On 19 Nov 2015, at 19:14, Collin B <[email protected]> wrote: >> 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.
No, of course I haven't read it. That entire paragraph is nonsense and nothing whatsoever to do with the matter in hand. It's just chaff thrown out to try and distract, and to feed your ego. If you've read the book I doubt that you've understood anything in it at all. > > 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. > Collin, your entire life is built on faith, which by definition is an assertion without evidence, indeed an assertion that flies in the face of all evidence. The fact that you try, however pitifully and rather touchingly, to provide evidence to support your faith only serves to undermine it because evidence has to be used scientifically, otherwise it is not evidence. Yet the science completely overwhelms your cherry-picked and distorted 'evidence'. You should really just give up, declare proudly that faith does not require evidence and stop making yourself look foolish. >> 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. > It doesn't make any difference. If anything it is even more preposterous than being able to predict the future. >> indeed, in Jewish thought Jesus is not the messiah > > That's reading the present into the past. No it isn't. The Jewish messiah has always been human, not divine. > 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. Irrelevant. > > 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. Irrelevant. Rhetorical flatulence intended to puff up your ego. > 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. You ought to find out what it means before you ask questions like that. You're just showing off your ignorance. > > What you've presented is a straw man. It is one that many accept without > question, but a straw man it remains. > It should be easy for you to knock down then, but you don't seem to be able to. > 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. So what? > Hebrews 11, esp. v. 6. > Very appropriate. It's a tautology. B -- 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.
