From: "Stevan Davies" To: crosstalk@info.harpercollins.com Date: Thu, 5 Feb 1998 09:44:19 +0000 Subject: Giving up Stephen Carlson wrote: > Steve may express frustration about being trapped, largely > due to being prevented from "atomizing the evidence" in an > effort to explain away the data that Thomas is more similar > to secondary Synoptic tradition (Mt and Lk) than to Mark at > a strikingly high rate. You evidently do not understand. The instances Antonio comes up with (and often then withdraws) and which you uncritially accept, are a hodgepodge of diverse observations, some having to do with Luke having sayings in common with Thomas that Mark does not have, some having to do with a common word between Th and Mt but not Mark, some having to do with other matters such as a Q saying showing up in Mt//Lk revising Mk which also is a saying showing up in Thomas. The "evidence" is not some unitary set of observable tendencies for anything at all. It is just a set of diverse observations. To declare that this simple observation is "atomizing the evidence" is just absurd. There isn't any "evidence" of a unitary sort in the first place. > If Thomas is truly independent, I would not expect Thomas to > exhibit an affinity to secondary Synoptic tradition at such > a high rate of agreement. "Affinity" is another overgeneralization, along with "similarity" and so forth. What there are are a set of diverse observations that can be made having to do with a lot of different sorts of differences and similarities which one would expect to result from different sorts of causes and conditions. To demand, by inappropriate application of Occam's razor, that a whole diverse set of things be explained by a unitary cause shows a lack of appreciation of the nature of causal explanation. One is not, for example, entitled to explain all physical phenomena as the result of God's grace just because it is a simple explanation. It turns out that for a whole variety of different sorts of things a whole variety of causal explanations is to be expected. > This is a datum that must be > explained. This is not a "datum" at all. It is a failure to carefully consider the observations and, instead, to lump a whole host of unrelated matters together resulting in a spurious "datum." > Sure, one can devise a plurality of hypotheses > to account for any particular situation in which Thomas is > more similar to secondary Synoptic tradition, but that is not > the only fact that one's theory must account for. The > preferred theory is the one which best accounts for all the > evidence without unduly multiplying entities (e.g. Occam's). > This evidence includes the high rates of agreement with secondary > Synoptic tradition. After a while, it begins to strain credulity > that any explanation but the easy explanation (dependence) is > correct. The idea that "the easy explanation" (i.e. "the preferred explanation") is correct even though it is itself not an explanation that easily explains any of the matters at issue, but supposedly explains more easily all of the matters at issue, is logical nonsense. > Perhaps what is making it difficult for some to understand is the > statistical nature of the argument. Given two unlabeled bags, > one with 50 red balls and 50 black balls and another with 5 red > balls and 95 black balls. If some reached into one of bags and > pulled out 5 red balls, it is easier to believe that the second > bag was sampled -- although it is still possible that an amazing > coincidence occurred. I feel this way about Thomas: among the > choices of Thomasine priority, independence, and dependence -- > which *a priori* predict different rates of agreements of Thomas > and secondary Synoptic tradition -- I find it easiest to believe > that our sample (those sayings Thomas shares with Mark) came from > the dependence bag. 1. You have no *a priori* knowledge of what those different rates of agreements are. I can just as well say (without much exaggeration) that if Thomas is dependent upon the synoptics one should expect AT LEAST 50% identity in word order and sayings order. You can make up other numbers if you like, 90% for this, 450% for this other thing. It's just spurious pseudo-argumentation. 2. The analogy above is based on fallacious argument, a a variety of false generalization, to wit: if a series of quite diverse things share any one thing in common they are ipso facto identical things which can be treated identically whether or not the one thing in common is inherent to the things themselves or imputed to them by the observer. So you take a set of sayings which can be sorted in countless ways (length, similarity to Matthew, form, ideology) and you sort it in terms of difference from Mark ignoring gross differences in the manner of difference. Then, ignoring all other data and all other elements of the sayings and all other explanations, you say that the sayings in the sorted set are proof of Thomas' dependence for that is the "easier" i.e. preferred explanation. I'm going to give up here. I cannot just explain and re-explain and try again to get basic logical errors straightened out in this discussion. Once the logical errors are understood, the supposed data evaporate and the preferred explanation for the supposed data is left without any support whatsoever. Steve