RE: Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?
July 28, 2017 at 2:57 pm
(This post was last modified: July 28, 2017 at 2:58 pm by SteveII.)
(July 28, 2017 at 1:28 pm)shadow Wrote:(July 28, 2017 at 11:59 am)SteveII Wrote: 1. There is a body of information we have (see list) that clearly claims something and provides reasons to believe that something.
2. If you want to claim that this is not evidence, then you must demonstrate WHY this is not evidence. See, the burden of proof shifted to you once you denied there was evidence (which is a claim). You now have to explain the bits of information we have (again, see the list).
3. If you were smart, you would take the more modest position of "the evidence is not compelling".
Do you really think this is an important point to argue? You're saying some decent things in my opinion, but it's not really unreasonable that someone would discard very weak evidence as not being evidence at all. There's a point where evidence goes from meaning nothing to meaning something, and it seems like a semantic difference to insist we include the evidence that really means nothing under the category of evidence.
In my experience here, most atheist have so little understanding of the NT, its provenance, its people, its content, and its message that there is no way they can even claim there is no evidence because of two facts:
1. Because they do not have any clue about the facts they are claiming are not evidence. Really not much at all. You just mentioned goat herders. Another "a book". Another mentioned Teacher of Righteousness, temples and Confucious. Another believes that Jesus must have been crucified twice. Paul didn't agree with Jesus or founded Christianity. And I have so many people blocked that I don't see half of the dumb things that are said. How do you reject something that you don't even have sufficient knowledge of?
2. They cannot explain why the facts we do have (of which they are unfamiliar) is not evidence of what it claims to be--failing to realize this is a claim to knowledge for which they can't possibly have because of 1.