Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Arkes on "Evidence"
Hadley Arkes has an interesting essay, at "The Catholic Thing", called "On Evidence." A bit:
. . .That eminent lawyer, Robert Bork, once remarked with his lawyer’s eye that the critical point was whether Jesus died and yet came back from the dead. If that happened, as Bork put it with a telling understatement, implications do flow from that point. When Jesus appeared again after he was buried, he elicited doubt even among the faithful. As James Wilson noted, he invited Thomas to seek the evidence of his senses by touching his wounds. The followers of Jesus, men anchored in the world of work with their hands, were not exactly a credulous lot. And yet, what they saw jolted them, and their lives would never be the same. It was the most direct evidence, the evidence of the senses, joined to the powers of inference; and from that point, grounded in things so elementary and true, the implications began to unfold, as they are unfolding even now.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/10/arkes-on-evidence.html