Thursday, June 20, 2013

Atheists evoke fallacies as defense while demonstrating they don't understand specail pleading



I made a post on CARM the other day arguing that atheist miss the point about eye witnesses. This came after a couple of threads where they argued that eye witnesses are unreliable. here's my post:

 In that discussion in the previous thread the emphasis got off on the unreliability of eye witness testimony. I think the salient points were lost.

The major point that is far and away the most important to make is not that the Gospels are backed by eye witnesses so they are trust worthy but that history itself is ultimately backed by eye witnesses. The great historiographers of the nineteenth century who laid down the rules for making history a social scinece, such as Benedetto Croce, made documents the basic stuff of history. Yet documents are compiled by people, that means eye witnesses.

the real issues are:

(1) If we decide to ignore eye witnesses testimony completely then it's also curtains for history.

(2) It's not that eye witnesses are so accurate but given for what we need to know we need their specific input.

a) calcification

b) resurrection

c) miracle working.


there's no way to know these things just from documents removed from eye witness accounts, especially not in the ancinet world.

(3) The fact that the eye witness testimony was safe guarded and kept intact.

(a) they had an oral tradition

(b) they didn't have to guard it very long because it began to be written while the witnesses were still alive.

witnesses functioned as a check and they didn't have to do that very long.

here is my page proving they began writing only about 18 years after the events.

http://www.doxa.ws/Bible/Gospel_behind.html

 Every single response was arguing from  guilt by association.



 Drugstar says:
book of mormon has eyewitnesses too.

 Originally Posted by Metacrock View Post
that's guilt by association. did you read the post? what did I say?you must know that guilt by association is a fallacy, why do you use it? do you know understand that fallacy means it's illogical?


Drugstar:

so is special pleading
why are the early xian eyewitnesses any more believable than the early mormon eyewitnesses?
 My response has nothing to do with special pleading. Saying that my witnesses are better is to special pleading. That has to do with  arguing that I shouldn't have to live up tot he same rule,which I did not argue.

When I pointed out they were using guilt by association I get this:

Originally Posted by Whatsisface View Post
Just saying stuff like this doesn't make it so. In fact, its not an argument.
it's obviously so. Just read the matairal. Its' plalin to see they are brigning in things that dn't aplly
Meta:
you seem to have gone astray form the concept of logical thinking. you are still willing to accept logical fallacies and think that it's valid to bring in old things as long as it sticks it to religion. that's just not valid. that's not fair. you can't have a discussion it's totally diagnostic it' sjust lynch mob mentality.

It's very very telling. I can't think of a more frank admission that your view point is bankrupt and cant' be defended by logic.
Just saying it's a logical fallacy doesn't make it so? what else would it be but guilt by association when one argues "other eye witnesses are bad so these must be too?"

Frank admission because they don't even attempt logical defense but evoke fallacious reasoning while trying argue that move are fallacious, demonstrate that they don't understand what special pleading is.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't think there were too many Mormon witnesses like there were for Christianity. That was a big community. Wasn't Mormonism and Islam mostly the work of one person?

Joseph Hinman (Metacrock) said...

Right, the whole town of Bethsada must have seen Jesus walking down the street and that's probably where the 500 came from (after the resurrection). only a couple of people claimed to see the gold tablets and they didn't get a good look at them.