A "fundamentalist" is someone who takes everything in the Bible literally. A "liberal theologian" is one who takes most of it metaphorically. Or so everyone says. The problem with this simplistic dichotomy is that language is fundamentally metaphorical. We seldom … Continue reading
In the last post, I made a list of entities which we Christians believe exist (I'll be referring to numbers from that list in this post, so you might want to pull it up in another tab). However, the composition … Continue reading
My second pillar of Science is elegant hypotheses, that all else being equal we should prefer explanations which are (some combination of) "simple, uniform, common-sensical and aesthetically pleasing". In a Bayesian analysis, this factors into our choice of prior probabilities, … Continue reading
After the discussion in the last post about the authorship of the Gospels, I've created a spreadsheet model, in Open Office format, to illustrate the probability calculus for whether the Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This … Continue reading
A common criticism of the Gospel accounts is that they are of low historical value because they are anonymous. This is based on the observation that the authorship is never explicitly mentioned in the main body of the texts of … Continue reading
