>Since you mention abductive reasoning, apparently without understanding what >it is, the simplest explanation for the apparent fit between the Gospels' >account and the OT scriptures is the one I have given, by essentially the >same reasoning that Hume gives for rejecting belief in miracles. > >B
I hope you've had the chance to read Peter Lipton's "Inference to the Best Explanation." I think it's the current standard on abductive logic and reason. All historical inquiry is abductive. How we deal with the artifacts of history can vary from empirical/inductive to just inductive, depending on the material and the test. One example of this would be documents. The empirical approach would be to test the media (papyrus/paper/metal/skin/ink). But verifying the content would be inductive -- evaluating its truth value). How it fits into the historical narrative remains abductive. You've made an assertion without evidence (that of retrofitted narrative), assuming that simplicity == accuracy. I don't know that such an assumption would stand up. Ockham not withstanding. >At the very least you have to believe that the Old Testament prophets could predict the future No, that the future was revealed to them. This is a matter of externalism rather than internalism. >indeed, in Jewish thought Jesus is not the messiah That's reading the present into the past. Until roughly AD49 Christians and Jews worshipped together. The big split came when Jews (Christians with them) were expelled from Rome. Along with other persecution matters the groups tended to separate. After that period ended they never did come back together. Hume is a funny character. On the one hand he pushed hard for empiricism, contributing greatly to the 20th c. empiricism movement. On the other hand he understood the problem of induction. In the end he was not able to reconcile the problem of empirical certainty and inductive sufficiency. Now, if you think your level of epistemic certainty rates at a 0.7 or 0.8, I'd love to hear the reasoning behind it. What you've presented is a straw man. It is one that many accept without question, but a straw man it remains. Faith is not a sense. But neither is it simply knowledge. It is a response to a presentation, roughly the same as what we call today a "considered opinion" or "philosophical commitment." In Biblical language it is a response to historical facts. Hebrews 11, esp. v. 6. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
