judge

What makes it good evidence?

All we have is assertions. We have a long puffy OP with assertions and no actual evidence or examples.

Peter Kirby

Gee, mate, if all your contribution is to say "you've got nothing," I'm hardly feeling inspired to write more for you.

stephan huller

Peter Kirby deserves our greatest respect for establishing earlychristianwritings.com and earlyjewishwritings.com. I've never said thank you before Peter but thank you.

Peter Kirby

This would be the part where you tell me that I'm brushing off the question because I can't answer it... and because I am trying to limit my time for ephemeral writing, you can make much of my supposed inability to answer.

However, I just remembered that I had a longer explanation of the one example that was the starting point for my letter. I put it on my blog post here:

http://peterkirby.com/archives/5

When others had already commented on an apparent disregard, in their minds, to make a best-attempt to represent the opponent’s argument accurately before preceding to rebuttal (accusing Dr. McGrath of demolishing “strawman” arguments), I was a bit eager to see that the latest post addressed this criticism from the outset. But instead of dealing with the actual objection that was raised to James McGrath, he made a strawman of the objection, raising the very same problem again in his reply. Instead of the troubling accusation made against him being given response, that of wrongfully representing Doherty’s work, that argument itself is facilely represented as an objection about a failure to point out the good parts of the book, as if it were a mere matter of charity to give the argument a fair shake. The review does indeed attempt to dismantle the arguments and doesn’t take the approach of presenting solid evidence against the proposed hypothesis, the logical course which would be suggested by the analogical reply about homeopathic medicine and young-earth creationism. Just disprove it instead of addressing the arguments themselves? OK, go ahead. But he doesn’t. He has his cake and eats it too, using an appeal on the basis that he doesn’t really need to engage the material because it’s fully bunk and that can be proven, but hey, he’s going to go ahead comment on several individual points of the argument anyway… just in a fashion that’s allowed to be lax about ideas like representing the opponent’s arguments properly because, hey, he’s just reviewing nonsense today. Hence this reply.

There you go. He misconstrues even the very objection that he is misconstruing arguments. That was the starting point for the rest of the essay.

GakuseiDon

I agree, but you wrote that:

"You [McGrath] say that it's okay to leave out praise of positive points when you are making a review with a negative emphasis."

But that doesn't represent the sense of what he wrote. McGrath said that he was leaving out the parts "which [have] no real bearing on [Doherty's] mythicist case". In other words, he said he is **focusing** on the mythicist argument. (Again, whether McGrath is doing this or not is a separate question to the point raised in your open letter.)

If you disagree, then tell me what makes better sense of what McGrath wrote in his blog post across those two paragraphs:

1/ (To quote you): "It's okay to leave out praise of positive points when you are making a review with a negative emphasis".
2/ (What I suggest McGrath was saying): "It's okay to leave out praise of positive points where they have no real bearing on the argument in question".

blastula

Yes, he strawmanned the strawman charge. That takes a special talent.

GakuseiDon

Can you link to the actual objection that was raised to James McGrath, please? McGrath writes that:

On a couple of other blogs I've encountered some criticism of my supposedly not having adequately presented the full extent of Earl Doherty's claims and arguments in his book..

So I'd be interested in knowing how you know that McGrath wasn't responding to "the actual objection that was raised to" him.

Toto

I believe that McGrath was referring to Vridar.

McGrath not paying close attention

and other posts there.

judge

Is the purpose of these boards so you can air your grievances with a 10 page open letter with no content whatsoever?

As a member of this board who is interested in discussing evidence, Ill ask you again to present some evidence, rather than just making assertions.
If you cant say exactly where the case was misrepresented then you post is just SPAM. There is no content just an emotional appeal and some assertions.

I made no claim that "you've got nothing" either, so dont misrepresent me please.

Im asking where exactly were dohertys arguments presented wrongy?
It cant be that hard unless of course you dont have anything very much.

Toto

judge: for the gory details, I refer you to Neil Godfrey's blog, Vridar.

http://vridar.wordpress.com/