This vital study offers a new interpretation of Hume's famous "Of Miracles," which notoriously argues against the possibility of miracles. By situating Hume's popular argument in the context of the 18th century debate on miracles, Earman shows Hume's argument to be largely unoriginal and chiefly without merit where it is original. Yet Earman constructively conceives how progress can be made on the issues that Hume's essay so provocatively posed about the ability of eyewitness testimony to establish the credibility of marvelous (...) and miraculous events. (shrink)

John Meier distinguishes ‘the real Jesus’ from ‘the historical Jesus’. Meier claims that whatever happened to the real Jesus after his death, his resurrection cannot belong to the historical Jesus because that event is in principle not open to the observation of any observer. But why think that the resurrection is not observable in this way? Meier finds justification in Gerald O'Collins' view that although the resurrection of Jesus is a real event, it is not an event in space and (...) time and hence should not be called historical, since a necessary condition of historical occurrences is that they are known to have happened in our space‐time continuum. Is this a good argument for the resurrection's being in principle excludable from the historical Jesus? A close examination of the argument reveals that it is not and that Meier's adoption of such a procedure contradicts Meier's own historical methodology. (shrink)

How do historians, comparative linguists, biblical and textual critics and evolutionary biologists establish beliefs about the past? How do they know the past? This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that offer scientific knowledge of the past. Using the analytic tools of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science the book covers such topics as evidence, theory, methodology, explanation, determination and underdetermination, coincidence, contingency and counterfactuals in historiography. Aviezer Tucker's central claim is that historiography as a scientific discipline should (...) be thought of as an effort to explain the evidence of past events. He also emphasizes the similarity between historiographic methodology to Darwinian evolutionary biology. This is an important, fresh approach to historiography and will be read by philosophers, historians and social scientists interested in the methodological foundations of their disciplines. (shrink)

This is the third volume in Alvin Plantinga's trilogy on the notion of warrant, which he defines as that which distinguishes knowledge from true belief. In this volume, Plantinga examines warrant's role in theistic belief, tackling the questions of whether it is rational, reasonable, justifiable, and warranted to accept Christian belief and whether there is something epistemically unacceptable in doing so. He contends that Christian beliefs are warranted to the extent that they are formed by properly functioning cognitive faculties, thus, (...) insofar as they are warranted, Christian beliefs are knowledge if they are true. (shrink)

Over the past fifty years, a number of approaches to the recovery of the multiple pasts of Hinduism have held the field. These include that of the discipline of History of Religions as it is constituted in North America as well as those of the Hindu nationalists, the col and post-colonial historians, and the Subaltern Studies School. None of these approaches have proven satisfactory because, for methodological or ideological reasons, none have adequately addressed human agency or historical change in their (...) accounts of the pasts out of which modern-day Hinduism has emerged. The Hindu nationalist historians hark back to an extended Vedic golden age in which religious practice remained unchanged until the corruptions spawned by the Turkish invasions of the eleventh century. Many Western indologists and historians of religion specializing in Hinduism never leave the unalterable ideal worlds of the scriptures they interpret to investigate the changing real-world contexts out of which those texts emerged. The colonial and postcolonial historians focus on the past two hundred years as the period in which all of the categories through which India continues to interpret itself—including Hinduism—were imposed upon it from without. Adducing examples of Hindu practitioners and thinkers from the colonial period, subaltern theorists and others argue that historical thought is itself alien to the authentic Indian mind. This article suggests a number of interpretive strategies for retrieving the multiple Hinduisms of the past and of the medieval period in particular as that time out of which most modern-day practices of Hinduism emerged. These include an increased emphasis on non-scriptural sources and a focus on regional traditions. (shrink)

Reasons for believing that Jesus rose from the dead.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Goal and Scope of the Argument The Concept of a Miracle Textual Assumptions Background Facts: Death and Burial The Salient Facts: W, D, and P Probabilistic Cumulative Case Arguments: Nature and Structure The Testimony of the Women: Bayes Factor Analysis The Testimony of the Disciples: Bayes Factor Analysis The Conversion of Paul: Bayes Factor Analysis The Collective Force of the Salient Facts Independence Hume's Maxim and Worldview Worries Plantinga's Principle of Dwindling Probabilities Knavery, Folly, (...) and the Love of Wonder Conclusion References. (shrink)

In common with history, all the social sciences crucially rely on descriptions of the past for their evidence. But when, if ever, is it reasonable to regard such descriptions as true? This book attempts to establish the conditions that warrant belief in historical descriptions. It does so in a non-technical way, analysing numerous illustrations of the different kinds of argument about the past employed by historians and others. The author concludes that no historical description can be finally proved, and that (...) we are only ever justified in believing them for certain practical purposes. This central question has not been addressed in such a thorough and systematic manner before. It draws on recent philosophy of history and will interest philosophers. But the wealth of material and accessibility of the presentation will also make it very valuable for historians and other social scientists concerned with the logic of their disciplines. (shrink)

The rejection of confessional commitments in the study of religion in favor of social-scientific or humanistic theories of religion has produced not unbiased accounts, but reductionist explanations of religious belief and practice with embedded secular biases that preclude the understanding of religious believer-practitioners. These biases derive from assumptions of undemonstrable, dogmatic, metaphysical naturalism or its functional equivalent, an epistemological skepticism about all truth claims of revealed religions. Because such assumptions are so widespread among scholars today, they are not often explicitly (...) articulated. They were overtly asserted by Emile Durkheim in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life , however, and are implicit in the claims of two other thinkers influential in the study of early modern Christianity in recent years, namely Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault. The use of such theories in the history of religion yields secular confessional history, parallel to traditional religious confessional history only with different embedded metaphysical beliefs. If scholars want to understand religious persons such that the latter would recognize themselves in what is said about them, rather than impose their own metaphysical convictions on them, then they should reject metaphysically biased reductionist theories of religion no less than confessional religious assumptions in the practice of their scholarship. Instead, a study of religion guided not by theories but by the question, “What did it mean to them?” and which is particularized in metaphysically neutral ways offers a third alternative that avoids confessional history, whether religious or secular. When carried out consistently for multiple traditions, such an approach can reconstruct disagreements that point beyond description to historical explanation of change over time. (shrink)

L'enquête conduite sur les sources de l'histoire des reliques christiques avait pour premier objet de repérer celles d'entre elles qui pouvaient concerner le linceul de Turin, de façon notamment à fixer le vocabulaire employé. Il a ainsi pu être établi que l'assimilation souvent faite du linceul de Turin avec le mandylion venu d'Edesse à Constantinople en 944 était impossible, les deux reliques étant conservées simultanément à Constantinople à partir d'une date inconnue, peut-être dès le 11e s. Les témoignages faisant état (...) de l'image sur le mandylion d'un corps, et non du seul visage reposent sur une interprétation erronée d'un texte latin maintes fois repris à la fin du Moyen Age. Les textes sont cités avec un contexte suffisamment large pour en éclairer le sens, et ils sont traduits. Ils attestent la présence du linceul à Constantinople avant 1204.The first goal of this inquiry, carried out on sources of the history of Christic relics, was to discover those among them which might involve the Shroud of Turin, notably so as to fix the vocabulary used. It has thus been established that the frequent identification of the Shroud of Turin with the Mandylion coming from Edessa in Constantinople in 944 was impossible, the two relics being simultaneously conserved in Constantinople from an unknown date on, perhaps from the 11th c. on. Later testimony describing the image on the Mandylion as being of a body and not just of a face rely on an erroneous interpretation of a Latin text, oft repeated at the end of the Middle Ages. The texts are cited within a context wide enough to clarify their meaning, and they are translated. They attest the presence of the shroud at Constantinople before 1204.Die Untersuchung über die Quellen der Geschichte der Christusreliquien hatte als erstes Ziel, diejenigen unter ihnen herauszufinden, die das Turiner Grabtuch angehen, um im Besonderen den verwendeten Wortschatz zu fixieren. Auf diese Weise konnte bewiesen werden, dass die oft gemachte Gleichsetzung des Turiner Grabtuches mit dem im Jahre 944 von Edessa nach Konstantinopel transportierten Mandylion unmöglich ist. Beide Reliquien wurden von einem unbekannten Datum an, vielleicht dem 11. Jahrhundert, gleichzeitig in Konstantinopel aufbewahrt. Zeugnisse, die vom Bild eines Körpers, und nicht bloß eines Gesichts auf dem Mandylion sprechen, beruhen auf einer irrtümlichen Interpretation eines lateinischen Textes, der mehrmals im Mittelalter verwendet wurde. Die lateinischen und griechischen Texte sind in einem breiten Kontext erwähnt, der ausreicht, um ihren Sinn zu erhellen, und sie wurden übersetzt. (shrink)