(June 29, 2018 at 2:21 am)Mathilda Wrote: There's a fire breathing dragon in my garage.
That's a claim. But according to xtians it is also the evidence so I don't have to back it up with anything else. You should all believe now me.
Problem is that there are many different contradictory claims so we need some way of differentiating between them.
I could provide further evidence if you like though. There's smoke coming from my garage. I could provide a picture or some third party report on it.
That's a claim and now that's actual evidence.
Thing is that we need to evaluate the claim and the evidence separately. This is what Huggy didn't understand in the thread about moral behaviour in animals. I used the evidence provided by Frans De Waal but disagreed with his interpretation of that evidence. In other words, the claim.
In the same way you may accept the evidence of there being smoke in my garage but disagree about the claim of the smoke breathing dragon. You might instead want to point out that it's more likely that my garage is on fire (Occam's razor and all that).
This is why we need to know what the evidence is and what the claim is. But all xtians can do is equivocate, bluster and insult when faced with this problem. But what else can they do? There is no evidence outside of the Bible to support it, but plenty of evidence to tell us that it's claims are incorrect.
I think the point is that if people report something as having happened, then those reports constitute evidence of that thing happening. Perhaps not good evidence, but evidence all the same. I think the problem with getting to that point is in presuming that the reports in the bible are the same kind as a report of a man in the street as to what they saw on September 11. If you could get to that point, then perhaps you could count the reports in the bible as some kind of evidence. It's not at all clear that any Christian is successful in getting the biblical testimony to that point, for a variety of reasons, which apologetic arguments are intended to get around. The Christian wants to claim that the report of a biblical miracle should have the same standing, as say, a historical event that Tacitus reports on. I don't believe that's true, so the evidence of the bible is tainted from that perspective.
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