Contra Hume

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Contra Hume · Great Bishop of Geneva! Atheists Tend to Take Over a Protestant Attitude to Catholic Legend

Testify / Erik Manning refers to Charles Leslie, here:

Can Miracles Pass Historical Tests?
Testify | 27 April 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SloawhX38Wk

A disagreement, or two, but not on the main point:

5:28 "those were known to be mythologies not based on historical claims"

I'd disagree for some.

The real takeaway about such pagan deities is basically that there were no uncontrovertible divine miracles.

1) The stampeding to death of Hippolytus the son of Theseus could be demons getting into a herd of horses. Making Poseidon a demon, which I'd agree with. Probably pronounced "potei Daon" in that time, which should ring some vibes.
2) The generation of Romulus, there are two possibilities. There was some hitch in the imprisonment, so Rea Silvia got pregnant the normal way, or a demon did what certain doctors do this day. Note, in such a case, as St. Augustine notes about women who got pregnant after dreaming of fauns, the experience would have been definitely unvirginal.
3) Delphic oracle didn't "accurately predict" the misfortunes of Laios, Iocasta, Oedipus. A demon made a couple of self fulfilling prophecies. He calculated the prophecies in such ways that it would very probably push divers actors to the very fatal actions. If it had failed with the son of Laios, it would have succeeded with someone else, sooner or later, among people who were exposing themselves to demons by consulting a Pythia in the first place.

If I'd take Charles Leslie's view on these "not being based on historical claims" I'd be forced to allow for similar doubts on events that happened thousands of years before the time of Moses, like the Fall of Adam in Genesis 3 (a very key event in Christian theology).

So, I'd say these pagan examples, are mainly events that happened publically and before the senses of people.

1) The hero cult of Hippolytus in Athens commemorates it. I do not have access now to scholarly research on how far back before Euripides' time one can trace that memory of Hippolytus, but my point is, the memory can have been there even if the altar/tomb shifted.

Fearful Symmetry: The Two Tombs of Hippolytus, Francis M. Dunn, 1992; I can just access a page on JSTOR, not the whole article, even less the book.

2) As I said there are two possibilities on how Romulus was made, that was not a public event, and the demonic version doesn't involve senses functioning normally in Rea Silvia.

But a couple of twin brothers killing Amulius would have been a very public event, as would their claim to be sons of Rea Silvia and grandsons of deposed Numitor.

AND the founding of Rome.

3) Iocaste getting buried after a suicide, Oedipus leaving Thebes with eyes gouged out, his sons with Iocaste fighting each other, killing each other, Creon taking over, would all have happened before the senses of people.

The consultations of the Pythia would have involved people in their normal senses, except the Pythia in a state of trance and one abused by demons.

The hitch would definitely be to some that so long time passed between pre-Trojan war events (i e prior to 1180 BC) and 5th C. tragedians. Or Romulus (around the time of Homer) and Quintus Fabius Pictor (lost but cited by Dionysius of Halicarnassus). But if we don't accept that memories of events can live on for long and be preserved with decent accuracy, or changes reflect changes in ideology, we are hard set to account for Moses knowing of the Genesis 3 events. Like Babel and unlike pre-Flood giants and Flood, it's not an event which can be presumed historical bc universally recalled all over different traditions of mankind.

On the other hand, if we do accept the historicity (though not "theology") of these events, we will see that Hindu tradition gives external confirmation for Genesis 4 and 6 in Mahabharata. Pandavas were fighting Kauravas, not in post-Flood India, but in pre-Flood land of Nod, east of Eden, or one of its colonies.

However, Ganesha being born to a "god" not very unlike Apollon, on a very high mountain far from human society, getting decapitated and having his head replaced by an elephant's head is obviously unhistorical. Key consideration, apart from improbabilities, all of that happened far from human society. That's however far from being the case with all Pagan mythology.

6:08 — 6:16
"that said reportedly Conyers Middleton infamous for his written drummings of ecclesiastical miracles looked fruitlessly for decades for one"

I would say that Hume was in a very different position for Conyers Middleton, about ecclesiastical miracles.

He was part of his time in France and pretty certainly heard of a Catholic miracle there.

So, in order to reject it, he came up with his philosophy, which is very roundabout, and he had to reject it in order to remain a Protestant, and he had to remain a Protestant to have a social standing on returning to Scotland.

Roman Catholic Relief Act 1791, as the title of the wiki suggests with at least some probability, came in 1791. By then, Hume had been dead for 15 years.

I look up Middleton in the wiki.

"The years 1747–8 produced Middleton's most significant theological writings. The Introductory Discourse and the Free Inquiry [16] addressed "the miraculous powers which are supposed to have subsisted in the church from the earliest ages." Middleton suggested two propositions: that ecclesiastical miracles must be accepted or rejected in the mass; and that there is a distinction between the authority due to the early Church Fathers' testimony to the beliefs and practices of their times, and their credibility as witnesses to matters of fact."

If Middleton had accepted the credibility of Church Fathers writing on miracles that happened some decades earlier (pretty parallel to the case some are making for the Gospels, if they deny Matthean priority, right?), he would have been forced to accept continued miracles among Catholics, and from absence of miracles among Anglicans have had to conclude that the Catholic Church was the true Church. At this time, he was more than 41 years before the relief act, and on top of that, in 1747 he had married his third wife, not uncanonically according to Catholic theology, the two previous ones having died, but as a third time husband he could not even get a dispensation to be a married priest, since a Catholic married man who becomes a priest is very strictly held to ...

Oportet ergo episcopum irreprehensibilem esse, unius uxoris virum, sobrium, prudentem, ornatum, pudicum, hospitalem, doctorem,
Diaconi sint unius uxoris viri, qui filiis suis bene praesint, et suis domibus.
Si quis sine crimine est, unius uxoris vir, filios habens fideles, non in accusatione luxuriae, aut non subditos.
1 Timothy 3:2, 1 Timothy 3:12, Titus 1:6

Not as a minimum, but as a maximum. A layman can have remarried as a widower, but a bishop or deacon or between them a priest, can't.

If Middleton had left England to become a Catholic on the continent, he'd have had to look for another job. And since he was older than I, that would have been irksome, like it would be very irksome for me not to get a living from my writings.