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  • From: Yigal Levin <leviny1 AT mail.biu.ac.il>
  • To: b-hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Academic Debate"
  • Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 05:12:44 +0200


----- 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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