Monthly Archives: July 2015

Podcasts

Tim McGrew lectures on undesigned coincidences in the Bible

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Dr. Tim McGrew
Dr. Tim McGrew

I have an interesting lecture for you to listen to today, by Dr. Tim McGrew. He is a professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University.

The MP3 file is here.

I do not have a summary of the lecture, but I do have an article that explains what undesigned coincidences are.

Lydia McGrew explains the concept of undesigned coincidences on her blog:

Undesigned coincidences in the Gospels … is an argument that was well-known in the nineteenth century but has, for no really clear reason, simply been forgotten as time has gone on. It is a cumulative case argument that the Gospels reflect, to an important extent, independent knowledge of actual events. Please note that this argument is quite independent of one’s preferred answer to the synoptic question. That is to say, even if, e.g., Mark was the first Gospel and others had access to Mark and show signs of literary dependence on Mark, the argument from undesigned coincidences provides evidence for independent knowledge of real events among the Gospel writers. There are many more of such coincidences beyond those given in the talk.

Basically, this argument finds cases where the same story is in two sources, but where some important detail is left out of one account so that something about the story seems out of place. But the other source has the missing detail that unlocks the mystery. This supports the view that the sources are independent witnesses of the same events. Multiple attestation is an indicator that the material is historical.

My favorite example of undesigned coincidences is the Philip example from John 6.

Lydia explains that example here:

As I was listening to Tim’s examples, I was struck by all the reasons there might be for a real eyewitness not to fill out the explanation for a detail. Think for example how tedious it is to listen to someone who goes back to explain every little detail he mentions in a story.

[…]Similarly, as John is telling the story about the feeding of the five thousand, it would be quite natural for him to say that Jesus asked Philip where they could buy bread if he were really an eyewitness–that is, because he remembered that Jesus did ask Philip. (Tim talks about why it was Philip in the interview.) But John himself might have had to stop and think for a moment if someone had asked him, “Why did Jesus ask Philip rather than any of the other disciples?” Presumably when John told the story, he wasn’t particularly thinking about some special reason for Jesus to select Philip for the question. But if someone were forging the story as fiction, he would have a reason for choosing to use a given disciple as a character at that point in his fictional narrative, and therefore he would be unlikely to choose that character without making the reason clearer to his readers.

All sorts of such things can happen when one is telling a true story, especially a story one has witnessed. One gets caught up in what one actually remembers and drops in incidental references to small facts, which facts are to some extent selected randomly by the memory as one brings the scene back to memory. This is typical of real memoirs but not of elaborate forgeries.

If you think this is interesting and useful, then give the lecture a listen.

News

Man suspected of influencing Tunis attack collecting welfare in UK

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It's not their money, so it can be wasted
It’s not their money, so it can be wasted

This is from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

A leader of the terrorist group suspected of being behind the Tunisian beach massacre is living in benefits in Britain.

Hani al-Sibai, an al-Qaeda cleric suspected of radicalising “Jihadi John”, lives in a £1 million house leafy street in fashionable west London.

He is said to be one of the “key influencers” of the Islamic fanatics believed to have recruited and trained gunman Seifeddine Rezgui.

Egyptian-born al-Sibai, 54, reportedly lives on £50,000 a year in handouts, disability living allowance, with his wife and five children.

Asked how he could justify taking so much in benefits, al-Sibai, who is under investigation suspected of benefit fraud, told the Daily Mail: “Ask David Cameron, don’t ask me.”

[…]Al-Sibai is understood to have close links to Tunisian terror group Ansar al-Sharia, which authorities believe to have recruited and trained Rezgui.

He is cited at length in a 2013 report by the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague, and is described as one of its “key influencers”.

Security services are understood to be investigating links between al-Sibai and his influence on the west London terror network in which Jihadi John – unmasked as Mohammed Emwazi – operated.

It is claimed that al-Sibai, a charismatic preacher, had “captivated” a number of young Muslim men who subsequently went abroad to fight jihad.

In a court case last year, he was accused of having “provided material support to al-Qaeda and conspired to commit terrorist acts”, an allegation he denies.

I guess people who support big government would tell me that this is compassion in action. The bigger government is, the more people government can help, right? That’s why we need to raise taxes and give the government more money so it can take care of all of these helpless people.

Well, I am for small government. No individual worker, working family, or private sector company would survive financially for very long by handing out money to terrorist imams. It’s so easy to make mistakes handing out money that isn’t yours, in order to buy votes from people. That’s what government does, and that’s why we need to keep government small. I don’t know about you, but have better things to do with my money than give it to government, so they can buy the votes of terrorists imams with it.

News

Illegal immigrant murderer chose San Francisco because it’s a sanctuary city

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Breitbart News reports on the recent murder of a young woman in northern California.

Excerpt:

Five-time deportee, seven-time convicted felon Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez said in a new interview Sunday with a local ABC News affiliate that he came to San Francisco because he knew the sanctuary city would not hand him over to immigration officials.

[…]Lopez-Sanchez has confessed to shooting Kathryn Steinle last Wednesday at Pier 14.

Had San Francisco authorities not refused a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainer request, Lopez-Sanchez may not have been in the United States and Steinle might still be alive.

[…]An ICE official told Breitbart News that ICE Enforcement and Removal had begun processing the suspect for reinstatement of removal from the U.S. in March. But instead Lopez-Sanchez was transferred on March 26 from the Bureau of Prisons in another city to the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department (SFSD) because of a drug warrant. ICE then filed the detainer request to be notified prior to Lopez-Sanchez’s release from custody.

A San Francisco court dismissed Lopez-Sanchez’s drug charges on March 27.

San Francisco and SFSD policy is to deny ICE detainer requests, barring special circumstances, such as a warrant for a suspected violent offender. The ICE detainer request was denied, and on April 15, 2015 Lopez-Sanchez was released. Two and a half months later Kate Steinle was killed.

The 2013 “Trust Act,” signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, gave California cities like San Francisco more leeway in deciding whether to comply with immigration authorities.

When I was listening to Ben Shapiro talk about this story while driving home last night, I was thinking about how much of a mistake it is to live in areas that are dominated by the secular left. You can see how many times common sense and the rule of law were disregarded.

The true horror of this story is that the victim paid taxes that were used to pay the people who refused to deport her murderer. She paid taxes and the state used them to pass policies and laws that protected her murderer.

The Breitbart News article  closed with this:

The same night Steinle was shot and killed, a four-time deported illegal alien in Laredo, Texas, murdered his wife with a hammer, according to his own admission. Breitbart Texas previously reported that Laredo Police Department admitted three prior violent encounters with the man. Federal agents told Breitbart Texas that Laredo police failed to inform Border Patrol of the encounters with the illegally present foreign national.

It was suggested that the woman would still be alive today, had police reported the man to Border Patrol.

The police are paid by taxpayers, but sometimes they don’t protect taxpayers. Sometimes, they have other priorities – political correctness and compassion.

What is interesting is the Obama administration response to the Steinle murder:

Referring to the shooting death last week of Kathryn Steinle, allegedly shot by a Mexican man who has been deported five times, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the U.S. would be safer if Republican lawmakers had approved comprehensive immigration reform backed by the president.

“The president has done everything within his power to make sure that we’re focusing our law enforcement resources on criminals and those who pose a threat to public safety,” Mr. Earnest said.

So, the Democrat solution to the problem of illegal immigrants murdering taxpayers is to give the murderers citizenship. I’m not sure that this will solve the problem.

Here’s another one from Breitbart News:

A six-time-deported illegal immigrant is charged in the felony hit-and-run of an Arizona mother and her two young children. The man allegedly admitted to being high on marijuana while causing the severe lacerations to a five-year-old boy. The five-year-old and a two-year-old were both taken to an area hospital.

And The Stream reports that the federal government released him to San Francisco knowing it was a “sanctuary city”:

This is a national story, because the federal government released accused shooter Francisco Sanchez to a San Francisco jail in March and the jail released Sanchez to the streets April 15 after the district attorney dropped a 20-year-old charge for marijuana possession. Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi said he did so in keeping with San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy.

Individual anecdotes are useful to illustrate, but for real knowledge, I need to see the aggregate data.

And here it is, from The Daily Signal:

According to a recent study released from the Center for Immigration Studies, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released 30,558 criminally-convicted illegal immigrants, with a total of 79,059 convictions altogether, in 2014.

Furthermore, the CIS report shows that among the 904,000 illegal immigrants who have ignored orders to leave the U.S., approximately 167,527 of these are convicted criminal immigrants.

Likewise, CIS’s April 2015 statistics indicate ICE has only arrested 11,983 at-large convicted criminal immigrants—despite the fact 168,000 criminal immigrants were identified.

Is government as responsive to the needs of taxpayers as private companies are to the needs of their customers? Or is government more concerned about the rule of law, or not offending their favored groups? Maybe we should think twice about voting for bigger government.