Ok, I'll put the amoral monster response as a direct reply and keep this branch about the tomb.
The location of the tomb was well known to three different groups.
One -- Jesus' followers: It was Joseph of Arimathea's tomb. Joseph and Nicodemus prepared his body for burial. In addition to moving the body, they had forty pounds of spices. (The amount of physical effort involved probably made their destination more memorable) And some women saw him placed in the tomb (Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee). That women are listed as witnesses is notable because in that culture, the testimony of women was not acceptable. This was messy reality, not a clean fiction.
Two -- The Jewish religious leaders did not want Jesus' followers to stage his resurrection. So they asked the Romans to guard the tomb. "The chief priests and the Pharisees gathered together with Pilate, [63] and said, “Sir, we remember that when He was still alive that deceiver said, ‘After three days I am to rise again.’ [64] Therefore, give orders for the grave to be made secure until the third day, otherwise His disciples may come and steal Him away and say to the people, ‘He has risen from the dead,’ and the last deception will be worse than the first.” [65] Pilate said to them, “You have a guard; go, make it as secure as you know how.” [66] And they went and made the grave secure, and along with the guard they set a seal on the stone."
Three -- The Romans knew where the tomb was because they guarded it. Roman guards knew any security failure could be penalized by death ordered by their superior officer. The Romans were also the ones approached by Joseph of Arimathea so there's a second reason they'd know where Jesus' body was. They set a seal on the stone as well, and the penalty for violating the seal was death.
The Jews and the Romans were motivated to keep the status quo. But Christianity and copies of his followers' writings sprang up like wildfire within the lifetime of eyewitness. The Romans could not squash the new movement. One thing would have helped: if they could just produce the rotting corpse from the correct tomb. But they couldn't. Neither could the Jews ask the Romans to do so (it being forbidden in Jewish custom to touch a corpse). Because the tomb's location and emptiness was well-known.
Besides, his eleven remaining disciples and other close followers said they interacted with the risen Jesus for a period of 40 days (including being served fish by his hands, touching him, his appearing to over 500 people, and many other convincing proofs). And these eyewitness refused to recant on pain of torture and horrible death (or exile in the case of John).
This is very unlike their former manner, which was cowardly. (Another hallmark of a reliable record -- it didn't protect the disciples from appearing as stupid as they were, fighting over who'd be the greatest or misunderstanding Jesus at times)
Such a change in courage is consistent with seeing that their leader really was God the Son come back to life, in the flesh.
It's not consistent with the idea they mis-remembered or lied deliberately at the cost of their own lives.
> It's not consistent with the idea they mis-remembered or lied deliberately at the cost of their own lives.
It's perfectly consistent with misremembering or lying or making stuff up for dramatic purpose or creating hoaxes. And we even have many modern examples of this. Thousands of people "independently" provide at least as accurate and at least as consistent descriptions of UFO encounters. You can only imagine how bad it was in a world where stuff got written down only after decades or centuries after it supposedly happened. And written down by very limited number of people because almost no one could read or write. You could have made up pretty much anything in that environments if you had an advantage of being able to write. And people did.
There are two kinds of conversations we could be having.
(A) Where one person tries to change the other person's mind
(B) Where one person explains how a rational person can hold a position ... This is different from showing how the position is the only one a rational person can hold
Let's agree not to attempt (A)
Are you willing to try (B)?
The root of this thread was someone else saying "I honestly don’t understand how anyone who has been proximate to childbirth can believe in intelligent design"
I explained how: It's one Consequence imposed by the Governor. He would have been completely justified if he imposed the Punishment immediately instead. The root question didn't ask about goodness or mercy, only intelligent design.
The question (yours) now is: can a rational person reconcile the claim that God is good with the reality that a baby could die of cancer.
And on this particular branch of the discussion we're comparing explanations for Jesus' empty tomb.
It's entirely rational to consult Simon Greenleaf who was one of the foremost experts in judicial evaluation of evidence (he wrote a classic textbook on it used in many law schools).
There are rules about judging documents as evidence in the court of law: where were the documents found, in what manner, in what condition, how do they compare with other known examples.
There are guidelines for comparing copies, tracing and evaluating differences, and dating documents.
And there is Jewish and Roman history.
It is rational to accept the evidence as indicating that things were as I described in GP. Which is that Jesus' disciples maintained they interacted with the risen Christ _to their deaths_ and this happened _during_ the eyewitness generation. And the written documents are very numerous (thousands) and many are legitimately dated within the same generation.
It is rational to think this explanation is more credible than a hoax or deliberate deception. We're free to weigh things differently, but I'm just showing it is quite a rational option. The hoax approach is opposed by the evidence.
I'm sure some will object that it's irrational to believe in miracles. But:
One-- that is not in the spirit of the supposition "Assume omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God." (I chatted with a co-worker once who simply could not suppose for the sake of conversation even though he was a software engineer and should have easily been able to pretend Jesus had what we computer folks call write permissions or root privileges. Actually I don't think his difficulty was intellectual so much as emotional.)
Two-- I have personal experience: a complete stranger performed a miracle on my leg. Before he did, I was shown a bone defect on an X-ray by someone else. Then, without knowing this, the stranger told me about the defect, and then he fixed me. I was sitting on the floor straight legged and actually felt my leg moving against the floor as the fix took place. Then I got another X-ray from Kaiser Permanente and it showed the defect was gone, even though I specifically told them what to look for (meaning they took exactly the correct X-ray to show it).
I'm doing (B) from the start because it takes me about a second to recognize a believer and I know that there's zero chance of convincing a believer of something that contradicts their belief.
> The question (yours) now is: can a rational person reconcile the claim that God is good with the reality that a baby could die of cancer.
Not 'could', they do die of cancer and no human intervention can prevent it at our current tech level.
That's the only reason I'm still in this thread. Because I have a slim hope of seeing attempt at an answer. So far all I got is attempts at misdirection, which is super common.
> Before he did, I was shown a bone defect on an X-ray by someone else.
And you are sure this was real because X-rays never contain any artifacts that could be mistaken for a defect and radiologists are always 100% accurate.
> I was sitting on the floor straight legged and actually felt my leg moving against the floor as the fix took place.
Are you familiar with dowsing rods? Brain is perfectly capable of creating sensations of motions that are not real. Especially when it's put in impressionable state by yourself or a skillfull fraud or both.
> Then I got another X-ray from Kaiser Permanente and it showed the defect was gone, even though I specifically told them what to look for (meaning they took exactly the correct X-ray to show it).
If you weren't "fixed" the result of the second test would be exactly the same as it was. It was just a simple case of more precise and targetted measurement revealing the error in the initial one. Yet you chose to remember it as firsthand evidence of existence of miracles.
There's really no reason for me to to reiterate what atheists said online for last two decades. Just go online and look what they have to say about miracles, faith healers and such.
- I refer to the evidence of something in the past (Jesus' empty tomb, the change in my leg)
- Instead of stepping closer to learn more about the evidence, you keep as far away from it as you already are and imagine things about the evidence
- From that distance, you think your evaluation is reasonable and mine isn't.
But that second step isn't reasonable. You're free to take it of course. But doing so precludes this from being a type (B) conversation. It's yet another kind of conversation (C) demonstrating the ease of maintaining objections by maintaining distance from the actual evidence and objecting to an imagined version of the evidence.
What you say about my X-rays arises not from any familiarity with them whatsoever, but starting from your conclusion and stepping backwards to what must be the cause.
If instead you learned more about my X-rays, you'd hear from me how the chiropractor showed the sideways bending of my spine (how many degrees to the left here, and back to the right there) by adding lines between corresponding vertebrae points and showing the angle deviation from vertical.
And then he showed me the cause which was the top of one femur was higher than the other, because one leg was longer than the other, the X-ray being captured in the standing position, barefoot with heels firmly planted etc. On the X-ray, he drew a line across the top of the femurs and showed the angle that deviated from horizontal.
And then he said it's like I've been stepping in a pothole my entire life and my spine has compensated by bending sideways. The difference is big enough to affect my spine but small enough that other people never noticed. And since it happened gradually as I grew, I never noticed either. But you'd also hear from me he wasn't hedging like there was any doubt about the X-ray's interpretation.
(The chiropractor lost my business because I could just put a little shim in one shoe and my spine wouldn't have to compensate anymore, and in fact this was his suggestion. No, he didn't try to sell me a shim. Yes, if a different interpretation of the X-ray were possible that'd allow him to keep my business, he would have said so.)
But the stranger noticed entirely independently and weeks later. I wonder if you suppose this was at some big tent revival where someone advertised a healer was in town.
No, if you had asked, if you had stepped closer to the evidence instead of keeping your distance and reasoning backwards from your chosen conclusion after imagining whatever you did, you would learn this was an ordinary boring Sunday at a boring church where I never saw or expected anything like this to happen, and he (truly a random dude that no one announced) singled me out, did his unexpected deed, and left. No one knew him, no one paid him, he didn't gain anything from it. He approached me unbidden, I didn't seek him out for a healing nor did I expect to ever see one much less experience one.
What is the reasonable explanation how this happened in separate places instead of the chiropractor and this stranger knowing each other and trying to gain from this?
You mentioned susceptibility. I wonder if you suppose I might be the gullible type who goes to big tent revivals. But if you stepped closer and asked, you'd learn I have two degrees from MIT and have spent more than two decades dealing with computers where the only thing that counts are facts. My friends from MIT who are believers are not susceptible either. Given a choice between one church that is known for good Bible studies vs another that has people speaking in tongues etc we would all prefer to go to the former.
I opened my eyes during the experience so I not only felt it, I saw it.
The follow-up X-ray was the exact same setup body position. It's what the doctor ordered after I described the chiropractor's conclusion about my legs.
Perhaps you are reasoning from an anti supernatural presupposition -- that anything supernatural is immediately dismissed. But as I said before, it's easy and reasonable to accept that IF God exists, then he can resurrect just as easily as you dragging a file back out of your trash.
The same goes for Jesus' tomb. If you would step closer and look at the evidence, you would see that the hoax theory is weak. My goal is not to convince you to change your mind because that's a type (A) conversation. My goal is to show you that resurrection is a reasonable explanation. Or rather, my challenge to you was to come up with a reasonable explanation of the empty tomb given the evidence. But now I realize it'd only feel like a difficult challenge if you're familiar with the evidence, which you are not. You could be, if you came closer to it and looked.
One fellow who looked at the evidence was a member of President Nixon's Watergate scandal. He experienced from the inside how hard it was to keep a conspiracy going. He saw what it's like to crack under the pressure. There's no way he could believe Jesus' disciples could carry to their painful deaths the supposed secret of a staged resurrection. This person was Chuck Colson.
Another is Lee Strobel who wanted to disprove Christianity. But the key is he came closer to the evidence with his skills as a professional investigative journalist to really attempt a direct undeniable smack down on it. He wanted to know it in exacting detail to totally refute it in a hit piece. But the evidence is so strong that he became a believer.
If you or anyone else is interested, here are some resources
Evidence That Demands a Verdict vols 1&2, Josh McDowell
Included in volume 1:
- think the Bible is no different from any other book? See chapters 1 and 4
- how can you trust the Bible when it wasn't officially accepted by the church until 350 years after the crucifixion? See chapter 3
- how do we know what we have today from the Bible authors was not changed from the originals? See chapter 4
- how can you believe in Jesus when all we know about him comes from biased Christian writers? See chapter 5
- *how can Christians say Jesus rose bodily from the grave? There are lots of possible explanations ... see chapter 10*
Included in volume 2:
- are the gospels a reliable record? See chapters 16 through 27
The Testimony of the Evangelists, Examined by the Rules of Evidence Administered in Courts of Justice -- Simon Greenleaf
Case for Christ, Lee Strobel
If you are willing to step closer to the evidence and take an honest look, these are available.
If you remain unwilling, then this branch of the conversation dies here. The record will show you maintaining the hoax/misremembering explanation as reasonable _only_ from a position of unawareness of the evidence. And I would then move to the other branch that you're waiting for. This wasn't a delay tactic. Perhaps I don't have as much free time as you, or my posts take longer to compose than yours -- they contain more as you can all see.
Correct explanation for empty tomb is that people either were lying or misremembering. People are known to do that all the time.