- RLD on Did you bring an Umbrella? (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday, 3/15)?: “We spent most of our time in Sunday School discussing Jacob and Esau. The teacher suggested that rather than tying ourselves in knots trying to justify Jacob’s actions, we could read this as a story of sin and strife followed by repentance and reconciliation (Joseph too). That makes it easier to see Christ in this part of the Old Testament. That did make wonder: if we’re not going to insist on Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob being perfect people, why did God choose them to be the founders of the House of Israel and the prototypes of exalted beings (“…sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob…”)? One possible answer is “nothing.” God deliberately chose ordinary, flawed people to demonstrate he can exalt anyone who will let him. But I think the fierce desire they had for a close relationship with God and the blessings of that relationship was part of it. That got me thinking about how that desire can play a bigger role in my life.” Mar 19, 10:40
- on Probabilities and Biblical Studies: “Aragorn, that is a sparkling gem. I addressed the notion of probability in biblical studies as part of my recent FAIR presentation. It’s just the wrong way to think about most of what that field is doing. The ability of scholars operating with a specific positivist paradigm to generate narratives of biblical history and find reasons in the text to support their narratives, does not make those narratives any more probable than anything else. The lack of extrabiblical attestation for the existence of Job does not make his existence improbable, and references to him in the bible do not make his existence probable. There is no mechanism for calculating probability for the vast majority of the output of biblical studies. In the words of Alan Torrance, “the assessment of probability is in no small measure a function of one’s epistemic base.”” Mar 19, 09:36
- on Probabilities and Biblical Studies: “Given the other comments, I don’t know if this is on topic, but the post reminded me of a comment made in this past Sunday’s Gospel Doctrine class, where a well read member said that after reading a particular book, he believes that Joseph’s coat of many colors was really the garment made for Adam when he was kicked out of the Garden of Eden. I wasn’t going to encourage the class to go down the rabbit hole, but to me that sounded like someone stacking improbabilities on improbabilities to hear what they wanted to hear.” Mar 19, 09:20
- on Did you bring an Umbrella? (Or What Did Church Lead You to Think About Yesterday, 3/15)?: “In the spirit of you post, which was lovely, I’ll share my experience from Sunday. I received a doozy, although well-intentioned, of a talk about how if we read anything even slightly uncomfortable about the church online, even if it by a church member, historian, true, backed-up, etc., the moment we recognize anything negative or that causes us stress we should close down the computer/phone and go read our scriptures until the feeling is gone because that is Satan working on us. There are times in the past I would have found this deeply upsetting because I find God by working through cognitive dissonance not ignoring it. But I know the speaker to be a extremely good, dedicated, generous person who has on a regular basis given the shirt off his back to help others. So I can accept that this is true for him, and isn’t it wonderful that he has found a path that works so well and has given him such great ways to help others. He’s living the right life for him. It used to be painful to me that I have to accept that his journey of faith is right for him while he sees mine as being influenced by Satan, since cognitive dissonance is a growth opportunity for me. I didn’t feel that way on Sunday though. I’m happy for him and beyond that I’m kind of apathetic about it all.” Mar 18, 22:23
- on Probabilities and Biblical Studies: “On chained probabilities, I suspect people are especially likely to overestimate the certainty of proposition X if it was taught to them as the consensus when they were undergrads (or earlier) and they didn’t have the tools to really evaluate it for themselves. I almost finished a physics major before switching to economics, and there was absolutely no disagreement among experts in the field about anything I was taught. I imagine I would have been well into grad school before I encountered anything where there was. Economics was rather different, to say the least, and biblical studies even more so. We all do the best we can with the evidence that’s actually available in our fields, but humility is needed. Hoosier and Aragorn, thanks for making my day. :)” Mar 18, 16:57
- on Probabilities and Biblical Studies: “@Mark Ashurst-McGee: I wouldn’t be surprised if Set Theory gets us closer to the realm of the Gods than almost any academic endeavor, and if Georg Cantor wasn’t a prophet in some way–even if he did go crazy. @Jonathan: One item on my ever-expanding get-to-it-before-I-die list is to run a survey of ancient historians/biblical scholars and have them give some kind of expert probabilistic estimate for the various theories in their field, and then hopefully have a large enough sample size that I can run interrater reliability statistics, etc. Not to make some kind of point, it would just be fun. And yes, while I think anti-evolutionist types sometimes abuse the “and then we found this one bone and it overthrew everything!” Sometimes we really do find a bone and it overthrows (nearly) everything (within limits). Aragon and Hoosier: I second the lol; that was beautiful.” Mar 18, 12:42
- on Probabilities and Biblical Studies: “Aragorn, Slow clap for this comment and for Mark Shea! Made me chuckle for sure.” Mar 18, 12:33
- on Probabilities and Biblical Studies: “From Mark Shea: “Experts in source-criticism now know that The Lord of the Rings is a redaction of sources ranging from the Red Book of Westmarch (W) to Elvish Chronicles (E) to Gondorian records (G) to orally transmitted tales of the Rohirrim (R). The conflicting ethnic, social and religious groups which preserved these stories all had their own agendas, as did the “Tolkien” (T) and “Peter Jackson” (PJ) redactors, who are often in conflict with each other as well but whose conflicting accounts of the same events reveals a great deal about the political and religious situations which helped to form our popular notions about Middle Earth and the so-called “War of the Ring.”. Into this mix are also thrown a great deal of folk materials about a supposed magic “ring” and some obscure figures named “Frodo” and “Sam”. In all likelihood, these latter figures are totems meant to personify the popularity of Aragorn with the rural classes. Because The Lord of the Rings is a composite of sources, we may be quite certain that “Tolkien” (if he ever existed) did not “write” this work in the conventional sense, but that it was assembled over a long period of time by someone else of the same name. We know this because a work of the range, depth, and detail of The Lord of the Rings is far beyond the capacity of any modern expert in source-criticism to ever imagine creating themselves. …. Of course, the “Ring” motif appears in countless folk tales and is to be discounted altogether. Equally dubious are the “Gandalf” narratives, which appear to be legends of a shamanistic figure, introduced to the narrative by W out of deference to local Shire cultic practice. Finally, we can only guess at what the Sauron sources might have revealed, since they must have been destroyed by victors who give a wholly negative view of this doubtlessly complex, warm, human, and many-sided figure. Scholars now know, of course, that the identification of Sauron with “pure evil” is simply absurd. Indeed, many scholars have undertaken a “Quest for the Historical Sauron” and are searching the records with growing passion and urgency for any lore connected with the making of the One Ring. “It’s all legendary, of course,” says Dr. S. Aruman, “Especially the absurd tale of Frodo the Nine-Fingered. After all, the idea of anyone deliberately giving up Power is simply impossible . . .”” Mar 18, 11:13
- on Probabilities and Biblical Studies: “Was the eponymous lamb in the Mary’s Lamb tale originally described as “little”? What was the coloration of its fleece? Why did the author choose to omit these details? Recent work on the apocryphal Mary’s Lamb tale has convincingly demonstrated its dependence on a children’s jingle popular in the twentieth century. This would, of course, provide a terminus post quem for the earliest version of the Mary’s Lamb tale. Critics of the hypothesis note that the parallels between the children’s jingle and the Mary’s Lamb tale comprise solely (a) the presence of a principal character named Mary, and (b) her ownership of a lamb. Notably, the received version of the Mary’s Lamb tale makes no reference to the diminutive size of the lamb nor the coloration of its coat, both of which figure prominently in the children’s jingle. More importantly, the Mary’s Lamb tale directly contradicts the children’s jingle regarding the proximity of the lamb to Mary. Compare the children’s jingle (“everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go”) with the clear alienation of the lamb from Mary which forms the central narrative element of the Mary’s Lamb tale. Furthermore, the children’s jingle makes no reference to any second cousin. In this essay, we argue that the parallels between the Mary’s Lamb tale and the children’s jingle are strong enough to convincingly indicate a direction of influence. The divergences are best explained by positing a significant revision of the tale (or perhaps even its original authorship) during the twenty-first century. This accounts for the divergences from the children’s jingle while retaining and explaining the convergences between the two writings. The authors’ omission of the lamb’s size and coloration in the Mary’s Lamb tale was, we propose, prompted by changing attitudes towards physical stature and skin coloration in the early twenty-first century. The lamb being “white as snow” was likely viewed as overly specific and too exclusionary in the divided racial environment of the early twenty-first century United States, thus limiting the rhetorical reach and force of the pericope. The addition of the treacherous second cousin, meanwhile, allowed the author to critique kinism, which was a growing fringe ideology during that same period. As we will demonstrate, this theory parsimoniously harmonizes… Just kidding, this is good stuff.” Mar 18, 09:21
- on Probabilities and Biblical Studies: “That’s been more or less my experience with doing philological work in my own field. You come up with the best model you can based on the evidence you have, but there’s never as much evidence as you really need, and sometimes weirdly unlikely things actually happen. The proposed solutions can be fascinating and even compelling, but the uncertainty is real. Humility about one’s own work and charity towards others’ work are needed. It’s a problem more broadly throughout the humanities. When I’m reading secondary literature, I’ll come across what are in effect statistical claims for which no thought has been given to statistically sound evidence. One way to avoid a replication crisis in your discipline is to ignore the idea of replication altogether.” Mar 18, 09:07
