Your original comment (too many pages to search to find it) was that God was natural. I commented that most other theists disagree with you, that God transcends nature (is supernatural) and the author of nature. Now you've made that into something else, which is standard Christian dogma.
Nature needs no help. The first wave of scientists showed us the clockwork universe, where heavenly bodies move without gods or angels pushing them, gases equilibrated without any intelligent oversight, and electrons moved through circuits unaided. This ushered in the age of deism, where the ruler deity was no longer needed. And the second wave of scientists showed us how the cosmos and the tree of life assembled itself, making the builder god no longer necessary, making atheism tenable.
Wasn't it you that made the fine tuning argument for God that I rebutted by asking why an omnipotent God would be constrained to choose certain settings of the fundamental physical constants? Who created the laws that this God is limited by? How can you call this a God if it could only have created this world one way if it were to support life and mind? If that's the case, this God didn't actually design anything. It merely obeyed rules imposed on it.
This is a common way for believers to depict the humanist experience, as empty and hopeless because there is no hope of an afterlife and so many unanswered questions. Often added is that the humanist has no basis for morality or spirituality. The humanist accepts that there may be no deity or afterlife, nobody not on this planet that loves him and watches over him, that he may never see deceased loved ones again, nobody watching and judging his behavior, that man is the author of his own morality, that authentic spirituality has nothing to do with spirits, and that many questions are unanswerable except with guesses that have no explanatory or predictive value.
I'm happy for you that you grounded yourself and corrected your life's trajectory with your religious beliefs, but please don't denigrate the experience of those who don't need or benefit from such beliefs. I liken it to needing glasses to read and getting some, then thinking that others who don't need them see less and are worse off than himself. Isn't it better to not need glasses to read, not worse?
No. One can only believe that account by faith. He has to believe the Bible, which is only believed by faith.
What's a fact to you? Does it include anything you have chosen to believe by faith? To me, a fact is a sentence or paragraph that demonstrably maps onto reality. If I say that there are apples in the refrigerator (the sentence), and one can open the refrigerator and find apples (the demonstrable mapping of the words onto reality), then the statement is a fact. If your definition allows for things that cannot be shown, then what you call facts aren't considered correct by the empiricist. This is the problem you are having here with your resurrection argument. The things you call facts can't be demonstrated. It is likely that an itinerant preacher and religious reformer called Jesus was crucified, but even that is not firmly established. Here's an excerpt from your link, the second of ten alleged facts:
- Jesus Was Buried in a Tomb Joseph of Arimathea put Jesus’s body in his new tomb and rolled a large stone across the entrance (Matt. 27:57-61; Mark 15:46; Luke 23:53-54; John 19:39-42). Concerned that someone might steal the body, the Jews requested a guard at the tomb (Matt. 27:64-66). Christ’s body remained there until Sunday morning.
The only test of time the gospels have passed is their believability to countless people asked to believe them over the centuries. What other test do you think they have passed? Prophetic accuracy? Internal consistency? Historical accuracy? The moral excellence of Jesus?
Regarding that last one, Jesus is regarded by his adherents as a moral genius. I'm still looking for the first contribution to moral theory original to Jesus that is considered a great idea by non-Christians the way that humanist moral contributions like democracy and guaranteed person freedoms have done. You don't need to be a humanist to see the moral superiority of modern life as a citizen over that which dominated the Age of Faith, or the moral superiority of forbidding slavery. What contributions to moral theory did Jesus make analogous to those? Turn the other cheek?
That marriage to a divorcee or ogling an attractive woman is adultery? That you must cut off your hand or pluck out your eye if it offends? "Take therefore no thought for tomorrow"?
Are these some of those excellent moral insights? I believe they're original to Jesus and the Gospels. Have they stood the test of time?
