One of the
greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century, Karl Popper,
seems to be contradicting himself with his theory of falsification. His
favouritism toward deductive conclusion of a theory (arriving at conclusions based
on logical analyzing of facts) versus inductive reasoning (arriving at conclusions
based on patterns and events that repeat themselves) seems to make sense, yet
he has been the center of critique for long time now. I believe I understood the problem with Popper's method of computing verisimilitude.
When he stated that "we can say
that t2 is more closely
similar to the truth, or corresponds better to the facts, than t1 ,
if and only if either:
(a) the truth-content but not the falsity-content of t2 exceeds
that of t1, or
(b) the falsity-content of t1, but not its truth-content, exceeds that of
t2"
Popper was not taking into consideration the
quality of arguments (truths- content and falsity-content). He is contradicting
himself by concentrating on the quantity of how many truths and how many
wrongs does theory t2 have compared to theory t1. But life
has proven many times to us that one and only one wrong deduction based on
falsity-content of theory t2 could be more important and have a
great weight into proving that this theory t2 is closer to the
truth. For example, I have a theory: I believe Jesus played a very important
role in human's history and therefore Jesus is an historical. Until here my
theory is proved true, based on Popper's criteria, because many stories told
about Jesus approve this. However, I don't believe Jesus was divine and I don't
believe he was a man either. I believe Jesus was a woman.
The amount of documents used to prove
that Jesus was a man and in some cases these documents try to justify the
hypothesis that he was even the son of God is an enormous one, as we all know.
But all this vast amount of documents cannot be considered historically correct
as they are written by people who already believed that he was the son of God
and was a man, without any proof as they did not witness any of the events that
they describe in these stories. None of
what has been considered "historical document" by Christians is written by people
who actually lived in the same period as Jesus. The closest truly historical
document that we have so far is one of the writings of Josephus in 70 C.E. Who
was Josephus? Josephus was a historian that was paid by the Roman general
Vespasian to write about the events of that time by appointing him the court
historian. This document is the closest in time to the actual events compared
to all other historical documents written about Jesus. It is also a document
that we can count on since many other historical events are also based on
Josephus' writings. Reading Mr. Ehrman's book "Jesus -- Apocalyptic Prophet of
the new Millennium" I understood that this account of Josephus about Jesus
(even though it is just a short passage) has perplexed historians and scholars
for the simple reason that Josephus remained a devoted Jew all his life yet he
mentioned in one of his writings that Jesus was the messiah. Above all, in the
first sentence of this passage Josephus gives a hint that Jesus was not a man.
This sentence is translated as follows " At this time there
appeared Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one
should call him a man." Unfortunately, the document is cut off, torn
apart right after these words. Christians use this sentence in their favor
assuming that Josephus is accepting Jesus to be more than a man, therefore
accepting Jesus to be the Son of God. But then historians are contradicting
this conclusion by mentioning the simple fact that Josephus never changed his
belief. He never became a Christian. If Josephus wrote that sentence believing
that Jesus was divine then he would have embraced Christianity, but as we know
it, he didn't.
If Josephus, the closest historian to
Jesus' time, accepted somehow that was the messiah, but indeed must not have
been a man, and yet he remained a devoted Jew, what does this tell us? This
tells us that Josephus continued to respect the teachings of his forefathers
who believed that the messiah that will come one day will be a human (not
divine) that will impact humans' lives tremendously. Now, the next
contradiction on Josephus account is that if Josephus completely believed that
Jesus was the messiah, was human, was a man, and impacted the lives of those
who have heard and followed him then what stopped Josephus from writing more
than just a passage about this messiah that his forefathers had been talking
about and Jews had been waiting for so long? The only logical conclusion
remained to accept in this case is the fact that Josephus himself mentioned in
the passage "if indeed one should call
him a man." We could have learned
more about Josephus' point of view regarding this messiah that he has doubts
calling a man, but unfortunately the document is torn and damaged badly,
leaving us with just one passage long enough to create doubts that he is in
fact accepting that Jesus must not have been a man but the son of God Himself.
Too bad that life plays these jokes sometimes. Or is it life? Who could have been so interested in using just
this part of this historical document, and only this part?
I would continue
and bring a few more facts that prove (from my point of view) that Jesus was
human and furthermore was a woman, but my facts will never overcome those of
Christians written over the centuries to convince others that Jesus was a man
or was the son of God (or both). Therefore,
I am closing this article by emphasizing that we should never look at the
amount of facts to prove that one theory is right and another one is wrong. Our
only focus must be the logical conclusion behind the facts and try to free
ourselves from the strings of past and also wrong beliefs sometimes.
