FdD Notebook - 2/5/25
Extraordinary claims - What's an ark? - Cycling in the mud
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Bonjour dear readers,
January 2025 is over, and we're don’t mind a bit. This has been far from the pleasantest month we've ever had as a family. Two weeks ago, I took our daughter Violette (4) to the emergency room because she was laboring to breathe. It was bacterial pneumonia and we ended up doing a five day stay. It was definitely a trial for the whole family: for Chelsea, taking care of the other kids on her own, as well as for Violette and me, who were confined to her room in the hospital. Thanks be to God, we were showered with love by our brothers and sisters in Christ, and we made it through. Violette has gotten better, she's doing very well now, and we're slowly getting back into our ordinary rhythm of life... just in time for the February school break 😳.
Epistemology
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?
Atheists often say this, and it’s one of their main arguments against any claim that God performed a miracle. They present it as if it were common sense: if I tell you I have a dog, you're probably ready to take my word for it. It's an ordinary claim. If I say I have a tiger, you're going to have your doubts if I don't have any proof, because that's headed out of the realm of the ordinary. And if I say that I have a pet dragon, that's an extraordinary claim that you're not going to believe without some extraordinary proof.
So this rule gets set up, and then if it's suggested that Jesus was raised from the dead, you are informed that here we have an extraordinary claim that's going to require extraordinary evidence. And of course, whatever evidence can be provided, it will never be extraordinary enough.
The problem is not the evidence, the problem is the rule, which suffers from at least two fatal weaknesses. It's simply not true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
(1) One problem is that this rule is not a reliable guide in real life. If we followed it meticulously, we'd suffer from unreasonable doubts at the same time as believing dangerous lies. The claims that the scammer on the phone made were perfectly ordinary, but disbelieving them was absolutely the right thing to do. On the other hand let's imagine I went golfing by myself one day, and at some point I happen to make a hole in one. This is extraordinary for the best golfers; for me it would border on the miraculous. No one has seen it but me, and I have no proof to offer except my word. So, if I tell my wife or my friends, would they be obliged to disbelieve me because I'm making an extraordinary claim without extraordinary evidence?
The direction both of these examples point is that the reliability of the witness is far more important to the reliability of claims than a measure of how extraordinary they are.
(2) An even more important problem is the fact that there is no objective measure by which to designate a statement as ordinary or extraordinary. What is considered to be extraordinary depends on the pre-existing worldview of the person evaluating and the presuppositions that he brings to the table. For example, let's consider the Christian claim that Jesus died on the cross and rose again the third day. For an atheist, the claim of Jesus' death is ordinary, while the claim of his resurrection is extraordinary. But for a Muslim, the claim of the resurrection is not intrinsically extraordinary (Q 3.49 Jesus raises the dead), but the claim that God would let his prophet die in such a brutal and shameful way, that is inconceivable.
Clearly, the Muslim's objection depends on a certain conception of God, but it's just the same for the atheist. He considers a resurrection to be extraordinary only because he presupposes the non-existence of God and the impossibility of miracles. It's not an objective quality of the claim that makes it extraordinary for the atheist, but the fact that it has no place in his worldview. Which of course we already knew...
Biblical Hebrew
Why is it called an ark?
“Ark” is not a normal English word. We don’t use it for anything other than one big boat and one box in the Jewish temple. So where does it come from and why is it there in our English bibles?
The Hebrew word for the boat built by Noah is תֵּבָה (tebah). This word appears in the Bible in only two books: in Genesis in the story of Noah, and in Exodus where it's the word for the basket in which Moses floats on the Nile. This is not, contrary to our translations, the same word used for the chest containing the tablets of the 10 Commandments. That word is אֲרוֹן (aron), and it's used almost exclusively for the ark of the covenant (exceptions: Gn 50:26, 2 K 12:9-10, 2 Chr 24:10-11).
So, if it's not the same word in Hebrew, why do we use the same word in English? And why ark? The answer to the first question can be found in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament made by the Jews in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. There we find the same Greek word, κιβωτος (kibotos), which translates the tebah of Noah and the aron of the covenant. Kibotos has the meaning of “chest” or “box”. This then is translated in Latin in the Vulgate Bible as arca, and it's this word that became ark in English.
Artificial Intelligence
A black and white question?
Personally I haven’t been an early adopter of AI. I don’t know if it’s short-sighted, but I simply don’t find it very interesting. This video made me laugh though: Levi Rosman pits ChatGPT against DeepSeek in the ultimate AI chatbot chess match. It’s also educational in that it gives a good illustration of how AI excels at sounding smart while actually being dumb. For a more serious, and quite helpful treatment, this article compares AI to a fuzzy jpeg of the internet.
Reading
I did a lot of reading in the hospital, as you can imagine. I finished God on the Brain by Bradley Sickler, Remaking the World by Andrew Wilson, and Men and Women in the Church by Kevin DeYoung. All of those were really good.
In progress: Redeeming Reason by Vern Poythress, The Eye of the Beholder by Lydia McGrew, and Beauty is Your Destiny by Philip Ryken.
Cycling
While Violette and I were in the hospital, looking for something good on the TV, we discovered a sport whose name I knew but had never watched: cyclocross. We both thought it was great. If you've never seen it before, have a look at this video:
But the Lord is in his holy temple;
let all the earth keep silence before him.”Habakkuk 2:20