experimentally “proven” every conclusion you accept

I am a professional scientist, but I must say that I am disappointed in any professional scientists you have met if they ever use the word "prove." We do not, and cannot prove anything for exactly the reasons you've outlined-the faith in our methods of measurement may be misplaced. We cannot be sure our methods are reliable and valid, and so we do not prove. We show, we provide support, but we never prove. Science is an iterative process which results in supporting literature which leads us to ultimately provide an assertion. One which can be revoked when new evidence suggests we are wrong. This is why the "an egg is good for you, an egg is bad for you" debate rages on. We cannot prove, only show.

This is why I am agnostic, not an atheist. In my mind, absolutism is folly in either direction. I am more inclined to believe the preponderance of evidence which suggests that there is no god, but a scientist to the core, I refuse to outright state that it is impossible. Improbable, yes. Impossible, no.

If you realize that human life is largely an exercise in faith and if you believe in God, miracles are quite possible.

That's one heck of an assumption of fact. And no, I don't. So sadly, I guess a miracle will never materialize for me. Oh well.

If you came to believe in God you might find the evidence quite attractive.

I did once. It was the attraction of science and logic which led me away from it. I wanted to believe so badly, I wanted it to be true. Ultimately, my logic prevailed- and I am much happier for it.

You lump all claims of miracle into the same category but you would not do that for science. There have been plenty of failures of science as well as hoaxes in the name of science. That doesn’t destroy your general confidence in it, however. I believe God can do miracles. I look at claims of miracles to weed out the good from the bad. Your “theory” doesn’t allow you to take this objective approach.

Here you seem to be making the incorrect assumption that I am an atheist. Indeed, I am not. As I have stated throughout my argument, I am agnostic. Therefore, I acknowledge that there may be a god. Truly, I do believe it is possible. I just highly doubt it because of the lack of proof. And no, the failures of science do not diminish my faith in the scientific method. If anything, it strengthens it. For something to be falsifiable, for something to be testable, that means we can answer some questions. Philosophy, religion, psychoanalysis (the early Freudian stuff)- all those are experiments for the mind, not truly testable theories. In the search of truth, if we had no failures, I would have no trust in the findings. Null results are valuable in their own right, because they show us that one path is closed, but we can test all the other paths too. Religion does not allow for such awesomeness.

Please do not take this as a personal attack on your religion. Religion does a good many things for a good many people. It also does ill. So long as you act responsibly with your religion, and do not do harm to people who believe differently than you, then I have no quarrels with your beliefs.

This is the perfect example of the elitist attitude that Christians have.

Care to explain your opinion?

I'm going to address a few of your specifics here, as I am a legitimate actual scientist. I am a psychological researcher who abides by the scientific method, and so sound scientific reasoning is something that, yes, I have a great deal of faith in. That does not undermine it's legitimacy. Scientific research, combined with my faith in it's methods and results add to my assertions. You have faith alone, no scientific support. Point one for science.

Scientology is a self-help movement that thrives because of its secretiveness and claims of success. My guess is that it will die off when it ceases to be a fad among the Hollywood types.

I sure hope so. Many religions come and go, and few have enjoyed the fellowship of Christianity, but that does not mean that Christianity is the one true religion. That's a logical fallacy. Just because many agree, doesn't make it so. Many people believe that if you shave your hair, it will grow back thicker and darker. That is patently false. Thanks to physics, it puts across the perception of being thicker and darker, but it is not actually so. I would be happy to elaborate, but that is a discussion for another time.

Concerning Jesus, I’m not sure how you produce a resurrection of yourself after a Roman crucifixion.

Neither am I. I'm also not inclined to take the word of a book published long ago without any historical support aside from it's own text and other canonized texts as fact. How do I know that he was actually a)real, b)crucified, and c)risen?

First, you live your life each day by “faith” in countless ways. Even your trust in science is largely based on faith

Agreed. But it's not faith alone. It's faith and the results that come from experimentation.

unless you are a professional scientist who has experimentally “proven” every conclusion you accept

I am a professional scientist, but I must say that I am disappointed in any professional scientists you have met if they ever use the word "prove." We do not, and cannot prove anything for exactly the reasons you've outlined-the faith in our methods of measurement may be misplaced. We cannot be sure our methods are reliable and valid, and so we do not prove. We show, we provide support, but we never prove. Science is an iterative process which results in supporting literature which leads us to ultimately provide an assertion. One which can be revoked when new evidence suggests we are wrong. This is why the "an egg is good for you, an egg is bad for you" debate rages on. We cannot prove, only show.

This is why I am agnostic, not an atheist. In my mind, absolutism is folly in either direction. I am more inclined to believe the preponderance of evidence which suggests that there is no god, but a scientist to the core, I refuse to outright state that it is impossible. Improbable, yes. Impossible, no.

If you realize that human life is largely an exercise in faith and if you believe in God, miracles are quite possible.

That's one heck of an assumption of fact. And no, I don't. So sadly, I guess a miracle will never materialize for me. Oh well.

If you came to believe in God you might find the evidence quite attractive.

I did once. It was the attraction of science and logic which led me away from it. I wanted to believe so badly, I wanted it to be true. Ultimately, my logic prevailed- and I am much happier for it.

You lump all claims of miracle into the same category but you would not do that for science. There have been plenty of failures of science as well as hoaxes in the name of science. That doesn’t destroy your general confidence in it, however. I believe God can do miracles. I look at claims of miracles to weed out the good from the bad. Your “theory” doesn’t allow you to take this objective approach.

Here you seem to be making the incorrect assumption that I am an atheist. Indeed, I am not. As I have stated throughout my argument, I am agnostic. Therefore, I acknowledge that there may be a god. Truly, I do believe it is possible. I just highly doubt it because of the lack of proof. And no, the failures of science do not diminish my faith in the scientific method. If anything, it strengthens it. For something to be falsifiable, for something to be testable, that means we can answer some questions. Philosophy, religion, psychoanalysis (the early Freudian stuff)- all those are experiments for the mind, not truly testable theories. In the search of truth, if we had no failures, I would have no trust in the findings. Null results are valuable in their own right, because they show us that one path is closed, but we can test all the other paths too. Religion does not allow for such awesomeness.

Please do not take this as a personal attack on your religion. Religion does a good many things for a good many people. It also does ill. So long as you act responsibly with your religion, and do not do harm to people who believe differently than you, then I have no quarrels with your beliefs.

Thank you for your comments. Here are a few replies.

1. I never made the argument that Christianity is the only true religion because it has endured and many people like it. There may be other things that lead me to the conclusion that Christianity is, as we like to say, the “fullness of God’s revealed truth” in this world. As a Catholic, I certainly acknowledge that other religions have various “truths”; indeed, all people are able to access many things that are true by examining the world of their experience as well as their own interior conscious lives.

2.I know Jesus actually existed, was crucified and rose again using the standard criteria of historical investigation. If you ask how we know any event of the past really happened we would go through the normal ways that a valid memory of the past survives into the present. Very few serious historians that I know of find it credible to question the fact of Jesus and his death. Some argue that the resurrection is a “trans-historical” event since, if it happened, it could not be investigated using the normal criteria of historical research. On the other hand, I think the historical sources argue solidly for the conclusion that the “footprints” of the resurrection are deeply imprinted on history. Christianity is a historical effect of the claim of the resurrection. I recommend N. T. Wright’s book, “The Resurrection of the Son of God.” It is a very thorough discussion of the resurrection from a critical-historical perspective.

3.Christian faith also involves “experimentation.” It is largely of a different sort that the empirical/hard sciences since we are dealing with a world-view/framework choice. The better analogy for religious faith is interpersonal human experience since we are dealing with a kind of life-commitment, something science does not require of those who experiment. We may be able to draw general conclusions about the structures of human experience with respect to religious experience by cross-cultural and cross-historical analysis but we certainly can’t treat religious faith like we can the behavior of a molecule.

4.I appreciate your admission that “science does not prove.” I’m sure we could quibble about terminology and semantics but I think I see your point. I do disagree with your claim that the evidence supports the conclusion there is no God. If you begin to find an answer to that question with a Procrustean “grid,” of course you will not find God. For instance, if you will only accept a “quantitative” solution to a problem, you will obviously dismiss qualitative features of reality (as in the current mind-body debate in respect to “qualia”). If one begins to explore the question of God with an openness to a positive answer, I think there are profound reasons to believe in God.

5.Regarding your autobiographical description of your experience, there are plenty of others who went a very different path. I’ve made it a habit to read after people on different sides of this question and I find it increasingly obvious that it is not the scientific “evidence” that ultimately directs a person to a conclusion on God but a more fundamental, more metaphysical (in the classical philosophical sense) set of considerations.

6.Concerning the “testability” of religious claims and those of science, I do think religious claims are testable. In fact, history has a pretty large “trash dump” of tried and failed religions. The test will largely be one of coherence and explanatory power. Since religious systems are comprehensive of everything (at least the “great” ones), you cannot stand outside the system in order to judge its truth-value. You have to judge the religious system by its power to explain from within. My main point in my earlier remarks was that science operates based on a huge set of assumptions that cannot be demonstrated from within science. These include (as already indicated), the law of non-contradiction, logical laws (validity of inductive and deductive logic), validity of sense experience, the validity of thought when applied to material reality, etc. The scientist assumes these are valid and then proceeds to test and experiment and theorize. Christian faith claims that these more basic structures of reason that transcend empirical demonstration are expressions/evidences of a “Mind” that ultimately grounds all “knowing.” If you reject such a Mind, you are left to establish the validity of logic (if you choose to explore that question) solely from within the subjective individual mind (since you paradigmatically exclude a transcendent ground). The history of modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, suggests this is a dead-end street. Once you admit the problem of establishing a certain link between subjectivity and objectivity and must do without a transcendent ground, it is philosophically impossible to “prove”, for instance, that the world of sense experience is anything more than an elaborate dream or experiment in a vat somewhere. Science largely ignores the whole matter and proceeds as if the foundations of human knowledge are certain but the more basic questions are left ignored in the background. If the certainty that we experience in our use of logical structures is a kind of “sharing” in a supreme Mind and if the “knowability” of the world by the human mind is an expression of the fact that it is ordered by a Mind that willed its existence, we have established an ultimate basis of confidence in our mental processes, sense experience, etc. You see, at the end of the day, a person must make an existential choice about whether reality is ultimately rational or if we are lost in subjectivity and have nothing upon which to ground the ineluctable certainty that we experience when we encounter reality.

I didn't read through all replies (got to page 2-ish) so this may have been answered.

But I'm just really curious what the proof of Jesus is? I have heard people say that there is historic evidence that Jesus lived, and I am really curious what it is.

Not doubting it, just curious as an agnostic-ish Pagan with Buddhist tendencies and a ridiculously open mind.

If everything Chis Angel has done was prophesied 1500 years ago, I'd believe it.....It's not that someone just came along and did a bunch of magic tricks. Jesus fulfilled prophesy from hundred of years prior

Please find post the scripture from the Tanach that says that.

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Not in the Tanach, but the book of Isaiah is full of prophesies and Isaiah is found in the dead sea scrolls which dates back a couple hundred years bc

“If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.”
― Penn Jillette,

I'm at work and can't complete my latest response, but can I just say: I this so much.

Hinduism.

In the interest of saving space, I won't quote the whole back and forth

I know Jesus actually existed, was crucified and rose again using the standard criteria of historical investigation. If you ask how we know any event of the past really happened we would go through the normal ways that a valid memory of the past survives into the present. Very few serious historians that I know of find it credible to question the fact of Jesus and his death. Some argue that the resurrection is a “trans-historical” event since, if it happened, it could not be investigated using the normal criteria of historical research. On the other hand, I think the historical sources argue solidly for the conclusion that the “footprints” of the resurrection are deeply imprinted on history. Christianity is a historical effect of the claim of the resurrection. I recommend N. T. Wright’s book, “The Resurrection of the Son of God.” It is a very thorough discussion of the resurrection from a critical-historical perspective.

I have no idea if Jesus existed or not, but I agree it is quite possible. You are right that most historians say he existed, but that does not make him a divine man. It's the resurrection part I have serious doubt of. And since that is the (many Christians argue) most important aspect of Christianity (Easter was always seen as more important from a religious standpoint than Christmas), I find it suspiciously dubious that this is the only claim that cannot be supported. I've read much on religion, and I honestly think it's not worth my time to immerse myself in something I will never believe. I'm just not interested enough in religion to read any more books on it, so I'll take your word that it is a fascinating and worthwhile read.

It is largely of a different sort that the empirical/hard sciences since we are dealing with a world-view/framework choice. The better analogy for religious faith is interpersonal human experience since we are dealing with a kind of life-commitment, something science does not require of those who experiment. We may be able to draw general conclusions about the structures of human experience with respect to religious experience by cross-cultural and cross-historical analysis but we certainly can’t treat religious faith like we can the behavior of a molecule.

And therein lies the problem. It's not properly testable by modern scientific practices.

I do disagree with your claim that the evidence supports the conclusion there is no God.

You're right. It's actually the lack of evidence which suggests to me that there is no god. There is really no evidence in either direction, but for something to exist, you would expect to see measurable traces. Of god, I see no such traces. All things attributed to god are easily explainable by science.

For instance, if you will only accept a “quantitative” solution to a problem, you will obviously dismiss qualitative features of reality (as in the current mind-body debate in respect to “qualia”). If one begins to explore the question of God with an openness to a positive answer, I think there are profound reasons to believe in God.

I'm fine with qualitative data, but you cannot draw conclusions as readily from such data as you can from quantitative data. Therefore, I prefer testable and measurable results.

Regarding your autobiographical description of your experience, there are plenty of others who went a very different path.

Absolutely. I, in now way, intend to suggest that my experience is universal.

I’ve made it a habit to read after people on different sides of this question and I find it increasingly obvious that it is not the scientific “evidence” that ultimately directs a person to a conclusion on God but a more fundamental, more metaphysical (in the classical philosophical sense) set of considerations.

Obvious? I think you are reaching here. I absolutely hate it when people assume they know my reasons for not believing in god. I hate it almost as much as TV's go-to story for why someone is an atheist. "Something bad must have happened to make them not believe." Well in my case, it was something good that happened, not something bad- I began thinking for myself.

Concerning the “testability” of religious claims and those of science, I do think religious claims are testable.

Not going to quote your whole argument here. Here's my problem with what you wrote. True science (i.e. following the scientific method) requires removing oneself from that which is being tested. You're entire argument here is philosophical. I have no patience for philosophy. It suffers the same fatal error of religion- it is a thought experiment, that is all. You go around using the word prove. That irks me more than you can know. To try to prove anything shows a fundamental misunderstanding of science and logic. Science does not ignore those issues of what is real and what is not. Quantum physics, for example, focuses on that issue a great deal. You are right, though, that in the end we must make an existential choice. You can have your Kierkegaard, and I'll take my Nietzsche. I'll choose what can be tested, what can be understood.

Ultimately, I like to believe that if there is a god, he's not so vain as to care whether or not I believe; that how I act and treat other people matters more. If there is a god, I hope we all have him wrong. Because if we don't, he sure sounds like a jerk that I'd really rather not spend all of eternity with.