Jesus explicitly and specifically prophesied that the temple would be destroyed, I don't see how this is a "confabulation", nobody could have known it was going to happen, and it was predicted well in advance of time.
Ok because you wanted to push me on it I did 5 seconds of google research... It's believed mark was written decades after the event and other prophets made similar predictions about the destruction of the temple... apparently it was some sort of a standard way to demonstrate god punishing israel, sorta like I guess how for america it might be common to depict the destruction of the statue of liberty.
And I was saying that our "current best evidence available" doesn't satisfactorily explain natural phenomena...
Such as? Give an example... if you mean those you offered up (regarding the fossil record etc) those are jokes.
I don't know about the size of the ark and that would affect it's feasability...fill me in please.
Genesis 6:15 This is how you shall make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its breadth fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits.
Translation: 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high
It is impossible to build with what noah had available, let alone how he got every species on the boat... let alone there being absolutely no evidence for a worldwide flood...
Any more than we don't need millions of years of fossilization?
We don't, there are a variety of dating methods we use to date them... However some of them probably did require millions of years. There's many different ways to end up with fossils.
This is where you're wrong and to be honest it's quite insulting to call the work of... just about all science 'conjecture', how demeaning. The claims made by scientists are independently verified by a a myriad of different scientists (with different beliefs, many christians, muslims etc) working in a myriad of different scientific fields (molecular biology, radiology, taxonomy, geology, botony) and using a myriad different proven techniques.
Don't take what I'm saying as gospel, I'm not God and I wasn't there to witness the events. But again, on the balance of probabilities it would be a good explanation...certainly better than the current theory that's floating around.
Yeah, you say that, but you offer up no good reason why this is so.
If there are I've not come across any.
What, you want to be walking along and trip over a fossilised dog?
Carbon dating has been shown to be wildly inaccurate in measurements.
Ok, carbon dating does have its limitations however as for wildly inaccurate, most inaccurate measurements have been taken because proper testing proceedure has not been observed or they are simply outlier measurements (you run the tests ... say100 times, 10 of them for some reason are far out of whack, but the other 90 are all within a very small MOE). There are also other dating techniques than carbon-14 (including other means of radiometric dating, tree dating etc) which independently confirm (where possible) that the measurements all at the very least seem to correlate.
The thing you have to realise is that the people who discovered the inaccuracies... were scientists themselves, often the ones working on the project. Science has self-checking mechanisms all along the way (including repeating tests, various avenues of peer review and finally the need for scientific consensus).
Alot of the things you believe in likewise cannot be fully explained, and yet you hold on to them with the same tenacity.
The parts where it cannot be explained I do not believe in. Obviously if we're going to get a little philosophical in the end I am believing in things that I cannot know (for certain), however it seems to me that my modus operandi of accepting/refuting different ideas (i.e. theory of knowledge), as in the "WHY" of why I accept science is much more consistent than your own "why". Why do you accept the bible? Why do you then not accept other religious/pseudo-philosophical texts which you have equal reason to accept?
I believe in the Bible because it's the divinely inspired word of God and it explains everything.
I.e. This is why you say you believe the bible, the first we can dismiss as it's rather circular the second 'explains everything' is quite interesting... Ok, so how were we created (god did it will be the answer, don't post up the specific verse for specifics, i'll then just go into how he did that, in the end you'll be left with 'god did it').. Ok, then if this is what the answer, isn't this on par with what you end up with from... most monotheistic religious texts? In fact, isn't 'God did it' quite on par with "any supernatural thingy did it" ?
Science cannot fully answer for evolution (hence the theory of evolution),
You don't understand what it means for something to be a theory. Gravity is a theory. Flight is a theory.
dinosaurs and the aforementioned gap in the fossil record (one example is the supposed development of reptiles to birds).
There are gaps... these are to be expected.
Mate stop taking my words out of context and go back a few pages- my post was in reply to claims that the historical Jesus set out to fulfil prophecy as an impostor.
There's a number of ways the myth could have come about:
- It's a mistranslation, they never actually meant virgin.
The Hebrew word in Isaiah is (almah), which undisputedly means 'young woman', with no implication of virginity. If 'virgin' had been intended (bethulah) could have been used instead (the ambiguous English word 'maiden' illustrates how easy it can be to slide between the two meanings). The 'mutation' occurred when the pre-Christian Greek translation known as the Septuagint rendered almah into .... (parthenos), which really does usually mean virgin. Matthew (not, of course, the Apostle and contemporary of Jesus, but the gospel-maker writing long afterwards), quoted Isaiah in what seems to be a derivative of the Septuagint version (all but two of the fifteen Greek words are identical) when he said Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, 'Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel' (Authorised English translation). It is widely accepted among Christian scholars that the story of the virgin birth of Jesus was a late interpolation, put in presumably by Greek-speaking disciples in order that the (mistranslated) prophecy should be seen to be fulfilled. Modern versions such as the New English Bible correctly give 'young woman' in Isaiah. They equally correctly leave 'virgin' in Matthew, since there they are translating from the Greek
- Jesus was not born to a virgin however the myth sprung up, check out snopes if you don't think these sort of myths can just spring up culturally.
- No one ever checked to make sure she was a virgin.
- His mother was really a different woman.