post 11

An ad hoc explanation is one that is constructed with no supporting evidence or argument simply to avoid an unwanted conclusion. Thus, pointing out that a doctrine "ancient" does nothing to show its not ad hoc. For example, take the article "When Prophecy Fails and Faith Persists: A Theoretical overview" or any of the plethora of studies on what ad hoc mechanisms religious believers use to rationalize the failure of a prophecy. I think (and others have argued) those same mechanisms were used by the early disciples of Jesus to rationalize his death (after all, the Jewish Messiah was not prophecied to die before completing his work). You could not then respond to my argument by saying "well, the claims of the disciples represent an ancient tradition and thus cannot be ad hoc." That would be a silly response. A claim can be ad hoc, no matter how old it is or who said it before a given speaker resorted to employing it. ."
the paper he refers to is by Lorne L. Dawson. you can see the abstract and first page here:


 The ad hoc argument came up in the previous post. The issue as he raised it was essentially about epistemic presumption. In his view religious doctrines dont' have any. Of course for the typical atheist being religious doctrine is automatic disproof anyway.I argued that doctrines of a belief system come with the package and enjoy the same presumption for the believer that the  system as a whole does becuase they rest on the same support that convinced the bleieve in the first place. This argument soared over his head.


 Noctambulant's particular "evidence" is an article by Dawson. Dawson is not necessary concerned with even arguing agaisnt Christianity per se. He's actually talking about proving the psychological Principe of connotative dissonance which is what Festinger discovered. The Festinger case is very amusing, everyone should read it. The original book is called When Prophecy fails" it was about infiltrating a flying saucer cult in the 50s, one that watched an old sci fi tv show called "captain video" to get secret codes about when the saucers were coming to save the group from an impending flood. (see an episode of Captain Video).