[b-hebrew] Academic Debate"
Yigal Levin
leviny1 at mail.biu.ac.il
Wed Oct 31 22:12:44 EST 2007
----- Original Message -----
From: <dwashbur at nyx.net>
>> > On 30 Oct 2007 at 8:22, Yigal Levin wrote in part:
>> >
>> >>Since none of us have yet recieved direct prophecy from God, we
>> >> cannot "take on faith" that the authors of the Bible did either.
>> >
>>
>> To which Dave Washburn answered:
>> > This is perhaps the biggest fallacy of all in "modern" scholarship.
>> > "It
>> > hasn't happened to me
>> > or anyone I know, therefore it doesn't happen." Yes, I know I'm
>> > simplifying, but that's the
>> > essence of the argument. And it's nothing but a cop-out.
>> >
>>
>> No, it's not. I didn not say that "it doesn't happen", only that since I
>> have no empirical evidence of it happening, I can not figure it in as a
>> factor.
>
> Okay, briefly, what sort of "empirical evidence" would be required?
>
> Dave Washburn
Any reasonable proof that anyone that I know, or that anyone that I can have
access to knows, or that any reliable witness that I could ultimately have
access to knows, that anyone had actually, undeniably, recieved messages
directly from God. Now I admit, that since we live in a cynical world, it
would take a lot to convince me, but if He wished to, I'm sure that He could
find a way. And I'm not being cyinical here myself. As others here have
stated, modern science is based on observation. That does not mean that
every one of us has personally observed every "law of nature" in action, but
we know that reliable witnesses, people working in controlled conditions or
trained observers in the field, have observered and recorded the various
phenomena that make up the basis for our understanding of the natural world.
Claims by people to have seen or experienced things which are not
explainable by the laws of nature as we know them are rightly treated as
being "problematic" until the same phenomena are observed again by people
from within the scientific community, in the same controlled conditions.
In the world as we know it, if a person writes about events that happened in
the past, he either: 1. had written sources, 2. depended on oral tradition,
3. made it up. Possibility number 4, "God told him", does not work in the
world that we live in, which leaves the other three to be discussed on a
case-by-case basis, which I'm willing to do, but not right now.
Yigal Levin
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