Torley Presents Alter's Case Against the Resurrection

[swamidass (S. Joshua Swamidass)]

There are many types of Gish Gallop. It does not always take place in formal debate: This is the part that I think applies. It need not take place in a short space of time.

@vjtorley

The Gish Gallop (also known as proof by verbosity [1]) is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort.

In written debate

“”Cite a giant wall of text, or a three hour long [Y]ou[T]ube video, and then claim it as irrefutable proof.
…
And… repeat.
—/u/LRonPaul2012[7]

In written form, a Gish Gallop is most commonly observed as a long list of supposed facts or reasons, as a pamphlet or green ink web page, with a title that proudly boasts the number of reasons involved — see the examples below. The individual points must also be fairly terse, so that each point individually can be easy to refute. Writing a single paragraph or two to refute, say “How come there are still monkeys?” is easy enough. But combined, a Gish Gallop might run to the same length as an essay of several thousand words, as each point requires in-depth deconstruction, refutation and evidence, whereas the initial assertion needs to be just that, an assertion.

…
To supporters, the illusion works, but those who disagree with the Galloper’s points often find the repetitive assertions and non-explanations tedious.

Gish Gallop - RationalWiki

What Exactly Is Your Point?

You write (and @dga471 quotes):

@vjtorley

I certainly don’t ascribe to the Resurrection based on faith alone. Rather, the question is whether it is rational and reasonable for any person to hold to a conservative view of the reliability of the Gospels (among other things).

No. The question I sought to answer in my OP was: is it irrational for a person that’s prepared to grant the existence of a personal God Who is able to work miracles and reveal Himself to people (as the Jews do), to reject the historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus as too weak to warrant his/her assent? I think the answer is no.

If this was your goal all along. Well, I think @dga471 and I agreed with it long before you made your case. The Resurrection does not box anyone into belief. What ever the evident basis for it, we can’t get around the biggest loophole of all. It is absurd to think that a man rose from the dead. It is always rational to look for a better a explanation.

@vjtorley

The apologists’ case for the Resurrection is full of holes that you could drive a truck through. Over and over again, the same bad old arguments keep getting recycled.

It seems you are putting an unreasonable evidential standard on the Resurrection. As I’ve said before, the precisely same thing can be said about arguments for evolution, and is. There are always loopholes, especially when there is no rigor or standards applied to the reasoning process. I do not expect to box anyone on in with an argument for Evolution or for the Ressurection.

@dga471

I think we have very differing views of what apologetics is about and what role it should play in converting people. This might be an interesting topic of discussion in itself. I certainly don’t think any sort of apologetical argument is sufficient to conclusively prove the case for Christianity, such that non-Christians would be irrational to reject it.

I concur with @dga471 here.