CADRE Comments

There are two really silly debate ploys that people sometimes use. I don't say they are peculiar to the atheist camp, but since I am more familiar with their arguments, than those of creationists, for example, I will use them. My aim is to raise consciousness about these fallacies in an attempt to get people to stop using them. these two fallacies exist in an interchange, a sublational interplay where one builds upon the other. The two fallacies are: (1) privileging one's own position (2) Truth by Stipulation. As it turns out the kids who offer the $500 to prove Jesus existed employ no. 1 fallacy in spades. They have erased the comments but before they did so they informed one contestant that he could not use Raymond Brown as an authority because Brown was a priest . It's just so obvious that a Priest is not objective, and they said explicitly that no one with a theology degree could be used. What's really odd is that they themselves use religi...

Carl Sagan I have a page dealing with this concept on Doxa, but it's not very good. This is a better version. I will combine the two eventually. The New Version is on my New Sight: The Religious A priori Carl Sagan made this statement popular in its current form, it was originally used by Hume, Laplace and other early theorists, but atheists have sense taken it as a major slogan for their decision-making paradigm. Marcelo Truzzi tells us: In his famous 1748 essay Of Miracles, the great skeptic David Hume asserted that "A wise man...proportions his belief to the evidence,"and he said of testimony for extraordinary claims that "the evidence, resulting from the testimony, admits of a diminution, greater or less, in proportion as the fact is more unusual." A similar statement was made by Laplace, and many other later writers. I turned it into the now popular phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" (which Carl Sag...

[Introductory note from Jason Pratt: the previous entry in this series of posts can be found here. A continually updated table of contents for all entries so far can be found here. ] At the end of my previous chapter, I demonstrated that metaphor does not necessarily need to mean something less than its imagery suggests; and that to immediately presume otherwise is a common fallacy in the discussion of religious propositions. Incidents and claims should be taken on a case-by-case basis, and filtered through an already developed philosophical position. So, to return to my example of Jesus' Ascension into heaven: what you or I believe this imagery can mean, is constrained by what you or I have already decided is, or is not, possible. If a supernatural God does not exist, then Jesus cannot have moved from our Nature to a Supernature while exhibiting the extent of His divine authority and/or existence. The story must reflect some other set of objectively real events: for example, pe...