(February 2, 2015 at 10:43 am)SteveII Wrote: I can't for the life of me think why believing 4 accounts of events is circular. You can level the charge of wrong, stupid, misguided, etc. but circular has a specific meaning. Special pleading also has a specific meaning. What am I "exempting from a generally accepted rule or principle without justifying the exemption"? Miracles? In fact you are employing special pleading in the case of miracles because you insist that an eyewitness testimony is not sufficient to prove a miracle exists when eyewitness testimony is accepted for every other event. You only exempt miracles based on your naturalistic philosophy.(Bolding mine)
What? Didn't we just spend the last several pages explaining why eyewitness testimony is not considered a strong form of evidence? And that's when we actually have eyewitnesses who we can verify the existence of. We can't even be sure that the eyewitnesses in question ever existed in your case.
One more time. The book is the claim. The book says "x happened". Does that make it true? Of course not. Not any more than something in a history book is true because it is in a history book. Rather, we have to ask why it is there. We could ask the authors for their sources, or maybe even interview someone involved in the actual event, but for something that is as old as the Bible, both of these are obviously out of the question.
In lieu of other evidence, we have to ask ourselves, is it more likely that some man was born of a virgin, performed miracles, and magically came back from the dead, or that this was all just made up? And if. for some inexplicable reason, you think that magic is the more logical explanation, then why do you not accept the claims of competing religious texts?
John Adams Wrote:The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.