DCHindley

Chili,

It does look as though he did not make much progress towards his PhD. Marquette says FT PhD candidates take 9 credit hours of work a semester (that's about 3 courses). Sixty hours @ 18 hours a year works out to 3.33 years. While "some" of the coursework he took to obtain his Masters degree counted towards his 60 hours of class credits, I am hesitant to believe that a Jesuit University would accept many of the credits for classes taken at an evangelical college/university, especially the apologetics courses.

Three semesters @ nine credit hours per semester = 27 hours of class credit over a year and a half. I am not sure why Marquette indicated that most candidates take 5-7 years to complete the program unless that includes their Masters and time to fully develop their PhD thesis paper. Usually they work as paid Teaching Assistants for their advisors through this final period in order to defray living and research costs. So, he must have dropped out of the program.

I've run across two fellows who attended Jesuit schools, one a history teacher and the other an undergraduate at John Carroll University, and they both emphasized that the Jesuits are famous for their ability to really make you think about what you are learning. Maybe, after so long at Evangelical colleges, he found the Jesuits were making him question his faith, causing him to withdraw. There could also have been a disagreement over which MA cources would transfer and which would not.

He claims he was a pastor at various churches for "14 years" until he became an athiest, which may be a stretch so his life journy resembles that of the Apostle Paul. It is not clear how much of this pastoring overlapped with his academic studies (which may have been between 7 1/2 and 9 1/2 years depending on whether his two MA degrees were done at the same time or in series).

DCH

Chili

Hi DCH, I really do not want to be critical, but know something about that myself.

My brother had his PhD from Leiden before he was drafted in the army, and I did my BA when I was 38 and it took me 3 winters to get that done as a farmer with 2 employees working for me.

Jaybees

I've seen a lot of drifting away from the OP in threads on FRDB, but this one is a bit like going from a discussion of peanut hearts to the track record of Paavo Nurmi.

sotto voce

Apparently so.

Duvduv

And who decides what is fable and what isn't?!
People believe that Abraham Lincoln was a great liberator, but it's just a fable.
Yet it's called "history "!!

Huon

People believe that Moses was a great liberator, but it's just a fable.
Yet it's called "history "!!

dockeen

Normalize this as necessary, my Ph.D. background is from Physics.

I have see a large number of people on the path to a Ph.D. not finish a degree.
The following are some of the main reasons I have noted

Bad Advisor
Advisor leaves
Research doesn't pan out
Finances
Family issues with respect to finances and lack of family time
Conflicts with real world job

And of course, you get the weird stuff, like the guy who refused to do a foreign
language, which was a requirement, or the guy that had a falling out with his advisor
who then tried to shaft him..

I finished largely because I was single, had a great advisor, and was at a school where
my teaching and tutoring enabled me to live fairly comfortably without incurring debt.
This enabled me to overcome a dead end my research took, which kept me around for
another year.

sotto voce

Is it?

What happens is that somebody changes, somebody's father, mother, son, niece, friend, work-mate, somebody known very well. He or she becomes different to deal with; better, or worse, according to taste, and the cause is attributed to someone called Jesus. Jesus is reckoned to have real existence, to have had real existence, because no other person makes people change the way he does. Jesus believed and believes in Moses, so Moses existed. Nobody thinks about history, the way historians do, real ones.

And certainly not the way the great flock of modern self-appointed historians does. So all this stuff about why Moses did not exist is not going to cut any ice.

Jaybees

It's too easy to dismiss the bible as jusst plain fiction. After all, the Iliad wasn't completely cpmstricted from whole cloth. Granted that Troy wasn't much more than a market village, that the Greek fleet probably consisted of a half-dozen leaky rafts, and the Mycenaean kings probably spent most of their time at home beating on rebellious peasants, Troy did fall, perhaps a half-dozen times and the repercussions were undoubtedly felt a dozen miles away.

Once literacy is achieved by even a small minority of a people, the folk tales become bigger than life stories of their past, along with a few totally fictional tales strewn along the way.

That's really all that the bible amounts to.

Huon

I have not been understood. My mistake.
Duvduv : People believe that Abraham Lincoln was a great liberator, but it's just a fable.
Huon : People believe that Moses was a great liberator, but it's just a fable.
It was a comparison between Abraham Lincoln and Moses.