in an interview with Time Magazine Richard Dawkins history's most overrated atheist gave a challenge to religious people when asked if a God exists he said this yes but it could be any of a billion Gods it could be God of the Martians or of the inhabitants of Alphas andori the chance of its being a particular God Yahweh the god of Jesus is vanishingly small at least the onus is on you to demonstrate why you think that's the case for sure as long as humans have been around we've been thinking about the idea of God from
our most ancient civilizations up until the modern day we've been thinking not only about God but what he might be like if he does exist for our line of evidence we're going to take a little investigation of a timeline of evidence now Richard it's taken me a while to get back to you considering I was 8 years old when you issued your challenge but prepare to see some evidence you may never have seen before let's go for us Christians we think that Jesus really is the Son of God that he really is God In the
Flesh but for critics the chance of that is vanishingly small and not only that it seems unreasonable for God to have shown up 2,000 years ago and not in the modern day when we can just take a video of him but there's actually evidence for why that had to be the case let's take a look at the first line of evidence spirituality there's a ton of ancient religions both big and small all but if you survey what each one was saying about the Divine you start to see some patterns form here's 15 different characteristics common
among ancient religious deity figures sometimes the deity was predicted zoroaster for example was apparently predicted since the beginning of time that would make sense for people who were thinking about God at some point they would expect that deity to exist and so they'd predict him in some mythologies the deity is from a royal lineage take a look at many of the Greek and Roman gods for example it would make sense too that a God would be thought of as Royal because royalty is often associated with power and authority some deities are born unnaturally Athena was
said to be born from the head of Zeus and the Tibetan God Indra was said to be born from the mouth of the god perusia this would make sense because people thinking about God would naturally expect him to have some kind of difference from humanity and to be special in some kind of way a few mythologies have the deity being protected as a child this was apparently the case with Buddha who is protected from the ugliness of the World by his parents this would also make sense if people are thinking about God they' think he
probably has at least some shared experiences with us some ancient deities faced Temptation demons apparently tempted the god Krishna this also makes sense we'd expect this God to be able to relate to us in some way and certainly we all face Temptation sometimes ancient deities were identified as shepherds in the ancient agrarian World Shepherds were very common they were guides and if these deities were supposed to be guides for us well then we'd naturally accept them as Shepherds unsurprisingly all the ancient deities are considered supernaturally powerful this makes sense to people who look around us
and see normal humans if we expect some kind of God to exist he's got to be more powerful than us often supernaturally powerful maybe even creating the entire world in in some mythologies deities engage with humans directly the Greeks and Romans knew this all too well the deities who guide Humanity would of course also teach them God would naturally be a teacher of us because he would know things that we don't know and so this would go along with him guiding Humanity he'd teach us things that we didn't previously understand many of the ancient deities
were said to require sacrifice lots of thoughtful humans thought about the evil of this world and they expected that the creator of the world would require some kind of sacrifice to make Penance for the evil in this world or to atone for it some of the ancient Dees also faced Trials of some kind dionis the Greek god apparently faced trial at the hands of King pantheus this would also make sense to people thinking about God because if God is supposed to be some kind of Judge then the judge should be consistent even if it means
judging themselves a few mythologies depict a deity sharing a Divine meal the Persian God mithis apparently shared a meal with Soul Invictus we look at meals as ways to communicate intimately with one another and so we'd probably want the same thing with God we'd expect God to be able to intimately communicate with us and so shared meals of course many ancient deities had the power to defeat death some were considered Immortal so naturally they had the power over death this makes sense as well considering humans are mortal and we'd expect deities to have that power
over something that we have no control over also sometimes those death defying deities offered that eternal life to their followers take Z moxis for example the god of the dasci who apparently offered eternal life to brave Soldiers this would make sense to people who are thinking about God and who understand death and have hope of overcoming that death lastly some mythologies describe Gods who judge the living and the dead the santal god takar jiu is said to have judged people before and after their deaths this makes sense to people thinking about God because if evil
is done on this Earth we'd expect it to be punished if not on Earth then certainly after this life here's a chart of the deities I mentioned plus a bunch more and how they stack up against these common characteristics not all of the deities are described with all characteristics in fact none of them are but you can see that there are still many similarities these similarities are often brought up to discredit the Christian concept of Jesus but we'll see how these actually work toward the person of Jesus the deities with the most similarities to each
other and Jesus are Osiris dionis zoroaster and Buddha the first three are often used to undermine Jesus saying that the Christians just copied him from earlier deities but nobody really thinks that Jesus is a mythological Recreation of Buddha do they well the same can be said for the other gods here the similarities are too broad and too super official to have any meaning and besides the only one that actually fulfills all of these characteristics is Jesus now for the really cool part oh you thought that was it no no no it gets a lot cooler
we're just getting started this is what I call the spiritual timeline which is the main part of my argument there are varying similarities among all those Gods I mentioned so let's put them on a timeline and just see what happens this is the timeline roughly speaking of the start and end of the worship of all of these deities I'll start with Osiris who is being worshiped from as early on as 3300 BC up until about 250 ad let's lay on top of that the timeline of tamuz the Mesopotamian God to see if we can find
a pattern starting then one by one we're going to put layer after layer of deity worship and see what happens this timeline goes up until the modern day by the way so we can say that this timeline represents the general summary of the expectations of humanity of the Divine Vine from the earliest worshiping of a god until now you can see that the largest number of these deities with similar characteristics were being worshiped within the time span of 350 BC to 380 ad so what what's the importance well don't you think with all these people
thinking about God over the course of many thousands of years that eventually they'd realize some true things about God and eventually that God would meet their expectations well if that's the case this window is a great time for something to happen because all these people are worshiping God all at the same time so let's call this the Red Zone something great is likely to happen here because of the spiritual overlap only one problem this window is about 700 years long that's way too broad well that brings us to reason number two for why Jesus had
to come 2,000 years ago culture all of these spiritual groups were worshiping God in their own way but with similarities all around the same time can we think of anything else interesting that happened in this period of History well a certain Empire took over the region and set the table for something interesting Rome conquered most of the Known World by 146 BC certainly all the area around the Mediterranean they built an amazing system of roads to connect the Empire which meant that people and information could travel a lot faster than any time previously they adopted
the at truscan alphabet and the Greek language making communication a lot faster as well when Caesar Augustus Rose to power he implemented the curses publicus which is essentially the ancient version of the modern Postal Service this helped spread information a lot faster and it lasted until the end of the Empire centuries later lastly Augustus initiated a time of Peace called Pax Romana that also lasted for over 200 years now our red zone is a lot smaller when you combine the general spiritual beliefs of the known world and the power and invention of the Roman Empire
you get a lot smaller window of History where something very interesting could take place however there's still a window of over 200 years in which the true God could potentially make himself known with Maximum Impact now let's look at reason number three for why Jesus had to come over 2,000 years ago prophecy of course all the other deities are being worshiped by other people but the Jews had some kind of concept of God as well now you might wonder okay great we've got all these spiritual groups worshiping God back then and yes the Roman Empire
was powerful but why couldn't Jesus have just shown up today why couldn't we just take pictures of him and have him plaster his face on a billboard saying I am God worship me prophecy that's why the Jewish Prophet Daniel said the Messiah would come after an edict to rebuild the city of Jerusalem and before the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem when well there was a decree sent out by King arz Xerxes in 457 BC and of course everyone knows the temple was destroyed in 70 AD in the first Jewish Roman War all of a
sudden our red zone is extremely small this timeline is over 5,000 years long from 3,300 BC to the 1900s in modern day but we have a red zone that is 98 years long that's from 29 BC when Pax Roman began up until 70 AD when the Jewish temple was destroyed do you realize how small of a percentage of the timeline that is that is 0.01 188% of the timeline I've expanded this timeline on the screen just to make it a little easier to see but here's what it actually looks like as a percentage of History
it's a sliver even this doesn't do it justice 0.088 per is nothing on this timeline and yet who happened to show up at this time Jesus of Nazareth okay yeah sure that's all well and good you say but maybe Jesus just kind of got lucky with his role of the dice yeah there's a lot of people worshiping God at the same time and there's a strong economy and a strong Empire in the Roman Empire but that was over 2,000 years ago okay great you can imagine all this evidence evidence leading up to this time as
a fuse and the time of Jesus his appearance is a bomb so the fuse ends the bomb goes off and there's some kind of Fallout some kind of effect of the bomb if he was nobody really nobody The Fallout would be brushed under the rug and we'd forget about him but do I really have to go over this part of the argument we're talking about a nobody Carpenter from one of the smallest nations on the face of the Earth that hasn't existed for 2,000 years up until the 1940s and yet we're trying to decide whether
or not this Carpenter was God we shouldn't know about him but yet there are believers from around the world who trust in the god of Israel because of him that's something significant I got to be honest Richard I think this is all the evidence you need you've got all these people worshiping God in a time where the region is really stable and it would really do well for God to show up and fulfill prophecy and a guy shows up saying he fulfilled that prophecy and claiming to be God and we're also talking about him 2,000
years later and legitimately considering his arguments but hey you might just want to be a cultural Christian like he said that's totally fine you don't have to worry about us because we're not going to crucify you for it a
