Origins Of Christianity

[steve_bank]

We can look at Gandhi to see how an historical Jesus may have become a myth.

I read Gandhi’s bio and a collection of his letters. He was no wanderings mystic dispensing wisdom. He studied law and passed the bar in England.

He was working in South Africa when he had an incident on a segregated train. That set him on his path. I think he was pragmatic, he knew the Brits could not be overcome with violence.

He had his quirks and idiosyncrasies, in short he was a regular guy in his generation.


The European mythical Gandhi began with still photos and film of him as skinny Indian in a loincloth and barefoot.


He was deducted toi improving the lives of the people. He went into a village where people defecated anywhere. In view of the people he scooped up feces in his handss and carried it to a latrine to make a point on hygiene.

He promoted cottage industry as a means to economic independence, his symbol was the spinning wheel.


When younger Europeans traveled to India to see him they were puzzled. Gandhi would sit around with people who had been with him for a while including a few Europeans having regular considerations as equals. Gossip and ‘shooting the shit’ so to speak.

Some Europeans raised him to a living myth without knowing who he was.

Gandhi is viewed in the context of the colonial Brits in India. An historical Jesus has to be veered in context of the Roman occupation of Israel.

Paul’s inspiration would have been a word of mouth myth.J

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

If an observation would be expected about the same under both, it is not evidential for deciding between them.

The issue, to which the above is put forth as a response, was the nature of evidence. The above quoted response is a failure.

The issue at hand was and is the condition(s) necessary in order for evidence to be evidence. The issue at hand was not - and is not - the nature of "deciding". The above quoted remark does not come close to identifying a necessary condition for evidence.

The above quoted remark sort of resembles a proposed necessary condition for "deciding" between possibilities. But, of course, decisions can be made without "evidence for" one decision over an other/alternative decision. Therefore, and unsurprisingly, the evidence-for condition necessary for "deciding" turns out not to be a necessary condition for "deciding" any more than it is a necessary condition for evidence to be evidence.

Of course, some modifier added to decision/deciding would be required for it to be possible that the evidence-for condition could be a necessary condition for the modified decision/deciding. But that still would not establish the evidence-for condition as a necessary condition for evidence itself - which is to say for evidence to be evidence.

“Differential support” is not ex post; it is how evidence functions prospectively.

If there is “evidence … prospectively”, then it is necessarily the case that there is evidence before there is differentiation, supported or not. This, too, means that functioning as differential support is not necessary for evidence to be evidence.

Inference and evidence are distinct

Until you can identify a necessary condition for evidence, your use of the word evidence is necessarily ambiguous at best. The fact is that if there is no necessary condition for evidence, then there is no way of distinguishing evidence from anything else - except maybe by apophasis.

In order to establish that inference and evidence are distinct, you need to establish that whatever is referred to as evidence is never itself in any way effected or affected by an occasion of (previous) inference. You have established no such thing. Absent any presentation establishing that evidence is never itself in any way effected or affected by an occasion of (previous) inference, it is necessary that inference and evidence be considered as not necessarily distinct. You have not so considered inference and evidence; therefore, your argument fails.

Just as observation is not expected to be independent of preconceptions and/or interpretations, evidence is itself not expected to be independent of prior inferences.

It is not a necessary condition of evidence that it be untouched by prior inference(s).

There is no such thing as evidence which is independent of understanding. Evidence is always a matter of understanding and a result of understanding. This means that if understanding includes inference, then evidence is not rightly characterized as distinct (in the sense of isolated) from inference.

Your appeal to “understanding” adds no public discriminator for Paul’s origin claim.

Evidence is evidence by virtue of its role as evidence. There is no evidence absent understanding. This means that it is only the public expression of understanding which can provide any "public discriminator". Understanding always provides some "discriminator(s)", and the same is the case for any public expression of an understanding. The expectation that an understanding would/should add some "public discriminator" beyond the possibilities which a public expression of understanding already makes available is senseless, and that means that the remark quoted immediately above indicates a lack of understanding about understanding which is in addition to the already explicated lack of understanding about evidence as well as a lack of understanding about the relationship between evidence and understanding. That is quite a list of failures.

It was previously already established that a divine origin for the inspiration was and is irrelevant since Paul's understanding was produced by Paul if Paul was inspired by God and since Paul's understanding was produced by Paul if Paul was not inspired by God and since Paul's understanding was produced by Paul if Paul's understanding was not inspired.

Paul's understanding expressed in his preaching concerning the allegedly good news about God and humans is the same understanding across all possible inspiration contexts. In that way, Paul's understanding is trans-contextual. That trans-contextual quality renders the "origin claim" as unnecessary for and to the development of an understanding about Paul's understanding.

There is no reason necessitating being uncurious about the "origin claim", but the "origin claim" is unnecessary for understanding Paul's understanding as expressed in the allegedly good news which he preached. The "origin claim" is distinct (in the sense of isolated) from the matter of the allegedly good news which Paul preached.

Divine inspiration - even if it was actual - did not cause Paul’s understanding. Even if it was actual, that inspiration was certainly not sufficient to determine Paul’s understanding even if that inspiration was a factor which contributed to Paul’s understanding. This means that your causal claim pursuit is unwarranted and contributes nothing to a pursuit of understanding. In fact, your insistence on the necessity for a causal claim demonstrates a lack of awareness on your part regarding problems with the very nature of the "cause" concept.

"Paul's origin claim" does not require any added “public discriminator” any more than does an act of charity or any other act of love for neighbor. But you will not be able to understand that until you have a better grasp on the nature of evidence. When you understand that point about charity and other acts of love, then you will better understand the notion of justified by faith.

 

[NoHolyCows]

The issue, to which the above is put forth as a response, was the nature of evidence. The above quoted response is a failure.

The issue at hand was and is the condition(s) necessary in order for evidence to be evidence. The issue at hand was not - and is not - the nature of "deciding". The above quoted remark does not come close to identifying a necessary condition for evidence.

It addressed exactly the nature of evidence. Saying an observation is evidential only insofar as it bears differently on rival hypotheses is not a “decision rule”; it is a conceptual criterion that tells you what makes anything count as evidence in the first place. If an observation is equally expected on all live explanations, it has no evidential bearing. That is a statement about the concept, not about anyone’s psychology of deciding.

Here is the necessary condition, stated plainly. For X to be evidence with respect to a claim, X must be a publicly checkable observation that is probabilistically relevant to at least one explicit hypothesis—i.e., for some hypothesis H and background B, P(X|H,B) ≠ P(X|¬H,B), or, equivalently for two rivals H₁ and H₂, P(X|H₁,B) ≠ P(X|H₂,B). Without such relevance, X cannot, even in principle, move the claim one way or the other and therefore is not evidence. This reframes “evidence” as a relational concept—evidence-for-or-against—a standard treatment in science, history, and law.

The above quoted remark sort of resembles a proposed necessary condition for "deciding" between possibilities. But, of course, decisions can be made without "evidence for" one decision over an other/alternative decision. Therefore, and unsurprisingly, the evidence-for condition necessary for "deciding" turns out not to be a necessary condition for "deciding" any more than it is a necessary condition for evidence to be evidence.

Of course, some modifier added to decision/deciding would be required for it to be possible that the evidence-for condition could be a necessary condition for the modified decision/deciding. But that still would not establish the evidence-for condition as a necessary condition for evidence itself - which is to say for evidence to be evidence.

That conflates two different things: making a decision and having warrant. People make decisions without evidence all the time; that says nothing about what evidence is. My condition does not define “deciding”; it defines when an observation has evidential status regarding a claim. If it does not change the relative likelihoods of the live hypotheses, it is not evidence—regardless of whether someone chooses to act anyway.

No modifier to “decision” is needed, because nothing in my account depends on decision. The necessary condition for evidence has already been given: public checkability and probabilistic relevance to specified hypotheses. A sufficient condition in practice is equally clear: pre-stated rival hypotheses plus an observation whose likelihood ratio favors one over the other by a stated threshold. Apply that to Paul’s “not of human origin” claim and the record we actually have—ordinary Koine prose, Greco-Roman epistolary form, arguments from available scriptures, and a human, variant-rich manuscript transmission. Every one of those observations is fully expected under human authorship and transmission and none is more expected if a non-human source acted. By the concept you asked me to articulate, there is no evidence for the non-human origin claim; it remains a private article of faith, not a publicly warranted conclusion.

If there is “evidence … prospectively”, then it is necessarily the case that there is evidence before there is differentiation, supported or not. This, too, means that functioning as differential support is not necessary for evidence to be evidence.

That inference is incorrect. “Prospective evidence” means you have rival hypotheses on the table that make different probabilistic predictions about possible observations before you look. The differentiation is already present in the hypothesis set: for at least one observation X, P(X|H₁) ≠ P(X|H₂). You then run the test; if X occurs, it is evidence precisely because it differentially supports one hypothesis over the other. If the rivals make identical predictions (no differentiation), then the planned measurement is not even prospectively evidential—it’s just data collection with no power to discriminate. In short, differential support is the necessary condition that makes an observation count as evidence rather than mere information, prospectively and retrospectively.

Apply that to Paul. Define H₁: ordinary human authorship and transmission; H₂: “not of human origin.” If H₂ has no distinct, public predictions—no linguistic, rhetorical, historical, or transmission features more likely on H₂ than H₁—then nothing you can observe in the letters or their manuscript history can be evidence for H₂. And that is exactly the situation: Koine Greek prose, standard epistolary and argumentative forms, dependence on available scriptures and contemporary conventions, and a thoroughly human spectrum of textual variants are all fully expected under H₁ and not more expected under H₂. With no differentiated expectations, there is no evidential purchase for a non-human origin claim. It remains a private conviction, not a publicly warranted conclusion.

Until you can identify a necessary condition for evidence, your use of the word evidence is necessarily ambiguous at best. The fact is that if there is no necessary condition for evidence, then there is no way of distinguishing evidence from anything else - except maybe by apophasis.

In order to establish that inference and evidence are distinct, you need to establish that whatever is referred to as evidence is never itself in any way effected or affected by an occasion of (previous) inference. You have established no such thing. Absent any presentation establishing that evidence is never itself in any way effected or affected by an occasion of (previous) inference, it is necessary that inference and evidence be considered as not necessarily distinct. You have not so considered inference and evidence; therefore, your argument fails.

Here is the necessary condition, stated crisply. For X to be evidence regarding a claim, there must exist at least two explicit, competing hypotheses H₁ and H₂ (with background assumptions B made explicit) such that the probability of observing X differs between them: P(X|H₁,B) ≠ P(X|H₂,B). Without that probabilistic relevance, X cannot in principle raise or lower the comparative credibility of H₁ versus H₂ and therefore is not evidence. This condition distinguishes evidence from “anything else,” across domains, because it is relational, public, and testable.

That requirement is a category mistake. Distinct does not mean independent. A map and the territory are distinct even though cartographers’ choices affect maps. Likewise, evidence is the publicly checkable observation X; inference is the rule-governed updating from X to revised credences over H₁ and H₂. Prior inference can guide which X we collect and which B we adopt, but once X is specified and observed, its evidential status is fixed by P(X|H,B), not by anyone’s psychology. So evidence and inference are conceptually distinct even if, historically, investigators use inference to decide what to measure.

Just as observation is not expected to be independent of preconceptions and/or interpretations, evidence is itself not expected to be independent of prior inferences.

It is not a necessary condition of evidence that it be untouched by prior inference(s).

There is no such thing as evidence which is independent of understanding. Evidence is always a matter of understanding and a result of understanding. This means that if understanding includes inference, then evidence is not rightly characterized as distinct (in the sense of isolated) from inference.

Observations are often theory-laden; that is why serious inquiry externalizes background B, pre-registers hypotheses, blinds analysts, and uses independent replication. The dependence you point to is handled by making B explicit and asking the only relevant question: given B, do rival hypotheses assign different likelihoods to X? If yes, X is evidence; if no, it isn’t. Prior inferences may shape B, but they do not erase the evidence–inference distinction nor the necessity of probabilistic relevance.

Agreed—and I never claimed otherwise. The necessary condition is differential likelihood under explicit rivals, conditional on an explicit background. Prior inference can be part of B; what makes X evidence is still that P(X|H₁,B) ≠ P(X|H₂,B).

Evidence is always evaluated within an understanding—that is why B is explicit—but that does not collapse the roles. Evidence is the observational input; inference is the update rule from that input. Conflating them licenses anything as “evidence” and destroys adjudication. Keep the roles separate and you can evaluate public claims. Apply this to Paul: take H₁ = ordinary human authorship and transmission; H₂ = “not of human origin.” Our observations—Koine composition, Greco-Roman epistolary form, argument from shared scriptures, and a thoroughly human, variant-rich manuscript tradition—are exactly what H₁ predicts and not more likely on H₂. Because there is no observation X with P(X|H₂,B) > P(X|H₁,B), there is no evidence for the non-human origin claim. By the necessary condition you asked me to state, the claim is evidentially idle.

Evidence is evidence by virtue of its role as evidence. There is no evidence absent understanding. This means that it is only the public expression of understanding which can provide any "public discriminator". Understanding always provides some "discriminator(s)", and the same is the case for any public expression of an understanding. The expectation that an understanding would/should add some "public discriminator" beyond the possibilities which a public expression of understanding already makes available is senseless, and that means that the remark quoted immediately above indicates a lack of understanding about understanding which is in addition to the already explicated lack of understanding about evidence as well as a lack of understanding about the relationship between evidence and understanding. That is quite a list of failures.

Evidence does not wait on anyone’s private “understanding.” The public discriminator is the observation that bears differently on competing explanations. If two hypotheses make different predictions about what we should find, then any observation that favors one over the other is evidence, full stop. That is how courts, laboratories, and historians separate claims. Your move makes evidence parasitic on inner states; mine keeps it where it belongs—publicly checkable differences in what the world looks like if a claim is true versus false.

It was previously already established that a divine origin for the inspiration was and is irrelevant since Paul's understanding was produced by Paul if Paul was inspired by God and since Paul's understanding was produced by Paul if Paul was not inspired by God and since Paul's understanding was produced by Paul if Paul's understanding was not inspired.

Paul's understanding expressed in his preaching concerning the allegedly good news about God and humans is the same understanding across all possible inspiration contexts. In that way, Paul's understanding is trans-contextual. That trans-contextual quality renders the "origin claim" as unnecessary for and to the development of an understanding about Paul's understanding.

If Paul’s understanding is produced by Paul regardless, you have conceded the point that matters for history: the observable content is human in origin. A claim that adds no testable surplus beyond “Paul thought and wrote these things” is evidentially idle. Either the origin claim makes discernible predictions—language, genre, transmission, or corroboration that differ from ordinary human production—or it drops out of the analysis. On the record we possess, everything looks exactly like normal human authorship.

That assertion is contradicted by the documents. Paul’s letters exhibit development and situational tailoring: different emphases on law and Gentile inclusion, different timetables for the parousia, different pastoral directives across communities, and stylistic and thematic variation even among the undisputed letters. That is not “the same understanding” floating above context; it is human reasoning adapting to audiences and problems, which is exactly what we expect from ordinary composition.

There is no reason necessitating being uncurious about the "origin claim", but the "origin claim" is unnecessary for understanding Paul's understanding as expressed in the allegedly good news which he preached. The "origin claim" is distinct (in the sense of isolated) from the matter of the allegedly good news which Paul preached.

Divine inspiration - even if it was actual - did not cause Paul’s understanding. Even if it was actual, that inspiration was certainly not sufficient to determine Paul’s understanding even if that inspiration was a factor which contributed to Paul’s understanding. This means that your causal claim pursuit is unwarranted and contributes nothing to a pursuit of understanding. In fact, your insistence on the necessity for a causal claim demonstrates a lack of awareness on your part regarding problems with the very nature of the "cause" concept.

"Paul's origin claim" does not require any added “public discriminator” any more than does an act of charity or any other act of love for neighbor. But you will not be able to understand that until you have a better grasp on the nature of evidence. When you understand that point about charity and other acts of love, then you will better understand the notion of justified by faith.

If the origin claim is “distinct” and “unnecessary,” then it carries no evidential weight and should not be used to ground authority or to trump rivals. You cannot both detach it from the content to avoid scrutiny and deploy it as a warrant when convenient. In public claims, what is unnecessary to explain the artifacts is unwarranted to demand assent.

“Not of human origin” is a causal claim by its own wording. If it neither determines nor reliably contributes to the content we can examine, then it does no explanatory work and is irrelevant to the historical question. If it does claim causal relevance, it must cash out in differential expectations we can test. You cannot have it both ways: either the claim affects what we should observe, in which case it’s testable, or it doesn’t, in which case it is extraneous to analysis.

Acts of charity are public by definition; they have observable content and consequences. “Divine inspiration” as an origin claim does not. That is why the analogy fails. History adjudicates claims by what can be checked, compared, and corroborated. In Paul’s case, the language, rhetoric, sources, and the messy, variant manuscript tradition all line up with human authorship and human transmission. There is no observation more expected on “not of human origin” than on ordinary human origin. By the only standards that bind in public inquiry, the origin claim adds nothing and warrants nothing.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

Here’s the crux you keep missing, Micheal. When you or Paul make a public claim about origin—“not of human origin”—you’ve stepped out of private understanding and into a domain that is adjudicated by public discriminators. In that domain, “evidence” is not whatever someone feels is meaningful; it is an observation that bears differently on competing explanations. Unless the “divine origin” claim yields expectations that differ from ordinary human authorship and transmission, it has no evidential force. Saying “understanding” is what matters does not fix that. It sidesteps it.

The difference between our positions is simple and decisive. I define what would count for or against the claim before looking: if H₁ = ordinary human composition/transmission and H₂ = “not of human origin,” then to be relevant H₂ must entail or at least raise the probability of some observable feature—linguistic, historical, or transmissional—that H₁ does not. If nothing in the letters or their manuscript history is more expected under H₂ than under H₁, then no observation can move us toward H₂. In that case the origin claim is evidentially idle. That is exactly our situation: the letters are in normal Koine prose, use standard Greco-Roman epistolary conventions, argue from shared scriptures in recognizable ways, and survive in a manuscript tradition with the very human fingerprints of copying, correction, harmonization, and divergence. Those are precisely the artifacts H₁ predicts; H₂ predicts none of them more strongly. Without differentiated predictions, your origin claim cannot be supported in public reasoning.

Science makes this distinction operational every day. Before a clinical trial, two hypotheses are set: the drug works versus it does not. We write down in advance what we should observe if it works (better outcomes than placebo by a specified margin) and if it doesn’t (no difference within statistical error). Patients’ inner “understanding” of feeling better is not what turns data into evidence; the pre-specified differential expectations do. If both hypotheses predict the same distribution of outcomes, then the trial is not evidential—no matter how sincerely the researchers “understand” their theory. Your move—making evidence contingent on private understanding—would make controlled trials impossible to interpret. Mine—requiring differential predictions—explains why they do work.

Courts operate the same way. The prosecution says the defendant’s DNA is on the weapon; the defense says it isn’t. The lab produces a profile with a calculable random-match probability. That observation shifts the odds between the two narratives because it is more likely on one than the other. A witness saying “I inwardly understand he’s guilty” is not evidence. It might explain why the witness believes what he believes, but it does zero adjudicative work because it creates no testable difference in what we should find in the world. Your approach collapses admissibility into autobiography. The legal system survives precisely by refusing that collapse.

An even cleaner analogy: suppose I claim a coin toss is “not of human origin.” If the outcomes are statistically indistinguishable from a normal human toss—roughly half heads, half tails, no impossible sequences—then my origin claim has no evidential purchase. To give it teeth, I must say what would be different if a non-human agent tossed it: perfect alternation, or a pattern that deviates from human motor noise in a defined way. If I refuse to name any such discriminator and then insist “understanding the coin is what matters,” I’ve switched topics. That is exactly what your replies do with Paul.

You also want to have it both ways on authority. You say the origin claim is “unnecessary” to understanding; if so, it cannot be used to trump rivals. If, on the other hand, you treat it as a warrant for deference, then it must cash out in public discriminators. Those are mutually exclusive stances. My position exposes the fork and forces the choice. Yours blurs it.

Finally, you suggest that because inspiration doesn’t “cause” understanding, causal talk is a distraction. But “not of human origin” is itself a causal assertion about source. If it makes no difference to the artifacts, it is irrelevant to history; if it does, state the differences so we can test them. Science and law both demand this clarity because it is the only way to keep inquiry from dissolving into rhetoric.

So here is the example framed your way, with standards neither science nor courts can refute. Take two origin claims for Paul’s letters. Under ordinary human origin we expect exactly what we observe: culturally situated Greek prose, standard rhetorical techniques, use of available sources, and a transmission history marked by very human variation. Under “not of human origin,” to be anything but a label we must expect some feature more likely on that hypothesis than on human authorship—something like invariant preservation, non-culturally sourced information that survives independent cross-checks, or linguistic properties inconsistent with human production. We find none. Therefore, the public record supports the human hypothesis and leaves the non-human origin claim without evidential traction. Your emphasis on “understanding” may describe how someone comes to believe, but it never turns that belief into evidence. That is why your position cannot adjudicate origin claims in science, in law, or here—while mine can, and does.

NHC

 

[DBT]

Divine origin would surely be something extraordinary, something not seen or heard before, something not thought of, a unique revelation. If not, if mundane, rehashed, what would be the point of it?

 

[Learner]

"Something not seen or heard before'

There's nothing surely about it at all. What rule of method is that logic according to?

You are introducing a nonexistent "theistic issue" that has no relevance to the conceptual context of the bible (as Theists read it).

The bible contradicts the flawed notion because it blatantly describes the worship of other gods and the wonders that people will perform that appear to be miracles to the easily dazzled.

The bible understanding already covers this ground and explains there will be many false gods and false prophets.

 

[steve_bank]

Judge: Defense call yourfirst witness.
Defense counsel: You clam the defendant is innocent, what is your evidence?
Witness: God inspired me, I know the defendant is innocent.
Prosecutor: I object, if god has evidence he should be made available for cross examination.

 

[NoHolyCows]

"Something not seen or heard before'

There's nothing surely about it at all. What rule of method is that logic according to?

You are introducing a nonexistent "theistic issue" that has no relevance to the conceptual context of the bible (as Theists read it).

The bible contradicts the flawed notion because it blatantly describes the worship of other gods and the wonders that people will perform that appear to be miracles to the easily dazzled.

The bible understanding already covers this ground and explains there will be many false gods and false prophets.

You asked what “rule of method” would require Paul’s claim of divine origin to be shown by something not otherwise explainable by ordinary human composition. The answer is the same rule used in science and in courts: a claim about cause is warranted only if it yields observations that are more probable on that claim than on its competitors. If H₁ is “ordinary human authorship and transmission” and H₂ is “not of human origin,” then evidence is anything publicly checkable that favors H₂ over H₁. Novelty is just one way to do that—e.g., access to information the author could not have by ordinary means, later independently verified. It is not the only way, but without some differential marker, the origin claim has no evidential traction.

Appealing to “the conceptual context of the Bible” does not change that requirement. Methods don’t become special-pleading just because the text is religious. Historians, scientists, and courts all ask the same thing: what would we expect to find if the claim is true, and is that different from what we would expect if it’s false? Scripture’s own warnings about “false gods” and “false prophets” actually concede my point. They explicitly detach “signs and wonders” from reliable source attribution. If wonders don’t discriminate true from false, then they cannot be used as evidence for divine origin. At that point, the only way to rescue the origin claim is to produce some other observable discriminator. None is on offer.

Now to the record we actually have. Paul’s letters are ordinary human artifacts by every publicly examinable criterion. They are written in normal Koine Greek; they follow recognizable Greco-Roman epistolary conventions; they argue from shared Jewish scriptures using standard rhetorical moves; they engage real audiences about concrete disputes; and they survive through a wholly human manuscript tradition with thousands of scribal variants across witnesses. The earliest substantial Pauline papyrus is from around the late second/early third century, long after Paul—so we do not have autographs or an “untouchable” transmission. These are exactly the features predicted by H₁. H₂ does not predict them any better, and it predicts nothing we in fact observe that H₁ would not already account for. By the only standards that bind public inquiry, the data support human origin and leave “not of human origin” evidentially idle.

In science: if a physicist claims a result is “not of human origin,” that claim must cash out in measurements that differ from what ordinary processes produce. A meteor is shown to be extraterrestrial by isotopic ratios and mineral phases that are statistically incompatible with terrestrial formation. A mere assertion of inspiration, or a narrative about a vision, does zero work unless it yields measurements that favor the non-terrestrial hypothesis. Paul’s letters present no such discriminators—no access to otherwise unknowable facts later verified, no linguistic properties inexplicable by human learning, no prespecified predictions that succeed where chance would fail.

In court: a witness’s private certainty is not evidence; corroborated, publicly checkable facts are. If the prosecution says “not of the defendant’s doing,” they must show fingerprints, DNA, timestamps, alibis—items that favor one account over another. A warning that “there are many false witnesses” does not create evidence, and it does not license accepting one claimant over rivals. Likewise, a biblical caution about false prophets undercuts using prodigies as proof; it doesn’t establish Paul’s claim. The only way to bind an outsider is with discriminating facts. Those are absent.

So there is no “nonexistent theistic issue” here. There is a single, neutral rule: for a non-human-origin hypothesis to be more credible than human origin, it must generate publicly testable expectations that differ from those of human origin and that are borne out by the artifacts. Paul’s letters, their language, their arguments, and their transmission history are exactly what we expect from human authorship. Your citations about false gods and false prophets, by your own standard, remove “wonders” from the evidential toolkit. What remains is faith—which you are free to hold—but it is not evidence that can warrant the origin claim in history, science, or law.

NHC

 

[Learner]

Judge: Defense call yourfirst witness.
Defense counsel: You clam the defendant is innocent, what is your evidence?
Witness: God inspired me, I know the defendant is innocent....

....but...but... I am not sure what the charges are?

Prosecutor: I object, if god has evidence he should be made available for cross examination.

Witness: I am not sure who is being charged here...and guilty of what? God is not available in this court...huh? Am I hearing the sound of didgeridoos?

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

Saying an observation is evidential only insofar as it bears differently on rival hypotheses is not a “decision rule”;

It is not a rule, and I never said it is a rule. So, what is with the putting decision rule within quotation marks? It just looks to be more of the same tired disingenuousness which is just who/what you are.

As I said, you have supposed it - not as a rule, but - as a condition alleged to be necessary (let's just jump ahead and say) for a warranted decision (what I previously anticipated with the "modified decision" designation).

it is a conceptual criterion that tells you what makes anything count as evidence in the first place.

You are right back to the erroneous notion that evidence is evidence only after - and only in situations for which - there is basis for deciding between hypotheses. And, yet, there can be evidence without and before any such decision. The basis for the deciding is not the evidence in and of itself.

a publicly checkable observation that is probabilistically relevant

Probabilities are perspective-susceptible; that is to say that those calculations are perspective-dependent, and that is to say that probabilities depend upon the possibilities taken into account along with those that are ignored intentionally or accidentally.

Shucks, there is that pesky possibilities issue yet again. My oh my, there is no getting away from having to think in terms of possibilities. Well, that's not quite right because, obviously, people often don't bother themselves in terms of possibilities while they think.

having warrant.

There is no getting away from having to think in terms of possibilities - if one wants to have "warrant". That is because warrant is determined in consideration of the possibilities considered.

Evidence does not wait on anyone’s private “understanding.” The public discriminator is the observation that bears differently on competing explanations.

Just more of that repugnant disingenuousness.

Understanding can be recast as an explanation to oneself. There is no difference between understanding and explanation that is relevant here. That is why there is no evidence without understanding.

The "competing" you keep going on about remains always irrelevant, because it is unnecessary for evidence to be evidence. Repeating that "competing" over and over makes no difference.

nothing you can observe in the letters or their manuscript history can be evidence

Another of the same old same old error in logic. Since evidence can be evidence - or said alternatively, if it is possible for evidence to be evidence - without being dispositive and without being probabilistically distinguishing, there can still be evidence with regards to Paul's inspiration. It just happens to turn out that such evidence is of no moment with regards to the message which expresses understanding, because the message is invariant across the possible inspiration contexts. And that means that your blinkered focus on Paul's inspiration is an obsession of no significance as well as an obsession with absolutely no dispositional significance.

The fact that Paul's understanding is invariant across all of the possible inspiration contexts means that the correct and proper focus would be set upon Paul's understanding expressed/preached as the allegedly good news. This follows from even your own erroneous depiction regarding the nature of evidence. If there is not evidence as evidence-for deciding which one of the inspiration "hypotheses" is in any way relatively more warranted, you are faced with the then-what.

You can certainly do as you do and strut amusingly like a banty who has no idea about his actual smallness or, in this case, having no idea of the actual smallness of saying: see there, there is no dispositional way to warrant belief in divine inspiration. You can make believe that is a genuine dead end so as to make believe that you have warrant for not being bothered with the then-what matter which follows, or you can face the fact that belief in inspiration was never ultimately the issue and was never the ultimate issue.

Your move makes evidence parasitic on inner states; mine keeps it where it belongs—publicly checkable differences in what the world looks like if a claim is true versus false.

Your "belongs" necessarily means "is ignored" because the subjectivity inherent in any perspective is "publicly checkable" in terms of other perspectives. That is the only way to achieve the most trans-contextual and trans-perspectival understandings and expressions. Your approach has no mechanism by which understanding can be further developed. Your approach only seeks to - and can only seek to - generate deference.

For X to be evidence regarding a claim, there must exist at least two explicit, competing hypotheses

By your reasoning, evidence is unnecessary for there to be an hypothesis. By your reasoning, it is necessarily the case that there can never be evidence absent multiple hypotheses. By your reasoning, it is a logical necessity that there can never be evidence for a first hypothesis. That is plainly absurd since to refer to evidence for an hypothesis is readily understandable because it is in no way necessarily ambiguous and because it is not necessary that there be multiple hypotheses in order for evidence to be evidence.

The circling back to the insistence that evidence necessarily requires the condition of there being multiple hypotheses incompatible one with the other(s) is evidence for there being a continued disingenuousness on your part.

If the origin claim is “distinct” and “unnecessary,” then it carries no evidential weight and should not be used to ground authority or to trump rivals.

As has been explained, that is a separate topic. If you genuinely want to discuss that topic, then characterize the "rivals" so that the matter of the attempt at that trumping can be addressed. And then I will know to what extent you have considered sufficiently the rivals matter in terms of the relevant possibilities.

“Not of human origin” is a causal claim by its own wording.

Your response to the statement referring to the "problems with the very nature of the 'cause' concept" is to repeat the "causal claim" claim combined with the own wording/plain meaning ruse which had already been addressed and obliterated?!?!?!

Your evident disingenuousness simply does not abate. But I still want to highlight one more instance of evident disingenuousness.

Acts of charity are public by definition; they have observable content and consequences. “Divine inspiration” as an origin claim does not. That is why the analogy fails.

That was your response to a remark about a supposed need for an "added 'public discriminator'". You resorted to ruse yet again by ignoring the condition of being "added".

You resort to ruse so often that you ooze ruse. In this case you resort to ruse in order to make it seem as if divine inspiration necessarily has no public aspect with "observable content and consequences." But a claim of there having been divine inspiration is not essentially different from a claim that an act is one of charity.

The claim of divine inspiration is certainly as observable as is a claim that an act is one of charity. The claim of divine inspiration has as much content as the act of charity claim. And both claims are analyzable in terms of consequences. The divine inspiration claim is tested in terms of the understanding which follows from the inspiration and whether that understanding is compatible with other claims and understandings about the supposed divinity which allegedly did the claimed inspiration. The charity claim is tested in terms of the concepts associated with the notion of charity.

That is sufficient to demonstrate that the analogy succeeds.

But, there is also this: There can have been an act of charity without it having been claimed to have been an act of charity. There can have been a divine inspiration without it being claimed to have been a divine inspiration. An act not claimed to be an act of charity can, with analysis-provided reason, be called an act of charity. A divinely inspired understanding not claimed to be divinely inspired can, with analysis-provided reason, be called an understanding that was divinely inspired. And, yet, a person can have reason to be skeptical in both cases. And then there is the then-what.

All of this actually relates to the nature and role of evidence. It frankly does not matter whether failure to understand this point is a consequence of an unwillingness or an inability, because that failure to understand is the same across both the unwillingness and the unable contexts.

Before a clinical trial, two hypotheses are set: the drug works versus it does not.

Unfortunately, that probably is a good way of describing how too much clinical testing is actually done.

It is unfortunate that the thinking behind such design is very much that shallow.

Blinding, double blinding, triple blinding, and so-called randomized control do not make the thinking behind such design less shallow.

The deeper thinking is that which, if it occurs, is conducted in terms of the possibilities that are identified and their being controlled for as variables.

One (or part of the) explanation for why there is a reproducibility problem today is that it is too often erroneously assumed that statistics (or a sufficiently large repetition) can ever effectively obviate the need for/the importance of the identification and control of variables.

Apparent anomalies can be extremely important and are not to be dismissed simply for being anomalous. The same might even be more so the case for what appears to be a lesser probability.

 

[steve_bank]

Judge: Defense call yourfirst witness.
Defense counsel: You clam the defendant is innocent, what is your evidence?
Witness: God inspired me, I know the defendant is innocent....

....but...but... I am not sure what the charges are?

Prosecutor: I object, if god has evidence he should be made available for cross examination.

Witness: I am not sure who is being charged here...and guilty of what? God is not available in this court...huh? Am I hearing the sound of didgeridoos?

The point is anyone can claim divine inspiration. I see it with Evangelicals I knew and see it on Christian TV and radio.

And a a variation, 'my faith says..(fill in the banks)'

My faith says I don't have to take vaccinations. Meaning I don't like vaccinations so I will invoke god as an authority telling me I do not have to.

Christian theology begins with an unprofitable a-priori assumption the all powerful god Yahweh of the OT exists and there are no other gods. From that a Christian can claim almost anything, including personal divine authority.

In tbe west until thee refrigeration the RCC vivaciously and harshly reserved divine authority for themselves. I was taught in grammar school the pope is diversely inpsired authority on Earth from god on morality.

Common people got inspiration fro god trough a priest.

Along came the Protestant Reformation. No pope or priest needed as a go between between you and god.

The Reformation is what enables you today to freely read the bible in English and freely interpret. Average Christina appear generally ignorant of where the theology and beliefs have cone form. It is not arcane academic knowledge, it is readily available in history books.

That the Christianity you imagine traces back to an ancient Jew named Jesus is a myth. It is all human creativity and imagination.

Examples? Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings. Intricate mythologies creased by humans. I have been watching reruns of Stargate SG1 and Star Trek DS9 with an eye on the mythologies.

Both have what to humans are superbeings who evolved beyond corporeal existence outside of our space and time. Both superbeings leave and inspire cryptic messages and prophesies that have to be figured out. That theme predates Judaism and Christianity in earlier mythologies. The pursuit of hidden knowledge traditions.

If you say god inspires you to think or do something Yahweh is not available for questioning as to validity. Hence 2000 years of Christian on Christian conflict and violence over what god wants,.

For me my cat goddess Shirley sits on my shoulder giving me divine inspiration. I can't see her but I know she is there.

Learner, all you have to do is believe with your whole heart Shirley is on your shoulder. Shirley is everywhere at once.

 

[Michael S. Pearl]

You asked what “rule of method” would require Paul’s claim of divine origin to be shown by something not otherwise explainable by ordinary human composition. The answer is the same rule used in science and in courts: a claim about cause

Paul does NOT claim that his understanding was CAUSED by divine inspiration.

Paul does NOT claim that his understanding can be understood only by those who (claim to) have had an experience of being divinely inspired.

Paul emphasizes the importance of understanding.

Paul emphasizes that the importance of understanding supersedes whatever importance that there might be attributable to inspiration.

The understanding with which Paul is concerned is that expressed as what he refers to as the good news about God, humans, and the relationship between God and humans as well as between humans themselves.

By Paul’s own reckoning, the understanding regarding the relationship between God and humans as well as between humans is of immeasurably greater importance than is Paul’s inspiration.

According to Paul, it is right to love the neighbor/stranger as oneself.

According to Paul, there is no need to prove in any fashion that it is right and good to act with love for the sake of the neighbor/stranger.

That love is NOT done for the sake of community.

That love is NOT done for the sake or benefit of oneself.

That love is done for the sake of the neighbor/stranger, and that love is NOT justified or warranted or justifiable or warrantable as a consequence of anything other than having faith that it is right and good to act with love for the sake of the neighbor/stranger.

An act of this love is justified by and arises from the faith which holds that love is to be done for the sake of love made manifest as/by being for the sake of an other person.

This acting with love for the sake of love as being for the sake of an other person - this faith in the rightness and goodness of this love - is prior to any and all physical science. It is also prior to the concerns and judgments of any and all courts.

This is an example of being justified by faith. That faith - in the form of its possible instantiations - is always to be tested by means of concepts and responses.

That means that the manifestation of the justifying faith is never actually complete, although the faith is, nonetheless, what always justifies holding that it is right and good to act with love for the sake of an other person.

Who has this faith?

 

[DBT]

"Something not seen or heard before'

There's nothing surely about it at all. What rule of method is that logic according to?

You are introducing a nonexistent "theistic issue" that has no relevance to the conceptual context of the bible (as Theists read it).

The bible contradicts the flawed notion because it blatantly describes the worship of other gods and the wonders that people will perform that appear to be miracles to the easily dazzled.

The bible understanding already covers this ground and explains there will be many false gods and false prophets.

Wouldn't you think that something that came, not from man, but God would have be special? If it's mundane, why bother we've heard it all before, what's the point.... ?

 

[Learner]

There's no issue here...not for the Theist at least. When we hear of similar claims about being special -in context to the bible, it emphasises there is only one 'Real McCoy'.

The "Heard it before" notion is a hatching of agenda ideas that created copies of the biblical narrative e.g. counterfeit gods or mimicking Gods attributes, like satan portrayed himself to be, for example.

Sounding similar i.e. '"hearing the narrative before..' .does not make it a logical issue "standard" because it's your (plural) particular perspective.

(Apologies, NoHolyCows. I will reply back to you at some point. I'm not good with long posts on my phone).

 

[NoHolyCows]

It is not a rule, and I never said it is a rule. So, what is with the putting decision rule within quotation marks? It just looks to be more of the same tired disingenuousness which is just who/what you are.

As I said, you have supposed it - not as a rule, but - as a condition alleged to be necessary (let's just jump ahead and say) for a warranted decision (what I previously anticipated with the "modified decision" designation).

The quotation marks flagged the phrase because you repeatedly treat my evidential criterion as if I were proposing a procedure for making decisions. I’m not. I’m specifying what counts as evidence in the first place: an observation E is evidence for H₁ over H₂ precisely when the likelihoods differ, i.e., P(E|H₁) ≠ P(E|H₂). That is a conceptual discriminator, not a policy for choosing actions. Your aside about my motives has been a recurring jab; we’ve already addressed that tactic and it doesn’t touch the criterion.

You’re still miscasting the point. Differential bearing is a necessary condition for calling something “evidence,” not for making a “warranted decision.” Decisions depend on priors, utilities, and context. Evidence, by contrast, is about whether E shifts the odds at all. If P(E|H₁)=P(E|H₂), E does not favor either side and so is not evidential between them. If they differ, it is evidential—regardless of whether a final decision is made.

You are right back to the erroneous notion that evidence is evidence only after - and only in situations for which - there is basis for deciding between hypotheses. And, yet, there can be evidence without and before any such decision. The basis for the deciding is not the evidence in and of itself.

You’ve reversed what I said. Because evidence is defined by unequal likelihoods, it is explicitly prior to any decision. Before choosing anything, one can ask, “Would E be more probable if H₁ were true than if H₂ were true?” If yes, E is evidence for H₁ over H₂. If no, it isn’t. Nothing in that requires a decision to have been taken; it only requires stating the competing hypotheses clearly enough to compute or estimate P(E|H).

Probabilities are perspective-susceptible; that is to say that those calculations are perspective-dependent, and that is to say that probabilities depend upon the possibilities taken into account along with those that are ignored intentionally or accidentally.

Shucks, there is that pesky possibilities issue yet again. My oh my, there is no getting away from having to think in terms of possibilities. Well, that's not quite right because, obviously, people often don't bother themselves in terms of possibilities while they think.

Correct—and that’s why competent analysis makes the background explicit. We write P(E|H,K), with K denoting shared background information. Dependence on K is not a bug; it’s how we prevent hidden assumptions. If you think K is too narrow or excludes a live alternative, propose the additional hypothesis and its predictions. Until “divine inspiration” is stated so that it yields testable likelihoods different from the human-origin hypothesis under agreed K, it does no evidential work. Re-stating that “probabilities depend on possibilities considered” merely underscores my point: unless you supply a divine-origin hypothesis with observable consequences that change P(E|H_divine,K) relative to P(E|H_human,K), appeals to “inspiration” remain evidentially idle.

There is no getting away from having to think in terms of possibilities - if one wants to have "warrant". That is because warrant is determined in consideration of the possibilities considered.

Agreed that warrant depends on the live possibilities—but you have to state them precisely enough to yield different predictions. In practice we write hypotheses against shared background K. If H_human explains Paul’s letters (ordinary Greco-Roman epistolary form, situational rhetoric, intertexts, and a manuscript tradition full of human copying errors) and H_divine is left so vague that it predicts the very same observations, then there is no change in likelihoods: P(E|H_divine,K) ≈ P(E|H_human,K). On that footing there is no additional warrant for “not of human origin.” If you want warrant for a non-human source, you must specify H_divine so that it makes different, checkable expectations about the artifacts we actually have. Until then, enumerating “possibilities” without differentiated content does not generate warrant.

Just more of that repugnant disingenuousness.

Understanding can be recast as an explanation to oneself. There is no difference between understanding and explanation that is relevant here. That is why there is no evidence without understanding.

The "competing" you keep going on about remains always irrelevant, because it is unnecessary for evidence to be evidence. Repeating that "competing" over and over makes no difference.

We’ve been through the jabs; they don’t address the substance. The criterion stands: an observation E is evidence for H₁ over H₂ when the likelihoods differ—P(E|H₁,K) ≠ P(E|H₂,K). That is a content test, not a personality test.

Interpretation is unavoidable, but the relevant “understanding” here is public and checkable: stating H, H′, K, and asking whether E was antecedently more expected on one than the other. That does not depend on anyone’s private introspection. It’s the same in science and in court. In science, smoke is evidence of fire over fog because P(smoke|fire) > P(smoke|fog); in court, a defendant’s fingerprint at a scene is evidence of presence over absence because the likelihoods differ. If two rivals make the same prediction, E is evidentially neutral between them. Calling that “private understanding” is a category mistake.

Competing hypotheses are exactly what give “evidence” its meaning. Without at least an implicit rival, “evidence” collapses into “description.” Saying “there is a letter” is a description; saying “the pattern of genre, rhetoric, and error rates fits ordinary human composition and transmission better than a non-human source” is an evidential claim because it distinguishes H_human from H_divine. Apply it here: the observable features of the Pauline corpus—human languages, culture-bound argument, and a transmission record full of ordinary scribal variation—are all maximally expected on H_human. Unless you specify H_divine so that those same features would have been improbable, the likelihood ratio stays ~1 and the origin claim adds no warrant. That is the entire point, and it has been consistent throughout despite the repeated attempts to wave it away.

Another of the same old same old error in logic. Since evidence can be evidence - or said alternatively, if it is possible for evidence to be evidence - without being dispositive and without being probabilistically distinguishing, there can still be evidence with regards to Paul's inspiration. It just happens to turn out that such evidence is of no moment with regards to the message which expresses understanding, because the message is invariant across the possible inspiration contexts. And that means that your blinkered focus on Paul's inspiration is an obsession of no significance as well as an obsession with absolutely no dispositional significance.

Evidence does not need to be dispositive, but it does need to discriminate. If an observation would be about as expected whether inspiration occurred or not, then it is not evidence for inspiration; it is merely consistent with it. That is the standard in science and in court: a fact counts as evidence for H₁ over H₂ when it is antecedently more likely on H₁ than on H₂. The Pauline data we actually have—ordinary Greco-Roman letter forms, situational argumentation, culture-bound assumptions, and the familiar profile of scribal variation—are fully expected on ordinary human authorship and transmission. Unless you specify a model of “divine inspiration” that makes those same features more expected than the human model, nothing in the letters or their manuscript history raises the probability of inspiration. Calling that requirement “blinkered” doesn’t touch it; it’s how evidential claims work. And the “invariance” claim is simply asserted, not shown. If origin were non-human, you would expect at least one differentiator in principle—error immunity, invariant transmission, novel information beyond contemporaneous sources, or successful risky predictions. We observe none. On evidential grounds, the origin claim carries no weight.

The fact that Paul's understanding is invariant across all of the possible inspiration contexts means that the correct and proper focus would be set upon Paul's understanding expressed/preached as the allegedly good news. This follows from even your own erroneous depiction regarding the nature of evidence. If there is not evidence as evidence-for deciding which one of the inspiration "hypotheses" is in any way relatively more warranted, you are faced with the then-what.

Evaluating Paul’s ethics and theology on their human merits is perfectly fine; I’ve been doing exactly that. But it does not rescue the origin claim. Paul didn’t just offer counsel; he asserted “not of human origin” and leveraged that claim in disputes. That is a public assertion about causation, and it is fair game for public standards. Your “invariance” premise is wrong on two fronts. First, historically, the content isn’t invariant: communities developed differing Christologies, eschatologies, and practices, and Paul himself adapts across letters. Second, even if one brackets development, the claim that the same message would be equally expected whether its origin were human or divine concedes my point: if the observable artifacts require no extra cause, the extra cause is unwarranted. The “then-what” is simple and has been my stance throughout—assess the content as human philosophy and ethics, and treat the origin claim as evidentially idle.

Your "belongs" necessarily means "is ignored" because the subjectivity inherent in any perspective is "publicly checkable" in terms of other perspectives. That is the only way to achieve the most trans-contextual and trans-perspectival understandings and expressions. Your approach has no mechanism by which understanding can be further developed. Your approach only seeks to - and can only seek to - generate deference.

Publicly checkable evidence does not ignore subjectivity; it disciplines it. The mechanism for developing understanding is intersubjective testing: rival readings propose expectations, and shared artifacts—texts, variants, historical context—are used to see which expectations survive. That process does not generate deference; it generates constraint. When a claim about origin makes no difference to any publicly testable expectation, it contributes nothing to explanation. Calling for evidence that changes what we should expect to observe is precisely how scholarship advances beyond each person’s private “understanding.”

By your reasoning, evidence is unnecessary for there to be an hypothesis. By your reasoning, it is necessarily the case that there can never be evidence absent multiple hypotheses. By your reasoning, it is a logical necessity that there can never be evidence for a first hypothesis. That is plainly absurd since to refer to evidence for an hypothesis is readily understandable because it is in no way necessarily ambiguous and because it is not necessary that there be multiple hypotheses in order for evidence to be evidence.

The circling back to the insistence that evidence necessarily requires the condition of there being multiple hypotheses incompatible one with the other(s) is evidence for there being a continued disingenuousness on your part.

You are conflating hypothesis formation with hypothesis appraisal. One can coin a first hypothesis without evidence; that is discovery. But the moment you ask whether an observation is evidential for that hypothesis, you are implicitly contrasting it with its negation: H versus not-H. That is already “two hypotheses.” In practice, “evidence for the first hypothesis” means the observation is more expected if H is true than if H is false. This does not make evidence “unnecessary”; it defines what makes something count as evidence at all. Nothing in Paul’s letters or their transmission has been shown to be more expected on “non-human origin” than on ordinary human composition and copying. Without that differential, you have no evidential support for the origin claim.

There’s nothing disingenuous about stating the basic logic of appraisal. Evidence is evidential only relative to alternatives—at the bare minimum H versus not-H. That’s how every serious method works: in Bayesian terms an observation E supports H precisely when P(E|H) exceeds P(E|¬H); in classical testing you assess data against a null versus an alternative. Hypotheses can be generated without rivals, but the instant you ask whether something “counts as evidence,” you are implicitly contrasting it with its negation. That’s not a rhetorical trick; it’s the definition of evidential relevance. Apply it here: identify one observation in Paul’s letters, their language, their redaction, or their manuscript history that is more probable if “not of human origin” is true than if ordinary human composition and transmission are true. You have supplied none. Until you do, the origin claim has zero public warrant and cannot be used to demand deference over rivals.

As has been explained, that is a separate topic. If you genuinely want to discuss that topic, then characterize the "rivals" so that the matter of the attempt at that trumping can be addressed. And then I will know to what extent you have considered sufficiently the rivals matter in terms of the relevant possibilities.

Here are the rivals, by text and content, exactly where Paul deploys “not of human origin” to trump them. In Galatia, Paul is opposing emissaries pressing Gentile circumcision and fuller Torah observance as conditions for belonging. Their warrant was human authority from Jerusalem and continuity with Moses; Paul counters with a non-human warrant, saying he received his gospel “through revelation of Jesus,” then pronounces a curse on any contrary “gospel.” In Corinth, he faces the “super-apostles” who trade on letters of recommendation, rhetorical polish, and visionary boasts; Paul answers by appealing to his own revelations and commission, again grounding superiority in source rather than in better arguments or closer witnesses. In Rome and Philippi he warns against teachers with different Christological and halakhic emphases, and again signals his commission as uniquely authoritative. In each case the dispute is fully human—competing messages, communities, and leadership claims—and Paul’s way of trumping rivals is to invoke a special origin. That makes origin part of his argument, not a tangent, and therefore it is subject to the same evidential test as any other asserted warrant: does anything we can observe in his letters, their language, their argumentative moves, or their manuscript history fit better if a non-human source actually stands behind them than if ordinary human composition and transmission do? The answer is no; all the observable features are exactly what we see in human controversies—rhetoric, appeals to tradition and experience, intra-movement polemic, later copying errors and edits. That is why the origin claim carries no public weight against his rivals.

Your response to the statement referring to the "problems with the very nature of the 'cause' concept" is to repeat the "causal claim" claim combined with the own wording/plain meaning ruse which had already been addressed and obliterated?!?!?!

Your evident disingenuousness simply does not abate. But I still want to highlight one more instance of evident disingenuousness.

There’s nothing to “obliterate” here. “Origin” is a source term; “not of human origin” is a positive source attribution that rules out human causation. Whether you call it inspiration rather than authorship, the proposition still asserts a non-human cause for the content Paul proclaims. Philosophers can debate nuances of causation, but historians still ask the basic evidential question: if a non-human source actually generated this message, what observable consequences would differ from the baseline of human generation? In Paul’s case we do not see any discriminating consequences. The letters are written in ordinary Koine Greek, they use standard Greco-Roman epistolary forms, they argue like other human letters with analogy, scripture, and rhetoric, and their transmission history shows the familiar profile of human copying—variants, corrections, and theological glosses. None of that is more probable on “non-human origin” than on “human origin.” That’s why, as a matter of method, the origin claim does no explanatory work and cannot ground authority over rivals. Interpretation does not deny context; it constrains it. The plain-language sense of Paul’s phrase is exactly a source claim. Because that claim yields no testable, public difference in what we observe, it remains an article of faith, not an evidential trump.

Accusations don’t substitute for analysis. This exact move—asserting ruse or bad faith while repeating the same points—has already been addressed. You have not identified a single textual, historical, or manuscript feature that is antecedently more expected if Paul’s gospel were “not of human origin” than if it were the product of human thought and community transmission. Until you do, the evidential status is settled: the origin claim carries no public warrant, cannot be used to demand deference, and is methodologically idle in adjudicating disputes.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

That was your response to a remark about a supposed need for an "added 'public discriminator'". You resorted to ruse yet again by ignoring the condition of being "added".

You resort to ruse so often that you ooze ruse. In this case you resort to ruse in order to make it seem as if divine inspiration necessarily has no public aspect with "observable content and consequences." But a claim of there having been divine inspiration is not essentially different from a claim that an act is one of charity.

The claim of divine inspiration is certainly as observable as is a claim that an act is one of charity. The claim of divine inspiration has as much content as the act of charity claim. And both claims are analyzable in terms of consequences. The divine inspiration claim is tested in terms of the understanding which follows from the inspiration and whether that understanding is compatible with other claims and understandings about the supposed divinity which allegedly did the claimed inspiration. The charity claim is tested in terms of the concepts associated with the notion of charity.

That is sufficient to demonstrate that the analogy succeeds.

But, there is also this: There can have been an act of charity without it having been claimed to have been an act of charity. There can have been a divine inspiration without it being claimed to have been a divine inspiration. An act not claimed to be an act of charity can, with analysis-provided reason, be called an act of charity. A divinely inspired understanding not claimed to be divinely inspired can, with analysis-provided reason, be called an understanding that was divinely inspired. And, yet, a person can have reason to be skeptical in both cases. And then there is the then-what.

All of this actually relates to the nature and role of evidence. It frankly does not matter whether failure to understand this point is a consequence of an unwillingness or an inability, because that failure to understand is the same across both the unwillingness and the unable contexts.

“Added” is exactly the point. For a claim of non-human origin, the added public discriminator would be some observable consequence that is more likely if the claim is true than if it’s false. Nothing you’ve proposed functions that way. You’ve offered no observation about Paul’s letters, language, arguments, or transmission that would look different under “divine origin” than under ordinary human authorship. Without that delta, there is no evidential addition.

A spoken claim is public; the source it asserts is not. An act of charity is public at the level that matters: resources move, harms are reduced, beneficiaries can be identified, opportunity costs are borne. Those are observable consequences even if we debate motive. By contrast, “divine inspiration” is a source attribution. It yields no distinct observable pattern in grammar, genre, rhetoric, or manuscript history that cannot arise from human cognition. Public claim ≠ public discriminator.

Analyzing consequences is correct; what matters is whether those consequences distinguish the hypotheses. “Understanding that follows” does not distinguish: originality, coherence, moral exhortation, and community formation all occur in purely human literature. “Compatibility with prior claims about God” is circular—tradition-dependent coherence is not evidence for a non-human source. For charity, consequences such as measurable benefit and costly prosocial behavior are discriminators between “charity” and “self-serving show.” For inspiration, you have offered no discriminator between “non-human source” and “human cognition.”

It isn’t. Charity is an act-type with observable criteria at the level of outcomes; divine inspiration is a source-type without unique observable criteria at the level of artifacts. One is empirically tractable, the other is empirically underdetermined. That asymmetry breaks the analogy.

Inferring charity without a claim works because the world looks different when charity occurs: there are identifiable beneficiaries, counterfactuals (“what if no one acted?”) change outcomes, and we can rule out alternatives by public facts. Inferring “divine inspiration” without a claim fails for lack of such differences. The same textual and historical features are fully explained by human psychology, culture, and transmission. Ockham’s razor applies: do not multiply causes beyond necessity. When two hypotheses predict the same observations, the simpler human-cause hypothesis is warranted.

The role of evidence is to alter relative likelihoods between competing explanations using publicly checkable observations. On that standard, nothing you’ve identified shifts probability toward “non-human origin.” Appeals to “understanding,” “compatibility,” or repeated accusations of ruse do not add discriminators; they reframe the question away from testable consequences. We have addressed this repeatedly: without observations that would look different if a divine source were real, the origin claim remains evidentially idle.

Unfortunately, that probably is a good way of describing how too much clinical testing is actually done.

It is unfortunate that the thinking behind such design is very much that shallow.

Blinding, double blinding, triple blinding, and so-called randomized control do not make the thinking behind such design less shallow.

The deeper thinking is that which, if it occurs, is conducted in terms of the possibilities that are identified and their being controlled for as variables.

One (or part of the) explanation for why there is a reproducibility problem today is that it is too often erroneously assumed that statistics (or a sufficiently large repetition) can ever effectively obviate the need for/the importance of the identification and control of variables.

Apparent anomalies can be extremely important and are not to be dismissed simply for being anomalous. The same might even be more so the case for what appears to be a lesser probability.

That’s a caricature. In real trials the formal setup is not “drug works vs it doesn’t” in the vague sense. It is a specified null hypothesis (no difference on a defined endpoint at a defined time) versus an alternative with an effect size, variance assumptions, power, and α-level. Protocols preregister primary and secondary endpoints, inclusion/exclusion criteria, stratification factors, covariate adjustments, interim looks, and stopping rules. That is not hand-waving; it is the standard architecture of modern RCTs.

It’s the opposite. Good trial design encodes mechanistic and clinical reasoning up front: which endpoint is clinically meaningful, what minimal clinically important difference to detect, what confounders to control, how to handle missing data, and how to control family-wise error for multiple comparisons. Shallow designs exist in the wild, but they are rejected by competent IRBs, regulators, and journals.

Randomization and blinding are not cosmetic; they are the core tools that neutralize selection bias, regression to the mean, placebo effects, observer bias, and differential co-interventions. They don’t replace thinking—they operationalize it. Without them, “control of variables” collapses into unmeasurable confounding.

Exactly—and RCTs do that by design: restriction (eligibility criteria), blocking/stratification, prespecified covariate adjustment, and sensitivity analyses. You don’t get better control of latent variables than random assignment plus adequate sample size; that’s why randomization is the gold-standard method for balancing both measured and unmeasured factors.

Reproducibility failures concentrate in underpowered, exploratory, or observational work. Large, well-run Phase 3 RCTs specify variables in advance, lock analysis plans, and routinely fail to confirm Phase 2 signals—precisely because they do not assume “statistics obviate control.” They embed control: randomization, blinding, allocation concealment, intention-to-treat, prespecified endpoints, multiplicity control, independent DSMBs, and replication across independent trials and sites.

Correct—outliers and low-probability findings can be signal or noise. That’s why credible evidence treats them as hypothesis-generating until replicated under prespecified conditions with correction for multiple testing. Anecdotal anomalies aren’t elevated to “cause” without showing they systematically reappear when bias and confounding are controlled.

Translating this back to Paul: even if you insist that trial practice is more nuanced than “works vs doesn’t,” the evidential criterion stands. A “divine origin” hypothesis is useful only if it predicts observable patterns different from ordinary human authorship—distinct content, form, or transmission features that survive controls for bias and culture. You have offered none. By the same standards that separate real drug effects from placebo and noise, “not of human origin” adds no discriminating evidence and remains an unfalsifiable add-on to an otherwise human record.

NHC

 

[NoHolyCows]

Paul does NOT claim that his understanding was CAUSED by divine inspiration.

Paul does NOT claim that his understanding can be understood only by those who (claim to) have had an experience of being divinely inspired.

Paul emphasizes the importance of understanding.

Paul emphasizes that the importance of understanding supersedes whatever importance that there might be attributable to inspiration.

The understanding with which Paul is concerned is that expressed as what he refers to as the good news about God, humans, and the relationship between God and humans as well as between humans themselves.

By Paul’s own reckoning, the understanding regarding the relationship between God and humans as well as between humans is of immeasurably greater importance than is Paul’s inspiration.

According to Paul, it is right to love the neighbor/stranger as oneself.

According to Paul, there is no need to prove in any fashion that it is right and good to act with love for the sake of the neighbor/stranger.

That love is NOT done for the sake of community.

That love is NOT done for the sake or benefit of oneself.

That love is done for the sake of the neighbor/stranger, and that love is NOT justified or warranted or justifiable or warrantable as a consequence of anything other than having faith that it is right and good to act with love for the sake of the neighbor/stranger.

An act of this love is justified by and arises from the faith which holds that love is to be done for the sake of love made manifest as/by being for the sake of an other person.

This acting with love for the sake of love as being for the sake of an other person - this faith in the rightness and goodness of this love - is prior to any and all physical science. It is also prior to the concerns and judgments of any and all courts.

This is an example of being justified by faith. That faith - in the form of its possible instantiations - is always to be tested by means of concepts and responses.

That means that the manifestation of the justifying faith is never actually complete, although the faith is, nonetheless, what always justifies holding that it is right and good to act with love for the sake of an other person.

Who has this faith?

Here’s the bottom line, Micheal. Paul makes a public origin claim—“not of human origin”—about the message he preached. Public origin claims are evaluated by public criteria. In every domain where we separate cause from conviction—history, science, and law—the standard is the same: what observable facts would look different if the claim were true? If a message truly arrived by non-human revelation, we would expect at least one discriminating indicator in the record—features of language, content, or transmission that cannot be adequately accounted for by ordinary human processes. What we actually have are fully human artifacts: letters that use normal Greco-Roman epistolary forms; arguments that proceed by analogy, citation, and rhetoric; and a manuscript history marked by the familiar mix of copying, correction, and interpolation found in other ancient texts. None of that is anomalous, and none of it turns into evidence of revelation by calling it “inspiration.” Whether or not Paul felt inspired is beside the evidential point; inner experiences are not public markers. Your own repeated concessions—that understanding is human, that inspiration does not cause the content, and that the content should be judged on its merits—settle the matter. Judge the content on human reasons, and it stands or falls as human philosophy and ethics, much of which has clear parallels elsewhere. Judge the origin claim, and it remains unfalsified, unfalsifiable, and evidentially idle.

Invoking “authority,” “love,” or “trans-perspectival understanding” does not change these facts. Ethical importance is not evidential weight. Accusing me of ruse or disingenuousness also changes nothing; those are labels, not counter-evidence, and every time you tack to them you confirm that the substantive tests have already been met: there is no observable discriminator separating “divine revelation” from ordinary composition here. In science, a causal hypothesis earns its keep only if it increases predictive fit beyond rivals. In court, testimony is weighed against corroboration and physical facts; sincerity without corroboration never becomes proof. By those same neutral methods, Paul’s origin claim contributes nothing knowable. Keep his best moral counsel if you like—it is assessable and adoptable on human grounds—but the moment you try to cash “not of human origin” as something more than a personal article of faith, the account is empty.

NHC

 

[steve_bank]

There's no issue here...not for the Theist at least. When we hear of similar claims about being special -in context to the bible, it emphasises there is only one 'Real McCoy'.

The "Heard it before" notion is a hatching of agenda ideas that created copies of the biblical narrative e.g. counterfeit gods or mimicking Gods attributes, like satan portrayed himself to be, for example.

Sounding similar i.e. '"hearing the narrative before..' .does not make it a logical issue "standard" because it's your (plural) particular perspective.

(Apologies, NoHolyCows. I will reply back to you at some point. I'm not good with long posts on my phone).

Back then do you think you walked down to the corner and picked a newspaper or a book?

From a search wax tablets were common and cheap. Writing on broken pottery.

Papyrus.. Parchment and vellum. Producing a book was expensive in time, labor, and materials.

Word of mouth was how news propagated. Caravans and individual travelogs. Oral communications.

AI Overview
Estimates suggest that Judea had a low overall literacy rate during Jesus' time, similar to the rest of the ancient world
. However, literacy was significantly higher among Jewish men due to religious emphasis on reading the Torah, and a basic education system existed in synagogues.
General literacy rates

Small, literate minority: Most scholars believe that only about 5–10% of the male Jewish population in Roman Palestine was functionally literate, meaning they could read and write proficiently.

Functionally literate means reading and writing, not comprehension.

Paul would have heard stories.

 

[NoHolyCows]

There's no issue here...not for the Theist at least. When we hear of similar claims about being special -in context to the bible, it emphasises there is only one 'Real McCoy'.

The "Heard it before" notion is a hatching of agenda ideas that created copies of the biblical narrative e.g. counterfeit gods or mimicking Gods attributes, like satan portrayed himself to be, for example.

Sounding similar i.e. '"hearing the narrative before..' .does not make it a logical issue "standard" because it's your (plural) particular perspective.

(Apologies, NoHolyCows. I will reply back to you at some point. I'm not good with long posts on my phone).

Two clarifications settle this. First, “something not seen or heard before” was never a rigid requirement. The methodological rule is broader and neutral: if you advance a causal claim—here, “not of human origin”—it must make the surviving facts more probable than they would be on the competing human-origin account. That is how claims are tested in science, in history, and in court. Novelty is one possible discriminator, but so are any other publicly checkable markers that favor the non-human hypothesis over the human one. Without some such differential marker, an origin claim has no evidential traction regardless of anyone’s theology.

Second, invoking “counterfeits,” “mimicry,” or “only one real McCoy” is a doctrinal move, not evidence. Labeling all similar phenomena “imitations” does not explain anything about the artifacts we actually have; it simply immunizes the claim from disconfirmation. An explanation that cannot be told apart from its rivals by what we can observe is unfalsifiable and therefore unusable in public analysis. By the Bible’s own lights, “signs and wonders” aren’t reliable discriminators—false prophets can produce them—so prodigies cannot do the evidential work here either. That concession forces the same conclusion I’ve stated from the start: to warrant “not of human origin,” you need some independent discriminator, and none is present.

Turn to the record. Paul’s letters are ordinary human artifacts by every examinable criterion: normal Koine Greek; standard Greco-Roman letter structure; arguments from shared scriptures and lived disputes; and a manuscript transmission with the expected spectrum of human copying variants. Those are exactly what the human-origin hypothesis predicts. The non-human-origin hypothesis predicts nothing in this corpus that the human hypothesis doesn’t already account for at least as well. That is why, by the only methods that bind people who don’t already share your creed, the origin claim remains an article of faith, not a warranted historical conclusion. Keep whatever moral counsel you find valuable on human grounds; but the moment you try to cash “not of human origin” as a public fact, the evidence doesn’t pay out.

NHC

 

[DBT]

There's no issue here...not for the Theist at least. When we hear of similar claims about being special -in context to the bible, it emphasises there is only one 'Real McCoy'.

The "Heard it before" notion is a hatching of agenda ideas that created copies of the biblical narrative e.g. counterfeit gods or mimicking Gods attributes, like satan portrayed himself to be, for example.

Sounding similar i.e. '"hearing the narrative before..' .does not make it a logical issue "standard" because it's your (plural) particular perspective.

(Apologies, NoHolyCows. I will reply back to you at some point. I'm not good with long posts on my phone).

There is an issue here.

We have a claim that a set of works is 'not the work of man,' that it comes from God, yet the work demonstrably includes Greek philosophy and other 'works of man.'

So we have a contradiction, where if one is true the other can't be true.