Why is it impossible for God to rise from death?
That's called begging the question.
Perhaps you ought to ask God.
How come Christians discount the possibility of the disciples stealing the body and yet they do not apply the same critical standards to the possibility of resurrection. I sense confirmation bias at work.
jeremy, we tend to discount the possibility of the disciples stealing the body because of the very same critical standards which you claim to be using
But you then discard those critical standards when you claim Jesus rose from the dead.
No, the latter is one of the possible explanations of the events that occurred, and is the only one for which there is even a scrap of evidence. Its folk like yourself who choose to accept possibilities for which there is absolutely no documentary evidence who are discarding the standards.
This is critical thinking, you can't relax the standards just for the things you believe in.
Couldn't agree with you more.
If you assume god, all critical thinking has to go out of the window.
Why?
Could God have helped the disciples steal the body and manufacture a resurrection myth. Of course.
He could have done, but to what purpose? The disciples had all scattered, scared that they were going to be arrested like the Rabbi they had been following for 3 years. Is it likely that he would have used these pathetic creatures to run a scam? After all, that is what you are suggesting occurred. How many people that you know would be willing to die for a scam?
All possibilities become equally likely.
Not really; we still have to look for the evidence for those possibilities. Perhaps you have evidence that no-one else has about one of the alternatives.
If you want to believe in God and that he did loads of wonderful things, that's fine but stop trying to insult our intelligence by dressing up your ideas as critical thinking or as evidence. Assuming the existence of God invalidates all of that.
No-one is trying to insult anyone's intelligence.