Ultimately, you are an autonomous human being: you decide what is true and what is false. No one can “tell” you to believe something. If they keep telling you the sky is purple, and you can well see it’s blue, it’s blue. Their assertions are meaningless at that point.

Hence a consensus isn’t a holy scripture. It’s just a datum, one datum among many, that you can use to assess the truth of a claim. When that datum weighs for or against a claim, depends on what you observe to be its merits (is it a well-founded or poorly-founded consensus; I linked you to an article outlining the tools by which you can vet a consensus for merit).

Only you can make that assessment. No one else can make it for you, unless you choose to trust someone else to do that for you. And in that case you need good reasons to trust their judgment. So then it’s back full circle: is their judgment well or poorly founded? How do you know? Why are you trusting them? Especially if you’ve been presented abundant evidence you shouldn’t and can find no evidence you should.

This is how epistemology works. There is no way around it.

None of this has anything to do with anyone’s opinion. This is all evidence-based reasoning. So you judge based on the evidence. So what does the evidence tell you about the consensus on this issue? If you don’t know, then gather all the pertinent evidence, and then see what it indicates. There is literally no other way for you to know anything about the world than this.

Everything you said makes sense to me and thanks for the sources, I’ll check them out. I’ve watched you debate this topic with prominent scholars and competent debaters like Greg Evans, Trent Horn (this was an excellent debate btw), and others, and you’ve convinced me that at least we have grounds for doubt. And that’s the position that I take especially since I’m not a scholar.

But let’s say I study the sources you provided and conclude that the consensus hasn’t considered the case correctly and honestly and has come to the wrong conclusion. That would still be my opinion against the consensus. Who decides who is right? You’ve concluded that the consensus on Historicity doesn’t adduce valid and sound arguments. But that could just be your opinion.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m playing devil’s advocate and taking the worst case scenario if I’m debating someone while I hold a minority view and my opponent keeps hitting me over the head with “the consensus disagrees with you”. To be honest I don’t see a way out of this problem.

Yeah. That’s standard race-baiting apologetics. When you don’t have an argument, attack race. It’s the same kind of tactic as when William Lane Craig attacks atheists as “cognitively defective” (so, fabricate a mental illness, and attack it). Or when all atheists back in the 80s and 90s used to be attacked as Marxist Communists (because that was a popular target of distrust then). For radicals in the black community appealing to their audiences, racism is the same kind of easy false charge to hide behind (because, like mental illness and Marxism, it really does exist, just not in the persons falsely accused of it; so anyone uncomfortable with the truth will be happier to believe that of someone than accept what actually happened).

It seems like you just can’t catch a break dealing with the “Conscious Community”. If you speak about Jabari, a Kemetic priest, he denigrates you as a tamahu and for your immutable characteristic, skin color. If you speak with a Conscious pastor, he accuses you of white supremacy.

I don’t always agree with everything you say, but one thing I know is that you are absolutely 100% not a racist or a white supremacist.

These “Conscious” will not judge you by the content of your intellect, but rather by the color of your skin and it is sickening. The receipts are there for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.

A consensus is only evidence for a thing if it is well-founded. For example, if a consensus of historians rejects a position without ever having read any arguments or evidence for that position, then that consensus has no value as evidence.

Thus, when evaluating whether a consensus has value as evidence, it is necessary to determine if the persons forming that consensus are doing so after having actually considered the case and correctly understanding it and actually adducing valid and sound arguments against it. If, instead, you find their opinions are based on false claims about and ignorance of key components of that case, then you know their consensus has no value as evidence. Whereas if you find the reverse (they correctly describe and correctly apprehend the key arguments, and have valid and sound objections to them), then you can cite that consensus as evidence.

For more see my article On Evaluating Arguments from Consensus and then see for yourself if any consensus-directed opinions being formed by experts regarding my thesis correctly describe and soundly object to the actual case I make, or not. To that end see List of Responses to Defenders of the Historicity of Jesus and see if you can find any valid and sound objection to my case from any actual expert; and compare that with the list of experts who grant my thesis is plausible. When you count experts with valid and sound objections to what I have actually argued (and not experts who misrepresent my case or fail to respond to its actual content), and experts who concur instead that my case is plausible, what ratio do you get? And in what direction does it go?

Yes! Thank you. Good catch. Fixed.

Anyway, I had a couple of questions but I can only remember one of them. I understand that you made a case against the consensus on Historicity. What if there’s a new consensus that your case against the consensus on Historicity is wrong? That would be evidence against your case, right?

No, that isn’t plausible. Logically not, because “Jesus is only a concept who was crucified in our mind” is still a (fictional) man and a (different kind of) place. And empirically not, because the Epistles are rife with clear declarations that Jesus was a real (not metaphorical) man who was crucified at a real point in history by real entities (which can only have been imagined as happening somewhere).

Perhaps you are confusing a theory about what people believed, with whether what they believed was true. Obviously if Jesus didn’t exist, it isn’t true that he was crucified somewhere. But indisputably, the first Christians believed (or claimed) that he was.

Therefore only theories of Christian origins that account for that belief-claim are possible. Otherwise they would not be a causal theory of the evidence at all. Yes, one such theory could be “the belief-claim was caused by purely metaphorical claims never meant to be mistaken as otherwise,” but that is one of the theories I mention that I show empirically in OHJ has a vanishingly small probability (so small as to be no meaningfully different from zero).

The Titan/Titanic parallel, for example. Like, yeah, we all agree, this is a lame parallel, even though it looks superficially impressive. But, apologist, you don’t think that way. If the Bible is miraculous for its fulfilled predictions, then so too is Morgan Robertson’s work. The fact that you show skepticism and investigate indicates only that you are engaging in special pleading, Pastor Damon. For you, connections and parallelism across texts and events are evidence of miracles. So which is it?

I still find it staggering, even as it’s obviously a result of the need to maintain the certainty of this belief, that they think the Pilate argument holds water even given their premises being granted. Like, yeah, if there was no good reason to believe Pontius Pilate existed, there would be no good reason. At best, they’d have shown that secular scholars should take a second look at Pilate’s existence. But I am convinced that apologists are so determined to reason through dogma that they assume everyone else is as well. They don’t recognize that a response from a scholar to their argument could easily be “Wow, you’re right, we probably should take a second look at Pilate”.

It sounds like you properly managed your clock. I will say that, having not watched the debate but seeing your summary, Damo seems, to his credit, to have avoided Gish gallops and other abuses of clock time that only work when formal debates are judged by people who aren’t sticking to formal standards (where, of course, bringing up an argument with no support can be responded to with no support and a group of such arguments can be clustered and rebutted simultaneously).