RE: Why Bart Ehrman Pisses Me Off..... sometimes
February 2, 2018 at 7:57 pm
(This post was last modified: February 2, 2018 at 7:59 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(February 2, 2018 at 7:00 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: If you proceed by eliminating the implausible from a story, by definition what you will have left is therefore plausible. To then turn around and accept those details on the basis of their plausibility alone is an irrational procedure. It's tautological. Whenever you remove the implausible and are left with only the plausible, and declare that core as true based upon its plausibility, then all stories become certifiably true. If you reduce Sherlock Holmes to the claim that a man lived in a flat in London, it's automatic that the remaining details are sufficiently mundane to pass muster. If you are going to reduce a story in this way, you must then look to other sources for its veracity, lest you engage in a pathetically reasoned circle.
Accepting what is plausible may be true is not the same as accepting what is plausible is therefore true.
In the absence of further evidence, it certainly is irrational to argue what is plausible is definitively not true, especially if the grounds of that argument is merely that the proposition in question by happenstance found itself amongst a collection of other propositions some of which are extremely dubious or demonstrably false, but that were likely arrived at through different methods.
