If, as is claimed, the Bible has absolutely no historical basis, why didn't the writers just put in that they witnessed the actual resurrection?  According to what you're saying, that would have added much more credibility to their witness, right?  I mean, if you're going to write a fiction story to establish a new false religion, I can think of much more spectacular ways to claim a resurrection than what is recorded in the gospels.  Can you just imagine what could have been written about it?  Lights, sounds, the whole shebang.  Wow.  All the elements that make great convincing fiction.  I'm picturing the great special effects from "War of the Worlds" (only, unlike that movie, this one actually has a plot.)  Yet none of those elements are there.  Hmm.  I wonder why???

"You would not need an investigation for the claim that someone drank a glass of milk this morning, because we know from previous experience that it is perfectly possible to drink a glass of milk in the morning."

I feel like we are getting somewhere.

There are two things in this paragraph that are worth noting.  The first is the clause 'from previous experience.'  That returns us to the fact that most of the things we claim we know comes not from our own 'previous experience' but from the 'previous experience' of others.  When we are sitting down to decide what is possible or not, the minute we step away from our own experiences as the defining guide about what is possible or not, we are faced with the challenge of deciding how best to determine the credibility of the ones informing us about their 'previous experiences.'  

Now, the whole idea of looking to another person's experience is to gain knowledge about things outside your own experience.   The whole process humbly admits that your own experience does not exhaust what is possible and what is real and what is probable.   It is begging the question to presume, based on your own 'previous experiences,' what is in fact the real previous experiences of others.  The whole point is to have them inform you.  If you only accept their informing on matters that you already have 'previous experience'' about then you are not in fact allowing yourself to be informed at all.  You may as eliminate the extra step and confess that you consider your own set of experiences the final measure of what is real and what is actual.

Now, the other point is the idea that drinking a glass of milk is not extraordinary and requires no investigation.  I'm afraid that just isn't so.  There are contexts where 'drinking a glass of milk' might very well be quite extraodinary.  For example, if your claim is that at 8 a.m. you were at your home drinking milk, but another person claims that he saw you 500 miles away at that moment, killing someone, your claim (or his), is extraodinary.

But we shouldn't for a minute think that we ought to believe either one of them if they do not themselves believe their own testimony.

The process of determining the credibility of these individuals will hopefully sort out the truth of the matter.  It may be extaordinary indeed that you claim to have been drinking milk at 8 a.m., but it can be corroborated by an ordinary piece of paper showing that you bought the milk at 7:55 a.m from a shop near your house.

I assure you that criminal investigators, when confronted with a claim as ordinary as 'I couldn't have killed the man, I was home drinking milk" will not simply say, "Ah well, 'we know from previous experience that it is perfectly possible to drink a glass of milk in the morning,' so the claim requires no investigation."

In fact, that is the path to guillibility and manipulation, isn't it?  I could lead you to believe all sorts of things that are not true simply by playing off of whatever you have already decided is possible and 'requires no investigation.'

The only thing that really makes anything 'extrarordinary' is the context and significance we draw from it.  The 'supernatural' may be extaordinary to you, but your experiences are not the sum of all reality.  Evolution is extraordinary to me, but my experiences are not the sum of all reality, either.  We must find methods that don't begin with our conclusions to sort out which is really true or not, to the best of our abilities.  If we care about the matter, that is.

Now, the whole idea of looking to another person's experience is to gain knowledge about things outside your own experience. The whole process humbly admits that your own experience does not exhaust what is possible and what is real and what is probable.

What is possible and what is probable are two very different things. An unlimited number of things are possible but only a finite number of things are probable.

Since the number of things that are possible is unlimited, possibility is insignificant to our understanding of the world. Things which possess no probability beyond the trivial probability of possibility are unimportant. We can safely ignore those things. Only things for which we have at least a smidgen of evidence are significant because only those things have a probable chance of being real.

It is begging the question to presume, based on your own 'previous experiences,' what is in fact the real previous experiences of others.

Unfortunately, this is the only way possible to determine "what is in fact the real previous experiences of others." Otherwise, we are forced into the ludicrous position of having to say that a psychotic's experiences reflect reality rather than that they reflect only the psychotic's interpretation of reality, and such.

To be rational, our beliefs must cohere; they cannot contradict. Therefore, if the experience of another person contradicts our own personal experience, then rationally only one of those two experiences can be considered an accurate reflection of reality. The other must be thought to be inaccurate. We cannot believe both that humans can fly like birds and that humans cannot fly like birds.

[This, of course, only holds true if one believes in an independent external reality. If, OTOH, one believes in many individual subjective realities or in solipsism, then all bets are off  -- and so is any meaningful discussion.]

Now, the other point is the idea that drinking a glass of milk is not extraordinary and requires no investigation. I'm afraid that just isn't so. There are contexts where 'drinking a glass of milk' might very well be quite extraodinary. For example, if your claim is that at 8 a.m. you were at your home drinking milk, but another person claims that he saw you 500 miles away at that moment, killing someone, your claim (or his), is extraodinary.

No, Ragnar is correct: neither claim is extraordinary. It is neither extraordinary to drink a glass of milk in the morning at one's home nor to murder someone 500 miles away from one's home.

An extraordinary claim would be to claim to do both things at once (i.e., to be in two different places 500 miles apart at the same time). Since that claim is unbelievable, it means that one of the two claims that give rise to it is almost certainly false.

But we shouldn't for a minute think that we ought to believe either one of them if they do not themselves believe their own testimony.

Why? One of them is very likely to be correct. In fact, in the case of two contradicting claims, one of the claims has to be correct regardless of its respective claimant's sincerity of belief.

Sincerity of belief is not evidence that the matter believed (or disbelieved) is either true or false. It is only evidence that the person who holds the belief is sincere (or insincere) in their belief about the matter.

I assure you that criminal investigators, when confronted with a claim as ordinary as 'I couldn't have killed the man, I was home drinking milk" will not simply say, "Ah well, 'we know from previous experience that it is perfectly possible to drink a glass of milk in the morning,' so the claim requires no investigation."

This misses the point rather badly. An investigation would not be undertaken to determine whether the man could drink a glass of milk at home. An investigation would be undertaken to determine whether the man was at home at that time. Again, it's not extraordinary to be at home drinking milk. It is extraordinary, however, to be in two different places that are 500 miles apart at the same time.

In fact, that is the path to guillibility and manipulation, isn't it? I could lead you to believe all sorts of things that are not true simply by playing off of whatever you have already decided is possible and 'requires no investigation.'

I think you mean ". . . whatever you already decided is probable" not "possible." Your continual use of the word "possible" when you mean "probable" is confusing and misleading.

The only thing that really makes anything 'extrarordinary' is the context and significance we draw from it. The 'supernatural' may be extaordinary to you, but your experiences are not the sum of all reality. Evolution is extraordinary to me, but my experiences are not the sum of all reality, either. We must find methods that don't begin with our conclusions to sort out which is really true or not, to the best of our abilities. If we care about the matter, that is.

What makes a claim 'extraordinary' is the fact that it is an exception to ordinary experience. People drink milk everyday. Most of us on this board have drunk milk ourselves. It is not an extraordinary claim to say, This morning for breakfast I ate an egg and two pieces of toast and drank a glass of milk.

It is an extraordinary claim to say, This morning for breakfast I ate an egg and two pieces of toast and drank a gallon of gasoline.

To be rational, our beliefs must cohere. In general, if someone says that he had a glass of milk with breakfast, I'll believe him. This is because such a claim makes sense based on my experience in the world. It doesn't mean that it is necessarily true that the person DID drink a glass of milk. It means only that my belief that he did so is rational.

If someone says that he drank a gallon of gasoline with breakfast, I cannot rationally believe his claim in the absence of very powerful supporting evidence. This, as in the previous case, doesn't mean that the person did not drink a gallon of gasoline. It means only that his claim that he did so is not coherent with my experiences in the world. I cannot both believe this person's claim and simultaneously continue to hold my beliefs about gasoline's toxicity in the human body. In other words, one belief or the other has to go.