Straightforward, hard-to-answer-questions about the Bible/Christianity

Christians who do their research properly instead of relying on apologists with their inevitable bias (which to my mind often shades into dishonesty) would know that the evidence is rather less compelling than you think.In my experience you should never, ever trust a conservative Christian apologist or you will be deceived. And if you really think that McDowell's case would stand up in a court of law then you have been.

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Yes PaulK, his evidence would stand up...why? Because in a court of law you don't have to have a piece of "gotcha" evidence or the smoking gun (although it helps if you do). I testify in court every week and the evidence used to indict somebody or to find somebody guilty rarely has a smoking gun piece of evidence. The "case" is built upon mounds of evidence. I've seen suspects found guilty when the prosecution could never produce the BODY!!

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No, it would not. You don't have witnesses you can cross-examine. The nearest to forensic evidence you have is archaeology and there are a lot of problems there (you can forget about Exodus being reliable fir a start). You'll have problems with the provenance of the bible, too. McDowell won't tell you about that. And that's why I'd say that you've been deceived.Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

Essentially you are arguing that if parts of the Bible are reliable, all of it must be. But that isn't true. The Bible is a collection of documents of varying degrees of accuracy. Even an individual document may get some parts right and others wrong. And the Bible does get some things wrong. How does getting some things right and others wrong entitle us to trust it in matters we cannot check ?

Given the content of this post Message 24 and it's predecessor, it is only my low opinion of apologetics that makes me think that your lecture even might represent any sort of improvement. For all I know it was a lecture focussing on the strict logical use of contradiction, introduced solely as a justification for rejecting issues which would be accepted as genuine contradiction in any other rational context.

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Unless you think it is too hard for me to do a presentation on syllogism, inductive and deductive reasoning, and common fallacies, all things we learn in the education system here in Quebec before arriving at university; I don't see how you can really think it hasn't brought any sort of improvement to an adult crowd.

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Let us say that when you open a post by "poisoning the well" I doubt your commitment to avoiding fallacies.

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Oh and btw, I don't see how you linking me giving the correct definition of what a contradiction is in formal logic shows in any way that I am incompetent in this area.

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I don't say that it does make you incompetent at formal logic. What I say is that it gives me reason to think that you are more interested in supporting dogma than at getting to the truth. You are implicitly arguing that ANY solution to a Biblical contradiction (in the broader sense of normal usage) should be preferred to accepting that there is a genuine disagreement.On the other hand I would say that you are DEFINITELY deficient in your understanding of the historical method. And that is almost certainly because your understanding relies on the inventions of Christian apologists.