Re: OT More pens (was Re: Phoneme winnowing continues)

Mark J. Reed sikyal:

> > In response to the assertion that we don't have hard evidence for Jesus'
> > stuff, I'd say that we have just the kind of evidence one would expect to
> > find from such events.
>
> Great.  But that kind of evidence is, by your own account, inherently
> subjective, and thereby inadmissible.  The evidence we have for
> the eruption of Krakatoa is, on the other hand, not subjective;
> you don't have to have been there at its discovery, and photographs
> and other depictions are perfectly convincing without any leaps of
> faith.
This statement itself is an assertion of epistemology. You believe
photographs to be generally reliable, unlikely to be faked and difficult
to fake if they are, and to always give an accurate portrayal of the thing
that they are purported to depict. The existence of Adobe Photoshop has
disproven all three of those assertions, and even before digital
photograph altering there were plenty of convincing ways of faking a
photo--and I'm not just talking about the blurry Nessie on a lake photos.

The point is that deciding what does and does not count as reliable
evidence is a subjective and non-scientific process. Science itself has a
particular set of epistemological criteria, as do religions (each religion
has their own), as does law, etc. You can apply the criteria of one realm
to another realm, but the results are generally meaningless.

> No-one is denying Jesus' existence or even deity here.  We're just arguing
> about a distinction between religious and non-religious teachings -
> which is a well-defined distinction, no matter what your beliefs.
The distinction obviously isn't well-defined, or else we wouldn't be
having this argument. Nonetheless, you're mostly correct--religious and
scientific epistemologies are separate things, and US law and Western
tradition since the 1700's suggests that they should be kept separate. The
absolute hegemony of the scientific viewpoint makes this somewhat
difficult, though, since religious people often wind up mistakenly
applying scientific principles where they have no relevance.

Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"

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