Satan Disproves Christianity

[John V]

Okay, I agree with you in part. Testimony counts as evidence. However, things are more complicated than that...

Ever wonder why we have perjury laws? Because people can lie during testimony; we don't assume that what everyone says is truthful just because they swore or affirmed it, after all.

Of course not. As I already mentioned, when someone doesn't recant in the face of personal loss, that's generally judged as stronger testimony than that of some who does recant. To your point on perjury, that's why sworn testimony is generally judged as stronger than casual testimony - the person making sworn testimony could suffer personal loss if caught lying.

Also, what about competing testimony? Religions do this a lot; there's 30,000 denominations of your religion, and many of them have directly contradictory claims in terms of their rules, and individual adherents often exhibit contradictory revelations. Isaac Newton's personal experience with god, for example, told him that considering Jesus to be god was idolatry, and that they were separate people. How do we decide which testimony is the correct one?

To start, we can continue with the same principle. Newton would have suffered loss had he publicized his view, and he didn't publicize it. He lacked the confidence that Paul had in proclaiming that Jesus was god.

What about all the religions you don't believe in? Alien abduction stories? Every weird claim that happens to have testimony attached? How do we tell which is true and which is not?

Again, I've covered such things in the past. If I must I can do so again, but pick one thing at a time in order to keep it manageable.

Testimony might be fine to you, but if it is evidence, it's weak evidence, especially with regards to fantastical claims. That's the crux of the thought experiment we're trying to do with you here; we're trying to show you that unverifiable testimony isn't a reliable way to get to the truth.

You're not doing a good job of it. Arguing that you don't understand the difference between a book marked as biography and one marked as fiction (a reasonable conclusion from your argument that it doesn't matter if someone admits making up a claim) certainly doesn't help.