Month: March 2011

The Argument from Silence

[T]he “argument from silence” is always a most untrustworthy way of attempting to throw doubts on facts for which there is positive evidence. Are we to doubt the existence of Milton or of Jeremy Taylor—of Bacon or of Shakspeare—because these contemporaries make no allusion to each other in their voluminous writings?

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The Best Answer to Strauss

The best answer to Strauss is to show that a clear, consistent, and probable narrative can be formed out of that of the four Gospels, without more violence, I will venture to say, than any historian ever found necessary to harmonize four contemporary chronicles of the same events; …

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Richard Whately: The folly of following fancy and taste

[W]hen each person brings his own candle to the sundial, to throw the shadow which ever way he will, there will be endless differences as to the conclusions embraced and rejected, precisely because the principle is the same, of each following his own fancy and taste.

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Sir Oliver Lodge: On the real position of skeptical scientists

It ought … to be admitted at once by [skeptical] Natural Philosophers that the unscientific character of prayer for rain depends really not upon its conflict with any known physical law, since it need involve no greater interference with the order of nature than is implied in a request to a gardener to water the garden—it does not really depend upon the impossibility of causing rain to fall when otherwise it might not—but upon the disbelief of science in any power who can and will attend and act.

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