Shrunk wrote:

Thomas Eshuis wrote:

Shrunk wrote:More high comedy, from WL Craig, professional doofus for Christ:

The writings of Herodotus furnish a test case for the rate of legendary accumulation, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states for these to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be 'unbelievable'; more generations are needed.

For fuck sake. There are people walking around today who are convinced there are pedophile rings operating on the planet Mars. That took a matter of days, not generations.

You'll note that Craig doesn't even attempt to explain/defend, why legends can't accumulate in less than 3 generations.

Well, some professor said so, apparently.

There's also a shit tonne of professors who say resurrections don't happen, but for some reason (not to do with Craig's personal presuppositions, no siree Bob) that gets swept aside.

One of Craig's favority fallacies: arguing through appeals to authority quotes. Often quote-mined as well.

Remember, this is the type of man who, for years now, has been saying that the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin model shows that the universe could only have been created from nothing by God, despite being told directly by cosmologists (and indirectly by Alan Guth himself) that this is not the case. And who claims that neuroscience shows that dogs cannot experience pain. At a certain point the distinction between ignorance, dishonesty, and plain stupidity no longer signifies.

Shrunk wrote:Remember, this is the type of man who, for years now, has been saying that the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin model shows that the universe could only have been created from nothing by God, despite being told directly by cosmologists (and indirectly by Alan Guth himself) that this is not the case. And who claims that neuroscience shows that dogs cannot experience pain. At a certain point the distinction between ignorance, dishonesty, and plain stupidity no longer signifies.

Let's not forget:
Defending genocide.
Being disengenuous and hypocritical when it comes to accepting challenges to a debate.
Frequently admitting that he doesn't care what the evidence says.

Oh, and how could I forget:

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/gener ... 27762.html

The funny and ironic thing about Craig and the BVG theorem is that the inflationary cosmologies to which the BVG theorem applies, are all multiverse models*, which Craig claims are all fantasies invented to avoid the "fine tuning problem".

So the very cosmological model Craig favors because he can construe it to fit with his finite-past-argument, undermines his fine tuning-argument.

* The inflationary cosmologies all create an infinite number of pocket universes.

The idea that the "empty tomb" is some kind of uncontested historical fact is not even supported by scripture, let alone the historical record.

If the tomb of an executed criminal was found empty and his followers were running about saying that the criminal had risen from the dead and was wandering the countryside, the Romans would quite clearly have had two possible responses:

1. This criminal quite clearly survived his execution and is at large, continuing to commit the crimes for which he was sentenced to death.

2. This criminal's followers likely stole the body (a capital offence at the time) in order to perpetrate a macabre hoax to continue his treasonous legacy.

Either way, the Roman authorities would be very fucking interested indeed in any person claiming to be in contact with the "resurrected" Jesus. Yet this is not the attitude recorded in the scriptures. The scriptures depict the Romans as completely uninterested in the followers of this alleged Messiah, viewing the whole phenomenon as just a theological squabble within the Jewish community. Roman persecution doesn't appear to be a thing (even in the Gospels) until Christianity picks up steam and the extreme pacifist views of the early Church present a threat to the administration of the empire.

It goes without saying that there's no historical record of either a manhunt for the survivor of a crucifixion or a manhunt for a bunch of seditious graverobbers.

I enjoy Richard Carrier's response to this fallacy of historical legendary accumulation. He cites the crash of a weather balloon at Roswell, Mew Mexico in 1947 which, within a single generation, had given rise to a UFO myth packaged with a sweeping government conspiracy. Three generations gone by, and in spite of thorough debunking by actual specialists in the field, the myth generated by the initial hysteria is known throughout the world, having entirely supplanted the true events, which are almost entirely forgotten in the popular culture.