Not only is this bad historical (or legal) reasoning, it’s bad science. This is a question-begging excuse to avoid upsetting the status quo. Here’s a good paper elucidating the issues with it Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?
And your support for this being descriptions of actual events is?
This is simply not true.
Don’t just assume I haven’t read good parts of Summa, please. I am actually capable of devising solutions to problems like the lack of certain kind of information. It is just that, which I have already explained, I fail to see Thomas as an authority. For example, in this discussion the term “substance” came up and you referred to claims by Thomas. The problem is that nothing resembling “substance” has ever been verified to exist. Ever! This means that the concept does not describe nature as we know it and this becomes a major problem when substance is used as a de facto reality in teaching and discussions.
I’m terribly sorry but English is not my first language so I have looked up the meaning of the term “recursion” but failed to see that I have misunderstood it in this context. Kindly explain my apparent misunderstanding.
It is highly unlikely that uneducated people living on the countryside of Palestine would read and write Greek at that level. Just for starters.
From not normal to supernatural when no empirical data for anything but this universe exists, is not a logic leap.
Ahh, more anecdotes.
Even more anecdotes. Eyewitnesses who totally contradict each other and a few things that cannot be explained using current models of nature.
The claims themselves. See below.
If you say so. Never heard of a consistent pattern anywhere else - but maybe I’m wrong. It wouldn’t be a fatal point; it would simply be interesting.
You could contend that the Categories are misguided (like any number of the great philosophers of Modernity would), but to say what you said probably means you don’t know what you are talking about (or you just assume that various Modern rejections of metaphysics are “obvious”). Substance is “that which is not predicated of another.” A man. A tree. A stone. These are substances. Do they exist? Or - to use your vocabulary - is there anything which at least “resembles” men, trees, stones, etc., which are not predicated of another? Is it at least somewhat plausible that this is a valid category? Are we in the same universe???
Who said they would? Merchants would all have known Greek, though… if you were even half-educated, you knew Greek. Koine is not that hard anyway. But plenty of preaching was done without a text… It is possible to tell people about these things without having them read. So your point is not helpful.
The difference is between ideologues and witnesses. If I say, “Communism is worth dying for!” it is different than, “I saw a man come back from the dead who promised me eternal life if I tell people about him.” One is merely believed as a principle – the other is testified to as a thing which happened. As for poverty, Matthew was not poor. Several other apostles may not have been that poor (and surely many of the 70 were not). But the point is more to say that they were not looking for money… especially Paul. Of all the ways to construct conspiracy theories about the apostolic college, one must find a way to include the murderous and then miraculous Paul in the theory… good luck. The point is you must explain who is lying and why, or who is confused and how. That’s why the claim is good evidence in this context.
Yes, fine… except some “not normal” things might indicate “supernatural” things.
Yes, anecdotes are pretty useful. It must also be useful for you to dismiss evidence simply because it is evidence. And I see you are appealing to Hume here – maybe without even knowing it. Trust me, that’s a bad plan. Hume on miracles… not good. Very bad. Would not Hume again. Doge says avoid.
That is a kind of fallacy of division; an “evolution of the gaps”: because something evolved gradually, every part of it evolved gradually. When actually if we look at something like recursive speech and reasoning capacity, this is either present or it is not. There is no gradation. There was a point in time B when it was not at an immediately preceding point in time A. I guess this is difficult to accept.
You’re darn tootin’ it’s difficult. You want us to accept that on some given Monday someone was incapable of conversing using recursive speech and then on Tuesday she could. It must have surprised the living daylights out of her friends.niceatheist:
That is a kind of fallacy of division; an “evolution of the gaps”: because something evolved gradually, every part of it evolved gradually. When actually if we look at something like recursive speech and reasoning capacity, this is either present or it is not. There is no gradation. There was a point in time B when it was not at an immediately preceding point in time A. I guess this is difficult to accept.
It’s exceptionally bad as a means of determining exactly what happened. You can try this test if you like to see how accurate your perception is…
That is (and maybe will remain) an unsolved mystery. A hypothesis is that there was at least one other individual in the same place at the same time who had the necessary mutation in their prefrontal cortex.
So you reckon that someone was born with a genetic mutation (both in the angular gyrus and Wernickes area - not the pre frontal cortex) that allowed them to immediately use recursive language and that there was another person born at that exact same time in exactly the same place with exactly the same mutation that allowed exactly the same ability.Freddy:
That is (and maybe will remain) an unsolved mystery. A hypothesis is that there was at least one other individual in the same place at the same time who had the necessary mutation in their prefrontal cortex.
