According to you I am guilty of being inconsistent. You think that because I rely of the testimonial evidence in scripture I should also rely on the testimonies of miracles. Otherwise I am being inconsistent.
Exactly, unless you have some sort of very peculiar self-consistent epistemology that solves the apparent contradiction somehow. I'm very interested in knowing more about it if that's the case.
No my attitude has not changed. It is still.....if hearsay is so unreliable that the courts will not accept it, then why should I?
If a court of law would probably never accept 1st century claims of miracles to be true either, then why should I?
Note: in case you are planning to cite Testimony of the Evangelists - Wikipedia as a rebuttal, remember to read the critical assessment section:
There are two examples of writers in recent years who have made critical assessments of Greenleaf's work, and of legal apologists who model their arguments on his book. Howard Richard Packham is a retired foreign language instructor and former part-time estate planning attorney who holds to an atheist worldview. He has written an internet article criticising the technical arguments set forth by Greenleaf and others. [2] Packham holds that what Greenleaf submits as eyewitness testimony is technically hearsay and therefore does not comprise direct evidence to demonstrate the resurrection of Jesus. He also holds that the criteria for the "ancient documents rule" is not met by the gospel documents and that the force of Greenleaf's argument is thereby undermined.
You think that because I rely of the testimonial evidence in scripture I should also rely on the hearsay testimonies of miracles. I can only do that if they are equally reliable.
How do you know if two testimonies are equally reliable? How do you measure reliability? Do you follow some principled approach to make that mathematical assessment?
But anyways, if that's how your epistemology works, go for it.
Sorry, yes, I got my fallacy names mixed up. By deflecting the argument, the fallacy you committed was not straw-man it was the red-herring fallacy:
Red Herring
Attempting to redirect the argument to another issue to which the person doing the redirecting can better respond. While it is similar to the avoiding the issue fallacy, the red herring is a deliberate diversion of attention with the intention of trying to abandon the original argument.
I already explained that I asked you to provide justification for an extraordinary claim you were forcing me to accept. But anyhow, believe whatever you want ...
It means having hard irrefutable evidence to corroborate their story. Doctors certificates, X-rays, videos, etc
Ok. I will answer your question based on the definitions you have provided.
Your question was: "Do you seriously think that 2nd hand unsubstantiated stories from unknown biased individuals is on a par with the testimony of scripture?"
My answer:
You are basically asking me the following:
Given a testimony X that is
- hearsay (i.e. we don't have the witness in person and can't interrogate them)
- unsubstantiated (i.e. we don't have access to doctors certificates, X-rays, videos, etc.)
- from an unknown witness (by this I take it that you mean we don't have enough information about the individual, i.e., there are valuable pieces of information about the individual we would like to know but unfortunately don't ??)
- from a biased witness (i.e. the witness comes from a background that might have possibly influenced them to claim what they claimed ??)
To answer this, let's apply the same rules to the testimony of scripture, for example, Acts chapter 2 (the story about the miracle of Xenoglossy).
- Do we have the witnesses in person so that we can interrogate them? No. Therefore, Acts 2 is hearsay.
- Do we have access to doctors certificates, X-rays, videos, audios or any other form of hard evidence? No. Therefore, Acts 2 is unsubstantiated.
- Do we know enough about the individuals who were present in Acts 2? Do we really know enough about the apostles and disciples who were allegedly present at Pentecost? What about the 3000 individuals who allegedly converted on that day? I guess you could say that we know a bit more about Peter, especially from the Catholic tradition, but do we really know that much? Can we corroborate that information somehow? Given that the story of Acts 2 is hearsay and unsubstantiated, claiming that we know enough about the actual witnesses would be far-fetched in my opinion, so I would say that Acts 2's witnesses are unknown.
- Are the witnesses biased? I would think so. Jesus was charismatic himself, leading a supernatural life, and the disciples allegedly spent 3+ years alongside him. Therefore, they were clearly biased to expect supernatural stuff to happen from time to time, and hence, it shouldn't be that surprising to hear miracle claims from them. Conclusion: Acts 2's witnesses were definitely biased.
If you don't agree with this point-by-point analysis, please show where I supposedly made a mistake.
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