 Everybody, today we are debating the resurrection and we are starting right now. Ladies and gentlemen, thrilled to have you here for another epic debate as today we are onsite at the atheist community of Austin as we are very thankful for their awesome efforts who have helped us set up at this venue. They have been terrific. And so we wanna say a huge thanks to the ACA and wanna let you know if this is your first time here, consider hitting that subscribe button as we've got a lot more debates coming up. In fact, today we will have Matt Dillahunty facing off with Mike Jones from Inspiring Philosophy on whether or not there are good reasons to believe in God. So that's going to be an epic one if you want a reminder, hit that little notification bell. And with that, wanna let you know folks, we are so thankful for our debaters who are here today who are debating for free. They just love to do it and we love to get to hear it. So wanna remind you their links are in the description. So if you're listening and you're like, hmm, I like that. Well, good news, their links are just down there in that description box. So you can click on their links and hear plenty more where that came from. So a couple other quick little things. If you have a question during the debate, just fire that into the live chat. I'll be trying to keep up with your questions so that we can ask those at the end of the debate. Super chats will be going at the top of the list and they also allow you to make a comment during the question and answer to which we will read to the speakers. And we wanna say again, we're thankful for the speakers for being here. And so I wanna ask if you could keep your comments as friendly as they usually are, that means a lot. And with that, we're going to be starting with the affirmative. So Jonathan is going to be starting today taking the affirmative on whether or not Jesus rose from the dead. And following that, T-Jump will be giving his opening statement. So with that, we have a roughly, you know, flexible 10 to 15 minutes for Jonathan to give his opening statement. And so with that, thank you both gentlemen for being here and the floor is yours, Jonathan. Thank you for having me. I wanna start off with the question. Why weren't the rulers of the Roman Empire able to falsify the resurrection of Jesus? It surely wasn't for a lack of effort because Eusebius records in his histories that forged memoranda of Pilate and Jesus were published under Emperor Maximum II around 311 AD and sent to every district under his command. He announced in edicts that they were to be publicly displayed and that they should be given to the school children by their teachers instead of lessons to study. As emperor, why would Maximum need to publish a forged memoranda of Pilate when he would have had access to the official records of the empire? According to Cicero, the prefect of Judea was obligated to deposit two copies of his account in the two chief cities of his province and place one in the archives of the Ukrainei. Justin Martyr in 150 AD appeals for the release of these acts in his published defense of Christianity to Emperor Antonius, which he believed would substantiate the gospel account affirming these things did happen as you can ascertain from the acts of Pontius Pilate. The response Justin received was not the publication of the official records refuting his claims, but martyrdom. It's interesting that Tacitus, one of the greatest historians of the Roman Empire who wrote specifically on the period in question, referring to the extreme penalty that Jesus suffered at the hands of Pilate and the early Christians in Rome did not provide a histographic narrative falsifying the resurrection event. In a similar fashion, Josephius provides valuable insight into first century Judaism, background of early Christianity, and an account of Jesus' brother James. Yet no tomb refuting the resurrection as a hoax, even though such a tome would have served Josephius well at the court of the Flavian Empire. Remember that years prior, according to the published acts of the apostles, the apostle Paul defended the gospel account as he stood before Festus, the prefect of Judea, and the grippa, the king of Galilee, the area where Jesus grew up and the events surrounding his ministry mainly occurred. For when Paul, when Festus accused Paul of being beside himself and claimed that too much learning had made Paul mad, Paul responded to Festus by stating, "'I speak forth the words of truth and soberness. For the king knows of these things before whom also I speak freely. For I am persuaded that none of these things are hidden from him. For this thing was not done in a corner.'" Several key points are established here in Paul's statement. First, as king, a grippa was well aware of the events that transpired in his kingdom and could have easily refuted what Paul was saying if a naturalistic explanation was available that could have been then published against Christians and copied throughout the empire. Second, Festus, who was prefect of Judea, had access to the official records in Judea and it could have been used against Paul if information was available to falsify the resurrection account from Pilate's memoranda. Lastly, Paul demonstrate that the account of Jesus' resurrection provides falsifiable criteria that is subject to a proper investigation by the rulers of the Roman empire to uncover. And it's this falsifiable event that is the resurrection that marks the distinction with Christianity as opposed to other religions like Islam and Buddhism. Unless the NSA had video surveillance of Muhammad's conversation with the angel Gabriel from the seventh century, or we can download the satellite images of the monkey that threw down the fruit of the bow tree onto Buddha's head that caused him to see the light, we don't have standard criterion to falsify those inner experiences. This is why we have Karl Popper's criterion of falsifiability. So we can evaluate the inherent testability of any hypothesis or statement. And remember, a hypothesis is generally scientific only if it is possible and principle to establish that it is fake. Therefore, let's be scientific in our approach and follow in the footsteps of the amazing Randy whose dealings with the supernatural claims of the psychic community wasn't just a ray of allegations that they were fake and he didn't believe it. Instead, he felt the need to demonstrate under scientific testable conditions how it was done. By putting Karl Popper's maximum into practice, James Randy was able to choose similar results to those of the psychic community through naturalistic means, thereby falsifying their supernatural claims. Therefore, in Christianity, all that is needed to falsify the resurrection of Jesus is to either produce the body, provide a credible tone from the ancient world with a naturalistic explanation of what had happened, or uncover the true identities of the gospel authors if they weren't the disciples of Jesus and exposed their myth, regardless of when the documents were published. Are we suggesting that these assignments are not well within the means of the Roman rulers to investigate and uncover? For I am aware of the a priori assertion that Jesus picked a time and a process that cannot be properly subject to investigation. Shouldn't we first understand how the Romans conducted investigations of religious cults before drawing that conclusion? Fortunately for us, the Roman historian Levy, who wrote the histories of Rome up until the glorious reign of Caesar Augustus, chronicles how the Romans investigated the religious cult of the Bacchus, which can be used as a base indicator of how Romans conducted investigations against other religious cults like Christianity. Remember that during the time of the Republic and the Empire, Rome operated as a well-organized police state and as such, Levy reported that the Romans were monitoring the religious cult Bacchus closely and gathering intelligence from witnesses on their activities. Now pay close attention as it provides clarity and insight into the thorough, serious, and careful nature of their investigation process. First, a high official is used, the council in this case, to conduct an interrogation of a former cult member to cooperate against intelligence the council had received. Second, Levy informs us that the witness named Hispela was summoned to appear and nearly fainted when she saw the lictors and the vegetable and the council's entourage and the council himself. Levy further reports the council informed the witness that if she could bring herself to tell him the facts, she had no cause for alarm. And she should reveal to them the ceremonies that were habitually performed in the nocturnal rites of the baccholini. Upon hearing this from the council, the woman was panic-stricken and such trembling seized every part of her body that for a long time she could not open her mouth. Even after her full confession, Levy tells us the council went on to warn her that if she was proved to be lying by the evidence of another witness, she could not expect the same forgiveness or indulgence as she would receive if she made a voluntary confession. He added that the man who had heard the story from her had given him a full account of the facts. The significance of Levy's details on Rome's investigation of the baccholini cannot be overstated. There isn't anything in Levy's account which leaves us with any doubt that the council of Rome was not going to gather the intelligence he needed from this witness or another to expose the conspiracy of the baccholini. For that was the power of Rome. The parallels of this case to Rome's investigation of another religious cult, Christianity is clear. Rome is again entrusting the gathering of intelligence to high Roman officials, in fact, those seated at the court of the emperor to expose the movement of Christianity. This is why prefects such as Polinias, Felix, Festus, and Pilate were interrogating Paul in Jesus. The empire of Rome was very concerned about insurrection. Felix, according to Josephus, had suppressed the messianic movement of the Egyptian prophet and ordered the assassination of the high priest, Jonathan. So it comes as no surprise while the prefects Felix interrogated Paul on two separate occasions. Haggisepius chronicles that the emperor Domitian dreaded the advent at Christ as Herod had and had his spies locate the grandsons of Jude who were of the family of Jesus in order to interrogate them. The same modus operandi is evinced in Levy's investigation of the baccholini. Remember, in each and every one of these interrogations, the witness could be turned over to torture or put to death at any time. Recall, this is why hispeller reeked of fear at the site of the council. Pilate emphasized this reality to Jesus when he said, do you not know that I have the authority to release you and the authority to crucify you? The baccholini the younger had established procedures for interrogating Christians and judged it necessary to find out what the truth was by torturing two female Christian decanises in his letter to Trajan. All that was needed to falsify the resurrection was just one credible witness whose testimony could be corroborated if it was a hoax all within the means of the Roman Empire to uncover. Yet despite all this immense power and endless amount of resources, the rulers of the Roman Empire failed to produce a credible tome that the resurrection or the gospels were a hoax in its investigation of Christianity. For when we turn to the positive empirical evidence, we find throughout the Roman Empire in all the apostolic churches, the same four gospels in Aramaic, Greek, Coptic, and Vedic Slatin, naming the same four authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, unlike the Gnostics who had different gospels naming different authors. The paraphrase John Chrysostom, if they're before that right, not at the same time, nor in the same place neither after having met each other and conversed with one another and then they all speak all things as it were out of one mouth, this becomes a very great demonstration of the truth. But on the contrary, it may be said that has come to pass there are many places they disagree. But rather, this very thing is the very great evidence of their truth. For if they had agreed in all things exactly even to time and place and to the very words, it would be evidence of collusion. In any normal court of law, independent witnesses that basically agree that have not colluded on their testimony would be conclusive in any normal court of law. As I said, we do know that throughout the Roman Empire, conversion to Christianity were occurring all over the place. It is obvious the Roman Empire had found the truth. That is the gospel truth. With that I conclude. Thank you very much, Jonathan. So that was the Christian case for the resurrection. Now we'll hand it over to T. Jump or Tom Jump, who will be representing the atheist position today. So glad to have you here as well, Tom. The floor is yours. Thanks, James. Happy to be here. Thanks for the ACA for letting us use this wonderful space to host this debate. So to jump right in, the topic today is did Jesus resurrect from the dead? And well, we have no reason to believe he did. But let's start with a little simpler topic. Like if someone tells you they saw a unicorn, should you believe them? No, if someone tells you they saw a dog, should you believe them? Sure, but what's the difference? What's the difference between the claim I saw a unicorn and I saw a dog? Well, the difference between our imagination and reality, these are not the two same things. So if you imagine going to the beach, you have the expectation of a nice clean beach with blue skies and clear seas. But in reality, we have lots of people there in dirty skies and gray beaches everywhere. There's a big difference between our expectations and our imagination of what it's like to go to the beach and the reality of what it's like to go to the beach. So because there's a difference between these two things, the stuff in our head and the stuff in the world, if you're making a claim about something existing in the world, like if I said I saw a dog, well, then you're gonna need evidence not just of something in your head like your personal testimony, but you're gonna need evidence of something in the world like the dog. So if someone says they saw a dog, it's reasonable to believe they saw a dog because dogs have an implicit empirical evidence in the statement dog. We have their taxonomy, their phylogeny, their bones, their genetic makeup, how to train them, what they're allergic to. All of that is entailed in that idea of a dog, but none of that exists for the word unicorn. Unicorns don't have an implicit empirical basis like that, which makes it not reasonable to believe the testimony of a person who says they saw a unicorn. So the difference is is when someone says they saw a dog, you have the combination of their personal testimony that I saw a dog. In addition to the evidence of reality of the empirical background of what dogs are, and that's what makes it reasonable to believe someone if they told you they saw a dog, but that isn't the case for unicorns because all you have in the case of unicorns is their testimony I saw a unicorn. And without that empirical basis behind it, it wouldn't be reasonable to trust them. So until they can provide like DNA of the unicorn or they can show you a place where you can go pet and touch the unicorn and see it yourself, then it's not reasonable to believe their testimony that they saw a unicorn. So to shorten this, you need evidence proportional to the claim to make it reasonable to believe, or which has been a principle stated by many before me by Carl Sagan, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence or Laplace. The weight of an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness or David Hume. In our reasoning, as concerning matters of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance of wise man therefore proportions his belief to the evidence. Therefore, it's because that these things that don't have an empirical basis are not reasonable to believe purely based on testimony that would mean that all such things doesn't matter what the testimony is or how much there is would be reasonable not be reasonable to believe. So miracles, magic, mythical creatures, the paranormal, the supernatural UFOs, none of those would be reasonable to believe based purely off of testimony. And in the case of Jesus and the resurrection, all we have is testimony and not just testimony. Testimony from thousands of years ago in old documents. So based off of just that evidence of testimony, without an empirical basis that miracles can happen at all, then there's no reason to accept that the resurrection actually did occur in any sense. One of the things Jonathan mentioned was a court case. In a court case, miracles are essentially thrown out prima facie, like they're not accepted. Miracles, magic, mythical creatures, paranormal, supernatural, all of those things are just dismissed immediately from a court case because there is no empirical basis for those things. We ended which trials hundreds of years ago. There are many court cases that have been attempted in the states today. For example, in 1971, the United States versus Mayo versus Satan and his staff, which was thrown out. And Jones versus God, a civil suit against God and Jesus, I kind of wish that one went through. There is the Stamboski versus Accolet, which is a case about a haunted house. That one also got dismissed, surprise. And there's a habeas corpus suit against God who listed God as a defendant in Harris versus the attorney general of Pennsylvania. All of these are thrown out because miracles, magic, mythical creatures, the paranormal, supernatural, and UFOs, all the things that lack an empirical basis are not reasonable to believe just based off of someone's testimony. And the same is true of the testimony of the apostles and the resurrection of Jesus. It's just an account that someone had. And until they can provide something greater than their testimony, then there's no reason to believe it was anything more than something in their head. To summarize, conceptual claims require conceptual conclusions, empirical claims, or conceptual claims require conceptual evidence, empirical claims require empirical evidence. So the conceptual evidence of the testimony of the gospels is only sufficient to justify the conclusion of the conceptual conclusion that it was something in their head, an illusion, a hallucination, misapprehensions, fabrications, any of those things would be reasonable conclusions based off of just the testimony that they provide. But it would not be reasonable to conclude that the resurrection actually happened on that testimony until they can provide a further basis of evidence, like demonstrating that miracles can happen in some way. And you shouldn't take my word for it. This is not just something I've said. You can ask the historians, for example, to quote Mike Lacona in his debate with Bart Ehrman. He says, first, Bart asserts that the majority of scholars outside of a purely Christian context do not regard the gospels as being historically reliable. I agree. To quote him again. Most biblical scholars and historians hold that the investigation of a miracle report lies outside of the rights of a historian acting within their professional capacity. And this definition is espoused by, I mean just lists a number of historians. So most historians agree with this criteria that history is not allowed to appeal to things that don't have an empirical basis. Miracles, magic, mythical creatures, the paranormal, the supernatural and UFOs. Therefore, using testimony from historical documents is not sufficient to justify belief that those things happened. Not in the Bible, not in the Torah, not in any historical document, because we need something greater, like empirical evidence, to demonstrate those things are even possible and justify the conclusion that they're not just in the head of the people who are making the claims. Thank you. Thank you very much. Excellent. And we will now go into the open dialogue portion. So thank you, gentlemen. And this would be about 30 to 40 minutes. The floor is all yours. Would you like to start? Yes. I said, thank you, T-Jump. I guess my first question is, there are elements of the resurrection or the historical count that could be falsified. Is that correct? Sure, like we could, if we had built a time machine, we could falsify the whole thing. Well, but I mean, you do believe in the Roman Empire. Yes. And did they have the means to verify if the boulder was moved or if there was nobody in the tomb? Yes, if those things existed, yes. And could they have verified if Joseph of Arimathea from the town of Arimathea existed and that there was a tomb in Jerusalem that he had? Are those things that could have been verified? Sure. Now, from the historical documents and the way we measure history is from the available documents from the people that left them. What the documentation from Levy, from what we have from the empire is that investigation was conducted. And if the assumption is that it was fake, why couldn't the Roman Empire falsify it? Well, I don't think they had the means to evaluate whether or not someone rose from the dead. All I could verify was that there was no one in the tomb, which can be doable in numerous ways, all of which would be preferable to resurrection or miracles because they have a natural basis, like someone could have robbed the tomb or there could have not been a tomb. Like we know that the idea that Romans would provide a tomb for the people that they crucified is highly unlikely and the fact that they would put a boulder in front of it is less unlikely and put guards even less unlikely. The most likely outcome is they probably just crucified and took them off the cross through in a mass grave, as Richard Carrier argues, that seems far more plausible than all of this tomb nonsense in the first place. So I don't really see the plausibility behind the argument that, well, they could have falsified it. Well, why would they even bother in that case? They may have been doing some other research, but it doesn't seem very pertinent to the topic. They definitely couldn't have falsified the resurrection part. They didn't have the technological means to do that. All they could, at best, do was show there was an empty tomb. Yeah, so they could have showed if there was an empty tomb, they could have falsified if Josephus had one. Now, I think an important thing to remember is that the empire under Maximus II did try to publish throughout the eastern part of the empire a record to try to falsify it. Why would they need to produce a forged memoranda if they had actual records from their investigation that could have corroborated those points, and that would have been the end of Christianity? Well, I imagine they really didn't care very much. I'm sure they did this as a common practice of trying to discredit many religions all the time. I don't think it was really important to them to actually focus on this. So I don't think it's really relevant to the topic, like whether or not Jesus rose from the dead, even if I grant there was a tomb and a Josephus, and he had a tomb, none of that really helps the case for the resurrection. That's just, okay, people in the past had tombs and lived. Okay, I'm happy to grant all of that, but none of that helps the resurrection case. Correct, but if they went to Jerusalem and they investigated that there wasn't no tomb there where the gospel account is stating, right then and there would be a major area to falsify. A report would be published and would be copied out the Roman Empire that there was no tomb. The individual by Joseph Arimathea didn't exist. He didn't own anything in there. So those essential elements of the gospel case that we find in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John would be discredited. And in a court of law, it would be thrown out because it doesn't have any available elements to it. So that's something, I mean, the Roman Empire could have gone and checked to see was actually empty. Was there actually a boulder there? Was it open? Those things are verifiable. I mean, in any investigation could be done. And we see high officials in the Roman Empire because they were very concerned about insurrection. And you have some of the highest officials in the Roman government interviewing to gather intelligence because they were concerned. Well, you sure? I grant that, but as far as I'm aware, none of them actually said, yes, there is a tomb. Yes, there is a boulder. Yes, we did confirm this. All of them just kind of didn't say it didn't happen. And that was about it. So from my perspective, there isn't actually any corroborating evidence that most of that happened. No extra biblical sources for pretty much anything related to the tomb other than just there was a guy named Jesus. So I don't think their investigation really was centered around disproving every little aspect. And even if it was, which it probably wouldn't have been in the first place, because there could have been many tombs there and knowing who owned what and which one went to which, you could have just attributed it to any of them. There's no, that's not really a grounds for anything. It's just, yes, they could have found a tomb and maybe or maybe not it was owned or used by Jesus and would they have cared? Probably not. That's not, probably not the goal of the investigation. And as far as I know, there's no written record of that actually corroborating that there was a tomb and there was a stone. Well, but they did publish throughout the empire these details, which could have been corroborated. The point of Hegasebius's report on the mission is that he felt it was important even years after the event, not only to find out more about the information, but actually locate the grandsons of Jude. And this is the emperor that's doing it to find out more information about what's happening. So they were able to locate two grandsons of Jews who was a family of Jesus. And once again, they were very concerned about insurrection. Felix had already pushed off movements of the Egyptian prophet. He had supposedly the high priest assassinated. So from the documents that we have, we can establish that they were very concerned with those groups. And towards the end of the empire, they tried to push forth propaganda to expose it. If they really didn't care, why would they publish something throughout the empire for everyone to be read, even to be given to children as opposed to lessons? Well, they didn't care about the truth. The goal wasn't to find the truth. The goal was to find something they could use against their political adversaries. And so since their goal wasn't the truth and they weren't doing an extensive investigation to actually find out what happened and were more just looking for dirt on their political opponents to try and discredit them, their investigation isn't a reliable source to discover or to lend credence to the fact that the tomb actually existed. It's only used, lend credence to the idea that they couldn't disprove it definitively with absolute certainty to the degree that they could just crush the opposing belief. That's just the best dirt they could find given the time period, essentially. So what historical documents draws your conclusion that they didn't care? So what historical record from either Tacitus, Josephius, even the gospel accounts, what records do you help maintain the stance that they didn't care in finding the truth of Christianity? Well, I'm just going off of the general consensus based off of how emperors operated, how people at the time operated. They didn't like them, they wanted them to fail. So were they actually trying to discover truth, highly unlikely given just human psychology? They're far more interested in maintaining power and dissolving the power of the opponent far more likely than they actually wanted to discover the truth. It's unlikely based off of just general history of all human beings that they actually wanted to discover the truth. Now, when Paul goes before the prefect of Judea Festus and the king of Galilee, Agrippa, he is called forth to give his confirmation of the gospel account, which he's allowed to do. Now at the very end of it, and we're speaking about the king of Galilee at this time, who is very aware of the information that's coming out of his kingdom, you have the prefect of Judea Festus there, who definitely has access to records from the Roman Empire. And at the end of Paul's statement, the only retort that the king of Galilee had was not a naturalistic explanation explaining what had happened because if there was a case to be made that body was stolen, there would be information available to investigate, to cooperate that account. King Agrippa's only response is, you almost convinced me to be a Christian. I would guess it's more satirical, and he probably wasn't serious when he said that, if he said that. I'm not familiar with the specific historical case, but I imagine they just didn't care enough to actually try and investigate it because I'm pretty sure they could have just made up anything they want. I'm pretty sure they rejected miracle claims in most cases anyway. I don't think it was like a actually definitive evidence that the resurrection happened. I think it's just the limitations of the time period. They probably just weren't that interested. They'd probably get these kinds of cases all the time. They just want to get rid of it, move on to the next thing in the job, just like any judge or any lawyer. But what we see in the investigation of Christianity is it didn't end just there. I mean, Paul is meeting with another procounsel, Felix, who we already know that's suppressing religious groups. So if you think about it, he's suppressing, he doesn't meet him only on one time, but a second time. He meets with Paulineus. We have Pliny, the younger, continuing the procedure of interrogating Christians, finding out more about them, the mission we have. And then towards the end of the empire, we have a forged memoranda published to try to discredit it, which shows that they were taking actions to falsify and gather intelligence to suppress this movement. But that's the same as essentially every religion throughout all time where people discuss it and people who advocate for it talk with the leaders and the prosecutors are trying to convince them, and same with Mormonism and Jonathan Smith. That's the same as far as I can tell with every single religion. I don't see anything about that that would make it more likely a miracle happened. I mean, because all of that is just technical stuff that humans do all the time throughout human history. Why would any of that be evidence of a magical occurrence? Well, and I bring up the case of the amazing Randy because he went to, because he evaluated the same way. Okay, well, we have the psychic community. They're making these supernatural claims. Obviously there was a big one in New York, so he's offering like a million dollars to put them under scientific testable conditions. So if we're gonna follow a scientific process, shouldn't we be able to set up criteria to help falsify the particular event just as James Randy did? The thing was is if someone in the psychic community guessed correctly at one of his questions, he wouldn't be able to create the naturalistic way they did that because it was a guess. But if it was fake, he'd have the means to recreate what they were able to do but using non-scientific means. And with the case of the resurrection, there are falsifiable criteria. I mean, it just has to be, there was no tomb there. That's the only thing that they would have had to respond. And if you think about it, Paul is presenting his case to those seated at the court of the emperor. That's all they had to say when you agree and then that would be the end of Christianity. We went to Jerusalem, there was no, there was no tomb there, there was no body and no Joseph of Arimathea ever existed. And that would be published throughout the empire and I probably wouldn't be sitting here today. Well, no, I would totally disagree. It doesn't matter how well you think you've disproven philosophy. I mean, there are still flat earthers here on the earth apparently. So the disproving of a fact really wouldn't affect how people believe but it's kind of like if I said, I saw a unicorn the other day and we can go look at the spot where the unicorn was and we can see hoof prints and we can see that there was grass that was eaten and we can see that there were like trails where the horse were running but none of that's evidence of a unicorn because they can all be explained by a horse. So in the case of the empty tomb that can be explained by someone robbed of the tomb or there was no body that was ever in the tomb in the first place or all kinds of things. None of that would be evidence of a resurrection because it's all just stuff people do all the time we see all around the world. In the case of falsifiability, it's not just falsifiability. That is one of the criteria of science but the others are testability, verifiability, confirmed by peer review. So you have to actually be able to repeat something not just falsify the one particular claim but repeat it to show it can be done again. It's an amber alert. Amber alert? That's inconvenient. So yeah, the fact that you can falsify certain aspects of the resurrection of Jesus like maybe there is an empty tomb, maybe Josephus existed, that there are people who lived in his family, none of that's actually evidence of the resurrection. To show the resurrection happened just like to show the unicorn happened, you need empirical evidence of unicorns. You need to show that the miracles can actually happen. That miracles are a thing in this world. Until you do that, it doesn't matter how much of the non-miraculous things you can verify it would still not qualify as evidence that the miraculous thing was a happened. Well, you know, and when we go to trials and we bring witnesses in, now the job of the witnesses obviously just to report what he's seen or reported. And the job of the investigator, if you would agree, is just to collect that information. Did they find the body? Okay. Horing off. So the question is for the investigator is to leave his biases out of it. And in the case of Rome's investigation, we have multiple high officials. We know they had acts and records of the event that they didn't publish to the public. Time after time, and we have the King of Galilee. We have the prefect of Judea, Festus. We have Felix. Were they not capable men within the Roman Empire? Was there seated at the court of the emperor to conduct a thorough investigation to falsify the Christian narrative? I'm sure they could have, but again, none of that actually helps your case. Even if we just say that all of that stuff happened today in the court case today, it's still none of it would be evidence of the resurrection. They're still just gonna throw it out immediately for the reason of the court cases I listed earlier. There's a complete dossier on all how miracles are assessed in courtrooms. The truth of the matter asserted is their law and the paranormal outside of the First Amendment by Christopher L. Henry, where he specifically goes through all of the court cases and shows that miracles are not assessed by a courtroom or jury. They're not within the branch of what a courtroom can do. So even if we granted all of that, none of that would be evidence of the resurrection. That's just, okay, so some people did some investigations and they didn't find one thing or another. None of that's evidence of miracle happened. So the testimony, so because it's preconditioned on miracles aren't reasonable, which is based on a worldview. So obviously the Christian worldview is, God created all things and naturally miracles can happen. Obviously for non-believers, miracles are impossible. So, but... I would not phrase it that way at all. So my perspective is for anything that's asserted, you have to either show, is this an imaginary thing in our head or is this a real thing in the world? And until you show it's a real thing in the world, then it's by default an imaginary thing in your head. So there's no presupposition about worldviews here. There could be the supernatural, there could be miracles, happy to grant all of that, but you first have to show it's not just a thing in your head. And until you do that, it's just a thing in your head. So the criterion, the burden of proof here is to say, if you wanna claim a miracle happened, you need to first show it's not a thing in your head before you can defer to that as an explanation of anything. So in the case of a court case, the reason it's dismissed is not a worldview. They don't take any position on worldviews. Many of the judges are Christians and do believe in miracles, but they say it is specifically outside of the capability of the jury to establish what miracles happen or what a God can do or what the inaccessible or unknowable can affect in the world because it's not within the realm of what we can demonstrate and show is actually not just a part of our imagination. We don't have a ability to do that. So it doesn't matter how much of the non-miraculous stuff we verify until you can actually verify the miraculous stuff. And so until you can like say, I believe whether there's a God and there are miracles, here's one I can do right now, pray to a God, gold brick appears in front of you and you do it consistently, then we show miracles are real. Then we have a good base to say, okay, well maybe this God can do some other miracles too and we can broaden our horizons about what we should take as a serious leap to as a causal relationship between what happened in the miracle attestation in the Bible. Until then, right now we got nothing. Right now we just got miracles or imaginaries as far as we can tell. So we have no reason to believe that miracles can happen and they're just more likely a hallucination, a delusion, a misapprehension, a fabrication. Any of the imaginary conclusions that we can come to are always gonna be more likely because it lacks that empirical basis. Just like if I told you I saw a unicorn, it's not reasonable to believe because we don't have an empirical basis of unicorns. But here we're dealing with a historical event that occurred at a specific point in time in history. We have information that could be verifiable. We have investigation into the act itself to gather intelligence to see if what's being said is truth and it's being done by multiple high officials in the Roman Empire. You know, Christianity is not like Buddhism. We can't test the light that he saw because it's an internal thing. But the Roman Empire, just as I've documented in their investigation of the baccalaate, they took it very seriously. They were able to cooperate the account. So Paul going before those meetings, they already had information that they were gathering. And so they're not going into those interviews blindsided. And when King of Grip is only responded, he almost convinced me to be a Christian. Even though it's a terrible, what he didn't provide it there is any evidence. And Paul specifically challenged him on that. These things weren't done in the corner. I mean, because we're talking about Jerusalem, a tomb, a stone that was moved and Joseph of Arimathea. All those things can be verifiably checked by anyone just going to the area to see, or, hey, there's tons of tombs. There's no specificity, specificity. You have the tomb by Joseph of Arimathea. So it's giving a specific person who purchased that tomb. You'd have to be very rich back in the ancient world to do it. And what I'm saying here is we have a thorough investigation done by a police state. One of the greatest empires. And they could not provide any falsifiable criteria. And what we've seen throughout the empire is there eventual conversion. And is that conversion come down to, well, it's the truth? Well, no, because the same thing happens all across the world every day. We can empirically verify crop circles. We can empirically verify UFO sightings. We have videos of UFO sightings on airplanes, pilots, lots of pilots to test to see UFOs. These things happen all the time. We have attestations of homeopathy working all over the world. None of these, and we can empirically verify some of them. We have medical documents of people who healed miraculously in an unexplainable way, supposedly due to homeopathy. We can verify all of these things, but is any of this evidence that homeopathy works or that UFOs are real? No, because there could be just an unknown natural cause to these things, or they didn't happen in the way they were attested to, or many other explanations. The fact that you are verifiable or falsifiable aspects of the story, like crop circles or video cameras, isn't in any way evidence of the conclusion you're aiming for, because it's something beyond what testimony can accomplish as a form of evidence. You need to actually empirically demonstrate that miracles are a thing and not just made up before you can use them as an explanation for any event, until then any explanation, any event that happens, you can only appeal to natural causes. So, wouldn't it be our job investigating into something to determine or recreate the naturalistic explanation? Because if the assumption is that it was faked, then we should be able to falsify it. And from... Well, not necessarily, but... If something's fake, it can't be... We can't figure out how it was faked. Yeah, not necessarily. There are magicians all the time who do really great tricks. Like I see Penn and Teller doing some tricks. I have no idea how to falsify those. Correct, and the point of James Randy is as an ex-magician, scientist and a skeptic, he was able to use his past experience and actually take what seems to be very hard, take in their abilities and recreate it under naturalistic, with a naturalistic way. And because we're actually dealing with the historical account, the best way to explain that or create the naturalistic explanation is go to the historical documents that are available to recreate that histographic narrative and determine from that evidence what actually happened. Well, that's the thing is you can't determine what actually happened. You can only determine within some spectrum of what things we can appeal to. So we know a certain things happen. Like I can grant the empty too, okay. But can we conclude from that a resurrection? No, that is completely outside of the bounds of anything in the historical documents. Nothing in the historical documents can lead to that conclusion at all because it's not one of the possible potential explanations that we have access to. It's not something we've demonstrated isn't just imaginary. So like if I said, if we see a hoof print in the ground and we're historians accounting that there is a hoof print in the ground, we cannot conclude therefore unicorns. Nothing they say could ever get us from the hoof print to unicorns because we have no empirical evidence of unicorns. So we can only appeal to things we have empirical evidence for because we can demonstrate those aren't just part of our imagination. The first part of any evidential claim is is this an imaginary thing or is this a real thing? And until we show it's a real thing then we cannot appeal to it as a source or cause of anything. It's not even a potential candidate until you can show it's not imaginary which means you would have to make testable verifiable predictions. So if I can say if the resurrection is true then miracles are possible and if miracles are possible I can pray to God and get a gold brick or something like that. Until you can make future testable predictions to demonstrate miracles are real and not just an imaginary thing then you can't even use it as a potential candidate to explain all of the natural stuff we do see. So even if I grant everything you said about all the historical accounts and the people trying to disprove Christianity that couldn't, none of that's evidence of the resurrection. It's just evidence that okay so here's some people who couldn't disprove an account of what happened a long time ago but it's not evidence that the account is true is just not proof that they couldn't prove it false. So where does that leave us? So if you think about the gospel account so once again in all courts of law and I understand where you're going to reason now once again reason does not have measurable criteria because it's dependent on what's reasonable for a particular culture of the follow. But we, the gospel accounts do present witness testimony and we have independent witness account that's verification of their testimony that there's an empty tomb, there's Joseph of Arimathea, it rolled away and the eyewitness testimony of I saw this. And then when we have 50 days after the event is over 3,000 men coming to Jerusalem and Peter speaking to them saying that you guys have seen it for yourself. These are things that you have seen. So I'm not up here propagating something that this is in Jerusalem where the supposed event had happened. Apart from the apostles, the Roman Empire, the people themselves were able to look and see if any of this has actually happened and 50 days later, the conclusion that was drawn from that crowd that came over to hear Peter preach is this is what had occurred. So if I'm looking at the empirical documents from history that has come up to us, where would that lead me if I'm looking at a Roman investigation that was ongoing for over 250 years of Christianity and their last ditch effort was an attempt to falsify. They failed to produce any naturalistic explanation. If there was a naturalistic explanation and you're right, it could have been robbed they could have took the body out. There could have been no tomb. It could have been someone that created the story 50 or 60 years afterwards. In that case, all we would need to do is find the author. Who's the one that propagated this? If you think about it, Virgil's Aeneid is one of the most popular myths that came out of the turn of the first century. We know who wrote it, Virgil. He was a poet. He was at the court of the emperor. We know who he was. So with these documents, if they're not from the apostles or eyewitnesses that we're evaluating our testimony is, what is, who else did it? So does that make sense? Yeah, but I can ask the same question about the Salem Witch Trials. If we look at these really detailed investigations by professional investigators and judges throughout the time period, where would it lead us if we actually took their claim seriously where they couldn't find a natural cause to this death and it seemed like there was a spell being cast and well, there was a good explanation. This is a witch and we put her to death and we burned her at the stake and there's lots of witches that we have at the time period. And would we, if we consider that methodology a reasonable methodology, well then we should probably believe in witches, but we don't. And the reason for that is because we have a new methodology. Like you said, there are many kinds of reason and many kinds of logic and right now the best kinds of reason we have as articulated by the fields of history and science and court rooms is that the supernatural can't be a plausible explanation or to quote from specifically one of the cases that I mentioned earlier, reason cannot encompass the supernatural. Divine faith is supernatural. It seems that recognition of the alleged fraud in this case eventually would require the civil courts to undertake and solve the problem to answer the questions which are outside the civil aspects of marriage and should be left to the parties and their respective religious affiliations for the possible solution. In our today's reason for pretty much every academic field and courtroom specifically and history specifically, we are not allowed to appeal to supernatural because we did that in the past many, many, many times like in the Salem witch trials and many other cases throughout history across the globe and it comes up failure every single time. So even if I granted that your Roman case did in fact take the time to try and verify this and ended up that they all themselves believed that the resurrection happened based off that investigation, that's still not evidence that the resurrection happened for the same reason that Salem witch trials isn't evidence that witches exist. We have better reasons in methodology now that the criterion is, well, you first have to show it's not imaginary before you can use it as an explanation, not after. What we'll do is pretty soon, if you guys are ready, we'll probably go into just kind of some concluding remarks and it's not timed. So this is just kind of any of your kind of final thoughts before we do go into the Q and A. So thank you guys. It's been a very thought provoking discussion. Do you wanna start with your conclusion? Sure, so my conclusion would be essentially the same as my introduction is that the first criterion and the first job of evidence is that we have to differentiate between is something an imaginary thing or is it a real thing? And the way we do that is through the scientific method, testable, verifiable, falsifiable predictions that we can say if this thing is real that I'm gonna make this prediction and if we can verify the prediction in the future, then we have pretty good reason to believe it's real. And supernatural claims have not been able to do that. Miracles, magic, mythical creatures, the paranormal, the supernatural UFOs, all of those have failed those tests consistently. And until we have that empirical basis, then it's not reasonable to use those as an appeal to explanations of what caused any event, regardless of whether or not we can explain it or not. Thank you very much, Thomas. And then we will go over to Jonathan. Thank you, Tom. I would like to say that because we're dealing with a historical event, we have to go to the historical records that were left by the people at the time. And when we start off with the case of the gospel testimony, those that are to be eyewitnesses of the event in question, they all come up with the empty tomb, the boulder moved, it was from Joseph of Arimathea and eyewitness testimony of to the original Christ. And when Rome, who was pursuing their normal investigative powers to suppress religious groups and find out more about it, not one credible tone was produced throughout the Roman Empire to provide a naturalistic explanation for what had happened. And when we go and look at the independent apostolic churches throughout in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, and that is Latin, it draws us to the same conclusion. And I just wanna end on thanking Tom and modern day debate for allowing us to have this dialogue and to open up the possibilities for this discussion. Absolutely, it's been a true pleasure. And with that, we are going to jump into the Q and A. So those last like 20 minutes or so, we're gonna try to get through as many questions as possible. If you do have questions and you've put, if basically if you've tagged me in the live chat just by putting at modern day debate, that'll help me to see those just so I hopefully don't miss them. And we'll start with a super chat. So starting up top, Steven Steen, thanks for your super chat. He said much more competent IT team tonight. And so it's true, it's a good opportunity to thank the Atheist community of Austin. They have been so good to us. I like it's honestly, we are so excited about how everything has come together and just the amazing help they've given. And I also wanna do, I do wanna thank, if those of you who were watching last night, if you saw the flat earth debate, wanna say thanks to Steven Steen and Tom Jump actually, as they were helping us do a lot of tech stuff last night. And so it totally saved me. So with that, we appreciate your question. Franks92, they asked, why didn't Jesus go to Rome? Well, this would have to be a speculative. We don't actually, we don't have any available information. Tell us why or why not that he chose the locations they did. We know mainly of his ministry in Galilee and a little bit outside of that area. To be honest, there's no available information I can draw from any historical record that would lead me back to that point. We do know that churches were established in Rome shortly afterwards, but not quite sure why Jesus didn't go to Rome. Maybe he wasn't a citizen, so. You bet. Thank you very much. And we're also taking questions from the live audience. We do have a live audience here at the Atheist of the ACA. So we wanna welcome anybody from the live audience. If you do have a question, you are more than welcome to use the mic that's available for you. And we'd love to hear your questions as well. And we'll kind of alternate if anybody does have any questions between the online questions from the audience, as well as the in-person audience questions. So next up, Sijafredo Sarabia. Good to see you. Thanks for your super chat. They said, T-Jump, how is the God question on the same level as unicorns or fairies? Wouldn't you have to say that it was an invisible unicorn for it to be a correct analogy rather than dichotomy? Oh no, it just applies to anything that lacks an empirical basis. It doesn't matter what it is. You can say supernatural, uber-natural, super-duper-natural, whatever you want. If it doesn't have an empirical basis, you need some way to differentiate it between is it an imaginary thing or is it a real thing? And so all things that lack an empirical basis are in the same category of imaginary things. Doesn't matter if it's Santa or unicorns or God. Gotcha, thanks so much. Also, appreciate your question from Sijafredo Sarabia. Thanks for your other question. They said, for Jonathan, granted the resurrection, what independent sources grant Matthew 27, 41 through 52, which describes dark skies, torn curtains, earthquakes, and dead saints rising in Jerusalem? Eusebius does pull an account at that time. So he does provide a record of some sort of occurrence that occurred at that time. So you definitely look up Eusebius's church histories. He does give a sort of event that appeals to some sort of event occurring from a non-Christian author. Got it, thank you very much. Next up, we do have a question from, if I mispronounced this, let me know. I'm sorry, Abbott Donnergal. Thanks for your question. This comes from online. And they asked, for Jonathan, what secular extra biblical historical sources support the idea that the Romans conducted an extensive investigation into the empty tomb? Well, we don't have any specific record regarding the empty tomb. The assumption would be that the acts of Pilate who oversaw an sentence, Jesus the crucifixion, though that information would have been available for the investigation. So we do appeal to those records. Justin Martyr appeals to those as well, which he believed at the time would have corroborated the Gospel account. And that's why throughout the argument is why weren't those records released if they had nothing to actually help Christianity's case on there? But we do have established procedures by Pliny the Younger in his letter to Trajan on how to deal specifically with Christians, their interrogation practices, the same type of modus operandi we see back in 186 BC with Levi's account of the baccalae. You bet. Thanks so much. And we're going to fly through, because we do appreciate your guys' support. We will read some of the silly super chats. Dwayne Burke, let's see, said, starting to lack belief in Tom Jump's chair. Thank you very much for that. If you haven't seen, if you're not a regular watcher, Tom Jump has the most epic chair that he usually streams from home as he streams in. And so thanks for that super chat. We appreciate that, Dwayne. Converse Contender says, you guys are all looking dapper. Thank you very much. You know, it's probably especially pointed toward Tom. You look terrific, Tom. So thanks, you guys both look great. Next up, let's see, we've got, with that, I think we do have all of our super chat questions. And so we are going to make one offer, anybody from the audience, otherwise what we will do is have an intermission before the inspiring philosophy and Matt Dillahunty debate on whether or not there are good reasons to believe in God. That debate is linked in the description. And so if you would like to watch that debate, we will be back in just about an hour live together in this room for that debate. So we hope to see you there. Thanks for coming by everybody. And one last thanks to both the speakers as we really appreciate both Tom and Jonathan for being here. It's been terrific. And we want to give as well one last thanks to the ACA for hosting. It's been terrific. And thanks for stopping by and hanging out with us today. Keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable. Have a good afternoon everybody. Thank you.