RE: Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?
August 2, 2017 at 11:23 am
(This post was last modified: August 4, 2017 at 10:29 am by Mister Agenda.)
Neo-Scholastic Wrote:Cyberman Wrote:We have photographs of Abraham Lincoln. We have documents written and signed by him. We have speeches written by him. We have contemporary accounts of his public appearances. We have not one jot or tittle of anything remotely similar for any godman character.
Still silence on Cato the Elder, Socrates, and Alexander the Great? We have less evidence that any of these existed than for Jesus of Nazareth. If the issue is simply one of having sufficient and reasonably accurate accounts about people from the ancient world, then Jesus of Nazareth stands out as one of the more extensively documented.
Maybe they didn't really exist. If they didn't, so what? It's not like we can't be wrong about whether they were real people.
Neo-Scholastic Wrote:Now admittedly, no miraculous claims are being made with respect to these other historical figures. So what? The point SteveII, RoadRunner79, and I are making is that skeptics have abandoned objectivity by ruling out the possibility of supernatural events in advance. In fact, they say that the mere mention of miraculous events in the accounts is proof that the accounts of miracles are false. That move is a basic logical fallacy called "Begging the Question."
The what is that miracles haven't been established as a possibility yet. That someone existed and that they violated the known laws of biology and physics are separate claims. The former might be plausible under Bayesian probability, the latter is inherently less plausible until the reality of truly miraculous events (requiring supernatural causation) is shown to be possible.
Prove one miracle, just one, and the other miracle claims will become at least slightly more plausible. It isn't begging the question to observe that a claim describes events not known to be possible.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.