Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Amaleq13 · 07-12-2004, 03:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by philowiz

Why is not eye-witness testimony evidence enough?

What "eye-witness testimony"?

CX · 07-15-2004, 09:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jbernier

No doubt. The question becomes "Were Matthew and Luke trying to present a literal, verbatim, genealogy of Jesus?" Or were they more interesting in presenting a theological point (in Matthew's case that Jesus is a Jewish Messiah, of the house of David; in Luke's case that Jesus is the universal saviour of all humanity). Note that these theological points are not necessarily self-contradictory; one could be both a Jewish Messiah and an universal saviour as these roles do not exclude one another in any way. Even if they did, however, that would only concern those who argue that the Biblical text (as a whole) must be perfectly harmonious in order to have something meaningful to say; I would argue that that was not the understanding of the writers of the Biblical text and thus cannot be an assumption which we can force upon the purpose of the text which they wrote.

Again, no doubt. See above observations about the purposes of the writers and the implications for our contemporary exegesis.

You'll get no disagreement from me, for the most part. My comments are strictly a response to a literalist position. The two genealogies cannot both be historically true. The theological underpinnings are not necessarily contradictory, but I'm not all that interested in theology. Much as I suspect AMt and ALk had different ideas about what constitutes "history" than we hard-minded moderns. In any event the theological aims of both authors certainly take precedence over their "historical" aims.

Clutch · 07-16-2004, 06:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by philowiz

In this case, not taking philosophy is a handicap, since there you learn that the only "absurd" things are those that are self-contradictory, which miracles are not. You need to be careful what you mean by "absurd", but violations of laws of nature are not absurd, they are not logically contradictory.

I've taken some philosophy. And I can tell you that taking "absurd" to mean "formally contradictory" is... well, totally absurd. (Though not a formal contradiction.)

A book that called the Matterhorn taller than Everest would contain an absurdity -- that is, a patent falsehood -- though not, of course, a contradiction. In just such an untendentious sense, rlogan is calling miracle claims (or at least, some of the miracle claims in the bible) absurd. He may be right or wrong, but he is not abusing the term nor obviously demonstrating some lack of philosophical acumen.

You have to understand that taking the logician's sense of 'absurd' to be the primary meaning is sort of like taking the quantum physicist's sense of 'spin' to be that term's primary meaning. A little philosophy is a dangerous thing...

If you are interested, I suggest you ask rlogan for the reasoning behind the claim that at least some of the bible's miracle reports are ludicrous. That might generate a more substantive exchange.

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