That's a good site.

I have every intention of getting him on the show at some point. Not sure when, but I'd love to have him on, and I'm sure he'd show

Well, you already did, this was a response to your response... I suppose if you want to write a response to the response to your response, you could... but what point would there be if you're just going to repeat yourself?

If you have something new, by all means, go on...

Then by all means, continue...

Yes. It is an excellent expose of some of the flaws in your reasoning, particularly your strawman definition of 'subjective'

Case writes:

i.e. like a mere preference....

But that's not what 'subjective' means here.

Case continues, and corrects your error here:

So you need to start over and correctly define the term, before you can even continue. As long as you refer to it as 'preference' you're failing to understand the term properly.

Paul did not say 'subjective preference" - so you're misrepresenting him here. He's talking about subjective data, as he's defined it above.

Your post here relies on a strawman misinterpretation of what the word means, and a fallacious implication that he prefers mere whinsy over fact.

If you can't present his actual argument correctly, then it's pretty clear that you fear his real argument.

Again, Paul is not saying that he prefers 'subjective preference over objective fact'. You're misrepresenting him yet again.

Most likely because you don't seem to understand the terms you're using...

And he's not saying he prefers subjective reports over 'objective' facts either, he's saying that there are situations where we only have subjective report... and he's showing you aren't even able to recognize when this is the case.

Here's how to best represent the real situation:

you write:

and Case corrects you, here:

Precisely. So please get it straight.

No one is saying that they prefer mere preference over facts, that's your strawman, born of your lack of any real understanding of the terms, or the methods you claim to be using.

I think that you don't understand what the term 'subjective" means, as Case already demonstrated in his response to you. Your definition is a strawman. You need to carefully read his response to your response....

Here's my first post on RR. You're interested in having me on your show?

Thanks, glad you like it.

Well, I didn't know that Paul had written a new reply until this evening. I read it just before you posted part of it on this forum.

To be honest with you, until I logged on to the forum again, I thought that you hadn't read it either. I was planning to quote the same section in your above post as a rebuttal to your accusation that my definition of "subjective" was a "straw man."

Let's set aside for the moment that in those quotations Gottschalk is describing the creation of narrative for the history reader’s benefit. Let's set aside that Gottschalk differentiates between narrative and "historical data" in those quotations. Paul uses those quotations to identify what he means by "subjective." Gottschalk’s key words are: imagination, inspiration and personal experience.

Paul has asserted in our debates and articles that, "there is no such thing as an 'objective historical methodology.'" So, how are we to determine the facts? Paul tells us, in his reply to my original paper, "Do Extraordinary Events Require Extraordinary Evidence?", that "History is a subjective study." (See http://caseagainstfaith.com/articles/extraordinary_events.htm)

So, if "History is a subjective study," how do we do historical research? Using the Law of Inference, Paul's answer is deductively clear: we determine history by imagination, inspiration and personal experience. Sure sounds like preference to me.

To be fair to Paul, almost immediately after declaring with absolute certainty that "History is a subjective study," he declares that it is both and objective and subjective study. (See http://www.caseagainstfaith.com/articles/extraordinary_events.htm)

He is also as adamant in the same article that "there is no such thing as 'objective' measure in history," and in one of his last articles he declares "there is no such thing as an objective historical methodology.” (See http://www.caseagainstfaith.com/articles/historicalmethods.htm)

So where does this leave us? Paul says history is determined both objectively and subjectively, but, he adds, there is no such thing as an objective method for determining history.

This seems to leave us with his original statement, “history is a subjective study." And by “subjective” we mean imagination, inspiration and personal experience.

But this conclusion is based only on his last article. Let’s take a look at some other quotes that give us a clue to Paul’s view of “subjective:”

“But if you ask 10 people how certain we can be that text 'A' is an accurate representation of the original, we will get 10 answers. How certain the accuracy of a document is, is SUBJECTIVE, each person asked that question will give a different answer.”(See http://caseagainstfaith.com/debates/lenardos_debate_10.htm)
In the above quote, it seems by the term “subjective” Paul means “personal opinion.” Let’s go on:

“Yes, history is subjective. If the Revolutionary War had been won by England, you don't think the history books today would portray the revolutionists as "heroes" now do you? So what? You say I'm dismissing history as subjective. I'm simply recognizing that it is what it is.” (See http://caseagainstfaith.com/debates/lenardos_debate_1.htm)

I think this last quote is most telling. In it, Paul shows that by “subjective” he does mean “preference.” He also confuses the commentary about history, with the actual history. Yes, I would agree that much of the commentary that we find in history books is preference. But what of the “facts of history,” are they also determined subjectively? I am not so much concerned whether or not the Sons of Liberty are called “heroes,” as I am with whom actually won the war. How do we make that latter determination? Can we objectively know who won the revolutionary war? Paul’s answer is: "There is no such thing as 'objective' measure in history," and “Yes, history is subjective.” So, I guess his answer would be, “No.”

G. Brady Lenardos

Brady,

You say that you don't care whether the American revolutionaries were heros or not, you are interested in who won the war. Why? Why do you care who won the war? There were surely more people killed in wars you never heard of. Why do you care who won the American Revolutionary war? Among the reasons is that our society has deemed it important to know about the origins of this country. Though there are people that enjoy history for the pure interest of just knowing things that happened, most people, if they have any interest in history at all, are usually most interested in the history that they feel has personal relevance to them today. A son of a WW II fighter pilot may be most interested in WW II history. Or even pre WW II history as far as how the events before it lead to it.

Similarly, a Christian, or even a non-Christian living in a predominatly Christian society may have interest in Roman history because of its relevance to Christianity. I'm no Roman history expert, but I at least know who Constantine was, and I probably wouldn't if he didn't play an important part of the origins of Christianity.

What particular pieces of history someone is interested in is, indeed, pure personal choice, with of course social influence. If our society didn't value knowing about Washington crossing the Delaware, then I probably would have never heard about it.

The papers and debate entries that I wrote prior to reading Gottschalk, I probably did not clearly differentiate between testimony and artifacts. Gottschalk's section "Objectivity vs. Subjectivity" that I quoted part of is good information that helped me to understand these issues better. You would do well to read Gottschalk's book.

I don't Gottschalk's book in front of me at the moment to quote further, but in subsequent paragraphs after the one I quoted, he says that many people have a strong bias against subjective knowledge, as you do. But he says that subjective knowledge is as valuable as objective knowledge.

Artifacts have many advantages. They are indeed objects that can be studied objectivly. Yet, as Gottschalk notes, testimony is often all that is available, there may be no artifacts. We are forced to rely on testamony, despite knowing that testamony has many, many limitations. There are guidelines that help one decide whether to accept a piece of testamony or not, but, there is no magic formula. There is no objective measure. But the guidelines Gottschalk provided are useful. And based on his guidelines, the Gospels fail miserably.

Did you have a particular work of Strobel's in mind? There's _Case for Faith_ (on theological problems like the problem of evil), _Case for a Creator_ (on Creationism), and _Case for Christ_ (on alleged historical evidence for the Resurrection). I've got articles on all three on my site, though the one on Case for Christ is by Earl Doherty, reprinted with his permission.

Note: if you by any chance have heard of _Case for Easter_ and/or _Case for Christmas_, those are just pocket-sized selections from _Case for Christ_.

As far as the pocket-sized ones, my point was, if you put something for Case for Christ up, then the Easter and Christmas pocket books are covered automatically as they are just selections from Case for Christ. Doherty would probably allow you to reprint the same material that I have on my site.

So, as far as Faith and Creator, my papers go... They are currently on my site and on the Internet Infidels. But, I have the rights to publish them anywhere I want. But put something like copyright Internet Infidels, reprinted with permission.

As far as byline, here's the deal. I originally used my real name on my site. But, a couple of years ago, my company was having a bit of hard times, and I was thinking I might need to find a new job. And I wondered if a prospective employer might google me, find my site, and take offense. So I started to use a pen name. But, Internet Infidels prefers real names. So, I wound up inconveniently having my real name there and my pen name on my site. I should probably change it sometime. But, for now, that is what I've got.

So, with articles that are on my site that are also on the Internet Infidels, I simply have no byline at all, other than the copyright Internet Infidels, Inc. So, go with that.

What Harper Collins says is "often used" meaning of subjective, I disagree with. Subjective can indeed use logical analysis, just "fuzzy logic" where the answers are not just 0 and 1.

As far as their definition of objective, they didn't emphasize something you have always claimed about objective, you've claimed that everybody following an objective methodology will get the same results.

I like these definitions from Merrium-Webster Online Dictionary:

Subjective:
4 a (1) : peculiar to a particular individual : PERSONAL (2) : modified or affected by personal views, experience, or background

Objective:
b : of, relating to, or being an object , phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality independent of the mind

We could get into epistemology, how do we know that the keyboard we think we are typing on is really there? I'd rather not go there, but, what is important is that even assuming our senses are reasonably reliable indicators of reality, it is still true that what our senses may see, hear, touch etc. are a distinctly separate entity form the objects themselves. We get an image in our mind (presumably) because of the photons that bounce off objects. But the photons that hit our eyes are not the object itself. My keyboard and CRT are not inside my head. I have in my head a representation of those (presumably) real objects.

Even if you and me are looking at the same keyboard/CRT, you have in your mind a representation of them, and I have in my mind a representation of them. I have no way of knowing if 'blue' looks the same to you as it looks to me. But, based on the fact that everybody who isn't color blind can identify colors of things as well as I can, I use this to infer that we at least get a roughly *equivalent* representation of 'blue' even if I can't know it is an *identical* representation of 'blue'.

You may wonder the point of all this. The point I'm getting at here is, when we say something is objective, we are talking about something that has existence outside of the mind. If you reread my quote of Gottschalk, he makes that point explicitly. If I say something is 'blue', I'm saying that the pattern I see in my mind tells me it is blue, and I have experience that when I say something is blue, other people will likely agree. The representation in my mind is not the blue object, but I have reason to believe that if I see a blue object, it is most likely because there is a real object that reflects photons in a manner that my mind sees as blue and other people will probably see as blue too.

It seems you need to reread my quotes of Gottschalk. He specifically indicates that objective means independent of the mind.