Follow up Alright, All You Dashing, Swaggering Bush Pilots

"Eric Miller" wrote in message t...
"Corrie" wrote:
"Eric Miller" wrote:
Again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Nothing could be more extraordinary, so it doesn't have to be proven
false,
it's assumed to be false.
Claimants have to prove it's true beyond a shadow a doubt.

Sorry, Eric, that's simply a cop-out.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is certainly *not* a
cop-out.
The patent office won't accept submissions for perpetual motion machines
unless they can be demonstrated.
Pons and Fleischmann claimed to have discovered cold fusion. An
extraordinary claim which, lacking evidence, was necessarily rejected.

Apples and oranges. A patentable invention has to be replicatable.
Pons and Fleischman's experiment should have been replicatable.


But back to the investigation, you're going at things backwards again.
Explain the empty tomb. That's not an extraordinary claim. It's a
puzzling phenomenon.


A resurrection is only a puzzling phenomena and not an extraordinary claim?
And while I'm not suggesting the empty tomb was "staged", are you suggesting
people of the time were unaware of how to create a martyr, make him (no pun
intended) larger than life, and had no motivation to do so?

Which people? The semi-literate fishermen with the hick accents who
followed him around, or the politically-connected, wealthy Pharisees
that he insulted at every opportunity? Those with means had no
motive, and vice versa. Further, his followers had no idea that Jesus
planned to get himself crucified. "Martyrdom" is not a Jewish idea.
(Masada doesn't count. The Maccabin had lost and knew it. The Romans
would have killed them all anyway, slowly and painfully. They chose a
less painful death. They didn't choose death over life.) The whole
notion of "Messiah" in period Jewish thought was of a conquering king,
not a suffering servant. That's how the Sanhedrin got Pilate to
condemn him - as a political subversive.

If you're going to hypothesize a conspiracy, it has to match the
established facts. So far, you're batting zero.

Eyewitness accounts? I wouldn't trust an eyewitness if they said the sun
rose in the East, that the sky was blue and that water was wet!

Hey, there's still hope for you. I understand that there ARE in fact
churches in Missouri. :-)

Sheesh, we
have eyewitness accounts of flying saucers and alien kidnappings. (True
fact: most UFOs are spotted at night... near airports!)

No argument there. I met a fellow who claims to have been abducted by
aliens. A deucedly odd fellow - the abduction could explain a lot!
:-) Or vice versa. There are also some sightings that have NOT been
explained. AFAIC, the jury is out.

(To steal liberally from my own email

Cheater! ;-^

Deductive reasoning moves from the general to the specific while inductive
reasoning moves from the specific to the general.
The benefit of deduction is that you can't reach a false (logical)
conclusion, however, the conclusions you can make are limited to your
premises. Induction has the benefit of being able to reach new conclusions
and generate new ideas, but at the cost that false conclusions can be reached.

While deduction has it's limitations, being governed by your assumptions
isn't the same thing as circular logic... unless your conclusion is one of
your assumptions.

And that is EXACTLY the point that I'm making. When you say, "A
resurrection is impossible unless proven otherewise" that is exactly
what you are doing! Don't you see that?


A valid argument by induction, starting with no assumptions and simply
looking at the evidence, is:
It rained today. It rained yesterday. It rained the day before. Therefore it
will rain tomorrow. Logically correct and consistent... and demonstrably
false (unless you live in Seattle).

As an aside, WWII pilots in the Pacific used that exact method to
predict the weather. It was at least as accurate as the
government-issue met forcasts.

But in the present discussion, your example doesn't examp. One, it's
not demonstrably false until it doesn't rain tomorrow (but will
Schroedinger's cat get wet insude the box? :-p) Two (related to
one), you're using past events to predict the future. That's not what
we're doing. We're using historical documents (and modern science) to
decide whether a reported event occurred or not.


Now, here's my beef with Holmes. The author called his method deduction,
most people think it was induction, but what the famous "when you disprove
everything else, whatever remains, no matter how implausible, must be true"
really was is called abduction. The problem being that there are an infinite
number of explanations for anything, so it's not possible to disprove
everything else. (And come on, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was taken in by the
Cottingley Fairies!)

And Piltdown Man, IIRC. Excellent hoaxes that were eventually
uncovered. (See the connection?) There may be an infinite number of
explanations, but most of them are patently absurd. "The body of Jesus
was stolen by the Cottingley Fairies" "The body of Jesus was eaten by
Piltdown Man." etc. Now then, it would be PERFECTLY appropriate to
lump the Resurrection in with those. A dead man coming to life is a
fantastic explanation. EXCEPT that we have evidence that a
resurrection actually occured: Documented eyewitness.

If you're going to be an honest skeptic (not that I'm suggesting that
you're being deliberately dishonest; I suspect you just haven't
considered the case) you can't just dismiss those eyewitness accounts
out-of-hand. If you do that, you're in league with the British
scientists who rejected accounts of large apes in the mountains of
Africa and Borneo. You're also intellectually aligned with Quen
Victoria, who refused to pass laws outlawing lesbianism (though she
did outlaw male homosexuality), because she simply didn't belive such
a thing existed.

You have to look at the evidence honestly, using the same tools you'd
use if you were investigating any other ancient event. How many
different texts do we have describing or referring to the event? How
close in time are they to the event? How many copies of each do we
have? How old is the oldest copy? Does the content match the
literary style?

With most ancient writers such as Plato and Aristophanes, we have at
most a few dozen copies of their work. The oldest copies are
centuries newer than the events they describe. Scholars are delighted
with this situation. No one doubts the historical authenticity of
classical Greek writers.

With the Gospels, Acts, and Paul's letters, we have an entirely
different situation. About 90% of the text of the NT can be
reconstructed entirely from quotes in the writings of first and
second-century church leaders. We have THOUSANDS of copies of the
texts. The oldest copies are within living memory of the autographs -
IOW, while we don't have Paul's "look how large I'm writing these
letters" statement in his own hand, the copy we do have could well
have been copied from that original. The autographs were written
within living memory of the events: Paul, Luke, and John all wrote in
first person. Mark's gospel clearly draws on still-older (that is,
closer to the events) sources. The many copies we have correspond
remarkably well - evidence that copyist errors are minimal. In fact,
no point of Christian doctrine is called into question by textual
variance.

According to the rules of historical-document analysis, that qualifies
as "extraordinary evidence".

In a nutshell, if we have:
(1) All planes have wings.
(2) The RV-6 is a plane.
(3) The RV-6 has wings.

Deduction lets us infer (3) from (1) and (2).
Induction allows us conclude (1) from (2) and (3).
Abduction gives us (2) from (1) and (3).

Your example doesn't examp. All three statements are independently
verifiable as true.

But they all have their place; stating you have to choose one over the
others is itself a logical "either/or" fallacy!

Point. But to refer back to your earlier statment, each of them has
strengths and weaknesses.

After all, the general premises used in deduction are usually the result of
(or are at least suggested by) induction and abduction.
In any case, an argument can be logically true and still be false if the
premises are garbage.

Correct. GIGO, to quote my IBM-engineer father. And concluding in
advance of investigation that a premise is "garbage" is itself a
logical fallacy, don't you agree?

To pull the other thread in he Regarding Elvis sightings, I've got
two responses. One. How many Elvis fans are willing to be tortured
and killed rather than recant their belief that Elvis is still alive?
(My guess, zero.) Two. Do you think it would be possible to
reconstruct an accurate account of Elvis' life today solely by
interviewing living witnesses, or by reference to the recorded
recollections of recently-deceased witnesses such as Sam Phillips?
(My guess, almost certainly.)

Re the thief on the cross, his partner-in-crime chose to die cursing
God. Foxhole conversions aren't guaranteed, merely permissable. See
the Parable of the Workers in the Vinyard, Matthew 20:1-16.

Re snake-old salesman in white suits, please READ mt 7-21 and then we
can talk about it. It doesn't look like you actually know what it
says. Also see Matthew 18:6 about people who preach under false
pretenses, or deliberately mislead their followers.

Corrie