Bill Pratt | June 14, 2013
Post Author: Bill Pratt If there is one thing I have heard dozens of times from skeptics, it is that eyewitness testimony cannot be trusted. Skeptics constantly point this out to me. Why? Because this is the the best way, in their estimation, to discredit the eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s life recorded in the New [...]
Bill Pratt | December 17, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Recently I was listening to the Unbelievable podcast and heard something telling from atheist James Croft. As he was discussing the historical, eyewitness evidence of Jesus’s resurrection with Christian Chris Sinkinson, he said the following (this is a paraphrase of what he said): The amount of eyewitness testimony of the death and [...]
Bill Pratt | June 29, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In this fourth post of the series, we will examine a final reason why the maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence fails as a paradigm for determining burden of proof. Mike Licona argues that even if we accept this maxim at face value, it still has intractable problems. Let us suppose that [...]
Bill Pratt | June 27, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 2 of this series, we started discussing Mike Licona’s analysis of Sagan’s Saw, as he calls it. Licona offered two examples of his wife coming home from the grocery store and telling him about people she met there. We saw that even if she told him about the extraordinary event of meeting the [...]
Bill Pratt | June 25, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In part 1 of this series, we looked at William Lane Craig’s response to the skeptical maxim, “Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.” Now we will review Mike Licona’s response from his book The Resurrection of Jesus. Licona reminds us that this was a statement that atheist astronomer Carl Sagan used to frequently [...]
Bill Pratt | June 22, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” I cannot count how many times skeptics of Christianity have trotted out this statement when conversing with me, usually in the context of Jesus’s miracles and resurrection. There are many possible responses to this statement, but in this four-part series of posts, I want to present [...]
Bill Pratt | April 20, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt Recall that in part 2, we looked at a couple skeptics’ views on testimony. The first skeptic’s view appeared to be self-defeating, but the second skeptic singled out testimony about supernatural events, thus avoiding the self-defeating approach of the first skeptic. However, the second skeptic has a different sort of problem, which [...]
Bill Pratt | April 18, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt In the previous post, we talked about the role of testimony in our everyday lives. There are some, however, who cast serious doubts on the reliability of testimony. Here is a typical quote from a skeptic who commented on this blog: As we all should know, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. There are [...]
Bill Pratt | April 16, 2012
Post Author: Bill Pratt There are 3 ways that a person can gain knowledge: experience, reason, and testimony. Experience simply means that we observe something directly with one of our five senses for ourselves (e.g., “There is a computer screen in front of me”). Reason means that we make rational and logical inferences from knowledge we [...]
Bill Pratt | November 28, 2011
Post Author: Bill Pratt One of our goals with this blog, from the beginning, was to try to answer honest questions that people have about the Christian faith. Why do I stress the word honest? Because one of the first things you learn when you write a blog about ultimate issues (i.e., God, morality , meaning [...]
