Continuing to Answer Stilwell's Paper [1 through halfway through 5]

Phil Stilwell Gets Remedial Philosophy (quora) · In Answer to Phil Stilwell / Tokyo Taboo · Phil Stilwell Responded with a Paper. Answering the Abstract · Continuing to Answer Stilwell's Paper [1 through halfway through 5] · From Phil Stilwells Assessment of Me

I will here elaborate on the points, three here:

• the practical point of the individual evaluating whether to follow an inspiration
• the point of the hierarchy when on behalf of the Church evaluating whether an individual was a saint
• the question of the Church and Her divine origin.

1. The Question That Never Received an Answer

As mentioned in my answer to the abstract, I don't think his question really needs one.

The two questions "what do I do know" and "am I right in what I'm habitually convinced of" are distinct.

No reasonable man usually fuses them.

2.1 Absolute certainty is too much to demand

The serious question is therefore not:

Can the believer prove the Holy Spirit’s involvement with absolute certainty?

It is:

Does the proposed method make correct source attributions reliably enough to justify confidence, and how would we know?

A medical test need not be perfect to be useful. But we need some idea of its sensitivity, its false-positive rate, and the population in which it was tested.

A parallel insanity is proposed in:

3. The Logic of Discrimination

... No mathematical precision is required to see the problem. Lundahl supplies no defensible values, ranges, or even comparative arguments for the likelihoods.

Totally superflous, as already stated. Except perhaps internally for the Church. Which would not use Bayesian logic in mathematical form to make assessments of moral probability anyway.

The method the Church uses is, did this method of discernment make saints.

This leaves us with the external question whether we have reasons to believe the Church.

2.2 Historical inquiry is not identical to experimental prediction

...

This concession does not rescue Lundahl. It removes an easy escape. ...

I briefly halt here to note he claims the paper format is meant to reduce rhetoric that could be too vague, to logic barebones. (See: why answer in a paper).

The metaphors like "rescue" and "escape" and qualifiers "not" and "remove" are rhetorically calculated to give the impression I'm the person divagating, the one who needs some kind of schooling in logic. But does he back this up?

The problem is not that Acts fails a laboratory test.

A laboratory test is not applicable in the first place. As a rhetorical flourish, this sentence is of course OK. But as a serious objection, no.

The problem is that Lundahl treats the claims inside one religious narrative as if they independently confirmed one another,

Well, depends on what you mean by "independent". If you certainly want "independent" sources, it's not just the Christian account, but loads of others, that lack comparable outside confirmation. No one will say that Acts confirms that Caesar made or destroyed a bridge over the Rhine. Perhaps Livy will confirm it, but Livy is as little independent of Caesar's tradition (not necessarily limited to the text in Bellum Gallicum itself) as an early Church Father is independent of Acts and related oral tradition.

For the Battle of the Somme, we can have an account independent of French sources in English or German ones, but if we treat the West as one community, which it is, what would you answer a Japanese if he were to ask "are there any Indian or Chinese confirming sources?"

Communities are not lab teams that have agreed to double check on each other. If you want to establish that colchicine is good against gout, it may obviously help if both French and American doctors report it (however, they differ on posology recommended). Because American and French doctors are members of an international "meta-team" where national medical corps are treated as "local teams" ... that have since long ago agreed to check on each other's results. And usually to do so in open scientific polemic.

The epistemically correct "independent confirmation" in history is usually the independence of observations resumed in one source. If I knew nothing from the things Jesus said apart from His obviously being the one telling the disciples of the temptation by Satan, I would be reasonable to doubt it. But there are claims that are far easier to check than that, to the first Christians, because different people actually all saw them. If the story is true, which shouldn't be the first go to main issue.

The "religious narrative" is a resumé of the independent sources that were available to those formulating it, that is mainly to Luke and prior to him those whom he spoke to.

The fact that the narrative is religious doesn't warrant it a treatment of higher and all the way up to disingenuous suspicion nor exempt it from being the story of a community's immediate origin. And for non-religious origin stories, Stilwell will not put up this doubt. I have never heard him put any scepticism on the United States correctly remembering to have started out as thirteen colonies of the United Kingdom which then at a certain date broke off connections in a war. I have never heard him pretend George Washington didn't exist or that his actual role was very different.

then asks his critic to explain every missing stage of an alternative history.

If I pretended that George Washington was a British governour and obtained independence by first petitioning and then calling a referendum, I assume that Stilwell would want me to explain why a War of Independence and a second War of 1813 was inserted into the narrative. Stilwell might pretend we could easily solve the problem in another way, by appealing to British records. That's beside the point. I could push disingenuous even further and say British records were faked later on. I suppose that at least at this point Stilwell would require a coherent, if not the one accurate, at least a coherent and possible history of how the non-event in the series of events became an event in remembered history.

I am applying exactly that same test. I am being perfectly consistent about my criteria. I am just not treating "religious narratives" as a specially suspect category, but instead "immediate origin stories of actually existing communities" (and to a weaker degree "stories of the community's past, even outside the crucial point of immediate origin as the community started) as a specially robust one. Amnesia plus false memory is curious even in one person, and even more so collectively. A claim that a community first knew it's origin to be A, then forgot A and replaced it with B to the point of referencing B as knowledge of their origin is a remarkable claim which would require quite some evidence. I ask my critic to produce it. Or at least an explanation, if not evidence for it. Even that is apparently too much, and warrants irony in a paper pretending to use the objectivity standards of the paper format/

And by the way, I would have a coherent scenario of why Jewish sources don't confirm the Christian ones. Stilwell himself has called the general mechanism I'm speaking of "villain-driven irrationality" in a different paper. That Jews to this day have a very clear tendency to cast Jesus for a villain, though non-religious versions have weakened it, and some Jews even religious ones, living among Christians, have dropped it, can be seen in some of the comments by Tovia Singer.

4. Satan Makes the Proposed Test Harder, Not Easier

Even if a healing were genuine, a language genuinely unlearned, or a vision genuinely external to the recipient’s imagination, a second question would remain: Which supernatural agent was responsible?

For healings, we assume Satan cannot imitate a totally sudden healing. God has put limits on his power.

For a person's good or bad inspirations, we assume, if he didn't repent of them and if he was a saint, they came from the Holy Spirit. And guess what the one most crucial test for him being a saint is? Healing miracles. Which brings us back to God having put limits on Satan's power, some types of sudden never ever having been within angelic power, fallen or unfallen, and some powers Satan would actually have in his nature being made inavailable to him if it were about deceiving ... so much that when Biblical prophecy talks about the Antichrist doing "signs and wonders" some say they won't even include miraculous healings and others that he'd need real relics from real saints.

Lundahl says that good moral direction points to God and the wrong moral direction points away from the Devil. But this assumes that a deceptive agent must display his final aim in every local act.

A Christian praying to God for direction, if he were in good faith following a deceptive but apparently morally good inspiration from the Devil, would thereby merit God's protection from deception when it became crucially bad. This is to some degree also true of as yet non-Christians. And this is part of the reason why someone outside the Church if genuinely a Christian would come into Her.

If Satan can imitate signs of goodness, then orthodoxy, charity, success, and even wonders do not reliably identify the Holy Spirit. If Satan cannot imitate them, Lundahl needs to explain why the deception hypothesis appeared in his own account of imagination in the first place.

Has Stilwell heard of consistently and all the way versus not all the way and finally with some glaring inconsistency? When the Church evaluates if someone became a saint, the Church has some real clues on what went "all the way" (not saying this has been the case with the Vatican II sect accepting John Paul II as a Pope, but that's a different discussion). For the individual decision maker or decision accepter, again, the person doesn't quite as much need an epistemic as a moral guide. Though obviously being acquainted with the truths of the faith clearly helps in detecting fraud.

5. The Church Does Not End the Regress

[diagramm notation could not be replicated here]

In ordinary language: the authority is legitimate because the Church is protected; protection is known through a tradition certified by the Church; and miracles read through that tradition are then used to confirm the Church.

You forget that the tradition is not just "certified by the Church" (as by an institution) but is actually the memory of the community. The Church is not a parallel to FBI, not even to Supreme Court, the Church is a parallel to the United States. Stilwell has probably confused the two related concepts "the Catholic Church" and "the hierarchy of the Catholic Church" ... which in some contexts is actually called "the Catholic Church". The United States does not recall being founded by Kemal Atatürk and arguably never will.

The historical existence of an institution is independent evidence that the institution existed. It is not independent evidence that the institution possesses supernatural protection.

Granted, but irrelevant.

We independently know that Mormonism exists. That fact does not verify Joseph Smith’s plates.

It may verify the existence of the plates, which I could explain as demonic, or it may not verify it. Depends on the detail. For instance, could the people attesting the plates have been in on a con game? And THAT depends on the detail of the story.

While we are at con game, before you ask "why not the reports of Jesus' Resurrection" con men don't volunteer to risk martyrdom. And if you pretend that the one doing the con game and the ones being martyred are different persons, how do you account for the top tier of the hierarchy being the ones martyred? The criterium is consistent, it involves "con game is a possible explanation, except when it's impossible" ... and it sometimes is for an obvious reason.

We independently know that Islam exists. That fact does not verify Muhammad’s revelations.

It arguably verifies he had or claimed to have revelations. If he was sincere, there is a certain problem of discernment that is not solved by the Catholic Church canonising him, because the Catholic Church hasn't canonised him.

The continued existence of the Catholic Church establishes continuity of a community, not the divine truth of the community’s account of itself.

How about starting with the human truth of the community's account of itself? I don't appeal to divine protection of the US when saying I trust the US on George Washington. I appeal to the improbability of a real origin A being completely forgotten and replaced by a fake origin B taken by all as if the real one. Already a very problematic and improbable claim about individual memories, but pretty absurd on the account of the community.

Now, the Mormon account of the plates is on several levels perfectly compatible with human fraud.

• Few people present when the plates were given
• plates often in a closed chest
• plates absent when Joseph Smith produced translation with use of two or one seer stone (depending on stages)
• plates returned, so not kept as relics by the Mormon Church.

I'd like you to construct one level where the account isn't so compatible on principles perfectly consistent with those (oh, never mind, I forgot whom I was asking, but still) I'm using to exclude fraud within the Church's account of Herself.

And similarily, the single person who could verify that Mohammed had revelations from Allah was Mohammed.

In this context, I'm reminding that Islam makes claims about only five miracles for the founding of its Ummah:

• the Quran (good style vs illiteracy of Mohammed, scientific knowledge beyond the period have featured)
• the split Moon
• the expansion in military action with victory after victory
• the spider weaving very quickly a web before the cave
• the night journey.

The two last of these, like receiving ayah after ayah supernaturally, depend entirely on Mohammed's claim about his own experience. The split moon can be explained by social conformity within the Ummah and social and military pressure for the king in India who confirmed it (in the 13th C).

And I think one can agree after seing long term English misrule in Ireland, including a genocidal application of tenant's contracts in 1847 to 1853, military conquest doesn't prove divine protection from error. From our own Bible, we have an even more direct confirmation thereof:

And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them. And power was given him over every tribe, and people, and tongue, and nation
[Apocalypse (Revelation) 13:7]

Whether you believe the prophecy or not, I think you can at least relate to the principle. Vanquishing someone doesn't prove him wrong and doesn't prove oneself right.

Any more parallels? I'll give one about Rome. I'm accepting Rome was founded by Romulus in 753 BC, I'm just not accepting he was son of Mars or that Jupiter Capitolinus as his granddaddy promised prosperity to Rome forever.

The Church’s existence, age, influence, and selfunderstanding are all compatible with a successful human institution. None discriminates divine protection from institutional durability. The regress stops only because Catholic authority is declared a stopping point. Declaring the stop is not validating it.

The account of the initial miracles, primarily the Resurrection, leaves no reasonable room for deliberate fraud, for honest misunderstanding or for hallucinations, which do not exist as collective phenomena. Several people in the same hospital may hallucinate due to ergotine poisoning, but the ergotine poisoning won't make their hallucinations agree. Radical restructuring of what was initially reported and taught need substantiation. Dating of Gospels and then pretending they were the only reports available for the community and then selectively presenting cases for initial absence of claims of physical resurrection are clearly prima facie absurd solutions, would not have occurred to Stilwell to do with the United States, would therefore require at the minimum a model.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Ruffinus of Assisi, Martyr
30.VII.2026

Assisii, in Umbria, sancti Rufini Martyris.