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About the "Sagan Standard"

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  Introduction Atheists can be like a dog with a bone when they find some witty one-liner or superficially clever aphorism. More often though they betray a tremendous amount of thoughtlessness when it comes to their worldview and its extended application.  Perhaps you’ve never heard of the “ Sagan standard ”, which is something like “ Hitchen’s Razor ”, when it comes to examining claims or, more properly, assertions. The “Sagan standard”, so named after astrophysicist and science popularizer Carl Sagan, is derived from his 1979 book Broca’s Brain , and is most often presented, sans context, as “ Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence ”. The issue is, of course, what do the terms “extraordinary claim” and “extraordinary evidence” actually mean when they’re used? Defining Terms Indeed the issue is, as David Deming points out, that Sagan never bothered to define his terms.[ 1 ] As a result, no one else seems to bother to define their terms, though s...
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Abuses of the Sufficiency of Scripture

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Introduction  I want to be a brief as possible in this, and to do so requires that I be blunt: there are many believing Christians today, Christians who are children and beneficiaries of the Reformation that are utterly ignorant of its principles. Chief among these is the principle of Scripture Alone—often articulated as Sola Scriptura— who are ignorant of what it means in practice. James White, in his book Scripture Alone , in giving the reader a brief introduction to the history of the Reformation, introduces the principle thusly, …[The] formal principle of the Reformation was sola scriptura , for it was the assertion of biblical sufficiency over against tradition that allowed for the recovery of certain biblical doctrines: justification by grace through faith alone, the proper form and governance of the church, the individual priesthood of the believer, and much more.[1] Historically, we must recognize that the principle was grounded in establishing an authority for what ...
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