Dylan Roberts

What’s the biggest lie Christians believe today?

I watched the video and read the article, and I agree with Wes's assessment this isn't a very strong argument. Cameron frames it as an inescapable dilemma for Wes, but he can easily split the horns. The bishops were reliable regarding NT canon identification, yet Wes can remain Protestant (i.e., their reliability concerning the canon doesn't logically entail reliability concerning every material doctrine they go on to further endorse). Reliability concerning the fact of inspiration of the NT canonical books is one matter, and reliability concerning later doctrinal development is another matter. Endorsing the first doesn't logically force you to endorse the second. There's another major issue. The article says that nothing in it depends on the necessity of an infallible Church. Um, but when you unpack the argument both horns need just that. The first horn works only if any error defeats reliability, which is not how reliability works. It's a track-record notion. The second horn works only if reliability entails being right item by item. But, reliability requires of a process that it tends to (over time, properly restricted to a well-specified domain, etc.) output more true than false beliefs. It doesn't require that each and every output is true. So, to get the horns to hunt you have to smuggle back in the very infallibility we're told by Cameron and whoever publishes Ecclesia Antiqua that the argument most certainly isn't about infallibility. In reality, it is. Further, I'm pretty sure there are many historical inaccuracies. Though I'd have to do research to confirm my suspicions. Setting aside historical issues, another worry is the notion of reliability. Processes are reliable relative to specific domains. There's no reliability writ large. So the conditional linking the bishops' doctrinal errors to an unreliable NT needs more specification. And when you do that you get a big hairy principle that is false. It's roughly that a body erring on any doctrine is unreliable on every doctrine. Given this is false and it undergirds the horn, the horn is false. And the argument relies on disagreement in a problematic way. It goes from books being disputed to beliefs about them being unwarranted. In the disagreement literature this inference doesn't hold. To secure disagreement that matters in an epistemic sense you need something like peerhood. You need comparable evidence and comparable access. Yet in the article we get non-peers being compared, as they're not working from the same evidence in key cases. This means you can't infer from the mere fact of their disagreement to beliefs about them (their canonicity) lacking warrant or justification. There are many more errors, which I don't have time to elaborate on. This quick note just supports Wes's estimation that Cameron parroting the so called Protestant Dilemma article is not a very strong case against Protestantism. And it is classic clickbait given how strongly Cameron overstates his case in the thumbnail, the description, and the video.

Hey Protestants! Need your opinion, Do you agree with Mauler that you only need to believe in the resurrection of christ to be saved? If so Jehovah witness are saved correct?