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Chapter Twelve - The Miracles of the Bible: The Quintessential Foundations of Paranormal Beliefs in Western Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2019

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Summary

The writers of the New Testament cannot be regarded as trustworthy witnesses to the resurrection— first because they were not eye-witnesses; second, because they were the slaves of a bewildering Old Testament exegesis and numberless current superstitions; and third, because they had little or no conception of any distinction between objective fact and subjective impression.

— Charles Gorham, The First Easter Dawn (1908)

We entertain a suspicion concerning any matter of fact, when the witnesses contradict each other; when they are but few, or of a doubtful character; when they have an interest in what they affirm. […] There are many other particulars of the same kind, which may diminish or destroy the force of any argument, derived from human testimony.

— David Hume, Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding (1748)

What we remember about an incident can actually be changed after the fact. When this happens, the witness truthfully testifies to remembering something that never happened.

Terence Hines, Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (2003)

The crux of the religionist assault on science and anthropology is the assertion that their supernatural and paranormal view of the world and universe based upon a Christian “evidence base” and “positive theistic arguments” provides a superior explanatory framework. In doing so, as noted before, religionists have made their theistic premises a legitimate subject for scientific and anthropological scrutiny in the tradition of systematic skepticism. In this chapter, therefore, I focus on the core premises of this “evidence base” and attempt to find out how well they hold up under such scrutiny and whether or not the religionist claim about the superiority of their supernatural framework, or what the theistic philosopher Plantinga calls an “Augustinian Science,” has any evidentiary justification. The approach is the same one I use when evaluating similar types of evidence in the context of any other anthropological analyses of supernatural and paranormal claims. This entails an examination of historical records, textual analysis in relation to anthropological findings, use of the principles of evolutionary and cognitive psychology, prior probabilities, the presence or absence of disconfirming evidence, and the availability of non-supernatural explanations that accord with the empirical evidence.

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Religion, Supernaturalism, the Paranormal and Pseudoscience
An Anthropological Critique
, pp. 295 - 312
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2019

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