Daniel's flat earth

The Shape of the Earth

Disregarding the dome, the essential flatness of the earth's surface is required by verses like Daniel 4:10-11. In Daniel, the king “saw a tree of great height at the centre of the earth...reaching with its top to the sky and visible to the earth's farthest bounds.” If the earth were flat, a sufficiently tall tree would be visible to “the earth's farthest bounds,” but this is impossible on a spherical earth. 

https://lockhaven.edu/~dsimanek/febible.htm

That's a fallacious inference for two reasons:

i) Human distance acuity is limited. 

ii) It fails to consider how the prooftext is introduced: 

I saw a dream that made me afraid. As I lay in bed the fancies and the visions of my head alarmed me (Dan 4:5).

But dreamscapes are notoriously surreal. Because dreams are imaginary, they aren't bound by what's physically realistic or possible. 

Low or high fatality rate?

This is the best article I've read on #COVID19.

"Countries that are prepared will see a fatality rate of 0.5-0.9%. Countries that are overwhelmed will have a fatality rate of 3-5%".

Let's act to flatten the curve.
https://t.co/r9dJTgxude

— Trisha Greenhalgh (@trishgreenhalgh) March 11, 2020

THREAD: In U.S. we face two alternative but hard outlooks with #COVID19: that we follow a path similar to South Korea or one closer to Italy. We probably lost chance to have an outcome like South Korea. We must do everything to avert the tragic suffering being borne by Italy 1/10

— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) March 12, 2020

Which medical experts do I follow?

Here are some individuals I follow as well as resources I use for staying up to speed with the coronavirus (i.e. SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19). Of course, that's not to suggest I always agree with them. I hope it's helpful to people.

Coronavirus doesn't care about your feelings

As Ben Shapiro is wont to say: facts don't care about your feelings. So here are some facts. Granted, even the "facts" in this case could be debated to a certain degree. Regardless it's a starting point for reasonable discussion.

Social distancing

@RandalRauser

Churches are among the premiere locations of social interaction. And yet, I've heard little about mitigation strategies to deal with #coronavirus. How should the virus change the way we greet, gather, celebrate communion? Figure this out now, not later.

https://twitter.com/RandalRauser/status/1237742328103596032

A good place to start is by social distancing ourselves from "progressive Christians" like Randal Rauser. 

Lockdowns

One "solution" to the exponential spread of the coronavirus is mandated lockdowns, citywide or even countrywide. That's feasible, at least temporarily, for folks who can work at home. Indeed, some folks always work at home. The computer/Internet age makes that increasingly appealing and feasible.

There are, however, many employers/employees in retail/service industries who must be on site to do their job. Should they be furloughed? If they can't work, they can't pay their bills. Can't pay the rent or mortgage or utilities or insurance or wireless carrier or the car or afford to shop for food and medicine, &c.

So it's a question of which groups are going to suffer the most as a result of countermeasures to address the coronavirus. Some will suffer more than others, and some groups will suffer as a result of the policies who were not suffering before the policies were implemented. It creates a new problem to "solve" another problem. So one question is which groups should be made to suffer. What are the necessary tradeoffs? Who should be hurt in the effort to help others? 

Quarantine

As I understand it, the justification for citywide, statewide, or national lockdowns is to avoid exponential infection rates through curtailing physical contact in large social gatherings. A kind of preemptive quarantine measure. 

I'm no expert, but doesn't effective quarantine require identification and separation of the infected from the uninfected? 

By contrast, lockdowns are indiscriminate. They force families to say at home. Yet families are notoriously contagious. If one family member is infected, other family members are likely to become infected. So aren't lockdowns creating millions of family-size petri dishes where infected and uninfected are exposed to each other? Doesn't that cause the infection to spread exponentially, only it's temporarily hidden behind closed doors? But maybe I'm missing something. 

Sense of scale

I'm no expert, but when I see some people comparing the coronavirus to the Spanish influenza, a sense of proportion has been lost. Here's one way I think about it:

i) Total world population: 7.7 billion

ii) National population totals (10s-100s of millions or more)

iii) Fractional subtotal of those infected

iv) Fractional sub-subtotal of infected who naturally recover

v) Fractional sub-subtotal of those requiring hospitalization

It's a serious problem when hospitals are overwhelmed, but in terms of the relative scale of the body count, aren't some doomsdayers losing a sense of proportion? That's not to make light of the body count, but in terms of historical comparisons and realistic projections...

Who's the biggest threat to homosexuals?

1. In the modern era there's a paradoxical relationship between Christians and homosexuals. On the one hand, many homosexuals feel threatened by biblical norms regarding homosexuality, as well as the political influence of Christians.

2. Ironically, homosexuals are safer in a society that's culturally and numerically dominated by Christians than a secular regime. An exception would be theonomists, who believe homosexual behavior ought to be a capital offense. I've discussed that here:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2017/03/should-sodomites-be-executed.html

3. However, it's my impression that most evangelicals take a fairly live-and-let-live attitude towards homosexuals. Mind you, I think homosexuals should be banned from positions of authority (e.g. occupations like public school teachers, Boy Scout leaders, mayors, governors, judges, attorneys general, military officers).

The reason homosexuals are safer in a Christian culture (theonomy excepted) is because Christians believe in basic human rights, grounded in moral realism. There's a general floor for how all humans should be treated. 

4. By contrast, atheism is dangerous to everyone because it has no moral direction. The protected classes can change on a dime. It's driven by academic fads and power politics. Some groups have more rights than others, and the pecking order shifts arbitrarily and unpredictably. Blacks have been demoted in relation to homosexuals while feminists have been demoted in relation to trans. Your group can be a protected class one year, only to be a targeted class the next year.

5. Another factor is that straight Christians don't want anything from homosexuals, whereas one homosexual may view another homosexual the way vampires view humans: that's food! Because homosexuals want something from each other, that carries the risk of exploitation, rape, and domestic violence. 

Sorting out presuppositionalism

The silly contest between Josh Rasmussen and SyeTenB demonstrates, once again, the need to do some sorting:

Regarding the YouTube interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zkcs-31PqFg&feature=youtu.be

There are at least three different things flying under the banner of "presuppositionalism"

1. There's the position of SyeTenB. He's a hack with a rabid internet following among a clique of pop Calvinist groupies.

2. That's not to be confused with academic versions of presuppositionalism. For instance:

Greg Welty, “The Conceptualist Argument,” in Colin Ruloff (ed.), Contemporary Arguments in Natural Theology (Bloomsbury Press, forthcoming).

https://www.proginosko.com/docs/The_Lord_of_Non-Contradiction.pdf

https://blog.epsociety.org/2013/09/responses-to-argument-for-god-from-logic.html

3. From another angle is the presuppositionalism of Vern Poythress. For instance:

https://frame-poythress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ChancePoythress.pdf

4. There are roughly two competing schools of thought that call themselves presuppositionalists:

i) One derives from Cornelius Van Til. Second-generation Van Tilians include John Frame, the late Greg Bahnsen, and Vern Poythress. We might classify James Anderson as a third-generation Van Tilian. 

However, he's been exposed to some other influences, like Plantinga and modal metaphysics.

Theistic conceptual realism belongs to a family of transcendental arguments. It's interesting how that's evolved. Kant's argument is more epistemological, in part because he doesn't have a robust theology to ground it. Kant might even be a closet atheist. And he's skeptical regarding our knowledge of the external world. So he can't say much of anything to back it up in terms of bedrock ontology. 

Although Van Til's version is partly epistemological, he tries to ground it in the metaphysics of Reformed theism.

Greg Welty and James Anderson have done a lot to embed the epistemological side of the argument in modal metaphysics. I think it's a transcendental argument with an epistemological side, but they've done more to model and detail the necessary metaphysical conditions that make it possible. 

ii) The other derives from the late Gordon Clark. Clark as an anti-empiricist. 

Clark's followers make second-order knowledge necessary for first-order knowledge. You don't know anything unless you know how you know it. They make the justification of knowledge a necessary ingredient in knowledge itself. Here are two examples:

http://unapologetica.blogspot.com/2019/11/gordon-clark-and-necessity-of.html

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/03/more-scripturalist-mumbo-jumbo.html

It's important to keep these two schools of thought separate, even though they both use the same designation. When you're accused of not understanding presuppositionalism, part of the problem is that there are competing schools of thought as well as different exponents with varying views.

I don't think Josh is under any obligation to understand SyeTenB's positionbecause  there's not much there there. 

COVID-19’s biggest threat is to the health of our economy

https://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2020/03/covid-19s-biggest-threat-is-to-the-health-of-our-economy.html

Why trust the Gospel of John?

From Facebook:

Jeff 

What is [the historicity of John] predicated on?

Hays

The eyewitness testimony of the narrator (i.e. apostle John).

Jeff

Same goes for UFOs and bigfoot?

Hays 

From what I've seen, the footage of bigfoot is just a man in a monkey suit. UFOs are a much more complex subject.

Jeff  

I'm just talking about written testimony of those phenomena. Nothing like video.

Hays 

Is your point to dismiss eyewitness testimony out of hand? That leads to extreme and irrational skepticism, including your own firsthand experiences.

Jeff  

I prefer to externalize my knowledge claims, I know my own senses are not always reliable.

You don't have to verify anything about the author's testimony? You take it all of faith?

Hays 

To begin with, there's archeological corroboration for the Forth Gospel (as well as the Synoptics). Peter Williams has a dandy little book on that: Can We Trust the Gospels?

Moreover, there's lots of incidental internal evidence for the Fourth Gospel. It has the hallmarks of oral history, with lots of unnecessary details and digressions. 

Furthermore, there's the argument from undesigned coincidences. 

Finally, there's lots of evidence for modern miracles, which dovetail with the supernaturalism of the Fourth Gospel.

Jeff 

Well, let's say hypothetically John can be boiled down to 1,000 historical claims. What percent of John's historical claims have been verified? It would be cool to have a resource that goes verse by verse, giving the external verification if it exists.

Hays 

That's not a reasonable method of verification. It's not case-by-case verification but whether there's good evidence that the source is reliable. We don't have to revert to amnesia every time we have evidence for a particular claim, starting from scratch with each individual claim, when dealing with the same source of information.

Jeff 

How do you establish good evidence on the reliability of a source except by examining some mystery number of truth claims that source makes? I'm asking about that very criteria that would grant a piece of text handed to me the 'good evidence' label.

Hays 

There's no magic percentage. One basic principle is that if a source is accurate when we happen to have available evidence which corroborates it, then it's likely to be accurate in cases where corroborative evidence hasn't survived. 

But in addition, there are different kinds of internal evidence and a variety of individual touches that indicate firsthand recollection. So it's not reducible to a single formula. I'm mentioning general criteria, not just the Fourth Gospel.

Why not wait and see?

I basically take a wait-n-see attitude towards it. That's mainly because I'm not a policymaker, so what I think makes no difference, anyway. I have no control over what businesses or gov't officials do about it.

In addition, I see some folks making doomsday predictions about how it will be worse than the 1918 Spanish influenza, but we don't know that, so what's the point of assuming the worst? What happens is independent of our assumptions. Assuming the worst won't make it worse–or better. It will be whatever it will be. Why the felt need to make assumptions about the future instead of discovering what will happen? That's the only real way to find out. If it turns out to be as bad as the Spanish influenza, how did that assumption, even if borne out by subsequent events, make it easier to cope with? How does assuming the worst improve the situation? Your assumptions don't change the outcome? It just makes you more miserable in the lead up. And what if you're wrong? Then you got all worked up in advance over something that wasn't nearly as bad as you feared.

Of course, the objection to a wait-n-see attitude is that if we take drastic precautionary measures, maybe we can avert catastrophe. And I'm certainly not suggesting passivity. I'm not suggesting a do-nothing attitude.

There are two competing risk factors. Two kinds of damage to be considered and counterbalanced. There's the harm of the virus itself. But there's also the harm to the economic infrastructure if we overreact. The economic damage could be far more harmful than the virus itself if we overcompensate.There's the harm of the virus itself. But there's also the harm to the economic infrastructure if we overreact. The economic damage could be far more harmful than the virus itself if we overcompensate. 

A sacramental faith

Thanks to Steve for passing along this Ligonier update from a pastor in Milan, Italy.

It'd be good if Christians could pray for them.

At the same time, I wanted to note a contrast in a word-based faith vs. a sacrament-based faith:

Reformed Protestant and evangelical churches can hold worship services online. We can join in and listen to live streamed sermons preached over the internet. Sure, it's not as ideal as meeting in person and worshiping together, but it's not necessarily fatal to faith.

By contrast, Catholic worship is different. Of course, Catholics can do all these things too. However, these aren't as central to their worship or liturgy; at best, the sermon might be on par with the sacrament. Rather Catholic worship centers on the eucharist. The transubstantiated blood and the body of Christ. Catholicism is a sacramental faith.

However, if there's no priest to consecrate the holy sacrament, nor a physical place to receive the holy sacrament, then how can Catholics partake of the eucharist? Can priests go door to door consecrating and administering the body and blood of Christ for lay Catholics? If Catholics can't receive the eucharist, then wouldn't that affect their faith? No wonder so many Catholics were up in arms when they heard that mass was suspended across Italy!

A danger of panicking over the coronavirus

It's striking how much of our super advanced and highly technical society including economy is based on simple trust. I guess that's why economists talk about fiduciary relationships.

However, if that trust is eroded enough, or even dissipates, then I presume our economy and society could potentially come crashing down like a house of cards.

That's one reason why my posts about the coronavirus or COVID-19 have focused on quelling fears and stemming panic. At least as much as a nobody like me can do.

Otherwise, if people become driven by panic, they might take drastic actions. Such as pulling out all their money from their 401k and selling all their stocks. Or yelling at and fighting one another over toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Or looting and rioting. Or worse.

If enough people take these sorts of drastic actions, then it could collapse our economy, gov't, society as a whole.

In this respect, doomsday prophets who have been shouting from the rooftops that the end is near could end up predicting a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Addendum:

Of course, none of this is to say things won't become catastrophic. However, I think there are at least two possible catastrophic scenarios: a catastrophe from the virus itself and a catastrophe from how we react to the virus. As I've maintained, the former could be possible; it's the latter that I'd like to avoid. The simultaneous occurrence of both would be terrible. (And I think Steve has pointed out much the same or similar.)

Christian witness during the coronavirus

https://www.dennyburk.com/battling-the-coronavirus-panic/

White Syeclone alert

James White

@DrOakley1689

Let's give Sye some love!

Adherent Apologetics

@AApologetics

 · Mar 8

The 2020 Christian Apologist March Madness Tournament! Round of 128! Josh Rasmussen vs Sye Ten Bruggencate (@SyeTenB)

Show this poll

https://twitter.com/DrOakley1689/status/1236775061819756544

I'm curious: has James White always been a member of SyeTenB's booster club, or is that another consequence of White hitching his caboose to Durbin's steam engine? 

It's unfortunate that White is plugging him. SyeTenB is such a hack. He brings presuppositionalism into disrepute. It deflects attention away from the best exponents–like James Anderson, Greg Welty, and Vern Poythress. Thanks to SyeTenB, his enablers and groupies, presuppositionalism now suffers from poisonous default association with an empty suit. 

Mortal sin

If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask, and God[a] will give him life—to those who commit sins that do not lead to death. There is sin that leads to death; I do not say that one should pray for that (1 Jn 5:16).

One of the puzzling things is how a Christian is supposed to know the difference between the two kinds of sins. The clue may be the occasion of John's letter. He may be alluding to the individuals who broke fellowship with the churches he pastored in Asia Minor. Heretical schismatics who refused to submit to his apostolic teaching. In context, that may be the mortal sin. 

Of course, some of them might have a change of heart. But perhaps John's point is that sometimes you may just have to give up on some individuals, not because their situation is necessarily hopeless, but there are other people and situations to pray about, so that, as a matter of priorities, it's okay to stop praying for some people and move on to other people and situations that call for prayer. And not in general, but the particular kind of obdurate sin that occasioned his letter. You've prayed for them repeatedly to no effect, and you don't have an open-ended commitment. You're not obligated to keep praying for them.

Even so, he doesn't forbid it. There are some people, like lost or straying family members, whom we never give up on as long as they, we live, or the prayer request is granted. 

Some coronavirus articles

I've posted some excerpts from recent articles on the coronavirus below. I think the articles are generally consistent what I've been saying in my posts on Triablogue.

If you only read one article, I'd recommend the interview with Dr. Scott Gottlieb. If you read two, the interview with epidemiologist Adam Kucharski is good.

I see at least 4 main groups of experts on the coronavirus pandemic: physicians, epidemiolgists, scientists, public health officials. To simplify, physicians (MD, DO) are knowledgeable about the coronavirus' effects on the human body. Epidemiologists (PhD) are the statisticians and mathematicians who look at the numbers (e.g. case fatality rates). The most relevant scientists (PhD) with the coronavirus would likely be virologists. Public health officials (MPH) help coordinate the response. Of course, there's some overlap in expertise between all these groups. And some people are experts in multiple categories (e.g. MD/PhD, MD/MPH).

Harmonizing the Resurrection accounts

Last year, Lydia McGrew did an interview with the White Horse Inn on harmonizing the resurrection accounts:

https://www.whitehorseinn.org/2019/11/whi-1491-reconciling-accounts-of-the-resurrection/

I'm going to quote some excerpts:

00:02:54 Lydia McGrew: I tend to think it [John's Gospel] was written later, on the basis of my interpretation of the patristic evidence, but I think for all that it includes, it could have been written before the fall of Jerusalem. That is to say, the internal evidence is consistent with an earlier date and was certainly written by someone highly familiar with Jerusalem before the fall. I also think that all this specificity that you're talking about there completely destroys any claim that John is of a partially non-historical or holy non-historical genre. So, there's sometimes genre claims you will hear about the Gospel of John. What genre is it? Craig Evans, in particular, has made these statements and I disagree with that. I think John gives clear indications, over and over again, of his historical genre.