Hey all! Due to tomorrow being the Fourth of July and an official holiday, we will not be meeting. Enjoy having a full day to yourselves 🤙🏽 Make up call TBD 🙏🏽 See you next week🔥

Hey y’all, not too long ago, I saw a video on a pastor named Paul Vanderklay’s YouTube channel where he had a discussion with a guy named John who runs a podcast called “Christianity on the Spectrum” (what I’ll be discussing from the video is roughly from the time 14:10 to 23:40). John is an expert at counter-forensics, which he claims is a deep analysis of how does/can one know things in historical reconstruction, and of what processes does one follow to accurately reconstruct the past. It seems that in his work he generally is doing analysis on events recently occurred (especially compared to ancient historical documents). I’ll give a definition I got from an AI overview, which is: A counter forensicist is a professional who reviews, critiques, and challenges evidence from an initial forensic investigation. They look for mistakes, biases, or wrong conclusions in crime scene reports. This helps ensure that the legal system is fair and that evidence is accurate. In the video (which is attached to this post), John essentially speaks on how he at one point accepted much of critical scholarship on the New Testament. Later when he began to reflect on his views on NT critical scholarship in light of counter forensics, he realized that a lot of the things said by the critical scholarship were erroneous, such as their strong claims for particular events not occurring and arguments against traditional authorship. However, he also thought that the claims made by the Christian apologists were erroneous as well. One of the things he mentioned in the video that is specifically problematic to him is when scholars use stylometric analysis to make strong claims about authorship, because the New Testament is only 30,000 words, which he claims is not enough data to draw from and claims that the New Testament does not have enough of the types of data required to do that kind of analysis. He additionally seemed to think that strong claims about Jesus did or did not say are (at least often) speculative. Do you guys have any thoughts on this? Have you heard this critique of New Testament scholarship or critiques like it? The video is linked below for those who'd want to watch (like I said earlier, I'm drawing from roughly 14:10 - 23:40):

A common internet trope we hear all the time is, “Well, I’m not convinced,” or “That doesn’t persuade me,” or “That doesn’t sound true to me.” And a lot of people get tripped up by this, because they think their job now is to sell the person on the truth of their position. But that already grants too much. We need to distinguish between the psychology of evidence and the epistemology of evidence. The psychology of evidence has to do with how evidence feels to you. Whether it moves you. Whether it strikes you as persuasive. Whether it produces some internal sense of certainty. But the epistemology of evidence has to do with whether the evidence actually supports the claim. Those are not the same thing. Merely reporting your psychological state might be interesting. It might tell us something about your background, your biases, your assumptions, your social environment, or your emotional resistance to a conclusion. But by itself, it has no philosophical weight. The question is not, “Am I convinced?” The question is, “What should convince me?” Notice how much work the word should is doing there. “Should” means we are no longer treating our private psychology as the standard. We are now submitting ourselves to a rule, a norm, a guideline, or an authority outside of our immediate feelings. And in this case, the authority is reason. Because none of us are ideal observers. There is no situation where two human beings are reasoning from a perfectly neutral, bias-free standpoint. We all come with emotions, desires, fears, incentives, background assumptions, biological pressures, and psychological complexity. So the point of reason is not that it magically makes us unbiased. The point of reason is that it gives us a way to regulate our biases. It gives us a standard by which we can discipline our psychology, rather than letting our psychology sit on the throne and call itself rationality. And this is where the epistemology of evidence matters. In philosophy, evidence is not just “whatever makes me feel persuaded.” Evidence is a relation of support. One proposition is evidence for another proposition when it raises, supports, or increases the probability of that proposition being true.

Docx. and PDF attached. -Jay49er

OH YA 🔥 Its that time… …another round of Q&A calls 🙌🏽 Join us this morning to go over any and all questions you may have. This is your chance to dig deep, find clarity, and and improve your knowledge-base. See you all very soon 🤞🏽