Why Do We Need A Book Against Miracles After Hume?

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I received a recent comment about my forthcoming anthology against miracles: "I’m eagerly looking forward to this book even though, after Hume, I’m not sure what more needs to be said."

This is nice to hear! I think it's my best anthology yet, but then I've thought that about each one as they were published. Probably no one is more eager to see this book published than me, as I've put so many many hours into it. Still, it's a legitimate issue as to why such a book is needed at all, especially after Hume's arguments.

I agree with you about David Hume. He's regarded as the most important English speaking philosopher, except that there are some powerful objections against what he wrote against miracles, even coming from atheists themselves. Since Christians keep writing books in defense of miracles as if Hume never wrote a thing, they need answered. This is a book that defends Hume and responds to specific miracle claims in the bible and in today's world. There hasn't been a book length treatment of miracles like this written by atheists in, I don't know, forever, and it's long overdue. Actually, it's Hume plus Strauss plus Darwin equals the destruction of Christianity and religions in general.

David Hume's influence over others is towering, and rightly so. In 1748 he wrote a pioneering chapter of objections against miracles in his book, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (chapter 10). This changed the course of theology, since he had a great influence on Friedrich Schleiermacher, considered to be the father of modern theology.

David Friedrich Strauss in turn was greatly influenced by Friedrich Schleiermacher at the University of Tübingen (1825-1831), who regularly attended his life of Jesus lectures. In 1835–36, at the age of 27, Strauss published his magnum opus--a mammoth of a work--titled The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, 2 vols. In it he denied the historical value of the Gospels and rejected their supernatural claims, describing them as historical myths.

Then in 1859 Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species was published which destroyed the Christianity believed at that time, along with others that were built on the rubble afterward. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on "David Hume" says, "Charles Darwin regarded his work as a central influence on the theory of evolution." Bet you didn't know that!

Was Mohammad Real?

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"We can't be certain how the Arabs became Muslim", says researcher Tom Holland. Fascinating! Was Mohammad ("the Praised One") originally Jesus? Was Islam originally a non-trinitarian Christian sect that rejected the need for an atonement on the cross? The evidence from coins don't lie. People do. This is extremely interesting and new to me. Makes sense. The first video is by the Atheistic Republic, who got me thinking. The others back it up.


Do You Believe In Karma? You Could If..

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...you were born somewhere else in the world. You might even pay to have bad karma removed! Which shows corruption abounds. So let me put it to you, to the degree there is corruption in a religious organization then to that same degree it's not from a caring god or a supernatural power. If so, say goodbye to all religions! For more religion photos of the week, see this LINK.

Giving Up Jesus for Lent

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Five Flash Podcasts
Each one under 5 minutes:

...on why the gospel resurrection stories don't work.

1. What to do with the Body? The Ascension story kills the Resurrection story.

2. Bad theology: What is the value of a 40-day resurrection?

3. The Empty Tomb: Why couldn’t they get the story straight?

4. The Empty Tomb: The apostle Paul didn’t know the story.

5. How can we trust anything in the gospels?

The next series of Flash Podcasts I’m working on: Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said.


David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. His book, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, was reissued last year by Tellectual Press with a new Foreword by John Loftus. The Cure-for-Christianity Library is here.

Bible Fables Are Not the Problem

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Core Christianity is the big nuisance
There are countless memes going around that ridicule talking snakes and donkeys, the ark full of animals, and a woman created from a rib. Who really cares about any of these? Any more than we care about fables describing floating axes, the sun standing still, or bears mauling boys who ridiculed a prophet. Aside from those who insist that the Bible is inerrant, ordinary devout folks don’t get too bent out of shape by the folklore.

But the ordinary devout folks also somehow manage to evade the grimmer, weirder ‘important’ teachings of the New Testament. If churchgoers spent as much time reading the Bible—really digging in—as they do watching movies, there would be more discomfort than they bargained for—and maybe quite a few would take their pastor aside to whisper, “Hey, Rev, this Bible chapter is really freaking me out.” Or do they just shrug their shoulders? They want to love their Jesus. It’s up to the minister to understand ‘all that Bible stuff.’

Claiming to Know God is the Highest Form of Elitism

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When I hear someone say that a god is responsible for something that happened or a decision that they've made, I cringe. Most things about religion have become cringe worthy to me. The more I explore the deeply entrenched mythologies of my own culture, the harder it becomes for me to take much of what humans do seriously. Little by little, I've realized that when it comes to our world view, most people simply embrace the one they've inherited. Religion is easy to pick on, however, because it's so full of blatant fairy tales.

Yet, it's equally difficult to dispel, because the religious are such elitists. 

To break through their privileged exterior takes a sledge hammer, blow torch and chainsaw. They're not only blind to reason but they honestly seem to believe that they have a personal connection to the most powerful being in the universe. 

The Cover to My Next Anthology

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Two Early Blurbs For My Upcoming Anthology On Miracles

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I previously announced this anthology here. Two early blurbs have come in. One is by Michael Shermer and the other by Dan Lambert. See below:

You Too Could Be Wearing These Hats and Participating in this Festival!

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All you had to do is be born into a different family and religious culture. That means you'll be going to hell too, if you don't confess Jesus as Lord and Savior! So wouldn't you wish you would treat your inherited Jewish religion as if you were an outsider, a nonbeliever, in hopes you might find the religion of Jesus before you die? Then you should test the religion you were actually born in with fairness and no double standards. For more religion photos of the week See this LINK.

Yay! ‘Nones’ Now as Big as Evangelicals, Catholics in the US

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In a shift that stands to impact both religion and politics, survey data suggests that the percentage of Americans who don’t affiliate with any specific religious tradition is now roughly the same as those who identify as evangelical or Catholic.

According to newly released General Social Survey data analyzed by Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University, Americans claiming “no religion” — sometimes referred to as “nones” because of how they answer the question “what is your religious tradition?” — now represent about 23.1 percent of the population, up from 21.6 percent in 2016. People claiming evangelicalism, by contrast, now represent 22.5 percent of Americans, a slight dip from 23.9 percent in 2016.

That makes the two groups statistically tied with Catholics (23 percent) as the largest religious — or nonreligious — groupings in the country.

“Nones have been on the march for a long time now,” Burge said. “It’s been a constant, steady increase for 20 years now. If the trend line kept up, we knew this was going to happen.” LINK.

Making Excuses for God: The Erosion of Decency

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Stretching and Breaking the Truth
“God inhabits eternity, outside of time and space.” So a pastor friend once told me, perhaps without realizing how much hard work was required for theologians to make God sound so good; they’ve been at it for centuries, redesigning God endlessly: an endless quest for respectability.

It’s just a fact, however, that the god who rampages through both the Old and New Testaments is a nasty-tempered tribal deity. Those who protest this assessment would do well to remember the story of Noah: “drown ‘em all” was old Yahweh’s approach to cleaning up sin—and getting even. And when Jesus ‘returns’ there’ll be a repeat—so Jesus himself promised (Matthew 24:38-39).

Valerie Tarico interviews David Fitzgerald about Christian apologist Lee Strobel's personal conversion story and his books.

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Excellent interview!
The story that Evangelicals find so convincing and delicious is this: Strobel, a tough-as-nails atheist journalist and his atheist family are out to dinner when his daughter is saved from choking to death by an evangelical nurse who felt called by God to go to the restaurant that night. Strobel’s wife converts, and Strobel sets out to prove her wrong, using the same strategy that made him a fearsome investigative journalist. He lines up scholars and theologians and confronts them with the hardest possible questions about their faith—and comes away convinced that the Evangelical view of the Bible and Jesus is true. He accepts Jesus as his savior and proceeds to lay out those persuasive interviews in his book, which goes on, as I said, to become a religion best-seller.

The problem, according to author and religion critic David Fitzgerald (and others), is that key parts of this story are distorted at best and fabricated at worst.

A CSI Quote and David Marshall's Response

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I posted this quote on Facebook from a recent CSI episode:

"People lie. The only thing we 
can count on is the evidence."

This should be obvious and non-controversial, right? The evidence never lies. Only people do. But Christian apologist David Marshall felt threatened by the quote. Listen up, when apologists feel threatened by talk of evidence it should alert the rest of us they're not being honest about the truth. He responded:



From Alvin Plantinga who doesn't believe Christians need objective evidence for their faith, to William Lane Craig who claims the Holy Spirit trumps all objective evidence to the contrary, to David Marshall who dogs my steps, Christian apologists must denigrate science to believe. Here are a few other gems to look at from DMarshall:

DM: "All scientific knowledge depends upon human testimony."

DM: “Those who make wild claims about the scientific method often base their arguments not on good human evidence, but rumor, wild guesses, and extrapolations that would embarrass a shaman.”

DM: Actually, John, I would say that almost all scientific evidence COMES TO US as historical evidence. Science is, in effect, almost a branch of history, as it transmits knowable and systematically collected and interpreted facts to our brains.

It takes ignorance to defend the Christian faith; ignorance of science. I'd rest my case here but it'll flare up again and again since this is so important for faith.

Bob Seidensticker's List of 10 Skeptical Principles for Evaluating the Bible

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It's a good list with a bonus principle. Principles 1-5 are here.

Principles 6-11 are here.

Another principle which I advocate is to read between the lines. Ask yourselves what the opponents of Jesus and Paul said in response. Were the Pharisees that bad as a people? After all, they were the people's party. What arguments did most Jews have against the resurrection claim? They were there, they believed in God, they knew their OT prophecies, yet they didn't believe. What did early Christians say in response to Paul? What did they think of him, and why? Do you think these opponents were convinced by the sheer logic of what Paul said? If not, how did Paul's Christianity come to dominate?

John Gray’s Criticism of the New Atheists, Part 2

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Last time around, I wrote about Gray’s claim that religion isn’t meant as “a theory that tries to explain the universe,” but is instead “an attempt to find meaning in events.” And I pointed out one rather obvious problem with this claim — namely, that many do believe in religion as a way of explaining things. But even if Gray were right about the meaning of religion, there would be a problem with his view.

The way he sees it, religion gives us insights into the human condition. In this, it performs much the same function as certain works of fiction. The myth of the forbidden fruit, for example, teaches us, according to Gray, about the “ambiguous impact of knowledge on human freedom” — which he tells us is more realistic than the myth found in Greek philosophy “that knowledge and goodness are inseparably connected.”

If the Bible Had a Sewer...

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…that’s where this chapter should be floating

One of the reasons that the Bible cannot be taken seriously as a word from God—from any god, let alone a benevolent, caring creator—is that it includes so much trash. Christian apologists know this very well; they’ve written thousands of books, and preached countless sermons, making excuses, doing their best to sweep the trash under the rug. Well, maybe not sermons so much: preachers don’t like to draw attention to alarming Bible embarrassments.

It’s easy to avoid the landmines in Leviticus or the Book of Revelation: just ignore them. Not too many laypeople—outside of diehard evangelical Bible fanatics—bother with the less-trafficked books. Stand outside any church as people are filing out and ask, “Don’t you just love the prophet Ezekiel?” Yet, despite lack of interest about what’s actually in it, they dutifully carry their Bibles; what could surpass this holy artifact?

Believing In God Produces More Pain Than Otherwise

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When life gets difficult, really difficult, it's better if you didn't believe in a god. Take it from me. I've been on both sides of the fence. When someone loses a 10 year old son to leukemia, or a daughter to a car accident, or a spouse who goes missing and is never found again, AND you pray for comfort or peace or a solution, which falls on deaf divine ears, I'm telling you it's better not to believe. For your pain is doubled at that point. The first pain is the suffering from the loss itself. The second pain is feeling abandoned by your god.

Over the years believing minds will convince themselves the loss was for the best, when they eventually ignore what should've been the case but was robbed by death. Or they'll read the obfuscations of some apologists who say Jesus carried them through their sufferings, or that he suffered with them. What does that even mean when one stops to actually think about it? But even by believing standards most of their petitionary prayers go without being divinely answered the way they were prayed. So it stands to reason believers are constantly, more often than not, disappointed from the lack of divine help, to say the least.

Me? Not so much...never to be exact! I never have to worry about any lack of divine help, and I never have to get frustrated over it either. In other words, I never have the added pain that comes from the lack of divine guidance, help, or comfort. Ever! So from my perspective, I say, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me...and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” [Matthew 11:28-30; NIV] Now do you understand?

Why Do We Suffer from the Invisible Man Syndrome?

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“Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.” 
― George Carlin

I was born with a vivid imagination. It was both a blessing and a curse. As a child, I wrote plays, stories, poems, songs and loved to pretend. Role playing was my favorite pastime. I could get into character better than any other child I knew.  Until quite late in life, well past preteen, I dreaded growing up. The real world didn't hold the same allure and fascination of my pretend world. Unlike many of my peers, "adulting" didn't seem all that appealing to me. Whereas they were anxious, even excited, to date, get their first jobs and mimic the grownups in their lives, I was skeptical. The real world looked a bit grim and the faces of most of the adults that I knew were often work worn, worried, anxious or depressed.

You too could purify the universe of bad influences, bad deeds and bad thoughts!

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All you had to do is be born and raised somewhere else on the planet. For more photos click here.

What Good Is Christianity?

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Who needs it, really?
Since humans began to walk upright, thousands of religions have come and gone. Many hundreds of gods have fallen out of favor: even many Christians themselves can’t stand the nasty god who stalks the Old Testament, although—hint, hint—it’s the same god in the New Testament. Christianity is now so splintered—the faithful have quarreled endlessly about it—even its most devout followers can’t agree on what True Christianity is. Millions of the faithful are holed up in their own defensive denominations, clinging to fragments of the faith they hold dear.

So what’s the point? Dan Barker has mentioned the elephant in the room: “I did not want to lose my faith, but I became painfully aware that Christianity has no case. I discovered there is no evidence for Christianity. And I also found out, to my astonishment, that there is no need for it.” (Losing Faith in Faith)

Hypothesis: Since Bayes Theorem Cannot Help Us It Should be Abandoned

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Here is the full title to this post:
Hypothesis: Since Bayes Theorem (i.e., the math, the equation, the formula) cannot help bring us to a consensus concerning something accepted on faith, or assess specific miracles and theistic based religions, and because it is ripe for abuse in the hands of Christian apologists who dress up their delusion with undeserved respectability, it should be abandoned for better alternative methods, by people who really want to know the truth.
This is not a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There is no miracle baby to be found in the dirty bathwater. Bayes is used by people in this debate who wish to look superior than others. It's a rite of passage into a specific club of intellectuals who like the status of being considered above the rest of us. But it solves nothing, clarifies nothing, and will be thrust into the dustbin of elite faddishness as one after another intellectual wannabe comes up with their own calculations without reaching a consensus between believers and non-believers on the inputs or the resulting probabilities. As philosopher Godfrey-Smith put it, “The probabilities” in Bayes’ Theorem “that are more controversial are the prior probabilities of hypotheses, like P(h).” He asks, “What could this number possibly be measuring?” He says, we cannot “make sense of prior probabilities” [Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 205]. He is dead on in the area I'm arguing, faith-based claims of virgin birthed deities and resurrections from the dead. And while I'm at it, gods themselves, who are supposed to exponentially increase the prior probabilities.

Bayes is a mathematical wasteland when applies to these issues. The only merit it offers is the discussion of the evidence and the ensuing arguments in defense of the inputs, which could be done without the math. So atheist apologists who argue for the use of Bayes Theorem in an area with no promise or hope of a consensus, are merely arguing for their own special status in these debates, and dividing people unnecessarily between Bayes users and non-Bayes users. The most extreme case of this is atheist apologist Richard Carrier, who thinks the rest of us are ignorant, stupid, and irrational to disagree. This only makes him feel relevant by arguing for his own irrelevancy. This is not to throw a bone at Christian apologists. I think Carrier is brilliant and has already dealt some significant death blows to the Christian faith. But on this issue his brilliancy, and undeserved superior ego, has led him to defend an irrelevant wasteland, a dead end, one that has no promise of accomplishing or solving anything.

The better tools? Science; requiring sufficient collaborative objective evidence commensurate with the type of claim; requiring claimants to shoulder the burden of proof; arguing from inference to the best explanation; using the standard of the Outsider Test for Faith; ridicule (after all, we know faith-based arguments are special pleading all the way down), and more. Carrier will respond just as believers do when it comes to their faith-based doctrines, by forcing these tools into the grid of Bayes Theorem and calling me a doofus another dozen times or more. So let's see this in practice, a friend comes up to you and says his wife gave birth to a deity. You say show me some objective evidence. We don't need Bayes at all there, do you see? I can understand why Bayesian reasoning without the math is much better when it comes to more complicated issues, but at rock bottom it's all about the evidence, just as apologist Vincent Torley was convinced by it, even though he had previously done his own Bayesian calculations. I see no reason why hammering home the lack of objective evidence won't work as well, or better than using Bayesian math. Bayes is probably worse off in terms of convincing others, for the only people who would slough through it are far less likely to be convinced by it. I've written a book on why responding to fundamentalist arguments in kind gives their beliefs a certain undeserved respectability. So my arguments against the use of Bayes are rooted there, but not found exclusively there. For as you can see I have other arguments that Bayes just doesn't help us (i.e., the math, the equation, the formula). [See Tag for more]

How Not to Be a Doofus about Bayes’ Theorem From Someone Who "Doesn't Really Understand Bayesianism"

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The title is a response to two posts Richard Carrier wrote here, and recently here. If anyone disagrees with Carrier we're irrational, ignorant, foolish, and now with a newly released super-bad description, doofus/doofuses. 

I would like to catalog the variety of responses apologists and atheists have toward Bayes, but I won't. What I do know is apart from the people he mentions who "don't understand Bayes" he should also include David Hume, Apologist Michael Licona and Dan Lambert. One wonders if anyone could have argued for anything before Bayes given Carrier's praise. Pffft. What I know is that those who use Bayes come up with wildly different results with regard to the resurrection of Jesus.

--Apologist Richard Swinburne calculates the probability of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, given the existence of a god, is 97%. Swinburne should run that past a peer-review panel including Muslims Jews and Hindu's to see how that goes over. ;-) We know from a historian's perspective that's utterly idiotic! 


--Apologist Vincent Torley calculated that "there’s about a 60-65% chance that Jesus rose from the dead." Of course, that was before he read Michael Alter's book on the resurrection, which I recommended, that had no math in it at all! How could this happen without Bayes? Oh my! But it did. Apparently the shear evidence Alter presented was enough. Wow! Who would have thunk it. 

--Apologists Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew calculated the odds of the resurrection of Jesus to be 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. *Silence* *Awe* *Respect* Christians must revere them for coming up with the highest calculation any intellectual *cough* has done so far. Can anyone do better here? They need to go see a doctor and get some meds, quickly. Richard Carrier thinks Bayes helps. Okay then. Please tell us how such a useful tool can produce these wide diverse results. Tools are supposed to help. But even among apologists themselves it does no such thing. Carrier says Bayes helps us clarify where we disagree and by how much. Really? We already know this! Dressing up a delusion in math is still a delusion. Responding in kind only gives a delusion an undeserved respectability. This is a major point of mine in Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End. Who's the doofus again? 

Introducing My Next Anthology "The Case against Miracles"

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[Update on 11/18/19: This Introduction has been significantly lengthened].

I finally submitted the digital book files to my publisher Hypatia Press, an imprint of Ockham Publishing out of the UK.
David G. McAffe is the editor. It has been seven months since I started working on it. Getting authors, working with them, and writing my own chapters while on the road for the last two months has wore me out. I'm glad that hard phase is over. I'm told it should be published by September or October, just in time for year end holiday shopping. How good is it? Well, I consider it the best anthology yet, and they've all been good! You can see the chapter contents right here. To whet your appetites my Introduction is below:

A Challenge for Churches

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Here's a post that I endorse by my friend Bob Seidensticker at Cross Examined. Churches should step up and do this. LINK

John Gray’s Criticism of the New Atheists, Part 1

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In Seven Types of Atheism, political philosopher John Gray, who’s an atheist himself, takes the so-called new atheists to task for their “notion that religions are erroneous hypotheses.” Treating religion this way, as if it were a kind of “primitive science,” is a mistake, he says. Rather, we must understand it as allegory and myth, as a way of imparting truths about the human condition. “Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe.” As evidence, he mentions St. Augustine’s fourth-century view that the Bible need not be taken literally, as well as Philo of Alexandria’s first-century description of Genesis as “an interweaving of symbolic imagery with imagined events.”

Christian Corruption Deserves Scorn and Ridicule

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Let the satirists and cartoonist sharpen their knives
At the end of God Comes Out of Retirement to Distance Self from Catholic Church we find this quote:

“I mean honestly,” continued God, “who’s going to believe you’re the arbiter of all that is good in the world if you can’t even see that being on the side that’s defending pedophiles is bad. Really it makes me want to smite the lot of them and let Satan sort them out, but I think that would probably be more a punishment for Satan.”

How did the Catholic Church manager to combine the ultimate misogynistic Old Boys Network (the Vatican) and the World’s Largest Gay Community in strident denial (the Vatican)? That is a formula for disaster on so many levels, including blaming pedophile on homosexuality. Here's an eyeopener:

In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy


This 550-page book by Frédéric Martel was published last month in eight languages, based on four years of research and interviews with Vatican insiders.

Of course Christian corruption is not confined to Catholics. How about those Baptists (Southern or otherwise) and mean-spirited Methodists.

Maybe the most corrupt practice of all, however, is blatantly selling a product you don’t have: the promise of eternal life. When you’ve got that gimmick you can get away with a lot and still hold your audience. The faithful don’t even notice, don’t even care, that the concept of God peddled by the churches doesn’t make sense.

Christianity Is Not Too Big to Fail, 5

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Helping it along…off the cliff



While claiming the moral high ground, Christians keep shooting themselves in the foot. Are they showing off that their brand of magical thinking is toxic? The Debunking Christianity blog has been amassing the arguments against this malignant religion for a long time. There are so many great articles in its archives that deserve to be kept front-of-mind.

 I asked John Loftus to nominate some of his own favorite articles from the last few years, and we will be re-presenting them, a few at a time. This installment includes:

Getting God Off the Hook for Natural Disasters

Does the Scale of the Universe Undercut Belief in a Tribal Deity?

Can God Do Perpetual Miracles?


Does Mythological Naturalism Presuppose Its Own Conclusion?

On Stigmatizing Left-Handed People: Science Is Eliminating What Faith Produced

Installment One of this series can be found here. Installment Two is here. Installment Three is here.

Installment Four is here. Please feel free to share these articles on social media. Keep them going! David Fitzgerald has said that Christianity not too big to fail. Let’s help that process along.




David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. In 2016 he was invited by John Loftus to write for the DC Blog.




The Cure-for-Christianity Library can be found here.

When a Nasty Piece of Work Writes Scripture

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Making Christianity Even More Cringeworthy
Before the Bible came under serious critical scrutiny—i.e., historians decided to analyze the texts as they do other documents from the ancient past—traditional beliefs about authorship were assumed to be true. Thus, the Pentateuch was written by Moses and the psalms by David; Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were folks mentioned in the gospels and/or epistles.

These traditional certainties have faded or eroded completely, because of evidence in the documents themselves. It turns out that most of the Biblical documents were penned anonymously, and many are now recognized as forgeries. But there is one standout author whom we can identify without a doubt, because a few of his own letters have survived. We know for certain who he was: the apostle Paul, who wrote some of the letters credited to him. Thus we can try to figure out his thought, and we have a pretty good idea of his character.

What Strain of God Virus Was Spread in Your Home?

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I was raised in a genuine American cult. The made-in America kind of religion that is unique to the spirit of this country. If you don't fancy the religious offerings of the day, invent a new one. Eventually, people will begin to follow you if you've got the courage to preach your truth and the intestinal fortitude to stick it out until the right group of people stumble across your church and decide to cast their lot with you.  

Christian Apologist Vincent Torley Says I've "rendered a service to philosophy"

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We've been discussing private miracles. [See tag below]. I’ve argued private miracles must pass the same tests that third parties require. People—I didn’t say children—who claim to have experienced a private miracle—I didn’t say a mere extraordinary event—can only say it was real after rigorously verifying it, by asking a whole slew of honest questions. They need a sufficient amount of third party independent corroborative objective evidence for them. This is what reasonable adults should require when it comes to a miracle of the private kind, just as they should require with a miracle claimed by a multitude of people—which happens never.

Torley is arguing that there are private miracles people should believe despite the requirement for sufficient objective third-party evidence. In the course of this debate Torley rewards me with a backhanded slap instead of praise when saying I've "rendered a service to philosophy". He wrote about an Indian Prince who experienced frost for the first time:
There's a famous passage in Hume's Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals (1777) where he writes:
The Indian prince, who refused to believe the first relations concerning the effects of frost, reasoned justly; and it naturally required very strong testimony to engage his assent to facts, that arose from a state of nature, with which he was unacquainted, and which bore so little analogy to those events, of which he had had constant and uniform experience. (Section X, Part I.)
Hume was willing to "bite the bullet" and acknowledge that people following his epistemic principles would sometimes reject as absurd things that later turned out to be genuine - nevertheless, he insisted, they "reasoned justly." Perhaps John is willing to "bite the bullet," or perhaps he wishes to reconsider his views. But what he has done, albeit inadvertently, is show that Humean skepticism, when taken to its logical conclusion (for that's where John's epistemology is derived from) leads to a reductio ad absurdum. And for that, I thank him: he has rendered a service to philosophy. Cheers.