4 ms·
The value of Bayes' work is somewhat orthogonal to his use of it to prove the truth of the Resurrection. It was valuable to show that Hume's approach was flawe
by lucozade 10y ago
The value of Bayes' work is somewhat orthogonal to his use of it to prove the truth of the Resurrection.
It was valuable to show that Hume's approach was flawed but limited value to prove the truth per se. To apply probabilities to the events you'd have to make an awful lot of assumptions about the accuracy of the, non-eye witness, reporting. However, it was an excellent approach for such an evaluation.
As to the Fulton Sheen quote. I's a bit unfair. I mean, if you're going to be picky about it you can lose the lunatic option: someone who claims to be God is either God or a liar, by definition. But you can be a liar by deliberate act, by diminished faculty or by being mistaken. And plenty of great teachers have been mistaken about important things.
And of course, in both the Bayes and Fulton cases, there is the implicit assumption that what was recorded about Jesus had no systemic bias i.e. any errors while recording what He said and did were mistakes, not deliberate misrepresentations. Given the strong requirement to show that He fulfilled scripture, this is a highly dubious assumption.
- sanderjd 10y agoIt seems to me that the most useful definition of "lie" is one where it does not include un-truths due to diminished faculty or simply being mistaken. I would not call Newton a "liar" because he wasn't aware of relativity...
- lucozade 10y agoIndeed. But one can't have it both ways. You either use your definition and call out ignorance/mistaken explicitly or you define lying as covering all unthruths. Fulton Sheen cheats by pretending to use your definition but subsuming more than deliberately lying under the liar banner. Very sneak these philosophers.
- sanderjd 10y agoYou may be operating on a deeper level than me here, but it seems like that Fulton Sheen quote just claims that being mistaken or ignorant about whether or not you are God makes you "a lunatic". Whether you use that terminology or just replace it with "incorrect about stuff", it still seems distinct from being "a liar". (I think we're in agreement that being mistaken about things is not incompatible with being a "great teacher", as I say in another comment here.)
- jabv 10y agoSee my reply above regarding the second paragraph - it's a good question. Regarding the final paragraph and implicit assumptions regarding the veracity of the content of the four canonical gospel accounts, I am not sure attributing it to "simple" assumption (i.e., the colloquial assumption where one just thinks something is true without examination) is reasonable given the education of both men and the body of work done over several centuries on examining epistemologically and historically the veracity of the gospels. See for example the intense work of John Henry Newman, 19th century Oxford scholar and intense defender of the historical reliability of the canonical gospel narratives.
- bloaf 10y agoJust be careful appealing to the imprecise, several century long corpus of work on the subject. By appealing to the works of the devout, people are apt to raise the equally hasty generalization described by Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- danielam 10y agoLying requires the intent to deceive. "Diminished faculty" or a disorder of mental faculties would fall under the normal definition of insanity, whatever the cause of that insanity. The claims Jesus made are too radical and too consistent to be described as mere mistakes.
- jospoortvliet 10y agoWell, no, most of his claims were quite common in the time, not much is radical. Also most of those we only know 2nd or third hand and we know it's been heavily redacted on the way. If radical claims are a reason to consider someone divine, Buddha has much better cards.
- danielam 10y agoThe claims in question are those that are radical, specifically those involving claims of divinity, and thus not claims, if true, that can be known through unaided reason alone (i.e., the subject of divine revelation). That these claims are known through second or third hand accounts is neither here nor there. The Jesus that we know is the Jesus in those accounts so unless there's another reliable source you're leaning on (there isn't), there's little sense in talking about the "real Jesus" outside of the gospels (the most charitable reading of your use of the word "redacted" I can muster is that you mean the non-canonical gospels that were omitted from the bible, but again, those are irrelevant for reasons given elsewhere). Buddha did not make claims about being God/the son of God (which is to be expected given the Buddhist attitude toward theism) and thus the comparison in this regard is meaningless.