skepticdude

Then you must think the basic education method in all of America's schools (i.e., closed book tests) are also unwarranted. After, just because junior needs to google something doesn't mean his claims to being a scholar are false, right?

To show that Holding's claims to scholarship are false, as he needs google and interlibrary loan and 3 days to respond just as much as the rest of us non-scholars do. What's worse, he already proves his distance from good scholarship with his written debates, it could only be total catastrophe should he be put in a classroom testing situation where he loses points when he can't recall facts from memory alone.

You think nothing is learned about the intellect of a person who loudmouths his scholarly abilities, then loses an oral debate on any subject of his choosing?

but obviously thought ideal by colleges and universities, who demand that you pass closed book tests before they issue you that degree that enables you to be called a scholar.

The point is not that all scholars can be "stumped", but that Holding would be stumped far more often, indicating he is nowhere near "scholar" level in spite of his online bantering that he is on the cutting edge of bible scholarship/apologetics.

Which is your first clue that they are far more honest with their true abilities than Holding.

And now you contradict your earlier assertion that one could prepare questions to stump scholars.

No, and that was precisely the point. If Holding agreed to debate me and hand picked the audience himself, he already said I'd be engaging in little more than sound-bytes. I replied that if that was the case, then his allegedly critical thinking personally picked Christian audience would surely realize I was using such underhanded tactics, and would be more inclined to feel I had lost the debate...which is thus a reason for him to have supreme confidence he'd win in such oral debate. But even with the odds stacked against me that much, he STILL refused to do this without demanding absurd conditions be fulfilled. The truth is; the difference between laymen and scholars is that laymen require the constant assistence of books and google, scholars already know their subject well enough to recall from memory all those answers they were required to memorize in all those closed-book tests they had to pass in college before they could claim the title "scholar".

Then you and I disagree on the intelligence levels of idiots. I am nowhere near a scholar on the bible, yet I could pretend to be a Christian and easily crank out articles like Holding's everyday. What is so hard about locating library books that pertain to specific issues and googling the same?

I don't know what you mean with this. So what if it can't be distinguished?

Irrelevent, no real bible school/seminary/college will accord you a BA or Th.d or MA in any bible-related topic (degrees that contribute to one's scholarly credentials) just because you read a whole bunch. They will demand that you pass closed-book tests, which are, again, imitated in an oral debate: you lose if you can't answer from memory alone.

When I say I wish to orally debate Holding to test his scholarship, I obviously mean that I wish to test his level of knowledge in an environment that would mimic a classroom: if he cannot answer from memory, he loses points.

Now you are just quibbling: what distinction is there between knowing how to answer a question and having the answer in your head? What scholar would answer a question in the wrong way, if the correct answer is already in their head? Must I also demand that Holding show up to the debate SOBER?

I have already proven that my oral debate challenge would put Holding in the same environment that students are put in classrooms everywhere in America everyday, for the purpose of evaluating their true level of knowledge: closed-book tests. Since Holding so loudly proclaims how scholarly his articles are, yet runs from oral debate challenges, I can only conclude that he knows he'd fail the acid test of a closed-book test, which shows that his claim to scholarly-level knowledge is bogus.

ANYBODY can write a scholarly-looking article if they know how to look up the relevent books at the library and have more than 2 days experience using Google. Holding would rather die than have his claims of scholarly knowledge analysed in an environment that controls against cheating. Holding is absolutely nothing without his computer screen and library card. I've proven my point and you and I are done bickering about it.

skepticdude

Do you think all classroom teachers in America are engaging in the ad hominem fallacy, when they grade a student's closed-book test answer sheet with a "D" or "F"?

Obviously I don't think Holding is genuinely stupid, he has read too much and done enough in college to be beyond that criticism. It's only his claim to being smarter than most bible scholars that I wish to test. When he fails that test (as most other Christians and skeptics already think he does merely by viewing his written discourses), I would conclude that his claim to possessing scholarly knowledge of the bible is a gross exaggeration of his true level of knowledge.

That's what would happen, and it's not an exercise in ad hominem. I would not conclude Holding's beliefs are wrong because he lies about his true level of knowledge. I'd simply show that Holding, professing to be a true Christian, has been violating a basic commandment his entire apologetics career.

It would be a perfect illustraction of the failures of Christianity: not even believing yourself truly saved and transformed by Jesus makes you less of liar than you were before you got saved, and this would run counter to all the biblical assertions that boldly demand that converts RUN from sin. How could Holding claim to be a true Christian, when he is a worse sinner than even some atheists, because of his absolute refusal to abide by clear biblical mandates about not returning insult for insult, etc?

See how an oral debate with Holding would be a glaring proof of the failures of Christianity to work in the real world? Now go ask Richard Carrier why he does oral debates, if it is already shown in written articles that Christianity is false.

skepticdude

No kidding, and it's probably gonna be mentally dangerous buffoons like Holding and his theologyweb idiots that move for a regress to the dark ages...and probably because they think it would be better for American Christianity to imitate the honor/shame culture of the Old Testament collectivist society, etc.

skepticdude

Well don't be worried. No authentic bible scholar, of Christian persuasion or otherwise, including those Holding most highly praises, agree with him on things he finds to be "obviously" biblical. Bird of a feather flock together, so the only people that would support Holding are those who are like him: confining themselves to their computer, probably draw crazy checks from the government, and have the sort of uncompromising socially phobic-attitude that prevents them from collecting in numbers large enough to effect social change. The worst part of them will likely be nothing more than large font type on your computer screen, perhaps italicized for effect. That's not even a bark, it's just a byte..

skepticdude

You may have a different understanding of "modern" than Rohrbaugh. I don't think he meant that nobody in the history of Christianity made a claim for inerrancy until the 19th century. I think he meant that the claim of inerrancy was never made by the biblical authors themselves. Surely Rohrbaugh knows of Augustine, Origin, Calvin, Spurgeon, Irenaeus, etc.

I will introduce a separate thread showing how the Chicago Statement admits that errors exist in the autographs of the bible.

Thanks for that reminder. Modern-day inerrantist-fanatics are good at creating the illusion that the way they view the bible is the only way that does justice to it. We'd have to ask how so many fundamentalist Christians, and therefore as close to Holding's faith-profession as possible, could still not be convinced of biblical inerrancy. Apparantly, the denial of biblical inerrancy is not wholly predicated on spiritual death or extreme ignorance as Holding's articles imply.

Hey, if Holding's favorite scholars disown him, that's a very different picture from the one he uses them to paint in his articles. If Holding is gonna call us stupid and wilfully ignorant, he deserves to have the same criticism stuffed back down his throat.

Very hard to understand! He spends his life vehemently defending a doctrine that he thinks is NOT vital?

But if you think those truths are not vital, nobody expects you to spend your entire life defending them. Holding spends his life defending biblical inerrancy, we therefore have the perfect justification to suppose he thinks the doctrine of inerrancy is "vital", and to therefore be suspicious that something's amiss, when he seriously states that he honestly doesn't care if the bible is inspired or inerrant.

Clutch

No. Just that the elements that consist in classroom tests aren't the elements that determine one's status as a scholar. In my defense, I think this because it seems to be true. We don't typically call 2nd year undergrads scholars, though they may have taken almost all the exams they're going to take by that time. If we call them scholars at all, it will be after they've done seminar and research work.

Right. Having a basic distribution of factual knowledge is one thing; being a scholar is another thing -- mostly more demanding, but partly just different. (Mathematicians can be crappy at arithmetic, and need to use a calculator.) If someone were consistently wrong about basic factual knowledge, it would certainly make it less reasonable to consider them a scholar. But nothing in your proposed debate structure would make clear to your audience that you were asking only about simple, basic knowledge of the sort that closed-book examinations are good for testing, rather than stump-the-expert questions that genuine scholars might not be able to answer instantly, either.

Yet again I invite you to slow down and actually think about this point: the people in your audience sufficiently competent to tell the difference between these kinds of questions are already the ones who know that Holding's a charlatan. The others will be left uninformed by this silly exercise.

I think that "losing an oral debate", or winning it, has little to do with scholarship in a wide class of cases. Creationists "win" debates all the time. This is yet another reason why your method is pointless.

No doubt. But you've lost the plot. The point is that even if you could make him say "I don't know" many times over, that in itself wouldn't show jack shit.

Obviously not. You could easily stump genuine scholars, most of whom would have no problem with admitting that they needed to look something up. But anyone who didn't want to admit this would have very little problem talking around it. (See the lack of a contradiction, there?) I mean, have you ever even seen a competent debater in action? Your triumphal fantasy about how this debate would go is painfully naive.

You are utterly wrong about this. Plenty of graduate programs, even course-based ones, are purely research-based, requiring only research papers and having no "closed-book" exams of any sort.

Yet this could only occur if you had the status of a teacher/professor asking only fair "closed-book" questions. You seem not to have that status, quite frankly; more to the point, your audience would have no reason to assume you had it.

Scholarship and expertise. Knowing where to look, how to look, for an answer; knowing how to tell a better answer from a worse one.

What a strange question. The issue is how they go about answering the questions when the answer is not in their heads. Knowing how to do this -- to academic-disciplinary standards -- is an element of scholarship. Scholarship does not begin and end with a list of facts you've memorized and can recall within twenty seconds. To point out the obvious: one can be both absent-minded and a professor.

No. Not anybody can do this. But at least some charlatans can, and that's all you need to claim. Similarly, some charlatans can enjoy the upper hand in an oral debate. So who do you think will be edified by the spectacle you're imagining? Best case: you ask some questions; Holding stalls or evades. Now, did you ask fair, general, basic questions, or were they absurdly over-specific, based on false presuppositions, etc? Nobody who knows the difference needs to be convinced that Holding's a jackass; nobody incapable of telling such questions apart would (or even should) be convinced, for the reasons I've explained in detail more than once now.

It's simply unfathomable that you consider an oral debate, of all things, to be "an environment that controls against cheating".

Your point is beyond saving, and if we're done with it, nobody will be happier than I.

skepticdude

Email is not private, and what i published is already protected by fair-use doctrine.

Don't waste your time, the moderators have already discussed the issue with me and have refused to exercise their option to delete the post in question. Take your lack-of-courtesy issues to them.

I have already argued here that even if such accusations against me were true, they do not change the fact that Rohrbaugh was giving his honest opinion of Holding. If you suppose Rorhbaugh would have spoken less negatively about Holding had he known he'd be quoted, then this simply means Rohrbaugh wouldn't be giving his honest opinion, but rather, one that gets him in less trouble. If anything, my failure to tell Rohrbaugh I'd be quoting him, is what provides assurance that Rohrbaugh gave his honest opinion, and wasn't simply saying something he thought was politically correct. Either way, I had no intention of quoting Rohrbaugh until I discovered, to my surprise, how negatively he spoke of Holding. That's a major slap in the face to anybody who reads Holding's articles and thinks he and Rohrbaugh agree with each other on what's "obviously" biblical.

Thanks for telling us how strongly you disagree with Holding's use of riposte and ad hominem. We have to wonder why you'd bother defending him by questioning the morality of exposing his disagreements with his own quoted scholars, when it appears that you disapprove so highly ad hominem in general. Given that mysterious state of affairs, it's clear to me you've never read Holding's materials or seen him debate his critics. Go to theologyweb and discover how unChristian that man really is. Or maybe you'll suddenly discover that ad hominems aren't as counterproductive as you wish skeptics to believe they are.

spin

I'm sorry, but this seems like a luzer thread. 1) it has nothing directly to do with BC&H and 2) it seems to be ugly bitching over some butch 2-bit apologist who likes to tango with unsafe partners. Does one have to walk into the pussy den? If you like cat-scratch-fever, why come here and tell? People on this forum are happy to pull apart inerrantist arguments, especially of those sad specimens that come here hoping to proselytize, but surely we have better things to do than to listen to the sobs of someone looking for trouble. :wave:


spin

Clutch

Huzzah.

Toto

Rest assured that the moderators have discussed all of these issues. We decided to leave this thread in BCH because it is has some connection to BCH issues.

And I would point out that JPHolding, while an embarrassment to True Christianity, however defined, has still attracted some participants in this forum as contributors or supporters - Bede and GDon in particular come to mind.