Faith is a term which is bandied about with carefree abandon, but what does it really mean? As I wrote to Christian apologist David Marshall some years back:
David
Part of the problem is that you are extracting these issues from their real world application and in a sense making them irrelevant. Let’s apply the faith vs reason to real life instances:
Here is an old post from DC which John Loftus posted, taken from a then ongoing debate with David Marshall about what faith is. It recently came up in a conversation involving labreuer and David himself. Let me know if it still holds:
David
Part of the problem is that you are extracting these issues from their real world application and in a sense making them irrelevant. Let’s apply the faith vs reason to real life instances:
I, as you may well know, contribute to the Skepticule podcast by recording a counter-apologetics segment for them, Pearced Off.…
Yup, you heard it here. The plagues. God getting involved right up to his neck in magic stuff. People and animals dying all over the shop. Frogs; gnats; darkness; rivers of blood; boils; hail; firstborns of Egyptian families and animals dying. AND THEN the army getting destroyed by a parted sea coming down on their heads.
So here’s the thing. The Christian seems to historiographically rate the NT over and above the other biblical books so that the Gospels have hermeneutic priority over any other book. My last book (The Nativity: A Critical Examination), and my subsequent radio debate with Randal Rauser, showed that the only time the Gospels are verifiable – that they intersect with known facts and verifiable incidents – is during the nativity accounts of Matthew and Luke.
I thought I’d resurrect this old chestnut. This was reported by the Secular Outpost some time ago:
“As reported by Christianity Today (see here), New Testament scholar Michael Licona has apparently lost both his job as research professor of New Testament at Southern Evangelical Seminary and been ousted as apologetics coordinator for the North America Mission Board (NAMB).
…
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Your problem here is that it is not a mantra designed to be talking about primary evidence. Primary evidence is the best evidence (usually, assuming sound of mind and not hallucinating etc). Your analogy fails because you are saying “If you could see both things with your bear eyes, then you would see they are both true.” However, this is a false analogy since we are talking about the standards of secondary and tertiary evidence.