An Epistemological Look at the Resurrection

[Sam266]

Introduction: My Background and Purpose


I come from a Christian background, though I no longer identify as a Christian. I spent 35 years actively involved in the church, during which time I taught classes on Christian apologetics with theological questions. This means I'm not approaching Christianity as an outsider who's never understood its claims, I know the arguments intimately. I've defended them, taught them, and lived within that framework for most of my life.

I studied philosophy at Geneva College, a Christian institution where faith and reason were treated as partners in the search for truth. After graduating in 1981, I continued studying philosophy for over 45 years, with particular intensity during the last 20+ years of my retirement. I'm now 75, and I've spent this time focusing on three interconnected areas:


Epistemology (how we know what we know), approached through the lens of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy, especially his final work, On Certainty. Wittgenstein's insights about language, meaning, and the foundations of knowledge have shaped much of what I've written.


Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), which led to my recent book From Testimony to Knowledge: Evaluating Near-Death Experiences (available on Amazon). In that work, I developed a rigorous framework for evaluating testimonial evidence and applied it to one of the most contested areas of human experience. The framework I use, JTB+U (Justified True Belief plus Understanding) with three epistemic guardrails, applies universally to any knowledge claim based on testimony.


Wittgenstein's later philosophy, particularly his concept of "hinges," those bedrock certainties that make justification possible rather than requiring justification themselves. Understanding what genuinely functions as a hinge versus what merely claims hinge-status to avoid scrutiny turns out to be crucial for evaluating religious claims.

My Current Project

I'm now working on a second book that examines the evidence for the bodily resurrection of Christ. I'll be sharing my analysis of the testimonial evidence in this forum, applying the same rigorous standards I used for evaluating near-death reports. My approach will focus on what the historical evidence can and cannot support, examined through clear epistemic standards that apply to any historical claim.

My Intentions


I want to be transparent about my approach: I have no desire to engage in polemics or personal attacks. I'm not here to mock anyone's faith or treat sincere belief with contempt. I recognize that for many of you, Christianity isn't just an intellectual position, it's central to your identity, your community, and your understanding of reality. I take that seriously.

That said, I also recognize that some may find my arguments offensive simply because of their conclusions. This isn't my intention, but it's an unavoidable risk when examining claims that matter deeply to people. I can only promise to be as fair, clear, and rigorous as possible. Good arguments should stand or fall on their own merits, not on whether they make us comfortable.


If my analysis is flawed, I want to know. If I've misunderstood the evidence or applied standards inconsistently, I'm genuinely interested in correction. But if the evidence truly is as weak as I believe it to be, that's something we should be willing to acknowledge, even if it's uncomfortable.

Why Philosophy Matters

Before I present my epistemological framework, let me address something important: philosophy is inescapable. Whether you love it or hate it, you're already doing it.


Every time you evaluate a political claim, make a moral judgment, defend a religious belief, assess scientific evidence, argue for God's existence, or even decide how to raise your children, you're engaged in philosophy. You're making assumptions about what counts as evidence, what makes reasoning valid, how we distinguish truth from error, and what standards we should use to evaluate claims.

Even if you say "I hate philosophy" or "I just believe what the Bible says," you're making philosophical moves. You're claiming that some approaches to truth are better than others, that certain sources are more reliable than others, that some methods of reasoning should be trusted while others shouldn't. Those are philosophical positions.


The question isn't whether to do philosophy, we're all doing it already, whether we realize it or not. The question is whether to do it well or poorly, clearly or confusedly, consistently or arbitrarily.

What Good Philosophy Does


I agree with many people's assessment that much philosophy isn't worth the paper it's written on. Academic philosophy can become self-indulgent, unnecessarily obscure, and disconnected from the questions people actually care about. But that doesn't mean all philosophy is worthless, it means we need to distinguish good philosophy from bad.

Good philosophy does several things:

1. It clarifies concepts. When people argue past each other, it's often because they're using the same words to mean different things. Philosophy helps us see those differences and speak more precisely.


2. It examines assumptions. We all operate with unexamined beliefs, about what counts as evidence, what makes something true, how we should evaluate testimony. Philosophy brings those assumptions into the light where they can be tested.

3. It checks consistency. We often hold beliefs that contradict each other without realizing it. Philosophy reveals those contradictions and asks us to resolve them.

4. It evaluates arguments. Not all reasoning is equal. Some arguments are strong; others only appear strong until examined. Philosophy provides tools for telling the difference.

5. It distinguishes knowledge from conviction. We can feel absolutely certain about things that turn out to be wrong. Philosophy helps us understand when our certainty is justified and when it's just... certainty.


This last point, distinguishing knowledge from conviction, will be one of my central points. Because one of the deepest confusions in religious epistemology is treating strong conviction as if it were the same thing as knowledge.

What I'll Be Presenting


Over the coming posts, I'll lay out an epistemological framework that applies universally, to scientific claims, historical events, legal proceedings, and yes, to religious truth claims as well. I'll explain:

• What knowledge is and what it requires (JTB+U)
• The difference between believing you're justified and actually being justified
• How testimony functions as a route to knowledge
• What standards distinguish strong testimony from weak
• Why certain beliefs require justification while others can function as foundational
• How to recognize when circular reasoning is disguised as legitimate support
• How to recognize self-sealing arguments

Only after establishing this framework, and giving everyone a chance to engage with it, question it, and push back on it—will I apply it to Christianity's central historical claim: the resurrection.

My goal is to show my work. I want you to see not just my conclusions but the reasoning that leads to them. If the reasoning is sound and the standards are fair, the conclusions should follow. If either the reasoning or the standards are flawed, that should become clear through honest discussion.

An Invitation

I invite you to engage critically with what I present. Ask questions. Point out where you think I've gone wrong. Offer alternative explanations. Show me where my reasoning breaks down or where I've applied standards inconsistently.

What I ask in return is that we distinguish between two different kinds of responses:


Substantive objections: These engage with the actual argument, they show where reasoning fails, where evidence is misrepresented, where standards are applied unfairly.


Defensive moves: These avoid the argument itself, they question motives, appeal to faith as exemption from scrutiny, redefine terms to escape conclusions, or simply assert that the argument doesn't apply to religious claims.


I'm interested in the first kind of response. The second kind doesn't advance understanding; it just protects belief from examination.

If Christianity's claims are true, they should be able to withstand honest scrutiny. If they can't, we should want to know that. Truth has nothing to fear from careful thinking.

I look forward to the conversation.

 

[Fervent]

I appreciate your methodical approach, though right off the bat we're going to run into a problem with the diallelus. What is your solution to the wheel?

 

[Sam266]

I appreciate your methodical approach, though right off the bat we're going to run into a problem with the diallelus. What is your solution to the wheel?

Yes, it's important to answer that question and my epistemology does, but you're getting a bit ahead of me. I'll give you a hint, the answer to the infinite regress problem and the problem of circular reasoning is answered using Wittgenstein's hinges from his final work On Certainty. Of course, there's also the Gettier problem, which I'll also answer.

 

[Fervent]

Yes, it's important to answer that question and my epistemology does, but you're getting a bit ahead of me. I'll give you a hint, the answer to the infinite regress problem and the problem of circular reasoning is answered using Wittgenstein's hinges from his final work On Certainty. Of course, there's also the Gettier problem, which I'll also answer.

Sounds like its just a dogmatic solution, though I am curious about how you avoid special pleading on your axioms.

 

[Sam266]

Sounds like its just a dogmatic solution, though I am curious about how you avoid special pleading on your axioms.

Think of hinges as the “chess conditions” that have to be in place before any move or strategy even makes sense. The analogy helps show both what a hinge is and why treating something as a hinge is not the same as being dogmatic.

Start with chess itself. In order to play a real game, at least three things are in place:

1. There is a board with its pattern of squares.
2. There are pieces with fixed identities and capacities.
3. There are rules that tell us what counts as a legal move, a check, a checkmate, and so on.

You do not normally argue for these in the middle of a game. You do not say “What is your evidence that bishops move diagonally” or “How do you know that this rectangle of wood is really a chessboard.” You just play on that background. The rules, the board, and the pieces are not conclusions of your chess reasoning. They are what let you reason about better and worse moves at all.

That is what a hinge is like in epistemology. When you reason about the world, you already stand inside a framework where things such as “there is a world,” “other minds exist,” and “memory is generally reliable” are taken for granted in practice. They are more like the rules and the board than like particular moves. You do not usually infer them. They are simply “in place” as part of the game of giving and asking for reasons.

Now, why is this not dogmatic

Dogmatism would be something like this: a player insists that a certain move is legal, no matter what the rulebook says or what any competent player thinks and refuses to consider any counterexample. A dogmatist treats an ordinary claim, the sort of thing that should be open to correction, as if it were above all criticism.

Hinges are different in at least three ways, and the chess analogy shows this clearly.

First, the status is grammatical (Wittgensteinian grammar), not a hidden thesis. When you learn chess, you do not first prove that the board has sixty four squares. You learn to move the pieces, to recognize legal and illegal moves, to see what counts as a checkmate. The “certainty” about the board and the rules is built into the practice. It is not a private theory about how things are. In the same way, hinge certainties are built into how we use words such as “know,” “doubt,” and “evidence.” They belong to the grammar of our practice of giving reasons, rather than to a secret doctrine behind it.

Second, the background is arational, not irrational. It is not that you have bad reasons for thinking the board has sixty four squares. You are simply not in the business of having reasons about that while you play. It stands fast. Likewise, our confidence that there is a world is not the outcome of a sloppy argument. It is what small children acquire by being trained into a form of life, learning to talk, to point, to correct mistakes, and so on, long before they can even understand what “evidence for an external world” would mean.

Third, the background can in principle change (although there are some background information that probably wouldn't change), but not in the same way as a particular move. Chess itself could be modified. We could decide to play a variant with different pieces or new rules for castling. At that point we would say that we are playing a different game, or a variant of the game. The fact that such change is possible does not mean that, during an actual game under fixed rules, every rule is held merely as a tentative hypothesis. It simply shows that what counted as a hinge for one practice can be replaced if the practice itself shifts.

The same holds for epistemic hinges. What stands fast in medieval theology is not what stands fast in modern physics. Forms of life can change. When they do, the whole pattern of hinges and ordinary beliefs can be rearranged. Recognising something as a hinge therefore does not mean declaring that it can never be different. It means describing honestly how it functions now in our actual practice.

So the chess analogy brings the point into focus. Hinges are like the board, the pieces, and the rules. They are not moves inside the game, and they are not defended one by one with further reasons. They make reasoning and doubt possible in the first place. Calling them “hinges” is not a way of sneaking dogmas in by the back door. It is a way of acknowledging that every practice of justification already presupposes a background that is not itself the product of justification, just as every game of chess presupposes the board and rules on which it is played.

Maybe that helps.

 

[Fervent]

Think of hinges as the “chess conditions” that have to be in place before any move or strategy even makes sense. The analogy helps show both what a hinge is and why treating something as a hinge is not the same as being dogmatic.

Start with chess itself. In order to play a real game, at least three things are in place:

1. There is a board with its pattern of squares.
2. There are pieces with fixed identities and capacities.
3. There are rules that tell us what counts as a legal move, a check, a checkmate, and so on.

You do not normally argue for these in the middle of a game. You do not say “What is your evidence that bishops move diagonally” or “How do you know that this rectangle of wood is really a chessboard.” You just play on that background. The rules, the board, and the pieces are not conclusions of your chess reasoning. They are what let you reason about better and worse moves at all.

That is what a hinge is like in epistemology. When you reason about the world, you already stand inside a framework where things such as “there is a world,” “other minds exist,” and “memory is generally reliable” are taken for granted in practice. They are more like the rules and the board than like particular moves. You do not usually infer them. They are simply “in place” as part of the game of giving and asking for reasons.

Now, why is this not dogmatic

Dogmatism would be something like this: a player insists that a certain move is legal, no matter what the rulebook says or what any competent player thinks and refuses to consider any counterexample. A dogmatist treats an ordinary claim, the sort of thing that should be open to correction, as if it were above all criticism.

Hinges are different in at least three ways, and the chess analogy shows this clearly.

First, the status is grammatical (Wittgensteinian grammar), not a hidden thesis. When you learn chess, you do not first prove that the board has sixty four squares. You learn to move the pieces, to recognize legal and illegal moves, to see what counts as a checkmate. The “certainty” about the board and the rules is built into the practice. It is not a private theory about how things are. In the same way, hinge certainties are built into how we use words such as “know,” “doubt,” and “evidence.” They belong to the grammar of our practice of giving reasons, rather than to a secret doctrine behind it.

Second, the background is arational, not irrational. It is not that you have bad reasons for thinking the board has sixty four squares. You are simply not in the business of having reasons about that while you play. It stands fast. Likewise, our confidence that there is a world is not the outcome of a sloppy argument. It is what small children acquire by being trained into a form of life, learning to talk, to point, to correct mistakes, and so on, long before they can even understand what “evidence for an external world” would mean.

Third, the background can in principle change (although there are some background information that probably wouldn't change), but not in the same way as a particular move. Chess itself could be modified. We could decide to play a variant with different pieces or new rules for castling. At that point we would say that we are playing a different game, or a variant of the game. The fact that such change is possible does not mean that, during an actual game under fixed rules, every rule is held merely as a tentative hypothesis. It simply shows that what counted as a hinge for one practice can be replaced if the practice itself shifts.

The same holds for epistemic hinges. What stands fast in medieval theology is not what stands fast in modern physics. Forms of life can change. When they do, the whole pattern of hinges and ordinary beliefs can be rearranged. Recognising something as a hinge therefore does not mean declaring that it can never be different. It means describing honestly how it functions now in our actual practice.

So the chess analogy brings the point into focus. Hinges are like the board, the pieces, and the rules. They are not moves inside the game, and they are not defended one by one with further reasons. They make reasoning and doubt possible in the first place. Calling them “hinges” is not a way of sneaking dogmas in by the back door. It is a way of acknowledging that every practice of justification already presupposes a background that is not itself the product of justification, just as every game of chess presupposes the board and rules on which it is played.

Maybe that helps.

Yeah, this just sounds like special pleading through semantic games. It's a dogmatic solution, with added steps to try to explain away the dogmatism. It's exactly the kind of shell game that analytic philosophy is supposed to dispose with but actually only serves to paper it all over through clever use of language. I'm immediately reminded of Carroll's Agrippa and the Tortoise.

 

[Sam266]

Some Christians believe that God exists, the Bible is the word of God, and the resurrection are hinges. They just don't refer to them like this, but they act as though they are hinges. Those beliefs are the bedrock of Christianity, beyond doubt for them.

 

[Sam266]

Yeah, this just sounds like special pleading through semantic games. It's a dogmatic solution, with added steps to try to explain away the dogmatism. It's exactly the kind of shell game that analytic philosophy is supposed to dispose with but actually only serves to paper it all over through clever use of language. I'm immediately reminded of Carroll's Agrippa and the Tortoise.

I do not think the hinge picture is special pleading, and it actually takes Carroll’s point more seriously than your comment suggests.

Carroll’s Tortoise forces the issue that neither rules of inference nor basic premises can be justified by one more premise, on pain of infinite regress. Agrippa’s trilemma makes the same pressure explicit. At some point the “Because?” questions either loop, regress, or stop. The hinge view is simply an attempt to describe where and how they in fact stop in our practices, rather than pretending that they never do.

Calling something a hinge is not giving it a magic justificatory status. It is exactly the opposite. A hinge is a commitment that does not sit inside the space of reasons at all. It is not “self justified” and it is not declared immune from evidence. It is what stands fast while we use concepts like evidence, doubt, and justification in the first place. That “standing fast” is visible in how children are trained into a language and a form of life long before they can even understand radical skeptical questions.

So there are two different projects here. One is to imagine a view from nowhere where every commitment must be supported by further reasons on pain of dogmatism. The other is to describe honestly how reasoning and doubt actually function for finite language users, who always already inherit background certainties they have never argued for. The hinge framework belongs to the second project.

You can call that “semantic games” if you like, but what is really going on is an investigation into Wittgenstein's grammar of “know”, “doubt”, and “because”. Wittgenstein’s point is that once you see how these words actually work in practice, you also see why the regress that Carroll dramatizes cannot be resolved by one more argument. Something has to stand fast. The hinge theorist is not papering that over. He is putting his finger on it.

One way to see that this is not just verbal juggling is to notice the structural parallel with Gödel’s work. Gödel showed that any sufficiently rich formal system faces a choice: either it is incomplete, or it is inconsistent. In particular, a system that can express basic arithmetic cannot, if it is consistent, prove from within itself that it is consistent. Any such proof has to come from a stronger meta-system.

Something similar is going on with hinges. Agrippa’s trilemma and Carroll’s Tortoise dramatize the fact that a system of reasons cannot, from within, justify all of its own inferential rules and basic commitments without either looping, regressing, or simply stopping. The hinge view does not “explain away” this problem; it takes it as a datum. Hinges are those stopping points, the inherited background that is not itself the product of further reasons, but on which the whole practice of giving reasons depends.

In other words, hinge theory is not adding a dogmatic extra layer, it is making explicit the same limitation Gödel exposed in formal systems: you cannot have a finite, self-contained system that both captures all truths of its domain and proves its own legitimacy from the inside. Something has to be taken as given at the level of practice. Calling those “hinges” is not special pleading; it is simply owning up to the structural fact that your regress argument already relies on.

Much of this I cover in my work on epistemology.

 

[Fervent]

Calling something a hinge is not giving it a magic justificatory status. It is exactly the opposite. A hinge is a commitment that does not sit inside the space of reasons at all. It is not “self justified” and it is not declared immune from evidence. It is what stands fast while we use concepts like evidence, doubt, and justification in the first place. That “standing fast” is visible in how children are trained into a language and a form of life long before they can even understand radical skeptical questions.

This right here is where it seems to be a shell game/special pleading. The notion that there is such a space at all is an invention, and can only be maintained dogmatically. It's a semantic shell game that serves more to paper over the problem with language than to actually engage with the challenge the diallelus presents. It seems to be precisely the sort of language-obfuscation that the analytics were supposedly combatting, which is not all that surprising.

 

[Sam266]

Yeah, this just sounds like special pleading through semantic games. It's a dogmatic solution, with added steps to try to explain away the dogmatism. It's exactly the kind of shell game that analytic philosophy is supposed to dispose with but actually only serves to paper it all over through clever use of language. I'm immediately reminded of Carroll's Agrippa and the Tortoise.

You keep saying “dogmatic” and “shell game,” but you have not shown where the trick is supposed to be. The regress you are invoking, from Agrippa and Carroll, leaves you with exactly three options:

1. Infinite regress of reasons.
2. Circular reasons.
3. Stopping somewhere.

There is no fourth option where every belief is backed by further reasons and you never need to stop. If you reject circularity and you reject an infinite regress as unliveable, then you stop somewhere. The only honest question is whether you make your stopping points explicit or pretend you have none.

The hinge view does the opposite of a shell game. A shell game hides the pea. Hinge talk puts the pea in plain sight and says:

Here is where the “because” questions in fact stop for us in practice. Here is the background we already treat as fixed while we argue about other things.

That is not special pleading, that is intellectual bookkeeping.

If you want to say that any stopping point at all is “dogmatic,” then you have just accused every finite reasoner of dogmatism, including yourself. Because you also either:

• push the “why” questions until you collapse, or
• stop at some set of unargued background commitments that you simply take for granted.

In other words, you have hinges too. You just refuse to look at them.

From that angle, the real shell game is the posture that says “I have no hinges, only pure reasons all the way down.” That is the move that shuffles the cups while pretending there is no table.

On my side, I am doing two things very plainly:

1. A Gödel style point about structure. No sufficiently rich system proves its own legitimacy from inside. Something has to be taken as given at the level of practice.
2. A Wittgensteinian point about grammar. Words like “know,” “doubt,” and “evidence” already presuppose a background of certainties. Children acquire that background long before they can even understand global skeptical questions.

You can disagree about which propositions function as hinges. You can argue that I have misdescribed our actual practice. Those would be real criticisms. Simply repeating “dogmatic shell game” is not.

So I will turn your charge around. The hinge framework is what you get when you take Agrippa and Carroll seriously and admit that the space of reasons has a floor. The refusal to acknowledge any floor, while still happily standing somewhere, is the real piece of philosophical sleight of hand here.

 

[Sam266]

Uses of "I know..."


We often talk as if “I know…” had one clear meaning. In practice it is doing at least two very different jobs.

1. “I know” = “I am sure”​

Sometimes “I know” just means “I am completely convinced.”

• “I know he cares about me.”
• “I know my team will win.”
• “I just know something is wrong.”

Here you are not really talking about evidence. You are talking about your inner state. You are saying “This is how it stands for me, do not try to shake me.”

Call this the conviction use of “I know.” It expresses firmness, not careful support.

2. “I know” = “This is well supported”​

Other times “I know” is a claim about evidence.

• “I know the store is open, I checked the website a minute ago.”
• “I know Paris is the capital of France, you can find it in any atlas.”
• “I know she left already, I just saw her drive away.”

Here “I know” means something closer to:

This is true, I believe it, and I have reasons you could in principle check for yourself.

Call this the epistemic use of “I know.” It belongs to the game of giving and asking for reasons. When someone uses “I know” in this sense, it makes sense to ask “How do you know?” and to expect an answer.

Why the difference matters​

A lot of arguments get stuck because people mix these two up.

One person uses “I know” as conviction.
The other hears it as an epistemic claim and starts asking for evidence.

The first person feels attacked. The second person feels stonewalled.

A small habit can help:

• When you say “I know…”, quietly ask yourself which use you mean.
• If you really mean “I feel very sure”, you can say that instead.
• Save “I know” for the cases where you are ready to show your work.

Once you see that “I know” often means two different things, some disagreements become much easier to understand, and sometimes easier to resolve.

 

[Sam266]

Why Epistemology Is Important We live surrounded by claims, scientific, political, moral, spiritual, each asking to be believed. Yet belief by itself proves nothing. What matters is how we come to believe, what counts as a justification for the belief, and what lets us tell knowledge from opinion. That “how” is the work of epistemology.

Epistemology asks the most basic but neglected questions: What does it mean to know something? What makes a reason good? When is doubt appropriate, and when is it confusion pretending to be insight? These are not puzzles for academics alone; they underlie every decision we make.

When we understand how knowledge works, we become less vulnerable to manipulation and narrative. We learn to see the difference between evidence and repetition, between understanding and agreement, between what is true and what merely feels persuasive.

A society that loses interest in epistemology does not stop believing, it just stops knowing why it believes. To recover that “why” is to recover our capacity for sense, for trust, and for truth itself.

 

[d taylor]

-
​

How a person comes to believe what they believe can not be defined and a single reason can not be established.

 

[Sam266]

-
​

How a person comes to believe what they believe can not be defined and a single reason can not be established.

Why do you believe that?

 

[Fervent]

You keep saying “dogmatic” and “shell game,” but you have not shown where the trick is supposed to be. The regress you are invoking, from Agrippa and Carroll, leaves you with exactly three options:

1. Infinite regress of reasons.
2. Circular reasons.
3. Stopping somewhere.

There is no fourth option where every belief is backed by further reasons and you never need to stop. If you reject circularity and you reject an infinite regress as unliveable, then you stop somewhere. The only honest question is whether you make your stopping points explicit or pretend you have none.

Option 3 is dogmatic, full stop. I am aware that those are the options. But any stopping point is going to be arbitrary unless we find something that is worth calling axiomatic with the only hindrance to acceptance being our understanding that axiom.

The hinge view does the opposite of a shell game. A shell game hides the pea. Hinge talk puts the pea in plain sight and says:

it's not the hinge that makes it a shell game, it's the refusal to accept that these hinges are arbitrary and fail to avoid invoking a dogmatic solution.

That is not special pleading, that is intellectual bookkeeping.

Again, the special pleading is in protesting that what you are doing is not dogmatism when it in fact is.

If you want to say that any stopping point at all is “dogmatic,” then you have just accused every finite reasoner of dogmatism, including yourself. Because you also either:

• push the “why” questions until you collapse, or
• stop at some set of unargued background commitments that you simply take for granted.

You're acting as if pyrrhonic skepticism isn't a genuine option.

In other words, you have hinges too. You just refuse to look at them.

i don't shy away from accepting the dogmatic nature of my position, I just find the whole "hinge' game a rather silly one because it is nothing more than trying to give respectability to an arbitrary starting position.

From that angle, the real shell game is the posture that says “I have no hinges, only pure reasons all the way down.” That is the move that shuffles the cups while pretending there is no table.

I agree, I'm not an infinite regressionist. I just believe that I have an axiom that only a fool would deny.

On my side, I am doing two things very plainly:

1. A Gödel style point about structure. No sufficiently rich system proves its own legitimacy from inside. Something has to be taken as given at the level of practice.
2. A Wittgensteinian point about grammar. Words like “know,” “doubt,” and “evidence” already presuppose a background of certainties. Children acquire that background long before they can even understand global skeptical questions.

You can disagree about which propositions function as hinges. You can argue that I have misdescribed our actual practice. Those would be real criticisms. Simply repeating “dogmatic shell game” is not.

It's not so much misprescription of the practice, but that it provides no escape from the wheel. We might say the skeptic is no less arbitrary, but I'm not so sure that's true since the only thing we need to grant the skeptic is that MP is legitimate.

So I will turn your charge around. The hinge framework is what you get when you take Agrippa and Carroll seriously and admit that the space of reasons has a floor. The refusal to acknowledge any floor, while still happily standing somewhere, is the real piece of philosophical sleight of hand here.

The issue isn't that at some point we need to have a floor, it's that the denial of dogmatism through the hinge concept is nothing but wordplay that creates a picture of certainty that is unsupported.

 

[2PhiloVoid]

Introduction: My Background and Purpose


I come from a Christian background, though I no longer identify as a Christian. I spent 35 years actively involved in the church, during which time I taught classes on Christian apologetics with theological questions. This means I'm not approaching Christianity as an outsider who's never understood its claims, I know the arguments intimately. I've defended them, taught them, and lived within that framework for most of my life.

I studied philosophy at Geneva College, a Christian institution where faith and reason were treated as partners in the search for truth. After graduating in 1981, I continued studying philosophy for over 45 years, with particular intensity during the last 20+ years of my retirement. I'm now 75, and I've spent this time focusing on three interconnected areas:


Epistemology (how we know what we know), approached through the lens of Ludwig Wittgenstein's later philosophy, especially his final work, On Certainty. Wittgenstein's insights about language, meaning, and the foundations of knowledge have shaped much of what I've written.


Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), which led to my recent book From Testimony to Knowledge: Evaluating Near-Death Experiences (available on Amazon). In that work, I developed a rigorous framework for evaluating testimonial evidence and applied it to one of the most contested areas of human experience. The framework I use, JTB+U (Justified True Belief plus Understanding) with three epistemic guardrails, applies universally to any knowledge claim based on testimony.


Wittgenstein's later philosophy, particularly his concept of "hinges," those bedrock certainties that make justification possible rather than requiring justification themselves. Understanding what genuinely functions as a hinge versus what merely claims hinge-status to avoid scrutiny turns out to be crucial for evaluating religious claims.

My Current Project

I'm now working on a second book that examines the evidence for the bodily resurrection of Christ. I'll be sharing my analysis of the testimonial evidence in this forum, applying the same rigorous standards I used for evaluating near-death reports. My approach will focus on what the historical evidence can and cannot support, examined through clear epistemic standards that apply to any historical claim.

My Intentions


I want to be transparent about my approach: I have no desire to engage in polemics or personal attacks. I'm not here to mock anyone's faith or treat sincere belief with contempt. I recognize that for many of you, Christianity isn't just an intellectual position, it's central to your identity, your community, and your understanding of reality. I take that seriously.

That said, I also recognize that some may find my arguments offensive simply because of their conclusions. This isn't my intention, but it's an unavoidable risk when examining claims that matter deeply to people. I can only promise to be as fair, clear, and rigorous as possible. Good arguments should stand or fall on their own merits, not on whether they make us comfortable.


If my analysis is flawed, I want to know. If I've misunderstood the evidence or applied standards inconsistently, I'm genuinely interested in correction. But if the evidence truly is as weak as I believe it to be, that's something we should be willing to acknowledge, even if it's uncomfortable.

Why Philosophy Matters

Before I present my epistemological framework, let me address something important: philosophy is inescapable. Whether you love it or hate it, you're already doing it.


Every time you evaluate a political claim, make a moral judgment, defend a religious belief, assess scientific evidence, argue for God's existence, or even decide how to raise your children, you're engaged in philosophy. You're making assumptions about what counts as evidence, what makes reasoning valid, how we distinguish truth from error, and what standards we should use to evaluate claims.

Even if you say "I hate philosophy" or "I just believe what the Bible says," you're making philosophical moves. You're claiming that some approaches to truth are better than others, that certain sources are more reliable than others, that some methods of reasoning should be trusted while others shouldn't. Those are philosophical positions.


The question isn't whether to do philosophy, we're all doing it already, whether we realize it or not. The question is whether to do it well or poorly, clearly or confusedly, consistently or arbitrarily.

What Good Philosophy Does


I agree with many people's assessment that much philosophy isn't worth the paper it's written on. Academic philosophy can become self-indulgent, unnecessarily obscure, and disconnected from the questions people actually care about. But that doesn't mean all philosophy is worthless, it means we need to distinguish good philosophy from bad.

Good philosophy does several things:

1. It clarifies concepts. When people argue past each other, it's often because they're using the same words to mean different things. Philosophy helps us see those differences and speak more precisely.


2. It examines assumptions. We all operate with unexamined beliefs, about what counts as evidence, what makes something true, how we should evaluate testimony. Philosophy brings those assumptions into the light where they can be tested.

3. It checks consistency. We often hold beliefs that contradict each other without realizing it. Philosophy reveals those contradictions and asks us to resolve them.

4. It evaluates arguments. Not all reasoning is equal. Some arguments are strong; others only appear strong until examined. Philosophy provides tools for telling the difference.

5. It distinguishes knowledge from conviction. We can feel absolutely certain about things that turn out to be wrong. Philosophy helps us understand when our certainty is justified and when it's just... certainty.


This last point, distinguishing knowledge from conviction, will be one of my central points. Because one of the deepest confusions in religious epistemology is treating strong conviction as if it were the same thing as knowledge.

What I'll Be Presenting


Over the coming posts, I'll lay out an epistemological framework that applies universally, to scientific claims, historical events, legal proceedings, and yes, to religious truth claims as well. I'll explain:

• What knowledge is and what it requires (JTB+U)
• The difference between believing you're justified and actually being justified
• How testimony functions as a route to knowledge
• What standards distinguish strong testimony from weak
• Why certain beliefs require justification while others can function as foundational
• How to recognize when circular reasoning is disguised as legitimate support
• How to recognize self-sealing arguments

Only after establishing this framework, and giving everyone a chance to engage with it, question it, and push back on it—will I apply it to Christianity's central historical claim: the resurrection.

My goal is to show my work. I want you to see not just my conclusions but the reasoning that leads to them. If the reasoning is sound and the standards are fair, the conclusions should follow. If either the reasoning or the standards are flawed, that should become clear through honest discussion.

An Invitation

I invite you to engage critically with what I present. Ask questions. Point out where you think I've gone wrong. Offer alternative explanations. Show me where my reasoning breaks down or where I've applied standards inconsistently.

What I ask in return is that we distinguish between two different kinds of responses:


Substantive objections: These engage with the actual argument, they show where reasoning fails, where evidence is misrepresented, where standards are applied unfairly.


Defensive moves: These avoid the argument itself, they question motives, appeal to faith as exemption from scrutiny, redefine terms to escape conclusions, or simply assert that the argument doesn't apply to religious claims.


I'm interested in the first kind of response. The second kind doesn't advance understanding; it just protects belief from examination.

If Christianity's claims are true, they should be able to withstand honest scrutiny. If they can't, we should want to know that. Truth has nothing to fear from careful thinking.

I look forward to the conversation.

As a student of Philosophy myself, I'm open to hearing what you have to say, particularly where the field of Epistemology is being invoked for discussion and explanation. So, the floor is yours and if and when I see something to 'disagree' with, I'll let you know, Sam.

 

[Hentenza]

As a student of Philosophy myself, I'm open to hearing what you have to say, particularly where the field of Epistemology is being invoked for discussion and explanation. So, the floor is yours and if and when I see something to 'disagree' with, I'll let you know, Sam.

Popcorn popped and recliner ready.

 

[d taylor]

Why do you believe that?

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A person may believe from an eye witness account while another may believe a persons account of an event.

 

[Sam266]

Option 3 is dogmatic, full stop. I am aware that those are the options. But any stopping point is going to be arbitrary unless we find something that is worth calling axiomatic with the only hindrance to acceptance being our understanding that axiom.

it's not the hinge that makes it a shell game, it's the refusal to accept that these hinges are arbitrary and fail to avoid invoking a dogmatic solution.

Again, the special pleading is in protesting that what you are doing is not dogmatism when it in fact is.

You're acting as if pyrrhonic skepticism isn't a genuine option.

i don't shy away from accepting the dogmatic nature of my position, I just find the whole "hinge' game a rather silly one because it is nothing more than trying to give respectability to an arbitrary starting position.

I agree, I'm not an infinite regressionist. I just believe that I have an axiom that only a fool would deny.

It's not so much misprescription of the practice, but that it provides no escape from the wheel. We might say the skeptic is no less arbitrary, but I'm not so sure that's true since the only thing we need to grant the skeptic is that MP is legitimate.

The issue isn't that at some point we need to have a floor, it's that the denial of dogmatism through the hinge concept is nothing but wordplay that creates a picture of certainty that is unsupported.

If you want to call any stopping point “dogmatic,” then you have not really criticized my view in particular, you have just described the human condition. Every finite reasoner either runs into regress, or stops somewhere. You say you are happy to accept that as dogmatic in your own case. Fine. Then the word “dogmatic” has stopped doing any real work against hinges.

Where we actually disagree is on what we do with that fact. Your move is to pick an axiom “only a fool would deny” and treat that as the special, non-arbitrary place to stop. The hinge move is different. It does not baptize a favorite thesis as self-evident. It describes what already stands fast in our practice: external world, other minds, basic memory, the use of modus ponens, and so on. These are not chosen dogmas; they are the inherited background without which you could not even state your regress argument.

Pyrrhonian skepticism does not escape this. The moment you “grant MP,” use ordinary language, trust your own memory of the discussion, or follow a rule, you are relying on hinge-like certainties. You can claim to grant only MP, but your actual cognitive life rides on a much thicker bedrock.

As for “word play”: every position in this area lives or dies by how it uses words like “know,” “reason,” “axiom,” and “self-evident.” The hinge approach is not smuggling in a solution by redefining them, it is doing the opposite: making their actual use explicit. If you say “only a fool would deny my axiom,” that is also a linguistic move; you are just not owning up to the background grammar that makes it feel compelling.

So, hinge talk is not a shell game to avoid dogmatism. It is intellectual bookkeeping: putting the stopping points on the table instead of pretending they are not there. You can still argue about which propositions function as hinges, or whether my description of our practice is accurate. But simply repeating “dogmatic shell game” does not touch the structural point we both already accept: the space of reasons has a floor, and you are standing on it too.

 

[Sam266]

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A person may believe from an eye witness account while another may believe a persons account of an event.

I agree with you in the sense that there are many ways to justify a belief. It's not just a matter of reasoning (logic), but there are other ways, such as sensory experience, linguistic training, pure logic (X or not X), and testimony, for example. I'll explain much of this as I go along.