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It is impossible to witness an impossible event, by definition. People are easily fooled, or willing to fool you, and therefore it is relatively common that a person will claim that they witnessed an impossible event. This is simply the nature of our imperfections. God and miracles have to be understood as a product of those imperfections.
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ISTM that the testimony of alleged witnesses has a right to be heard and believed, until and unless there are solid reasons to suspect it.
The question is not whether testimony by past writers is ever reliable - as an historian, Hume, like Gibbon about 20 years after him, had necessarily to rely on such testimonies. Testimony and its use is not the problem. The problem is whether, given the extraordinary character predicated of miracles, their miraculousness as events can be established by human testimony. They are said to be more than ordinary events - so what kind of testimony is adequate to make claims of their occurrence worthy of belief ? And how may that testimony be recognised when offered ?
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Originally posted by Apologiaphoenix View PostAre there double-standards when it comes to eyewitnesses?
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How should we handle eyewitness testimony? Lets plunge into the Deeper Waters and find out.
Earlier this week I wrote a piece on atheist incredulity. In response, I got asked a question about eyewitness accounts of things like UFOs. Should we believe in those? Its quite amazing to me that its taboo apparently to suggest that skepticism should be held in an unquestioning way.
This isnt new. Hume had the same skepticism to eyewitness claims of miracles and sought any chance he could to dismiss them. Today, we do have a sort of doublespeak going on in the atheist community. How does that happen?
Go to the Gospels and what are you told often? These Gospels were written decades after the event! It means either the story of the original viewers of the event, otherwise known as the eyewitnesses, were changed, or that the writers never got to speak to any eyewitnesses.
Then, if you go and show that eyewitnesses were involved, well, eyewitness testimony isnt always reliable. Sometimes you get told that its notoriously unreliable. So if the Gospels do not contain eyewitness accounts, we cant trust them. If they do contain eyewitness accounts, we cant trust them.
So lets look at the above topic of UFOs as an example. Should we trust them? In some cases, yes. All a UFO is is an Unidentified Flying Object. Do some people see such objects? Yes. Does that mean an extraterrestrial craft was sighted? No.
Keep in mind also that for those who hold to science, science itself has SETI set up about the question of extraterrestrial intelligence and this is an active question in the scientific community. If we have an active question and we have an eyewitness of an event, should we not at least listen to them?
Note that this is a fine line to walk on. Should eyewitness testimony be believed blindly? No. Should it be dismissed arbitrarily? No.
Its important to realize that many of us will measure what we see in the world against our own worldview and background. If you are an atheist, you will have a natural tendency to question any claim of a miracle. If you are a theist, you will be skeptical of naturalistic explanations of events you deem to be miraculous.
This is why each of us must rise above our own skepticism. I think atheists, for example, would do a lot better in convincing on evolution if they did not make it be the case that it is to be seen as evolution vs. God. Many theists could be more open to an evolutionary creationism, but if you tell them going the route of what you say is science means abandoning God, they wont, because God is much more important in their lives.
On the other hand, those of us who are theists could bear to be more skeptical of some miracle claims and many other claims. When we share claims easily as golden proofs that are easily disproven, then we do ourselves a disservice. We should test all the claims we encounter like that.
Note also with eyewitness testimony, I have no problem with taking the character of the person into consideration. Many of us would be skeptical of the words of a stranger. What if its a close family member that you know to be trustworthy? Do you just dismiss it?
At this, I want to also answer one other claim about miracles. Would I accept eyewitness testimony for a miracle outside of Christianity? Well, why not? If a miracle happened, then it happened. I cant give my faith tradition a special exception on the rules of evidence. I think the atheist has more at stake here because if a miracle did happen, well, atheism is in trouble.
Which brings me to a fun little saying of Chesterton on miracles which I will paraphrase. The theist believes in the miracle, rightly or wrongly, because of the evidence. The skeptic disbelieves in the miracle, rightly or wrongly, because he has a dogma against them. Consider a work like Craig Keeners Miracles. If just one miracle in that book is a bona fide miracle, naturalism has a lot of explaining to do. If everyone of them is fake, theism can still be true and even Christianity. Who has more at stake?
The solution is really simple. Dont believe blindly, but dont dismiss blindly either. Try to put aside your own biases every time for the investigation. Follow the evidence where it leads.
In Christ,
Nick Peters
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