There’s a recently discovered tablet that is making headlines. It is claimed that:
- The tablet predicts a Messiah that will die and be raised from the dead 3 days later, and
- The tablet is dated before the time of Jesus Christ.
Let’s set aside authenticity issues for the moment. I’ll let the archaeologists hash that out. I’m more interested in something that strikes me as a pretty interesting phenomenon that might be of interest to epistemologists, although I’m not sure what philosophical conclusion (if any) can be drawn from this.
There seems to be interesting disagreement about what people on the social bookmark sites take this to be evidence for.
Two of of the biggest social bookmarking sites, Reddit and Digg, have recently linked to this article.
The person who posted this to Reddit seems confident that this is strong evidence against Christianity.
But check out the first comment on the Digg link. The first comment seems to think that this tablet poses a problem for atheism (and I presume some kind of confirmation of Christianity).
Again, I don’t know if there is any philosophically interesting conclusion to draw from this, but it’s an interesting case of disagreement, particularly because it’s disagreement about what some bit of data counts as evidence for.
Not sure why that’s “news” – Isaiah predicted the same thing 2000 years before that. ???
I know that there are a lot of passages in Isaiah that are cited by many as prophesy concerning Jesus. I just went back and looked through a bunch of them.
There was stuff about suffering that gets cited as a prophesy about Jesus, but I didn’t see anything about resurrecting after 3-days. Which passage is alleged to predict resurrection after 3-days?
Andrew,
I’ve read very little about this, but from what I gather part of the issue is that the prediction concerns someone other than Jesus. (So, that’s what distinguishes this from Isaiah’s prophecy (assuming that we can safely say that that prophecy did concern Jesus).) What this is supposed to do is undercut the very silly sort of argument that is supposed to show that the originality of the resurrection story ‘beefed up’ the testimonial evidence for Christianity. I guess there might be Christians disappointed to learn that the Jesus story is a story told at least once before, but even though I’m an atheist I’m having a hard time getting all excited about it.
I think this is an interesting example of two motivated peoples looking at exactly the same thing as seeing radically different explanations. The Christian and the Atheist who stand at the massive expanse that is the Grand Canyon can do so seeing two totally different things, the first the work of God, and the second the work of time. It’s why arguing religion ultimately goes nowhere, I think, because if two people can look at the same thing and see something radically different, what chance is there that they can ever agree? The best possible outcome is agreement to disagree.
Sam,
You wrote:
It’s why arguing religion ultimately goes nowhere, I think, because if two people can look at the same thing and see something radically different, what chance is there that they can ever agree? The best possible outcome is agreement to disagree.
I think I would have written:
If two people can look at the same thing and see something radically different, what chance is there that they can ever agree? The best possible outcome is agreement to stop disagreeing and become agnostic.
Agree or disagree?