(May 25, 2016 at 11:56 am)Mister Agenda Wrote:SteveII Wrote:You really can't understand the difference between examining if a series of events happened and the 27 sources that describe these events? Answer the question I asked: then by that standard we could never believe anything that happened in the past on any subject?There's historical method. It involves primary sources, and principles of determining reliability. For example, any given source can be corrupted or forged, so original documents are considered more reliable than copies. How close the source is to the event (in time and space) is considered, whether the source is an eyewitness, whether credible independent sources support the same narrative, how likely it is that the source is motivated by bias (are they selling something?). That's a rough summary of what I found here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical...eliability
Are you defending the charge of circular reasoning and/or are you saying the 27 books/letters are not reliable? If so, why should I believe them to be unreliable and not, in general, what they purport to be?
