Talk:Daniel (biblical figure)/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Not ALL scholars

To finish my point, not all scholars accept Historical Criticism. Claiming that a scholar is one who holds only to historical criticism is circular reasoning. To be sure, MOST scholars accept historical criticism. But even the Historical criticism page acknowledges that not all scholars accept it. To quote the page: It "leads to conclusions that conservative scholars find unscientific."

And remember, Wikipedia is not about what is someone's POV truth, it is about what is factual. And it is a fact that not all scholars accept Historical criticism.

Also, it is irrelevant how many do, or how many do not, accept it, but to those who are unable or unwilling to think for themselves, nor let others think for themselves. --MindyWaters (talk) 07:54, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Mindy, the source doesn't say that "all scholars" accept "historical criticism", it says there's a scholarly consensus that the figure of Daniel is legendary. It was you who introduced the word "all" and the idea of "historical criticism," a term that isn't in the source.PiCo (talk) 10:22, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

it was 180.200.143.109 who introduced the idea that ALL scholars held to historical criticism, even implying that only scholars who hold to historical criticism are scholars. That is why I started this comment, because not all scholars hold to historical criticism. And even if they did, the reader has the right to know that the view of this page is historical criticism or higher criticism. My addition to the article ties the article to the topic of higher criticism article. It isn't in the source, but it is part of wikipedia.--MindyWaters (talk) 16:29, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Mindy, nobody "holds to" historical criticism, it's simply a collection of tools for investigating the origins of texts. Nor does the source, or our article, say that "all" scholars believe Daniel to be legendary/fictional - it says a consensus, not all scholars. Nor does the source mention "historical criticism". We need to stick to sources and not introduce qualifications without backup. PiCo (talk) 02:46, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Mindy, I gather your problem is that you feel the article is saying that ALL scholars believe Daniel to e legendary. That's not the way I read Collins' use of the word consensus, and it's obviously not so - I can name half a dozen well-regarded books that treat Daniel as a real person. So I've added a little to the beginning of that line that makes clear this is the view of MOST scholars, not all. Believe me, I'm trying to accommodate you. PiCo (talk) 09:16, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Thank you, I don't mean to be contrary, but would like to see the article reflect what really exist about what people and a variety of scholars think about Daniel, both the book and the person. I disagree that Historical-criticism is just a set of tools. It is also a belief system that starts with vaticintium ex eventu from which the set of tools are based. I prefer the "grametico-historical" exegesis which has been traditional with and since the Reformation, which uses the tools of 1. Lexical, the meaning of the words in the time used, 2. Syntactic, interpret according to the grammatical principles know to exist at the time of the writing, 3. Contextual, looks at what was written befor and after the passage, 4. Historical, inquiry is made as to the circumstances that called for this particula writing, manners, customs and psychology of the people, 5. According to the analogy of Scripture, this principle recognized the divne unity running through the scriptures. --MindyWaters (talk) 23:09, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Mindy, all the sources I know of say simply that the mainstream/majority view is that Daniel (the book) is pseudonymous and that Daniel (the character) is legendary/fictional. We have Collins, who is a very eminent scholar, also Coogan, and many more. Even among conservative scholars who think Daniel was a real person and the real author, none that I can find say this is other than a minority view, and none make reference to any particular type of scholarship. We have to follow reliable sources, we can't put words into their mouths. PiCo (talk) 08:19, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

Thread revived in 2020

@PiCo: However, if there indeed do exist conservative scholars who think Daniel was a real person and those scholars have published this view in works which are reliable sources, does the principle of Neutral Point of View allow, if not mandate, us to include this minority opinion. If so, would it be ok to do so in this case? Perhaps, would the source by Miller be one possible example of this which may be included on this page? Yea, I would agree with you that Collins would be one possible reliable source for the study of the existence or non-existence of a Historical Daniel. However, there are other sources out there as well which add additional information. Penitentserf (talk) 15:03, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Agree. This is fringe, this not good (Collins, 1999 and Noegel & Wheeler, 2002). Saying that cloisters and our ancestors do not tell the truth is not good. Sitting in a round table and each citing his left is not scientific. I my opinion this is very bad and sad propaganda. Satanists, atheists, marxists want to burn the old and the new testament; as in North Corea. The Book of Daniel is relevant is our time, so no tale but bitter reality... --Chris.urs-o (talk) 04:12, 24 February 2016 (UTC)

Nobody here wants to burn your book, buddy. We just consider it fiction. Fiction does not mean false, it means unproven. Tgeorgescu (talk) 08:51, 14 December 2018 (UTC)

I might add to my reply above: if at WP:CHOPSY it is considered pseudohistory, it is dead in the water as far as Wikipedia is concerned. Tgeorgescu (talk) 16:36, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

@Penitentserf: To pass pseudohistory as credible would be to compromise basic policy. Tgeorgescu (talk) 17:09, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Penitentserf - I'm not sure why you want to revive this thread after so many years - it would be better to start a new one. Anyway, your question is whether we should/could mention reliable scholars who believe Daniel was a real person, on the basis of reliable sources. That policy is indeed fundamental to Wikipedia, but it includes the concept of Due Weight, which means that we don't give all opinion the same attention, but instead favour them in the following order: (a) consensus, if one exists; (b) if not, then majority and important minority opinion. Note that we don't mention individual scholars, we find bodies of opinion, consensus, majority, minority (fringe we don't mention at all). The tricky part, of course, is discovering what is consensus, majority or minority. Personally I do this by googling whatever topic I need with the prefix "consensus" (or most, or whatever); if nothing comes up I try "majority"; and if still nothing comes up I go to major encyclopedias like Eerdmans or Oxford, on the basis that they'll try to present a "safe" picture. As for Stephen Miller, I don't see that he claims his view is a majority one, and we have other sources which say the majority view is that Daniel was fictional.Achar Sva (talk) 22:26, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

References

Thank you for your time and being patient with me on this issue. I really appreciate the opportunity to discuss these issues and to hear everyone out. I am in no way making any claim to the historicity of Daniel being a majority opinion. Rather, I am simply saying that the historicity of Daniel is a minority, but not fringe, position. In my discussions elsewhere, I find that one major point of disagreement is over historical method. Pope Benedict, who also happens to be a WP:CHOPSY level scholar, holds an alternate minority-view historical methodology which is not fringe. As well, I find that Alvin Plantiga, who is a WP:CHOPSY level scholar, does a really good job explaining the historical issues present and that that Plantiga's explanation would have a place on a page which discusses the historicity of one of the books of the Bible..Penitentserf (talk) 18:29, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

See Talk:Nebuchadnezzar II#Fundamentalist POV: the thesis of real, fulfilled prophecies in the Book of Daniel is dead in the water as far as mainstream history is concerned. "Daniel was a real prophet" is pseudohistory. The Pope is a theologian, while Plantinga is a philosopher, neither of them wear the hat of historian. So they do not represent mainstream history. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:37, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

I found this critique of Plantiga on a website called LibraryThing:

Mr Plantinga's new book is ostensibly about the conflict between theism and science. The goal is to establish that they are not in conflict. It is a strange book in that it is part philosophy, part theology, part Christian apologetics and in part a religious devotional tract.

Before I criticize the author's position, let me first contextualize it a bit.

Mr. Plantinga is a thinker in the Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) philosophical tradition. Until the latter half of the 19th century, one could claim to be a Christian and claim to be rational at the same time. However, along came critical biblical studies undermining the accepted view of the bible's authorship and historicity, and then came the onslaught of geology which established the fact that no biblical flood occurred, dinosaurs predated humans by eons and evolution was a fact( even if the path and mechanisms are still in dispute ). This thoroughly discredited the veracity and credibility of the bible. If something as basic as the creation story and the biblical flood never occurred, what else didn't occur? Maybe we evolved after all. Maybe there was no Garden of Eden. Maybe Jesus never rose from the dead (For why a group might invent the resurrection story read Festinger's When Prophecy Fails). What's a believer to do? The only option left is retreating to commitment. Theology went from a scholarly science to an ideology. This response expressed itself as fundamentalism among the low-brow, neo-orthodoxy among the high-brow and presupposionalism among the Dutch Calvinists (For someone who still maintains that one can do scientific theology, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science. For a discussion of this process of Protestant theology becoming an ideology see, Retreat to Commitment, W.W. Bartley III).

Following Calvin, leading Dutch reformed thinkers like Nicholas Wolterstorff and Alvin Plantinga developed what has become known as the 'New Reformed Epistemology.' (You can Google to find other notable Dutch Reformed presuppositionalists). The thinking was, since there is no longer any evidence for Christianity, let's abandon evidentialism altogether. The new mantra is: "The Holy Spirit' creates its own listeners." From now on, we'll just assume god exists and Christianity is true.

In fact on pages 167-168, the author says, "My evidence base is the set of beliefs I use, or to which I appeal, in conducting inquiry...It is important to see in this connection that the evidence base of a Christian theist will include theism, belief in God and also the main lines of the Christian faith" The point of the book is not to establish the truth of Christianity. That option has been forever foreclosed to Christian apologists. Instead, the author wants to establish that belief in god is rational and that a certain type of Christian theism is not incompatible with science. The purpose is to immunize the Christian faith from rational and scientific criticism and falsification.

However, it is a stripped down version of Christian theism and not the Classical Christianity of our ancestors that he defends. The author accepts evolution, and since he says he accepts the findings of science, he would no doubt also accept the ancient age of the earth, the fact that there is no evidence for a worldwide flood, and that there is no archaeological evidence for the Jewish exodus from Egypt. He argues for theistic evolution and god's continual intervention in the world. He says that god intervenes at the quantum mechanical level by collapsing the wave function to achieve his results without violation of natural law (because the collapsed eigenstates are unpredictable anyway). Through this process, god can also guide and orchestrate the direction of evolution. This definition is therefore not incompatible with science. However, this definition of god's intervention makes his presence and activities undetectable. From an explanatory standpoint, this addition of god into the mix adds nothing.

Rather than comment on every twist and turn of the author's argument, let me just comment on a few: the rationality of belief in god, faith as a form of knowledge and the evolutionary argument against naturalism.

The author defends the thesis that belief in god is rational. To make his point, he asks if we can prove (I guess in the mathematical sense) that other minds exist. He claims we can't do it, yet we accept that other minds exist. We believe all kinds of things we can't prove. That's rational he claims, so what's so irrational about believing god exists then? Belief in god is on the same order as believing other minds exist. Except that it isn't. I interact with other people all day every day and use a common language and cooperate on common tasks. The brute facticity and immense weight of the world and other minds confronts me constantly. This does not occur with belief in god. Where is the immense weight of evidence for god? If there is, why struggle with doubt, dear believer? I have never once in my life doubted whether my children have minds.

Secondly, the author claims that there are other sources of knowledge than science, namely religious faith. He claims that since we accept the reliability of rational intuition, memory, and perception, we should accept religious faith as reliable knowledge. Once again, the author ignores the brute facticity and immense weight of the world that confronts every living thing. Reality constrains our perceptions, intuition and memory. We constantly interact with the world and the feedback we receive corrects our cognitive mistakes. What are the corrective constraints on religious faith knowledge?

Thirdly, Plantinga argues that if evolution is true, our cognitive faculties would be unreliable and we could not obtain reliable knowledge (our cognitive faculties have a very low probability of being reliable). Only a god who created us (i.e., guided our evolution) could guarantee the reliability of our cognitive faculties. This is his famous evolutionary argument against naturalism. We do have reliable knowledge. Therefore, naturalism is false.

I, however, I accept evolution and fully accept that our cognitive faculties are unreliable. So how is reliable knowledge possible then? It is possible by means of a method external to us. It is called scientific methodology. It is an intersubjective activity that corrects for the unreliability of our cognitive faculties in order to arrive at reliable knowledge. Plantinga thinks that science's lack of apodictic certainty is a weakness. It is its strength. The scientific community is constantly correcting itself, making knowledge more reliable and thereby overcoming individual cognitive flaws. Hence, from this perspective, evolution and naturalism are consistent with reliable knowledge. Religion is just the opposite.

This book is a case in point. Plantinga assumes the truth of theism and has to do mental gymnastics to argue for the compatibility of a watered down Christian theism and science.

This brings up a larger problem I have with Plantinga's position. He completely ignores the social determinants of knowledge. To him, we are isolated social atoms trapped in a Cartesian bubble struggling to establish warranted and justified true belief. As I just mentioned, we are born into a society with pre-given meaning and knowledge. I learn the knowledge from credible community leaders knowing that I can retrace the steps that establishes this as knowledge if I need have to justify it. Science is a community activity and not a solitary activity. It assumes the immense weight of the facticity of a world where no one has witnessed people rising from the dead or water being turned into wine.

In the end, Christian theism can be defined in such a manner to make it compatible with science, but the resulting religion will doubtless be unsatisfying to most people. According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, there are approximately 41,000 Christian denominations and organizations in the world. According to many of them, your eternal destiny is uncertain unless you pick the right one. What's a prospective Christian to do? I guess the Holy Spirit will guide them to the right one. Who needs evidence? ( ) 2 vote PedrBran | Dec 14, 2012 | Achar Sva (talk) 23:49, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

This critique of Plantinga is not very relevant to the article, don't you think? The talk page is to discuss the article, not to promote your opinion on some unrelated philosopher. Seb773 (talk) 02:08, 12 November 2022 (UTC)

Penitentserf has WP:CITED Plantinga in defense of the historicity of Daniel. tgeorgescu (talk) 00:48, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Yeah, but this critique of the EAAN is irrelevant to the historicity of Daniel. Seb773 (talk) 17:26, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

References