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GwynJ,
You wrote:
> "Great advances in science" due to Jesus would
> have required a belief in who He was/is. As we
> know, there were skeptics even while He lived.
> So, advances would not be guaranteed, anyway.
There are plenty of scientists today who believe in Christ, yet they can't do the things Christ's believers could do in the New Testament. Actually, no one today seems to be able to do the miracles reported in the Bible. Are they incompetent? Not faithful enough?
My point about great advances is that IF Jesus and his Apostles had really performed miracles then it IS possible to do such things today. Such a reality would mean modern science, which discounts such things, wouldn't work properly. It would be in need of serious revision.
For example, Wine could be chemically converted from pure water, the mass of a few fishes and loaves could be increased a 1000-fold, faith and prayers could exert enough force to cause weather to change and mountains to move, The surface tension of water could be increased many fold (enough to support a human body), death could be reversed by faith and prayers, etc.
Since these alternative realities don't operate in today's laboratories we should be confident they didn't happen then either. It's more likely that the Biblical writers made these things up than that the laws of nature as we study them today were temporarily suspended while Jesus, one of his Disciples, or one of the Prophets performed a miracle.
> As for 'a much greater change in the world'
> expected, would we really discount all the
> believers who made it possible in subtle and in
> significant ways for scientifically-inclined
> progeny to pursue their studies and educate the
> world?
Rather than promoting science, Christianity was such a detriment that it helped to cause the Dark Ages. I would have expected a tremendous flowering of knowledge, love, forgiveness, peace (personally and globally), etc. Such things did not happen. The world was not the much better place it should have become, and I claim would have become, if the Son of God had really come to the Earth about 0 A.D.
> As it is, if I truly want to devote studies to
> science, I won't settle for the diluted form in
> this forum (with all due respect to the
> contributors who are sharing their many years
> of experience) - I'd go directly to the
> contributors' sources of information for
> the 'whole story'.
That's admirable, but very difficult. To understand the original sources requires that you have a mathematical and scientific background similar to their own. It's probably easier to understand Relativity (or any other scientific topic) by going to textbooks than to the original papers (of Einstein).
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