Belief in Christianity is rational

Thanks Pro. I. Preface I will finish off my arguments before rebutting Con’s arguments. II. Textual transmission I spoke about Oral Traditions and the issues surrounding it (akin to the ‘telephone game’ or ‘Chinese whispers’. Another severe issue we have is with the manuscripts themselves. We do not have the original manuscripts which were written 70-100AD, our earliest fragment of the New Testament manuscripts is a credit card sized piece of Mark containing less than a handful of verses which dates 117-138AD. Our earliest complete manuscripts don’t appear until nearly 300 years later (!).[1, 2] Printing did not exist during this period, and copying of manuscripts needed to be performed manually by hand, letter by letter by scribes at the time, and as such many, many mistakes were made. Some were unintentional mistakes which number in the thousands, which while often minor, can and do change much of the original meaning of the text over many iterations. There are other far more serious changes which are ‘intentional mistakes’ (more on this later) Each manuscript is copied, and the copy is copied, and that manuscript is copied, and so on and so forth. Each generation of manuscripts will contain all the errors of the predecessor, plus the errors the scribe makes and other changes. We have approximately 6,000 fragmented/complete manuscripts and they all differ from each other, with more mistakes contained within them than there are words in the new testament (!!).[3] There are serious errors made that are known, such as the last twelve verses of the Gospel of Mark, which are now regarded as most likely a forgery, the famous story of “Pericope Adulterae”, is also known to have been an evolution on earlier manuscripts, as scribes made changes to the story which made the narrative fit Jesus’ perceived character.[4] The take-home message from this argument is: 1. We do not know what the original texts state 2. We have abundant evidence that the manuscripts we currently have are significantly different from the original text 3. We know that the scribes were not without motivation to make intentional changes (and hence fabrications/significant alterations) III. Rebuttals Pro presented zero arguments in R2 for me to rebut, and wasted his entire Round 3 by comparing Christianity to other religions. There is simply no way that demonstrating that belief Christianity is more rational than other religions would in turn demonstrate that belief in Christianity itself is rational. To present an analogy, we could have the best boy athlete of all the schools in a district, who runs the best 800m times, but this does in no way qualify him to run in the Olympics. His performance against his fellow schoolmates in no way demonstrates his performance is adequate for such a level of competition. Similarly demonstrating that Christianity is more rational than other Religions only demonstrates what is said at face-value. As such Pro’s entire R3 fails to affirm the resolution whatsoever. Moreover Pro has only attacked 3 other religions (Judaism, Islam and Hinduism), but a sobering thought is that this is a drop in the ocean when stood against all the religions that exist and ever existed. Pro has failed to attack Taoism, Theistic Buddhism, Pagan, Krishna, FSM etc etc. Pro’s strategy to demonstrate Christianity the most rational is untenable and unworkable. IV. Counter-Rebuttals As it stands, Pro has yet positively demonstrates the rationality of belief in Christianity, so these rebuttals aren’t even needed to win the debate, as he has spectacularly failed to uphold his BoP. Oral Tradition: Pro attempts to demonstrate that oral transmission CAN be reliable, but this is completely irrelevant to the debate. I CAN hit a target from 1000m away with a gun, but I need all the right conditions and healthy dose of luck in order to succeed. Pro presented examples of trained people who commit to memory by repetition, and other ‘advanced techniques’, but none of this has the least to do with the oral transmission of the stories of the new testament. First consider that the stories were in circulation for at least 40 years (70 for the events of Jesus’ birth) before they were documented, for which pro has provided no evidence that even ‘advanced oral techniques’ could maintain long stories (many thousands of words) in even rudimentary condition. But then also consider that it’s not just oral transmission, but witnessing, each even only occurs once in history, and is transmitted via the person telling that story, and that person telling another person a story etc. It will clearly undergo many iterations and transmissions before any formal oral could ever set it in stone. Moreover, it is impossible with oral transmission to determine which stories are actually witnessed, and which were fabrications or fables since there is no evidence that it could have been after a few ‘generations’ of converts. Oral traditions simply amount to hearsay, and simply cannot be reliable, especially considering the time and location involved, where there were many oral traditions of obviously false stories. Gospels Dating: Pro has failed to demonstrate what an ‘early date’ means, and given that the consensus of Scholars is Mark was written ~70AD and the others written up until the early first century, I am not sure we disagree much here. If Pro asserts that the Gospel of John was written earlier than 80AD, then he actually needs to provide opposing evidence of this, as this goes against scholar consensus, but I don’t see how this makes much difference for the purposes of this debate anyway, the issues are pretty much the same in oral attestation. Authorship: Is Pro advocating that the labels on the Gospels actually represent the alleged disciples that authored them? Pro ignores my point that the Gospels are internally anonymous, moreover none of them even claimed to be eye-witnesses. He also ignores that commissioning and executing the authorship of an entire gospel would have been impossible for most people who could write at the time, due to the high-level writing skills, the availability of paper and the manufacture of ink, all of which cannot be taken for granted at the time they were composed. Pro provided zero reason to think that the disciples were even literate, remember that most of them were fisherman and peasants (which the disciples were), and such families did not receive an education. These families are part of the lower soceo-economy classes in Galilee has approximately 3-10% literacy rates, and much lower read & writing rates (literacy =/= ability to write). [5] Moreover he ignores that the timeframes involved in Jesus’ death and the composition of the manuscripts almost certainly rules this out given the life expectancies at the time.[6] Pro affirms that green was widespread in the ancient world, but how on Earth does this affirm that the disciples spoke, let alone read AND wrote Greek? Mandarin (Chinese) is widespread in the modern world, but that doesn’t mean a random stranger plucked from London is going to be likely to speak it. Moreover, in Galilee where Jesus and his disciples lived the predominant languages were Aramaic and Hebrew, and the consensus is that Jesus would have likely spoke in Aramaic, which diminishes the chances of his disciples speaking Greek. [7] Interdependency: It demonstrates that we do not have multiple independent attestations of the same event (which would be ideal if we are trying to determine if these events really happened, since multiple attestation would make a fabrication less likely), and hence the stories are much less well attested than would be acceptable for a reliable story. We have many copies of one source, and very strong reasons to believe that this one source is full of falsehoods. Therefore it really does matter that they are not independent. Jesus’s Existence: Even if Pro demonstrated Jesus existed, he in no way demonstrates that Christianity is rational. The Christian tenets depend on what Jesus did, and who he was (see his opening round), Pro needs to affirm that the stories written about him are actually true. Pro tries to affirm Jesus’ existence by affirming the veracity of the Old Testament….. which has precisely zero to do with Jesus. How on earth does demonstrating some feats of the Old Testament actually show that the New Testement is reliable? The jump in logic here is as wide as the grand canyon… Pro’s other positive arguments here are completely irrelevant to demonstrating his existence, let alone his feats. V. Summary Pro has: 1. Failed to affirm the resolution in any way 2. Failed to rebut my refutations of the resolution As such Pro has already dropped this debate, back to Pro for his closing. VI. References 1. http://en.wikipedia.org... 2. http://en.wikipedia.org... 3. http://carm.org... 4. http://books.google.co.uk... P365 5. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Q-Z) p50. 6. http://books.google.co.uk... 7. http://books.google.co.uk... 313-315