Who to believe , Ham or Ross?

What, by mind-reading? What's your methodology for truth-detection? "Oh, he has an honest face." Yeah, that's always worked.

The latest posts are the usual nagging niggling nitpicking nuisance questions about things I've mostly already answered, not serious, so I don't see the point in pursuing this thread further. See you all elsewhere maybe. Cheers.

What's your methodology for truth-detection?

I love how actually been asked to provide a shred of evidence those people existed is seen as "nagging, niggling, nitpicking".I can't understand what your purpose is at this site - most of your answers either dodge the question or dismiss them out of hand.I hope your purpose is not preach and "testify", that's just a pain in the arse.

I would say, "caesar".

I'd really like to know if you are going to be drinking poison any time soon without harm, and curing the sick by touching them, like the Bible says you can?

Yeah, and the U.S. won a famous victory in Vietnam.

Most of the questions I have already answered and I see no need to keep repeating my answers, especially to people who don't take the time to read but shoot off one-liner needling "questions" intended only to put me on the defensive. I've made my views pretty clear. "Evidence" here is little more than a club for beating people up.My purpose at this site? To defend my opinions, and perhaps improve my arguments. Why? It's all you guys are doing with your "evidence" mantra. Preach preach preach, never give a moment's credence to the opponent.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-31-2005 11:35 AM

The "opponent's" position is that "evidence is meaningless", and that's so obviously wrong, why would we give it any credence?

And we are the nattering nabobs of negativism I suppose.I want to know if this "science can't know history" theme is something you picked up during or since posting dozens of times questioning the underpinnings of geology, or if it was a planned fallback position or intentional destination.Looking at past events has a place in human endeavor. Numerous examples of forensics have been mentioned and ignored.It has also been shown that looking at physical evidence can corroborate or refute historical accounts. Taking any historical text as exact reportage is frightfully naive. Requiring historical text as a foundation for any investigation puts you even more centuries behind and speaks volumes about your curiosity for the natural world.ABB

I missed the posts on forensics. Sure you can reconstruct events to some extent from all kinds of clues, but the farther back you go the less reliably you can do so, and without some kind of witness evidence from the time in question so much the less reliably. DNA is very useful though, and I've wondered if there's anything in the DNA of the mammoths and other ice-preserved creatures to show how many generations there have been between them and their modern relatives. Historical accounts of what for instance? Some crime cases, yes. There is only one historical text anyone would ever suggest should be taken as exact reportage because of its special content, and most who have lived by it have affirmed this for millennia. All other texts are subject to the usual questions, although since most of the texts from ancient times are pretty much all anyone has to go on for knowledge of the times in question, rejecting them as evidence of those times would be plain stupid. Beyond that, my point has been that physical evidence alone is inadequate for determining the past and that is simple truth.

Neither. It's developed in various Christian apologetics books, I forget whose, and I've used it many times in other contexts. It's a valid and important insight. It simply became relevant in recent contexts or I happened to remember it for some reason.

What an odd thing for them to come up with!Since all of Christianity is based only on history written down in a form separated from input by any eyewitnesses. It means that they are invalidating their own beliefs. That seems odd to me.In addition, we know that, of all forms of evidence, eyewitnesses are about the very least reliable (with secondary sources taking eyewitness accounts being the worst).

...every religious text ever written.Look, seriously. We get it. "The Bible gets special rules, etc." "Everything is wrong except the Bible, unless it agrees with the Bible." Yeah. Heard it all before, and it was just as silly then as it is now.I'm at a loss for how to address this stuff. If you think turning your scepticism off the minute you crack into the pages of the Good Book, or that the normal rules of sense and logic cease to apply to anything with a cross on the cover, then its pretty clear that you're not going to be receptive to reason on this issue. I might just as well argue with the bum around the corner who is convinced that a shadowy government organization put a chip in his head.This is why creationists aren't scientists, and why creationism will never be science; true science applies the same method to everything under its perview. The second you say "well, here's something that we're not, under any circumstances, going to apply the scientific method to," you've left Science-Town.And that's fine. Nobody says that you have to play by our rules. Just don't teach this make-believe to my children when they should be learning science, and don't ask me to pay for it with my tax dollars.

But this is the odd idea, a very common one but very odd. The eyewitnesses are the writers of the various books and the people they write about too who also witnessed the events they record. The books were all originally separate scrolls, and only combined with selected others late in their history. Many different authors wrote them -- and many others that did not become part of the canon too. The New Testament was circulated among the churches all over the Roman Empire for the first three hundred years, in the form of many copies of many scrolls, and eventually the ones considered by all the churches to be inspired were gathered into one collection at the Council of Nicaea. The idea that these books are not themselves eyewitness reports -- and they call themselves that, and they report the witness reports of others as well -- is the odd thing, created by the fact that we have both testaments in one book. So all these different people witnessed the doings of Jesus Christ and some of them wrote down their own versions and CLAIMED to be eyewitnesses too. Well, these are direct eyewitnesses in a time when no other kind of evidence was available, and there are a LOT of them, and they all agree with each other about the basics despite the fact that their accounts are not identical in every point -- which only adds to the verisimilitude of the accounts anyway.This message has been edited by Faith, 03-31-2005 10:54 PM