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David_Gerard comments on Tell Your Rationalist Origin Story - Less Wrong
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There exist only two non-biblical pieces of evidence for the existence of Pontius Pilate -- and he was the damn Prefect of Judaea for Cthulhu's sake. How much "direct evidence" do you expect for a rather Jewish-cult-leader, one of possibly dozen such groups the time?
So is it just his noteworthiness that you doubt, not his existence?
No, that's a completely unbelievable explanation. If he was fictional he'd not have been of Nazareth with a circuitous reasoning about why he was also of Bethlehem -- he'd have been directly of Bethlehem. His name wouldn't have been Jesus with a completely circuitous explanation about why "Emmanuel" also counts as his name, his name would have been directly Emmanuel.
Nor do I know of any fictional characters that are so deliberately placed recent history and yet their existence is believed by their contemporaries as real. If the Christian movement had began in the 1st century, and yet its founder placed as having lived in 3rd century BC, that explanation might make sense. But he was placed as a contemporary, and expected to be believed to be real. You don't do that with fictional founders of your order.
Jesus was a real historical figure. His being fictional just doesn't make sense -- same way that Mohammed being fictional doesn't make sense -- or do you also believe Mohammed fictional?
"There is more evidence for Jesus than X" turns out not to be such a good argument either.
And there is serious historical thought that Mohammed, too, was fictional. The Wikipedia article maps out the scanty evidence.
The real problem with either question is the excessive interest in getting the "right" answer. If e.g. Socrates turned out to be a fictional character invented by Plato, philosophy wouldn't care. If Gautama Buddha turned out to be fictional, Buddhism wouldn't care. But Jesus or Mohammed existing or not is a REALLY BIG DEAL, and we really don't have a great deal of evidence in either case. Considerably less for Jesus, and a lack of evidence where it would have been expected had he existed.
Yeah, that's a ludicrous idea too. Some people seem to think that "fictional" is the null-hypothesis, to be believed by default unless there's an extraordinary amount of evidence to the contrary. This is nonsense: Fictional characters of historical influence aren't more common than real people of historical influence.
This is bias at its most obvious.
If you believe that someone made a fictional character up, and then he made thousands of near-contemporaries believe in his existence, that's a rather extraordinary hypothesis, which has a very low prior given that nobody else seems to have ever managed this feat ever.
Muhammed existed. Jesus of Nazareth existed. The evidence are overwhelmingly in their favour -- including the various bits of inelegancies and clumsinesses in their life-stories that only real-life people display, not fictional characters constructed at their time-period. And there's not a single piece of evidence that someone authored them as fictional characters.
Right in quotes? Are we now pretending that truth has a subjective value now? This is about being less wrong, and people that assume "fiction" to be the default hypothesis, and that discount religious texts as evidence just because they are religious texts, they are more wrong than other people.
Socrates existed too.