AronRa
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I've received a number of tweets from @Aj2Parkes, @Kingdomfocus1, and someone who created a twitter account out of an obsession to hate on the mythicist, D.M. Murdock. They have all challenged me on twitter. They want me to give in-depth explanations and provide evidence for history, theology, and evolutionary science, and they expect me to do all of this in posts of 140 characters or less. Obviously no sensible person would ever even try to have a serious conversation like that. So I'm opening a new thread here. Where their questions can be dealt with appropriately.
@DmMurdockErrors doesn't even know what I'm saying, but still pretends to have shown errors in my logic. Someone asked me whether I discount the gospels as evidence of Jesus. I answered that the contradictory absurdities in the Bible are not evidence that impossible nonsense really occurred in history. The Bible is not a compilation of history but of mythology. I mentioned that even the early church founders dismissed most of the gospel authors as frauds. The Murdock hater then demanded that I reveal which gospels were considered fraudulent and by whom, insisting that they still would have had historical significance. But the gospels I'm referring to are the 16 non-canonical gospels which the early church fathers rejected outright. Once men had decided which fables should be canonized, Bishop Athanasius condemned the use of non-canonical tomes in his Festal letter of 367 CE. Thus, other books would be treated as damnable heresies which must be silenced and put out of sight. So I asked the Murdock hater what historical significance the infancy gospel or the gospel of Thomas could have had. The response was that I wasn't allowed to comment on those, insisting that my answer to their question is somehow a non-sequitor fallacy. It's not my fault if they don't know what I'm talking about, because they can't follow a protracted conversation on twitter. But that doesn't make it a logical fallacy to answer their question correctly.
That person also insists that there is historical confirmation of Jesus, despite the admission that there are doctoral historians who say otherwise. This person thinks Tacitus counts as confirmation of a historical Jesus. Fair enough, lots of people think that, even though its not so. So I was asked whether Tacitus lied or made up a fictional story, as if that were the only explanation here.
Similarly, they told me to send "the link" that proves evolution. I suppose I could send a link to PubMed, which includes tens of thousands of peer reviewed articles proving evolution. But I don't think that's what they're asking for. I told them it wouldn't do me any good to send thousands of links they don't understand. That I would have to explain it.
They also challenged me as to whether I would accept their evidence of God and creation. If they had it, I would be compelled to consider it of course, just like they're compelled to ignore the evidence I'll show them in this thread. The only thing we've discussed so far was whether both sides tell lies. They've already conceded that the religious side lies, but I think they did that thinking that I would make a similar concession. But I told them that I am unaware of any lie told my any scientist promoting evolution, and I'm unaware of any truth told by any believer about religion. Of course they cited Haeckel's drawings as the best example of an evolutionist's lie; every creationist does. But they don't know what they're talking about.
Here is an excerpt from my book where I talk about Haeckel:
@DmMurdockErrors doesn't even know what I'm saying, but still pretends to have shown errors in my logic. Someone asked me whether I discount the gospels as evidence of Jesus. I answered that the contradictory absurdities in the Bible are not evidence that impossible nonsense really occurred in history. The Bible is not a compilation of history but of mythology. I mentioned that even the early church founders dismissed most of the gospel authors as frauds. The Murdock hater then demanded that I reveal which gospels were considered fraudulent and by whom, insisting that they still would have had historical significance. But the gospels I'm referring to are the 16 non-canonical gospels which the early church fathers rejected outright. Once men had decided which fables should be canonized, Bishop Athanasius condemned the use of non-canonical tomes in his Festal letter of 367 CE. Thus, other books would be treated as damnable heresies which must be silenced and put out of sight. So I asked the Murdock hater what historical significance the infancy gospel or the gospel of Thomas could have had. The response was that I wasn't allowed to comment on those, insisting that my answer to their question is somehow a non-sequitor fallacy. It's not my fault if they don't know what I'm talking about, because they can't follow a protracted conversation on twitter. But that doesn't make it a logical fallacy to answer their question correctly.
That person also insists that there is historical confirmation of Jesus, despite the admission that there are doctoral historians who say otherwise. This person thinks Tacitus counts as confirmation of a historical Jesus. Fair enough, lots of people think that, even though its not so. So I was asked whether Tacitus lied or made up a fictional story, as if that were the only explanation here.
Aj2Parkes and Kingdomfocus1 are somehow unaware that the Bible has been proven wrong on every testable claim that it makes. They want me to name which passage of the Bible has been disproved. I said that the myths about the Garden of Eden, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the Exodus had all been disproved. But they want me to send them "the link" that shows how the Garden of Eden was disproved. Judging by the volume of threads on this forum and all the thousands of links provided here, there obviously couldn't be just one link on the side of reality. And if there were, it would be outnumbered and highly suspect.Robert M. Price said:Tacit Agreement
Cornelius Tacitus (Annals 15:44), writing about 125 C.E., asserts that Nero blamed the Roman Christians for torching the city. He was scapegoating them in order to divert suspicion from himself. In case his readers were unacquainted with Christianity, Tacitus explains they were a sect founded by one “Christus” or “Chrestus” (both versions appear in this or that manuscript).
They got their name from Christ [Christus or Chrestus], who was executed by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius. That checked the pernicious superstition for a short time, but it broke out afresh – not only in Judaea, where the plague first arose, but in Rome itself, where all the horrible and shameful things in the world collect and find a home.
Some have suspected this, like the Testimonium Flavianum, to be a Christian interpolation. It is odd that no Christian writers quote this material for two centuries. It must have been of great interest had it been available, so maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it hadn’t been written yet. For me, it’s a toss-up. But the point is moot, since, as in the case of Josephus, even if the text is authentic and original, it does not constitute proof of a historical Jesus. It merely reflects what Christians were saying in the early second century. The same must be said about the second-century humorist Lucian of Samosata: Both were way too late to know any more about a historical Jesus than we do.
Similarly, they told me to send "the link" that proves evolution. I suppose I could send a link to PubMed, which includes tens of thousands of peer reviewed articles proving evolution. But I don't think that's what they're asking for. I told them it wouldn't do me any good to send thousands of links they don't understand. That I would have to explain it.
They also challenged me as to whether I would accept their evidence of God and creation. If they had it, I would be compelled to consider it of course, just like they're compelled to ignore the evidence I'll show them in this thread. The only thing we've discussed so far was whether both sides tell lies. They've already conceded that the religious side lies, but I think they did that thinking that I would make a similar concession. But I told them that I am unaware of any lie told my any scientist promoting evolution, and I'm unaware of any truth told by any believer about religion. Of course they cited Haeckel's drawings as the best example of an evolutionist's lie; every creationist does. But they don't know what they're talking about.
Here is an excerpt from my book where I talk about Haeckel:
So my first challenge then would be (1) Name one evolutionary scientist who lied in the act of promoting evolution over creationism. (2) Name a professional creationist who did not lie when trying to defend creationism or condemn evolution. As creationism is based entirely on lies, and science is based on critical analysis in peer review, no one has ever answered either question despite many attempts. They don't have to take this challenge. I'd rather they ask sincere questions since I am making a sincere effort to help them understand reality and not be fooled by fables.Haeckel studied dozens of embryos under a microscope and interpreted them to promote his idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” suggesting that embryonic development reflects the organism’s evolutionary ancestry. Haeckel's ‘biogenetic law’ of embryological parallelism was one of many notions of biological transcendentalism first proposed by Lamarckian naturalist, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire in about 1760. Haeckel believed that the developing fetus mirrored its evolution such that it might pass through phases of becoming a fish, then an amphibian, then a reptile each in succession before becoming a mammal. To illustrate this, he produced about a hundred drawings of embryos at various stages. But he later admitted that about a half-dozen of them were either false or speculative due to a lack of visual references. In the first edition of his best-selling book Naturliche Schopfungsgeschichte (Natural History of Creation), Haeckel used the same image to represent the embryos of dogs, chickens, and turtles. When a reviewer alerted him to this, he said that no one could tell the difference at that stage, which was probably true given the instrumentation of the time. While this is not necessaruily a lie, the fact that any of his drawings were admittedly without reference has disgraced Haeckel’s name in the annals of science despite the fact that these were corrected in each of the later editions.
Creationists now insist that Haeckel was reportedly convicted of fraud by a German court, though that doesn’t seem to be the case. His creationist contemporaries, including Rudolf Virchow and Louis Agassiz, did accuse Haeckel of deception, but the charge of fraud didn’t emerge until 1997 (Science: Haeckel’s Embryos: Fraud Rediscovered). No one argues that a scientist shouldn’t promote speculation as fact; leave that to religion. But the drawings Haeckel didn’t have references for in his first edition aren’t the reason for the recent charge of fraud. It was a computerized analysis of his artwork as compared to microphotographs of the same species at the same stages of development. The charge was that he embellished these drawings to imply more resemblance than there was based on a critique of his artistic skill. However, it has been shown that this same analysis would also indict Haeckel’s enemy contemporaries on the same charge, as well as modern embryologists too.
“The historical and biological evidence, however, shows the charge against Haeckel to be logically mischievous, historically naive, and founded on highly misleading photography.”
—Robert Richards, Haeckel's embryos: fraud not proven (2008)
The images now under scrutiny were taken from Haeckel’s hastily assembled first edition of Anthropogenie. However, each of the subsequent editions had the advantage of better instrumentation, and the accuracy of the drawings improved. But there was nothing wrong with those images to begin with. The damning microphotographs published by Michael Robertson in 1997 showed these embryos with yolk and other maternal material which made them look very different. That, and the chicken was photographed at a different angle with a different lens effect while the salamander was a different size. Haeckel clearly indicated that his drawings were only of the embryos, omitting things like yolk, and that he made them all the same size and oriented the same way for ease of comparison, so there’s no foul to fault.
The very author who indicted Haeckel in 1997 seems to have softened his view since then, perhaps after his own errors in the indictment itself were brought to light.
“Haeckel’s much criticized embryo drawings are important as phylogenetic hypotheses, teaching aids, and evidence for evolution. While some criticisms of the drawings are legitimate, other are more tendentious,”
—Richardson M, Keuck G (2003)
Haeckel’s ABC of evolution and development. Biol Rev 77:495–528