The Tension of Faith

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I agree that my position as you've expressed it has issues, but that's not my position. Evidence is the result of events in the real world. The written word is a method of recording evidence, an imperfect one, but isn't evidence itself. I've been calling it information whose accuracy and correspondence to reality may be good, bad or absent, or anywhere along that spectrum. Evidence always corresponds to reality

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And yet you have said all the things I attributed to you. If you disagree with yourself you certainly don’t have a coherent position. Written documents are, of course, the result of events in the real world. Just - usually - not direct results of the events recorded in them (but often indirect results)

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You've misremembered what I said about astronomical records. I used the example of Tycho Brahe, saying that meticulous as he was, even he made recording errors. I didn't even mention the scribal errors that crept into his records.

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If you want to say I misremembered you could at least produce a relevant error. Instead of introducing something I didn’t even mention.

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I'm afraid it's all we have,

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We’ve got to use a useless criterion because it’s all we have? Given the fact that nobody else uses it it seems entirely possible to do without it.

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It is the unreliability of the written and spoken word and it's disconnection from reality by it's passage through the human perception system that defines a true distinction between our positions, so I myself don't see what you say as proving your point.

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You actually think I have been arguing that written records are not subject to that unreliability ? Really ?While I won’t quote here, you did say that my explanations of the appearances in 1 Corinthians were both unlikely events and inadequate to explain the appearances in 1 Corinthians. Message 626With zero evidence to support either claim.

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I said in an earlier message that I was discussing the entire NT, not just 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 except where I hopefully made it clear that's what I was talking about.

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By which you mean that the discussion had to lump,all the NT stories about the appearances together as one thing, despite there being multiple contradictory accounts by different authors. Which is a silly thing for you to do, and it is certainly not sensible to insist that I must be doing it to. You don’t get to change what I am talking about by unilaterally deciding that the topic is broader.

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Sorry I seem to be making such a hash of this for you. I wish I could do a better job, but I'm doing the best I can.

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See above for many things you shouldn’t be doing.

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Gee, that's so strange, because I don't recall ever saying anything like that.

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And yet you say that a criterion that would cause us to reject all potential evidence must be used because it’s all we have.

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Read the entire Bible then, it's chock full of evidence for miracles, in both the Old and New Testaments

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Claims of miracles - especially in ancient documents, which tend to be credulous - are hardly adequate evidence that a miracle occurred.

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You aren't going to get any better kind of evidence for miracles than eyewitness reports...

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For some ancient miracles there can never be adequate evidence. But for large scale miracles there could be more than there is.

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...and secondhand reports are just as believable in the context of the Bible

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Because appearing in a collection of unreliable documents makes implausible claims more believable ?

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God's gone to great lengths to give you everything you could possibly need for belief, so sad to see it distrusted and rejected.

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Essentially then you are claiming that God got things stupidly wrong so we should pretend that he got it right. I guess that’s what Biblical inerrancy is all about, but it hardly seems to fit with Christian belief.Miracles are such unlikely events and miracle stories so common in ancient literature that the natural conclusion is that the stories are generally false. Providing miracles that will only appear as stories, then, is not doing anything to encourage belief in any rational person. Especially when the sources are often unreliable in other ways.

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Well yes, obviously the bible contains stories about a real time and a place. No one doubts that, say, Jerusalem existed. Having it mentioned in the stories isn't remarkable and adds nothing.

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There is far more than that. King Omri, for instance was a real person, and the founder of a dynasty that ruled Israel for some generations.

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I didn't dismiss it, foolishly or otherwise. I accepted your point that the flood story may refer to an actual flood

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That is rather odd since I never made any such claim. The point which you managed to ignore for the third time in a row is that the text contains evidence of the spread of a story. (It also contains evidence that the writer of those chapters of Genesis mashed two versions of the story together)

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The point I'm making is that sure, the bible contains stuff that is historical, but that's of no consequence because the evidence we need is that which supports the main claim - that god was at work there causing genocide, raising the dead and turning water into wine and so on. But all we have are unsupported stories.

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And I say that your focus on that is blinding you to the other uses of the Biblical text of evidence. As you have quite clearly demonstrated.

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And yet I haven't said all the things you attributed for me. For example, in your Message 650 you said:

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Since you are going off into other messages entirely I take it that you concede the point with regard to our discussion.Moreover the could be wrong criterion does indeed rule out all scientific and legal evidence.

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I think what you're trying to do with much of what I say is a kind of Reductio ad absurdum by identifying ridiculous implications of what I say and then accusing me of actually saying them

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If the mere possibility of error is sufficient to rule something out as evidence then everything is ruled out. If you want to set a more reasonable criterion then it is far from clear that you can rule out all written evidence.For instance in discussions with Ron Wyatt supporters here I relied on the inscriptions on a block statue - and not even the inscriptions themselves but a translation - to identify the statue. And I still consider that good evidence, when what I have is not just written evidence but a second-hand report that I can’t even validate!Did I really do,something horribly wrong there? Because I don’t see it - I still think I had a very strong argument there.

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As Tangle says in his Message 669, "The discussion about whether something is evidence or not is spurious, we could claim almost anything to be evidence of something. The issue is whether the stories about specific key events amount to anything more than just stories about them?"

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As I pointed out, Tangle was fundamentally wrong since we can certainly ask other questions concerning the texts and a lot of interesting questions have little or nothing to do with the truth of the stories.

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Certainly you referenced my comment about astronomical records.

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Indeed I did, but you will note that you still do not point to any mistakes I made nor any reference to scribal errors (Because I never singled out any particular source of error)

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But our perceptual system is not a "useless criterion", as I said in the part of my quote you chopped off. What I actually said was, "I'm afraid it's all we have, and the progress of science (which involves replication, and which, combined with instrumentation that has grown increasingly sophisticated over time, helps overcome imperfect perception) shows that it is sufficient."

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I’m sorry for making the mistake of assuming that you were trying to make a relevant point. If nothing we have qualifies as evidence by your standard then your standard is wrong. Arguing that we do adequately treating things that could be wrong as evidence hardly helps you.

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If you see that same unreliability then that's a good step forward toward common ground

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No, it’s not a step forward. That I agree with things I already agreed with from the start just is not any advance,

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...but then why do you object so strenuously to my proposal that they not be called evidence. "Information", "accounts", "reminiscences", any of a number of other words, but not evidence. Too unreliable to be called evidence.

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Because the reliability of written accounts greatly varies - and even a largely false account might be useful evidence for some purposes. Is 1 Corinthians really too unreliable to be used as evidence of early Christian beliefs ? Are astronomical records really too unreliable to be used as evidence for dating correlations ? Are the inscriptions on Egyptian block statues too unreliable to be evidence of the subject’s identity ?

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I wasn't calling your naturalistic explanations unlikely and inadequate. I was disagreeing with your characterization of them as unlikely and inadequate.

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Presumably you mean you disagree with my assertion that they were NOT unlikely and inadequate. Which of course does mean that you thought that they were unlikely and inadequate. For which you have still offered no real support.

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And second of all, nowhere did I insist that you must be doing the same. I was trying to bring the source of a possible disconnect to your attention.

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I can see no other reason why you should think my explanations to be unlikely and inadequate. And you still haven’t provided any other.

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By "concede the point", are you referring to where you said, "And yet you have said all the things I attributed to you"? If so then the answer is "Of course not," since what you replied to was a counter to that. Why would you interpret a rebuttal as concession?

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There was no rebuttal. Rather than go back and pick up on the points I was referring to you went and picked out a statement from another post. That’s not a rebuttal, that’s an evasion.

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I'm not sure why you think I'm "going off into other messages entirely." Message 650 is the message from you that contained the example I cited of you asserting something I never said. In that message you claimed I said, "Percy has clearly rejected modern-day scientific and legal standards as inadequate," yet neither Tangle or I could see where I ever said any such thing.

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I said that you went off into another post entirely because you did. The things I was referring to came from Message 647 as should be obvious if you follow the context of the discussion

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Not the way I'm defining evidence it doesn't,

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If your definition is at odds with the criterion you put forward then that’s just another example of incoherence.

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Not that it isn't true that "a lot of interesting questions have little or nothing to do with the truth of the stories," but this discussion has been focused on the evidence for the truth of the stories. Tangle was just continuing that discussion, and it makes little sense to fault him for not addressing things not under discussion.

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Except that the point is a major point of the discussion - even if we restrict it to my exchanges with him and he has repeatedly failed to even notice it when it is explicitly laid out for him.

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When I mentioned "ancient astronomical records" I was using the example of Tycho Brahe, saying that even meticulous as he was he still made errors, but I didn't reject his work

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But as we know you were objecting to my point that ancient astronomical records were useful evidence in dating. Obviously you do insist that they are not evidence, yet I cannot see any reason why. The mere possibility of error hardly seems sufficient.

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Did I do something to piss you off? Because whatever it is I'd sure like to undo it so we could resume a civil and constructive conversation.

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The evasion and even dishonesty in service of an obviously ridiculous view seem to qualify

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But it's not true that "nothing we have qualifies as evidence by your standard." As I've said many times, evidence is the results of events in the real world, and so the written word isn't evidence. It's information or an account or a reminiscence or a story or something like that, and of course I mean when trying to establish the truth or falsity of something in the real world.

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The written word is obviously a product of events in the real world. What you mean! I presume is that an account of events is not a direct product of those events. Nevertheless the idea that there is even an absolute distinction between information and evidence is silly. Any information that provides even a little support to a claim is evidence.

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And how do you tell which part of a largely false account is true without evidence from the real world?

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What makes you think that is necessary?

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I don't think that was ever the question. The question was whether it was a true and accurate account of actual events, not whether it was a true and accurate representation of early Christian beliefs.

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In other words it is useful as evidence of Christian beliefs even if it is false. Do you see why a blanket dismissal ofvwritten accounts as evidence is silly ?

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I never said anything about dating correlations, but you keep including it, so if it has some special significance then you'll have to let me know what it is.

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Obviously it is an example of the written word being useful evidence.

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But we just finished agreeing that there can we a wide range of reliability in the written word. Names on statues, shopping lists, street name signs, these are short and sweet examples of the written word and their reliability probably isn't too bad. But their reliability is practically the opposite of accounts about miracles.

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So, instead of insisting that the written word is never evidence maybe you should concede that in some cases it is pretty good evidence. THAT would be progress.

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I'm sorry I was insufficiently clear, but I *did* just explain what I meant, though you chose not to quote it or address it. What I said I meant in my previous message was, "I wasn't calling your naturalistic explanations unlikely and inadequate. I was disagreeing with your characterization of them as unlikely and inadequate. I view the supposed miracles and your naturalistic explanations on a completely different axis from you and would choose a completely different characterization, such as that you're attempting to find naturalistic explanations for events that likely never happened, which is something I've said before."

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Making obviously contradictory claims followed by a non-sequitur is hardly useful discussion.Firstly you have done nothing to establish that it is likely that the events never happened. Even if you did, that does not address the question of whether my explanations involve likely events that are adequate to explain what little we are given. We are not given clear miracles, we are given events that are taken as miraculous. Which comes back to the point - if likely events can adequately account for what is given why should we not prefer that explanation to one that assumes that the accounts are pure fiction ?

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If you follow the discussion back, you only have to go back as far as Message 676 to see where you went adrift.

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Obviously I didn’t. You took a statement out of context, and tried to rebut it by citing something it wasn’t talking about. That is fact.

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Yes, if it were at odds, but it's not.

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Your criterion only allows things that are certainly true to be considered evidence. And you explicitly said that your definition contradicts that. So obviously something you said isn’t true.

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Oftentimes when you use the phrase "the point", it isn't clear what point you're referring to. Like now.

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Unless you are going to insist on multi-level quotes some things have to be worked out from context, which may include following the thread back. If you do that you will find it is perfectly clear.

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No, I wasn't. Honestly, I didn't know what your point was by mentioning dating.

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You don’t understand why I would respond to the claim that writings can’t be evidence by producing an example where written records ARE useful evidence ?

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Well, as I said, my particular perspective doesn't seem to be working for you, and it seems to be making you upset. If you're so strongly opposed to not viewing the written word as evidence then why don't we work out something else?

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The claim - silly as it is - is hardly the worst thing.

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Ah. Well, no evasion or dishonesty was intended.

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If you are being unintentionally evasive and dishonest then you have a problem.

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Okay, so let's find other terminology. I originally walked down this road in response to Faith's assertion that the Bible is evidence of its own truth and accuracy. What would be a good response?

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The sensible response is that the Bible is full of evidence of its unreliability. The Bible contains errors and inaccuracies and myths and legends. Even the better parts are heavily biased. The Bible at its best doesn’t live up to the standards of the best ancient historians.

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You don't think people are interested in knowing what in a written account is true and what is false? That in some cases it's essential, such as a suspect's statement?

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And another evasion. The question is whether a written document can be useful as evidence in some ways without caring about the truth of its claims. And the answer is yes.

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No, that wouldn't be an accurate "in other words" consistent with how I was trying to distinguish between evidence and the written word.

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That’s probably because your distinction doesn’t make sense. Obviously if you agree that 1 Corinthians gives an accurate picture of early Christian belief then it is evidence that early Christians believed that, by any reasonable understanding of the word evidence.

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I'm still not clear on what dating correlations you're referring to.

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Then maybe you should have asked instead of trying to dismiss the point with irrelevancies. Seriously, ancient records of known astronomical events are often dated. Using those dates we can relate their dating systems to ours.

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What's wrong with calling it fairly reliable information?

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What’s wrong is using it as evidence while refusing to call it evidence.

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I think showing that events actually happened requires positive evidence, not the absence of negative evidence.

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Then you are putting the cart before the horse. I was talking about a priori likelihood - which doesn’t need establishing that the events actually happened. In fact it is useful information in making a judgement of whether they did actually happen.

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As I've said, for all you know you're explaining events that never happened.

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Which is, again, irrelevant to the question. The question is whether the events in my explanation are ones which would be likely to occur and adequate to explain the account. Whether the events in the account happened or not doesn’t affect that,

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Not sure what you're saying here.

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I’m saying that rejecting the events in the grounds that they are miraculous is a mistake since they are not clearly miraculous. We reject the idea that people actually saw Elvis Presley after his death - but we don’t reject the claim that some people thought that they saw Elvis Presley after his death.

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Why should we?

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I’d say on the grounds that it is the more plausible explanation.

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A quick reading of the top of Message 676 reveals that you're wrong about evasion, wrong about changing the topic, wrong about everything pretty much.

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I guess your inability to follow the context is acting up again.

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But you accuse me of saying lots of things I didn't say. It's your MO, as they say, that you find it much easier arguing against things that you make up yourself, because things you make up can be ridiculous and wrong in ways that what people really say often are not.

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Funny how you haven’t found a single genuine example then.

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When I trace back I find that you seem to have lost the flow of the discussion. I think you confuse yourself more than anyone else when you write things whose meaning isn't clear.

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Then why are you the one making all the mistakes ? (Here’s a hint it is because I DO look back at the previous messages)

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Given how poorly you express yourself, no.

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I thought it was pretty well known that ancient astronomical records were used in working out chronologies. And i5 obviously is an example of written documents being used as evidence.

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So, in other words, you're not interested in finding common ground, you just want a pissing contest

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Hardly. Objecting to your confused and often - to be generous - error-ridden arguments seems entirely reasonable.

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I think you assuming the worst in people is more your problem. How long will you be prattling on about these invented offenses?

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They certainly aren’t invented.

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Sounds good to me, but I've already been down that road with Faith more than once, as have many others, so I tried an alternative approach. You don't like this approach. Neither does Modulous. I'm not sure I do either, I'm sort of trying it on for size, and discussing it with others helps me do that, or would except you keep misstating what I'm saying.

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Since your view keeps shifting it seems misstatements are inevitable. Are written documents evidence but we mustn’t call it that ? Evidence for some things or not for others ? Not evidence at all ? Is it the case that the mere possibility of error is sufficient to disqualify a putative fact as evidence or is it not ?You’ve argued all of them.

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So you turn out to be wrong. Your question was not "whether a written document can be useful as evidence in some ways without." Your question was, "What makes you think that is necessary.'

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In fact I turn out to be right - if you read in context.The question - with the context filled in was why is it necessary to work which part of a largely false account is true?If the truth of the document doesn’t matter - for that use - then it is obviously not necessary. And that was the point. That is the reason why a largely false account may be useful evidence.

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Your error rate is getting way up there, plus you're becoming increasingly accusatory and unpleasant.

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Says the guy who has made numerous mistakes and many false accusations.

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Well, I can tell it doesn't make sense to you. I think that if you take a break from being outraged and irrational that it will make it easier to find some common ground.

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A funny way to reply to a perfectly rational point. Since this distinction is one you’ve invented and one that goes against normal usage (and where technical usage in philosophy tends to skew the other way) it seems to be just an idiosyncratic personal use that will inevitably cause misunderstandings without actually contributing anything useful

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But this view is receiving a great deal of push back from you and Modulous, so I'm trying to find some common ground. Maybe it would be better to say that there are some ways in which the written word is evidence. For example, the Gospel of John could be considered evidence of what an early Christian community believed, even if it isn't evidence that Jesus ever turned water into wine.

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And that doesn’t really solve the problem. It IS evidence of Jesus turning water into wine - it’s just hopelessly inadequate evidence that can be rightfully disregarded.

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But that was the basis of my whole proposal, that we should only call things evidence when they're a result of events of the real world, when they're unadulterated by the human perception system. I was proposing different nomenclature. It's legitimate to disagree with the proposal, but your counterargument makes no sense because it confuses my proposed definition with the standard definition.

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If you admit that all you are doing is creating a new definition - and you should have said that right up front - then the whole thing is pointless. It achieves nothing. Especially when it isn’t even clear what qualifies and why.

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Definitely not. Things are true because they're supported by evidence, not because of an absence of negative evidence.

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And yet another error. We weren’t talking about things bein* true, we were tslkin* about things being likely and - as I clarified in the next line I was talking about a priori likelihood (which would have been clear if you actually understood the - quite simple - argument in the first place)And it is quite obvious that you still don’t understand it since your criticisms all miss the mark.And still we have no reason why you insist that my explanations are not a priori likely events which adequately explain the account.

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Why is it more plausible that the miracles were actually just natural events misinterpreted as miracles, instead of that the miracles are just made up?

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It is certainly plausible because the supposed miracles can be adequately explained by natural events that were (mostly, anyway) likely to occur anyway. As I keep pointing out. If you want to argue for the plausibility of complete invention that is your job.

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How easy it is to impute such stupidity to people two thousand years ago that they would mistake a natural occurrence for a miracle, on the one hand, or such lying deceit that they would make up a miracle that didn't exist -- to impress the reader or what?

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If you had bothered to find out what we were talking about (which, you know you could do by reading a couple of Bible verses) you would know that the only miracle is people thinking that they have seen Jesus. In some sense. There’s not even a claim that the sightings were miraculous in those verses.But I guess your normal intelligent people aren’t bright enough to manage that.

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Sorry about that then, but it sure reads like a typical response to claims of miracles anyway, so as a response to that it's quite apt.

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Not really, but we can’t expect you to know that. Most explanations don’t make the witnesses stupid or accuse the reporter of lying - unless there is evidence. There are many ways miracle stories can get started.

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But I guess your normal intelligent people aren’t bright enough to manage that.

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Echoing my words is a more effective response when it is appropriate. When it isn’t - I wasn’t the one making claims about normal intelligent people - it just looks silly.

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You apparently can't even describe the context, let alone understand the rather simple exchange quoted at the top of Message 676.

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Except that the problem is yours. You - at best - forgot the context of the discussion and tried to claim that you hadn’t said things attributed to you in one message - by attacking a statement made in another. That’s hardly my mistake.

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Sure I did. I guess your memory is failing you, too.

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No, I knew all about that false claim of yours.

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If you were truly looking back at previous messages then you wouldn't be so confused, and you would be quoting from them to support your position. The reality is that you're making all the mistakes, and I'm the only one quoting from old messages illustrating your mistakes.

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Except that you aren’t proving any mistakes. But if you want to convince me that you are engaging in intentional misrepresentation this is a good way to go about it.

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Chronologies of what?

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The Chronology of the Ancient Near East would be an example although it’s often broken down into separate entries (e,g, Assyrian Chronology)

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There you are expressing yourself poorly again. What is "i5"?

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Trust you to pick on a typo. Which, if you must know is due to changes in the iOS keyboard with iOS 11, of course reading in context could tell you that the word should be it

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Only in your warped little world would continual efforts to find common ground with you be misinterpreted as shifting views and misstatements. So I'll stop trying to find common ground with you.

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Since i’m not referring to your attempts to find common ground it seems that you have just made her another mistake,

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You mean a written document like a technical paper? No, they're not evidence. Only the results of the experiment or investigation constitute evidence. The technical paper is not itself evidence. However it describes the evidence and how to reproduce it.

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I mean any written document at all since that is what you seem to be talking about. But this leaves all the examples where written documents are useful evidence unaddressed.

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You know, it's extremely easy to provide a link to a message. Where is this coming from? Or is this just your latest version of what you really meant, an ungrammatical one at that. I'll assume that where you said "work" you really meant "work out". So your question becomes, "Why is it necessary to work out which part of a largely false account is true?" You follow your question with this clarification:

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It comes from the context you left out - before your full quote. Message 678

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Did you think you just said something coherent?

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I know I did. As I have pointed out 1 Corinthians is useful evidence for Early Christian belief whether it is true or not. False documents can be useful evidence - for some things.

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Well now you've finally said something comprehensible, partly true and useful. Yes, what I've proposed isn't normal usage. I haven't been hiding that, in fact I've said several times that I was trying to look at what qualifies as evidence in a new way. And yes, invariably such proposals can cause misunderstandings. I disagree that it doesn't contribute anything useful.

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It certainly isn’t a good way to convince people of anything, let alone Faith who can’t even accept that the Biblical accounts are of low quality as evidence. And yet you said that you were trying to convince her. Redefinition don’t bring anything new to the table. It seems more like an attempt to delegitimise genuine (if weak) evidence by playing a definition game.

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Yeah, it is disappointing that I can't work out all the details in just a couple days.

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You haven’t even got the basics worked out.

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You're arguing for the plausibility that the likelihood of explanations whose nature you do not and cannot know explain the interpretation as miracles of events that you don't know and cannot know what they were. The mere description of what you're postulating is sufficient to indicate a complete lack of plausibility.

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The mere fact that I listed likely explanations in Message 579 and I am concerned only with explaining the claims made in the cited verses. Which I note do not explicitly interpret the events as miraculous.. Thus I know the nature of the explanations, and all I need know about the miracles.

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As to the plausibility of invention of the miracles, I've already done that. Miracles, the suspension of physical laws, are impossible. If you want to argue for the plausibility of miracles, that's your job

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But the plausibility of miracles is not in question. The question is the plausibility of my explanation versus your idea that the whole account is fiction. Assuming that the account contains explicit miracles is simply wrong, and yet another of your mistakes.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

Lengthy replies seem to be a waste of time so three examples will show what is going on here.

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I mentioned Tycho Brahe and you skipped over to ancient historical chronologies and expected me to follow? What a wingnut you are.

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In reality this is what was said: You will note that Tycho Brahe’s errors are introduced to answer the point that Records of astronomical events are used to establish chronologies.. And it is not at all clear why Brahe’s errors are of any great relevance to the point (Were his records used to establish any chronology at all ?) [quote] It comes from the context you left out - before your full quote.[/qs]There you are with your "context" again. I think your definition of context must be, "Things I wish I'd said but forgot." Well, hallelujah, you did a message link. Congrats! [/quote]Since I quoted the relevant context and provided a link to the message it is clearly something I DID say, not something I wished I had said

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The mere fact that I listed likely explanations in Message 579 and I am concerned only with explaining the claims made in the cited verses. Which I note do not explicitly interpret the events as miraculous.. Thus I know the nature of the explanations, and all I need know about the miracles.

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Well that's a load of nonsense. You don't even know what natural events stood in for the miracles, so you couldn't possibly know "the nature of the explanations." But you've got conceit, I'll give you that.

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Obviously I do know the nature of the explanations that I listed in my post - which is linked. To say that I cannot is ridiculous.

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What is going on here is the destruction of civil discourse. Any time you're ready to return to it and eschew the barrage of accusations of mistakes and evasions and so forth just let me know

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You departed from civil discourse quite a way back.

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At the time I had no idea what you meant by "chronologies." I briefly considered the possibility that you meant when supernova and comets had appeared in the skies, but I didn't dwell on it. Obviously my mention of Tycho Brahe indicated that I had no idea that by "chronologies" you meant of ancient civilizations.

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And yet that does not change the fact that you chose to call me a wingnut based on a serious misrepresentation of the discussion. Hardly an example of civil discourse

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What you should wish for is the ability to compose a comprehensible quote. This is woefully incomplete and confused at best and nonsense at worst.

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It is complete enough to show that you accused me of inventing the context right before I provided relevant context with proof. And you say that I am destroying civil discourse and making false accusations ?

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Again, congratulations on the message link, but it doesn't matter what you posted there. The problem for you is that what natural events stood in for the miracles, or the nature of the explanations for what people mistook for those miracles, is unknowable. I'm aware that you have the conceit to repeatedly claim you know them.

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On the contrary. Since the explanations I have been talking about all along are mine of course I know what they are. And since the point is to explain the account in 1 Corinthians 15:5-8 I don’t need to know what actually happened (and I remind you that those verses do not explicitly make any claims of miracles).Really you ought to ask yourself why you are making so many irrational objections to my argument.

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Jes followin' your lead, darlin'.

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Oh no, the credit is all yours. The refusal to understand my argument, the ridiculous assertions, the failures to follow the thread of conversation, the complaints when your errors were pointed out, the false accusations. Really how could there be any constructive discussion under those conditions ?As for the rest of your post the answers already given refute your claims.

I tell you what Percy. The next time you object to one of my arguments and can’t be bothered to understand it, just say so and save all the unnecessary unpleasantness.Unless the unpleasantness is the point, and at this stage that wouldn’t surprise me.