I love that one... they attempt to insult you by telling you that you embrace the same principles they embrace.  Yes I know I use a ton of faith, and you refuse to... but haaa you loser... you must have so much faith to believe X.  What an idiot you are... with your faith! 

As for any evidence that you're faithful professor would present, this link will help answer just about any proof he'd provide: http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/2889

Flavius Josephus (AD 37?-101?) 

"At this time there was a wise man called Jesus, and his conduct was good, and he was known to be virtuous. Many people among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified, and to die. But those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive. Accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have reported wonders. And the tribe of the Christians, so named after him, has not disappeared to this day" (Antiquities 20:200) 

• Many problems abound here. Firstly, this is the Arabic translation of the text. Many consider this a more accurate translation, it does not in anyway change the fact that it is an interpolation. I'm using it to show that even if we ignore that faulty greek translation which is not as accurately translated, this passage STILL does not appear until 300 years later when Eusebius, in the 4th century, cited all the "evidences" of Christianity obtained from Jewish and pagan sources. Eusebius, who admitted to forging multiple works, as well as lying for the sake of his beliefs, as Gibbon recounts: "I have repeated whatever may rebound to the glory, and suppressed all that could tend to the disgrace of our religion" 
  
  The text Gibbon speaks of is as follows:
  "But even if the case were not such as our argument has now proved it to be, if a lawgiver, who is to be of ever so little use, could have ventured to tell any falsehood at all to the young 
  for their good, is there any falsehood that he could have told more beneficial than this, and better able to make them all do everything that is just, not by compulsion but willingly? 
  
  'Truth, O Stranger, is a noble and an enduring thing; it seems, however, not easy to persuade men of it.' - d PLATO 
  
  Now you may find in the Hebrew Scriptures also 
  thousands of such passages concerning God as though He were jealous, or sleeping, or angry, or subject to any other human passions, which passages are adopted for the benefit of those who need this mode of instruction."
  (Chp. 31, Book 12 of Prae Paratio Evangelica). 
• Which is also verified by Robert Ingersoll, "The great religious historian, Eusebius, ingenuously remarks that in his history he carefully omitted whatever tended to discredit the church, and that he piously magnified all that conduced to her glory." Ibid., Vol. 1, p. 293" 
• Apparently Eusebius was the first to use this passage because it didn't exist during the 2nd and 3rd centuries. The passage is not found in the early copies of Josephus. Are we to assume it magically appeared there? Please. If it had been authentic you would have heard more about the passage during the centuries prior when the early chruch fathers were struggling to gather any pagan articles on such a person as Jesus. Instead their silence is deadly to this argument. 
• The early Christian fathers such as Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen were acquainted with Josephus' works they would have quoted this passage had it existed. Chrysostom often referred to Josephus and it's highly unlikely he would have omitted the paragraph had it been extant. Photius did not quote the text though he had three articles concerning Josephus and even expressly stated that Josephus, being a Jew, had not taken the least notice of Christ. 
• Neither Justin in his dialogue with Trypho, the Jew, nor Origen against Celsus ever mentioned this passage. Neither Tertullian nor Cyprian ever quoted Josephus as a witness in their controversies with Jews and pagans and Origen expressly stated that Josephus, who had mentioned John the Baptist, did not recognize Jesus as the messiah (Contra Celsum, I, 47). In Origen's own words, Contra Celsus, BOOK I., Chap XLVII : 
  
  I would like to say to Celsus, who represents the Jew as accepting somehow John as a Baptist, who baptized Jesus, that the existence of John the Baptist, baptizing for the remission of sins, is related by one who lived no great length of time after John and Jesus. For in the 18th book of his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus bears witness to John as having been a Baptist, and as promising purification to those who underwent the rite. Now this writer, although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, whereas he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these calamities befalling the people[...] 
• The passage also interrupts the narrative. Immediately before it Josephus tells of a rising of the Jews due to bitter feeling at the conduct of Pilate, and its bloody suppression by the ruling power. The words immediately following the passage are: "Also about this time another misfortune befell the Jews" and we are told of the expulsion of the Jews from Rome by Tiberius on account of the conduct of some of their compatriots. What is the connection between the reference to Jesus and these two narratives? That there must be some connection if Josephus wrote the passage about Jesus goes without saying in view of the character of the writer. Josephus was always careful to have a logical connection between his statements and from a rational standpoint there is no occasion whatever to put the passage about Jesus in the connection in which we find it. 
• It's so obvious, even the Catholic Encyclopedia states it as a forgery!

In case you missed it, I underlined and bolded the last fact which is the easiest to remember, that would be considered the dumbed down version.

Was it Pliny the Younger?  Or would it ring more of a bell if I said cat up a tree?  If it's Pliny... check that post out.

Wow damn you guys are fast, i barely had time to potty like it was 1999 before you all swarmed in haha. Thanks for the info, ill post his response when I email him tomorow, and just saying cat going up a tree is just gunna make me think about how retarded the guy was at the time haha.

On the forgeries in Josephus. You don't need a degree to read books by the experts and as Sapient has rightly pointed out, even the catholic church denounces the Josephus forgery.

Eusebius even wrote to a friend in the process of a big stoush he was having with pagan scholars of the day (believers in mithras, I think) and said he would need to contrive more evidence: "For our purposes let us turn to Josephus the Jew", he wrote.

Your Dad is free to read all this, too. And it's not up to you to de-convert him. The onus is on your father or anyone else who believes, to product some compelling evidence of their invisible friend. It's my bet their evidence will tend towards the far reaches of

probability and go along the lines of: Where did we come from then? The human 'mind' is proof of a soul or 'every effect must have a cause', etc.

They might even come up with the groaning statement that: "It's in the bible..." When they rail against evolution they'll whine on about the absence of intermediate forms, obviously expecting to see winged crocodiles fluttering about.

My dad was an evangelical minister and one of his big reasons for believing was this statement: "If there is no god we are just lost in the cosmos with no choice but to haul ourselves up by our own bootstraps..."

Now, I'm not sure where he came up with this bucket of horseshit but it left him moist-eyed in the pulpit every time. I personally love the idea earth is star trek capsule, alone in the cosmos.

The point is you can't convince your dad. People have their own weird reasons for believing in invisible things whether they are brave enough to own up to them or not. You should focus on finding your own truth.

Perhaps you might ask your father what his qualifications for a belief in a god who exists outside of the universe in some sort of quantum reality.

He's asking questions about why he should believe anything I say?  Why start now?  Clearly he's eaten up everything from the pulpit.  Tell him my qualifications are that I wear a skirt on Sunday, can convert a piece of bread into the body of a dead man who never lived and I like to drink wine from a crunk cup.  That's enough to have him eating out of my hands, right?  Oh wait... he only believes those people if they already agree with his twisted preconceived notions of reality.

I mean seriously.... shit.  Now... here's the truth:  I don't want him to believe anything I say about Josephus just because I said it.  In the same way he should have never believed what the Church said just because a Priest said it.  He needs to cross reference everything.  Look it up for himself.  If he finds one piece of information, search for conflicting information, and keep searching for conflicting information, until he's tired, and then do it again.

If he's not willing to research it, tell him to drop the retarded rebuttal, and go back to throwing 10% of his income away to the most violent and repressive regime the world has ever known.  And what are his qualifications?  Has he even read the entire bible?

Yea, this has been one of my main points inthe ongoing debate, the over 50 historians/scribes/philosophers not including the "biggest happening at that time" in anything. You would think that out of the thousands of people that supposedly followed him, at least a couple would have written at least something down somewhere, after all don't we have writings from religions before christ. But yeah thanks all on filling my gun with ammo haha i'll come back if i ever get a jam in the barrel.