andrewcriddle

I'm worried that this may be off-topic but see this 1968 scientific article about the coming ice age Common Opponent Sought and Found ?

Andrew Criddle

Diogenes the Cynic

A single speculative article written by a surgeon?

Dave31

..

Grog

I have been making this point for some time. Anybody who has sat through grad student seminars has seen it: idealists both right and left bending their views to be more in line with the powers that be. It is almost all about cultivating the right support. It is even worse in doc programs where it is necessary to have advisor support to get published, an absolute necessity to earning a PhD, maintaining funding, etc. Fall out of favor and your hopes and dreams can be dashed by a single person. See for example:

Bias suit against UO revived

Notice that Horner's defense against gender discrimination here is that the student refused to make revisions:

" UO lawyers said Horner wasn’t retaliating when he resigned from Emeldi’s dissertation committee, but rather he was frustrated that she refused to make changes to her dissertation plans to produce a more focused piece of scholarship."

But this wasn't just any student, this is a student described as a "superstar." But here in this case, the advisor had ultimate control over the fate of this student. He resigned and NO ONE else would then sit on her committee because of his influence (that's the unstated part of this story...and, though, this post isn't about the bias, one might be interested to look at a comparison of male and female salaries, and the fact that Horner himself has a tenured position against policy even though he received his PhD from U of Oregon).

The point here is that advisors, tenured, sitting professors, have a huge amount of power over students, which actually increases exponentially from bachelor's through doctorates. When you see relationships like Casey-Fisher, you have to keep in mind how the whole system works. Stephanie Fisher no doubt is competent, but so were, undoubtedly, other students who maybe did not share her fervor for Casey's views and whose relationships were not so cultivated. You might reflect on other famous advisor-student relationships in the field in question.

GakuseiDon

I think that is unduly pessimistic. I've worked in IT in the area of process improvement over 20 years, and one maxim is that when the pain of remaining the same exceeds the pain of change, people will change. I think what constitutes the "mainstream" in academia does make it difficult for change to occur, perhaps overly difficult to introduce new paradigms. There must be a way to do this, without opening the doors to the nutzoids of the world. But probably something for another day.

aa5874

The Nutzoids of the world appear to be in academia. Please, read "Did Jesus Exist?" by Bart Ehrman.

Ehrman AGREES the Gospels are highly problematic as historical sources, that we do NOT have the original Texts, that we do NOT know the authors and that the New Testament accounts of Jesus are filled with discrepancies and contradictions both large and small. See "Did Jesus Exist?" chapter 6--page 179-184.

Yet Ehrman still used the very Admitted Discredited New Testament as his PRIMARY historical source for his Jesus.

The Nutzoids of this world appear to be in academia.

Now, when we consider that Ehrman is a professor will there be more or less Nutzoids in academia???

GakuseiDon

Interestingly, in Dr James McGrath's review of Dr Carrier's "Proving History", he quotes Carrier on the value of scholarly consensus:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/explori...g-history.html

On the subject of seeking consensus among historians and scholars, Carrier writes,

“This process cannot be bypassed, as specialists in a field are the most qualified to assess an argument in that field, so if they cannot be persuaded, no one should be (unless their resistance can be proven – not merely assumed – to have other motives than truth-seeking). Conversely, if they are persuaded, everyone else has a very compelling reason to agree (unless, again, their acceptance can be proven – not merely assumed – to have other motives than truth-seeking). This is the social function and purpose of having such experts in the first place” (p.21).

Carrier even articulates as a separate axiom that “an effective consensus of qualified experts constitutes meeting an initial burden of evidence” because “it is far more unlikely that an incorrect argument would persuade a hundred experts than that it would persuade only one; and it’s far more unlikely that it would persuade any expert than that it would persuade even a hundred amateurs” (p.29).

The question I would like Price to answer is that if it is up to "the elders of the scholarly establishment get busy scrutinizing the theory", how do "the elders" know that the theory exists in the first place? What is the mechanism that Price is proposing there?

hjalti

So why don't you just ask him?

Steven Carr

How did Ehrman get to know what is in Price's books? What mechanism was in place there?

Diogenes the Cynic

Anybody can write a book. The mythers need to engage in some systematic peer review with a coherent and testable theory. Richard Carrier is at least attempting to do this. Price has not yet presented a specific theory of Christian origins. He is good at pointing out the weaknesses of the historicist case, he is good at talking about mythicism, showing parallel typologies in a better supported, less tendentious and more professional manner than the likes of Acharya S. He is also good at showing the vacuity and special pleading of a lot of the objections to these parallels, but he has not presented a specific, methodically supported theory of his own, or really endorsed anyone else's.

His books are mostly for a popular audience and a lay audience, not for a scholarly one.