(August 7, 2017 at 10:04 am)Mister Agenda Wrote:RoadRunner79 Wrote:No... not taking anything away from the matter. It was just a re-cap.
I think that it is intriguing , that you said the only people who know the truth of the matter is the other witnesses and myself. Can the witnesses not transfer this truth of the matter to others through testimony?
Yes they can. It's just not possible to know if they are correct and truthful without evidence to support that. The testimony is the claim. Evidence is the body of facts that support or undermine the claim. Going through life taking everyone's word for everything will land you in trouble.
RoadRunner79 Wrote: I would assume that if there was DNA evidence, I don't witness these facts first hand, but rely on the testimony (either documents or expert testimony) in court to relay this information. Why can't the same be done with testimony? Are you saying that my testimony in confessing to the crime would be evidence, whereas anyone else who saw is somehow not evidence? Couldn't someone just bring up the false convictions based on confessions?
Sigh. The testimony is the claim. The evidence is what makes you justified in accepting it as accurate. People give false confessions all the time. Police interrogations are practically designed to elicit them. Plenty of people have been falsely convicted based on their own confessions.
'I beat Joe with a chair' is a claim. If I did, in fact, beat Joe with a chair; the evidence should support that claim: Joe should show signs of being beaten, the chair should show signs of being used to beat someone, and my story should hold up under cross examination and investigation of the circumstances, nothing found that would motivate me to claim I beat Joe when I didn't, no one says I was somewhere else when it happened, etc. I should be convicted if no evidence is found to exonerate me despite my confession. It makes a difference if the confession was freely given or obtained by interrogation.
Why is this so hard for you? It's like you have some motivation to not be able to get the difference between a claim and evidence for or against a claim.
It's basically an argument based on semantics but from what I can tell, in a court of law witness testimony is considered evidence.
It might be insufficient evidence or fabricated evidence or it might be considered reliable witness testimony.
In science then obviously witness testimony isn't evidence.
To cut through the bullshit all this amounts to is trying to connect the word "evidence" to religious eye witness testimony to make the events described seem to be "evident".
In my opinion, as a non religious person, any religious person who wants to call religious witness testimony "evidence" that's fine by me, as long as that isn't confused with scientific evidence and my argument would be that 2000 year old testimony concerning claims of the supernatural is ridiculous, laughable anecdotal evidence.
There's a similar tactic in Islamic apologetics relating to the hadith, they call it the science of the hadith. Which basically amounts to the science of anecdotal evidence.
Are you ready for the fire? We are firemen. WE ARE FIREMEN! The heat doesn’t bother us. We live in the heat. We train in the heat. It tells us that we’re ready, we’re at home, we’re where we’re supposed to be. Flames don’t intimidate us. What do we do? We control the flame. We control them. We move the flames where we want to. And then we extinguish them.
Impersonation is treason.
