but calling it evidence that miracles are real or evidence that the events described actually happened does not seem fine.
Why?
Can you give me a bit more to go on?
Well that was largely my question to you! Other than 'I don't believe miracles can happen' or things to that effect - what is your actual argument. It seems incredulity is your principle argument at this point and I don't think it's sufficient for this point. Can you go further in your explanation?
In what I wrote that immediately preceded the part you quoted I gave examples of what seemed appropriate about considering the Gospel of John as evidence, and I offered those to show how different they were from the supposed evidence of miracles to make clear why that doesn't seem like real evidence.
Can you expand on why it doesn't seem like real evidence, though? I understand why other aspects can be considered evidential, I'm just hoping for more regarding the parts you don't.
Because it's a miracle.
I just got back from Mars. I wrote it, so in your book that's evidence. How do you know it isn't true?
'Because it's a miracle' isn't an explanation to knowledge of falsehood.
As for your question - yes it is evidence. But I have other evidence to hand that calls your testimony into significant dispute.
One dictionary's definition of evidence is "that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof." Nothing in John tends to prove miracles or be grounds for belief in miracles
The evidence I see strongly suggests many people think it is grounds for belief. An apparent witness report is grounds for belief, even if you have reasons beyond the evidence in examination to for opting to disbelieve the witness.
I don't see it as evidence.
That's your business, of course. Nevertheless I happen to think a testimony is evidence, as do most other people - professional historians included. Like when you argue with Faith about what constitutes scientific evidence of a global flood (or not), you make reference to how the term evidence is used in science. Well this is history. And a written witness statement is evidence of the things testified to. Even if, upon analysis, it is regarded as unreliable evidence.
Well, The Diary of Anne Frank and the Gospel of John are completely different beasts. The likelihood of finding accurate information in a diary is far, far greater than finding it in a religion's origin story full of the supernatural.
The reliability or accuracy of the mundane events in either is a different question as to whether either is data that can interpreted using historical methods to support, to varying degrees, various historical hypotheses.
We can be confident in Frank's account of there being Nazis rounding up Jewish people on the grounds of corroboration. Some minor event like asking someone to fill a jar, less so. We can, however, use historical methods - as you hint at - to suggest that Frank seems like an honest reporter of things generally and so her jar filling story has more credibility than John's jar filling story.
This again makes me feel like we throw around the word evidence indiscriminately. Everything written or asserted isn't evidence.
Anything that makes claims about what happened in the past is evidence about what happened in the past. We can use various methods of evidence analysis to make determinations as to its credibility.
I think you are using evidence to just mean 'supports something to a degree that causes me to either believe it - or at least come close to that'. That just isn't a reasonable approach to history, though. Whether it convinces you or not is not relevant as to whether it is evidence.
A witness stands up and says 'Percy killed my cat'
Another witness stands up and says 'Tony killed your cat'
They are both evidence we can approach, examine etc., in order to try to determine what happened in history. If the first witness says, on further questioning 'Percy used magic to control Tony's actions', it's still evidence being given. It's just we both probably believe the credibility of this account less.
Displays as boxes in Chrome, but Safari displays it. Neat that there's Cuneiform.
I know, right? It is odd regarding Chrome but then Chromium's had unicode problems for years - I'd have thought Google would be all over fixing that, but there you go.
Sure, but is it really a possible strand of true history
Heh. True history.
The answer, of course is, who knows? It's literally ancient history! I doubt it is historically accurate.
say a possible part of a document signed by William the Conqueror at Old Sarum? Or is it line from a script from The Man in the High Castle? Calling one possible historical evidence and the other fictional historical evidence just seems, well, wrongheaded. One might be historical evidence, while the other is without question not historical evidence.
Well what of Hermann Goering's testimony at the Nuremberg Trial? Is that evidence? I say it is. We have to acknowledge that he is a biased observer under duress, and someone who is likely guilty of worse things than lying to save his own skin - which should colour the way we interpret what the evidence tells us regarding the truth of things.
What about Emmy Goering's testimony in My Life with Goering - published 30 years after said life? What of testimony of *her* daughter, Edda? Or of Bettina Goering his grand-niece if it were given today? They may have access to family oral tradition that could be considered evidence. It's reliability may well be questioned, of course, but still...
But John being non-Synoptical is just an excuse to evade the question. There are miracles that appear in all three Synoptics, so choose one of those. Isn't that, for you, evidential corroboration?
I answered this, not evaded it. I said, "To some extent, but other considerations weaken the corroboration". If we pick one of the three to corroborate John, we still run into problems of their disagreements, even over mundane things.
But this is a pointless rabbit hole to go down, surely?
If there's no reason to accept it as true, maybe it shouldn't be considered evidence.
I didn't say there was 'no reason'. There are reasons, I just think the reasons to reject it are stronger. Whether I accept that the evidence (ie., claimed witnesses, or reports compiled from claimed witnesses) sufficiently supports the claims - say of walking on water -to elicit my belief in them, doesn't stop that evidence from being evidence. Sorry about the punctuation in that bit!
Not accepting the truth of the claims of a witness in court doesn't render the witness statement 'not evidence'
Well, like I said, I think the word evidence is overused. Information is presented to the jury. Some of it is evidence.
No - it's all evidence. This isn't overusing the word, its using it quite normally. The defence presents their evidence and argumentation, the prosecution presents theirs. The jury decides what the facts are (as they are relevant to the case) based on this evidence. If they think witness A is full of shit, witness A's statement is still part of the evidence.
If my garden path is wet, this is evidence it has been raining. It is also evidence that a pipe has burst. If someone says 'a pipe has burst', that doesn't mean it hasn't been raining. It doesn't mean my path is wet because of the pipe. it doesn't even mean a pipe has actually burst. It's just further evidence for the hypothesis that my path is wet because a pipe has burst.
The truth of the matter comes from examining all the evidence and making a determination when a certain threshold of confidence is attained. As you said an interwoven pattern. But if all I had to go on was the wetness of the path, that's still evidence - even if it is insufficient to determine the truth.
I don't accept something as true just because there is some evidence. There are conflicting pieces of evidence, there are pieces of evidence which call into question certain types of other evidence. We are both skeptical of eyewitness evidence, and one reason you have already cited is DNA evidence.
But my question was about the Bible. For you the Bible contains multiple corroborative accounts of evidence. How do you reject their reality?
And that's what I answered. I reject it on numerous grounds, too tedious to go over here especially since we probably agree. I cited one in which I know we certainly do - the unreliability of eyewitnesses. Some others might be biased authors, with an unobfuscated agenda - a biography that conforms to mythological narrative rather than a typical human life - characters that don't feel realistic - Jesus talking to locals in Greek, the distinct lack of miracles since we discovered scientific principles, and cameras etc. I mean I could go on but why bother?
Just because there are numerous accounts isn't reason on its own to accept something as true - I'd have thought this was obvious. Check out
Message 655 for where I posted some criterion historians have developed when analysing a source...you can see numerous reasons in there as to why I reject their reality.
When she was talking to me (as opposed to berating me) in this thread she kept describing a process whereby faith developed from evidence, and from that faith developed a faith in things unseen. Since the entire chain of faith depended upon evidence at the outset I never could see the distinction between the two types of faith, except as an excuse for believing in the unevidenced, and I still haven't been able to reconcile these claims with her statements something like, "Blessed are those who believe in things unseen."
Did you read the source you cited? It goes into this in a way that may be a little less problematic.
Think about it in terms of Anne Frank again. If we analyse her work and deduce she is credible, but she makes some historical claims which are neither corroborated nor falsified - we may decide to believe her testimony on the grounds she has proven trustworthy in other areas.
So you have evidence (the Bible). If you decide it is credible, you can use that trust - that faith - to believe the things which you might have decided without that trust, shouldn't be believed. But because of the general trust, you can apply it further to more specific acts of trust. At some point, if you trust enough of the Bible that you trust God wouldn't screw us all around, then you trust in the things which only God knows. Heaven, pre-human creation - the future of mankind etc etc --- the truly unseen.
Whether adherents wish to acknowledge it or not, all faith is blind faith. They might believe in their hearts that they have evidence, but there are many religions. Their adherents can't all be right about their supposed evidence, and undoubtedly all are wrong.
It's not blind. It's myopic. It's credulousness. It's believing on insufficient evidence. If there were no evidence, then their belief would likely be idiosyncratic akin to the delusions of a psychotic.
It's possible for two witnesses, three witnesses, a thousand witnesses at trial to all be wrong and to disagree with one another. It'd still be evidence that can be approached, analysed and used to try and arrive at the truth. Even if that truth is 'many people are too credulous'.
Yeah, I wasn't sure what to think about that because it contradicts the other quote. But besides that, it doesn't mention evidence
Perhaps it isn't contradictory and harmonising them is just not as straight forward as thinking 'faith means one thing and one thing alone in all cases'. Reading the whole document suggests that faith is thought of as a multi-faceted thing.
It does mention eye witnesses. Which is evidence.
Faith is confidence or trust in a particular system of religious belief, in which faith may equate to confidence based on some perceived degree of warrant.
Again, nothing about evidence.
See the word 'warrant'. As the entry continues, quoting Lennox:
quote:
The validity, or warrant, of faith or belief depends on the strength of the evidence on which the belief is based
Good stuff, but we already know that evangelicals believe their religion is based upon evidence. You're not going to have any trouble finding stuff on the Internet attesting to that view.
Then we can agree that the religious perspective on what 'faith' is is not 'without evidence' but in fact they do see 'faith' not as 'blind' but as based on evidence.
Yeah, I understand what you're saying, but I still see it as dissonant to view all occurrences of the written word as evidence of the real world, particularly that which is already known to be fantastical.
I continue to think this is due to you being of the opinion that evidence must be something that renders something 'probably true' as opposed to 'that which increases the probability of something being true by any degree'.
If we had no Gospel, no Bible at all and someone started making claims here (well obviously this forum may not exist without the Bible, but I digress) about some ancient guy called Joshua who walked on water... we'd rightly be puzzled to understand where it was coming from.
If however, someone witnessed this event and wrote it down...we'd be flying in the face of historians to say 'you have no evidence'. It'd be more correct to say 'some anonymous author writing in the 1st Century is hardly credible enough evidence to justify belief in something so fantastical as that'.
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