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发帖数: 6300 | 1 The Case for Christianity, Unrealistic Expectations and Evidential Modesty
One of the most important aspects of jury selection is finding jurors who
have realistic expectations. If you’re someone who needs a surveillance
video from the crime scene before you can be certain about what happened at
the time of the murder, you’re not going to be selected for any of my cases
. None of the murders I work were recorded on tape. If your someone who
thinks that CSI technology should provide us with DNA from every available
surface at the crime scene, even years after the murder occurred, you’re
not going to be selected as a juror either. There’s a vast difference
between the CSI technology portrayed on television shows and the CSI
technology available in real life homicide investigations. In short, if your
evidential expectations are too high, prosecutors are going to excuse you
from jury service. Unrealistic expectations can keep you from discovering
the truth. If you can’t get comfortable with the investigative, scientific
and evidential limits that are part of every criminal case, you’ll never
have evidential certainty about anything. All cases involve unanswered
questions; each of us needs to deal with this reality unless we are prepared
to be paralyzed by doubt at every turn.
I’ve seen unreasonable expectations impact the way people view the New
Testament. Bart Ehrman clearly held a view of Biblical inerrancy that
crippled his opinion of the Gospels once he discovered the presence of
textual variants. As an atheist coming to the text for the very first time,
I reacted very differently to the alleged “contradictions” I saw in the
Gospel accounts and to the discovery of scribal insertions and variants. I
had already been working criminal investigations for many years and
understood the nature of eyewitness accounts. I knew that witnesses seldom
agreed on details of the same crime, that witnesses could be wrong about a
particular detail yet still considered reliable by a jury or a judge, and
that juries could arrive at proper conclusions with less than complete
information. In other words, my initial evidential expectations were
appropriately modest. I didn’t expect perfection and I didn’t require it.
Instead, I was concerned about reliability and I understood that
dependability was not reliant on perfection.
There are dangerous presuppositions that hinder investigations. My personal,
dangerous presupposition was philosophical naturalism. It prevented me from
exploring any reasonable explanation that might include a supernatural
cause. But there’s another dangerous presupposition that many of us take
for granted, and it’s just a debilitating as philosophical naturalism. We
have to be careful to avoid “evidential perfectionism”. No worldview can
answer every important question; no worldview is evidentially perfect. As an
atheist, I could not account for the beginning of space, time and matter or
the appearance of life from inanimate materials, yet I was comfortable in
spite of these unanswered questions and absence of evidence. Now, as a
Christian Case Maker, I recognize that it’s important to help people
understand more than the nature of the evidence for the Christian Worldview.
We have to first help people understand the rules that govern this evidence
. It’s not about what to think, it’s about how to think. That’s why it’s
important for us to help people understand that they cannot expect
evidential perfection in the cases we make for theism or Christianity. There
’s a reason why the standard of proof (the SOP) in criminal cases is “
beyond a reasonable doubt” and not “beyond a possible doubt”. We can be
certain about our conclusions, even though we have less than a perfect
collection of evidence. We simply have to begin by reigning in our
perfectionist presuppositions.
J. Warner Wallace is a Cold-Case Detective, a Christian Case Maker, and the
author of Cold-Case Christianity
http://coldcasechristianity.com/2013/the-case-for-christianity- |
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