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The Life Foundations
Nexus
THE DENOTATION HALF-FUTILITY PRINCIPLE
By Dr. Michael J. Bisconti
Read the Empirical Futility Principle page
before you read this article.
The “Empirical Futility Principle”
states:
Physical evidence alone cannot achieve
100% certainty as to what is the true text of the Bible in the original
languages.
Therefore, you need something more. What is this “something more”? Well, there is only one other type of thing
that can assist us in determining the true text of the Bible and that is “the
denotation (meaning) of the text.” In
other words, you can identify the true text of the Bible by checking to see if
it has the correct meaning. Therefore,
you are going to have to determine the correct meaning of the true text of the
Bible before you can identify the true text of the Bible.
The correct meaning will be the meaning
of one of the manuscripts of the Bible.
If you are starting from scratch, you, initially, do not know what that
meaning is. Therefore, you must examine
the meanings of all of the manuscripts of the Bible, pure and corrupt, to learn
the correct meaning of the Bible.
Let us work with an imaginary example:
You have two manuscripts. One says “Jesus is only a man.” The other says “Jesus is God and man.”
How are you going to know which of the two
manuscripts expresses the correct meaning?
Of course, if you are a believer, you know which of the two manuscripts
is correct – the second. But suppose
you were confronted with the following imaginary example:
You have two manuscripts. One says “Peter walked one mile towards
Bethlehem.” The other says “Peter
walked three miles towards Bethlehem.”
This example requires an investigation of
the “context pool” of the manuscripts.
A context pool is “all possible contexts based on all manuscripts.” For example, the first manuscript said in a
previous verse that on the previous day Peter had walked a mile away from
Bethlehem. The second manuscript said
that on the previous day Peter had walked two miles away from Bethlehem.
Here is the context pool for the two
manuscripts:
·
Context for manuscript
1: Peter walked a mile away from
Bethlehem.
·
Context for manuscript
2: Peter waked two miles away from
Bethlehem.
Obviously, context number 2 for the
second manuscript is possibly NOT TRUE.
Why? Because, if Peter had
walked two miles away from Bethlehem, he couldn’t have then walked three miles
towards Bethlehem. This would mean
there was an INCONGRUITY (AN INDIRECT CONTRADICTION) in the second manuscript.
The fact of the incongruity would NOT
prove that the second manuscript was incorrect. It would only prove that A PART of the second manuscript was
incorrect. However, you would now know
that it was PROBABLE that the second manuscript was incorrect.
The type of analysis and reasoning you
have just read is useful BUT IT WILL ONLY OBJECTIVELY ESTABLISH A PROBABILITY
AS TO WHAT IS THE TRUE TEXT OF THE BIBLE.
Therefore, we need something more.
The “Denotation Half-Futility Principle” states:
Denotative evidence added to physical evidence
cannot achieve 100% certainty as to what is the true text of the Bible in the
original languages.
See Probabilistic
Textual Induction And Inductive Textual Calculus.