From Phil Stilwells Assessment of Me
That post was, as yet, a response to him.
Under it, he posted the comment:
If you don’t have a coherent answer to my central arguments, I recommend you not respond in order to avoid ossifying a legacy of illogic.
In other words, either my impatience to go out of order and show distaste for his curiosity in Catholic decision making was incoherence about the order in which he had presented his arguments, or in fact this curiosity was his central argument and not accepting it was incoherent on my part.
I am afraid that this is the case.
If you are heavily into coaching and leadership, certainly the decision making of others can be one of your interests.
STILWELL CONSULTING, 2003 - Present
Contract Rewriter / Graduate School Preparation / Private Language Coach
• Rewrite technical and academic papers for professors and graduate students at Japanese universities.
• Coach students in writing, submitting, and presenting academic work for programs at MIT, Stanford, and in Silicon Valley.
• Prepare students for overseas MBA and graduate programs; provide corporate English training and private Zoom-based instruction in English and core business concepts.
• Teach practical applications of AI and provide individualized life coaching alongside academic and professional-development services.
I find zero evidence of his having any experience, academic as a student or professional in his hired or consultant capacities, of historic epistemology.
And that from taking his claims at face value.
I find plenty of evidence of his applying totally inapplicable and more specialised items of epistemology than those that would generally or from the nature of history apply to history.
That from taking his arguments at face value as really his and not meant ironically.
With the exact same naiveté, I find plenty of evidence that he actually loves making strawmen. As long as they are directed against Christian believers or his "legacy of illogic".
6. “Believe Every Story” Is Not a Serious Rule of Evidence
Lundahl states his general policy plainly:
“I have a prior commitment to believing any story unless there is a specific reason to disbelieve it.”
(Lundahl, “In Answer”)
At first this sounds admirably open-minded. In practice it is impossible.
Human beings tell incompatible stories. One tradition says Jesus rose from the dead; another says he did not die on the cross. One witness says a saint performed a cure; another attributes the same recovery to medicine, misdiagnosis, or another deity. Two mutually inconsistent accounts cannot both be accepted at face value in the same respect.
Did you notice the strawman?
I did not say "believe every story" I said "believe any story unless" ...
In another paper this same Phil Stilwell wants us to consider giving different degrees of credentiality to what we believe. Like I have 100 % credentiality that the Sun rose this morning, but perhaps 75 % that I will get food, not too much food, and no food that violates Friday abstinence this evening.
He is not unfamiliar with different degrees of credentiality, if that was his term, but what about different degrees of evidentiality? In classical logic and epistemology, there is such a thing as "prima facie evidence" ... meaning evidence for a specific proposition, unless there is stronger evidence against it.
Two stories may indeed contradict each other, which means we have a logical (and not just prima facie) reason not to take both of them at face value. In that case, one option is to compare the probability of the two stories of getting it right. I'm not sure whether the reference to people denying the Cross was Surah V, which I have had the burden to have to read in school, it could be some other Surah. But Surah V is from early 7th C Hedjaz region of the Arabian Peninsula. Matthew 27 is (at least in an Aramaic form later translated to Greek) from within a decade of the event. The reasons to believe any Surah is that Mohammed received a revelation, for which he gave no other signs of divine protection from error than the miracle of the Quran and the miracle of military expansion. Except of course if the Surah is speaking of events in the life of Mohammed, I think it probable that Ethiopian Christians did attack Mecca as told in Al-Fil. And fail to reach it. The reason to believe the Gospels in their theological dimension is, divine protection from error, which has to be proven by miracles. But the reason to believe them in their historical dimension is, they are the origin story, or story of immediate origin, of a certain community. Even Muslims accept that to some degree, except they tend to say that details were faked.
Phil pretends that this doesn't matter, even so it is just "a claim" by "an institution" ... presumably like Phil having Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy | summa cum laude is "a claim" by "the institution" known as University of Kansas. Or is this where his trust in claims by institutions fails the test of consistency, which he so claims to value and find lacking in my arguments?
The point is, if I were to accuse Phil Stilwell of Academic fraud, and of never having made BA in Philosophy, let alone Summa cum Laude, that's not a logical impossibility. As he has according to other claims of his been in the employment of the Japanese government, a very secularist country by the way, even more than Sweden, which as a Catholic I found toxic, he could have been protected from pursuit by University of Kansas, or Japan could have bribed University of Kansas to not pursue him. Could. But these possibilities being logical options doesn't make them logically preferrable. I think it makes more sense that Phil Stilwell's teachers in philosophy at Kansas simply sucked and had an atheopathic bias, than that Phil Stilwell lied about them.
And this illustrates the point. I believe his story, because I do not have positive proof or even a coherent scenario of how he would have gone about to fraud. Japan certainly would have preferred someone who actually did have a degree. The Japanese government certainly would have had means to double check if they found anything fishy about the claim. And not meaning in the sushi sense. I mean in the sense of the fish sold in a village in Armorica. But presumably either they didn't find anything my black-smith great-grand-pa would have wanted to insult Unhygienix for. Or. Taking a whiff they decided to check, and found that no, it was as unfishy as sukiyaki.
But the thing is, for this probability, I simply have Phil Stilwell's CV. One written source.
Now, Phil Stilwell speaks of several literary sources depending on each other in the case of for instance different Christian books as "a candle and three mirrors are not four independent light sources" ... fine. But a photo of four candles is a single evidential source that a certain room at a certain point in time did have four independent light sources.
That's why I value independent observers more than independent writings. If I want the witness evidence to a certain Al Capone related shooting, if I had been judge back then, I would have called the witnesses and checked their independence. But since I live now and not back then (and on top of that am not that judge), I access them usually via ONE written source, the court records from back then.
Now, recall what I said about prima facie case. It is a case which can sometimes be overridden by stronger considerations not foreseen in it, or only inherent in itself when taking a closer look. But if a prima facie case is one hundred times or more in fifteen to twenty variations offered to be overridden and the closer look at itself or the potentially overriding consideration, each time favours the prima facie case, not the factors pretended to override it, that is a very strong case that sustains the prima facie case.
If I recall going to SSHL and learning Latin back in my teens, this is a very strong prima facie case against anyone who wanted to tell me "no, you are Elias, you actually were to a prophet school unless you started it, and you learned reading Hebrew from the Torah written in Old Hebrew characters" ... a very strong case indeed. My point about claims by a community is, communities also have memories, and when making the initial claim, they have an awareness of who could give some kind of evidence against it. And the fact of them having a memory is a good case against the claim changing very radically.
I don't say this to teach Phil Stilwell logic. I consider him a hopeless case. I say this to denounce the University of Kansas and its department of philosophy as having been incompetent in epistemology back in 1992 to 1998. I'm denouncing them to avoid ossifying their legacy of illogic. But when it comes to their department of education or whatever giving him an even higher degree (Master of Arts in Education, TESOL), I have no beef against that one. Phil Stilwell's English is good.
Not so his logic:
Lundahl contrasts Luke with Tolkien: Luke was received as a historian, while Tolkien was received as a novelist. This is a false choice. A writer can intend to report history and still preserve legend, depend on poor sources, shape material for theological purposes, or make honest mistakes. Genre matters, but genre does not guarantee accuracy.
The Woodstock analogy fails for the same reason. Woodstock is supported by photographs, audio and film recordings, contracts, news coverage, business records, physical traces, and many independently accessible witnesses. Acts says that Pentecost was public. The public character of an event inside a story does not create public evidence outside the story.
In 7.2 he admits the likelihood of the genre "history". In 7.3 he treats Acts as if it were fiction. If his own CV is not fiction, his being to Japan cannot be treated as "public within a story" but has to be treated as public, tout court. The speech of Peter cannot be treated like a speech by Aragorn.
The ample documentation we have for Woodstock apart from any single story or resumé (and most people won't check multiple stories) is a chronological accident, we happen to live close to Woodstock and in an era where Christianity has made written documentation ten thousand times more common than it was back in 1st C Roman times. Photographs are a point that reminds of Secondo Pia. Also totally absent from Roman times.
If you want photographic evidence, I actually would like to refer you to Barry Schwortz. But apart from sindonology, photographs is not how 1st C AD Roman Empire is studied for history.
Lundahl challenges the critic to choose: if the story was invented around AD 50, living witnesses would reject it; if around AD 150, the community’s earlier story would need to be forgotten.
This is a false dilemma. Stories need not appear fully formed on one Tuesday.
Long form stories with multiple episodes, no. But the thing is, any given episode, and Pentecost was a very central one in the Christian story, needs to either be present or absent at a given date.
They can develop through repeated retelling, harmonization, symbolic interpretation, liturgical use, selective memory, and gradual elaboration. Different communities can preserve different versions. A written account can stabilize one stream without every prior participant receiving a ballot.
A community which in AD 50 stated, whether in the book of Acts or just as liturgic kerygma, that Pentecost had occurred twenty years or less before, if this had absolutely not happened, those who would have been there would have involved someone able and willing to step up against the narrative. People who had been in Jerusalem in AD 30, 31, 33 (three years I've seen as options for the year of Christ's Death and Resurrection, the most common being 33) would have known it hadn't happened.
The Upper Room where they had been praying was above the tomb of King David, a place which would receive regular visits by pious Jews and still does so. It's not as if it had been located in "London" and much more as if it had been located in front of Big Ben, so it could not have been possible to tell one group from King David's tomb it happened before the Temple and one who were before the Temple it had happened on King David's tomb.
I have studied how legends work in relation to real events. I don't believe in legendary inflation much more in legendary conflation and other simplifications. As my example from "die Rabenschlacht" illustrates. My disbelief in time machines is an overriding consideration against taking at face value the idea that Theoderic beat Ermaneric in one battle at Ravenna. My knowledge of probably Procopius via wikipedia means, I trace this to Ermaneric and Theoderic beating different people at Ravenna in different centuries and the battles getting conflated into one.
But Phil doesn't care one whit about what I know, I'm just a miserable antisemite for saying one Jewish contribution to our institutions is pornography. He didn't bring up what non-Catholics had contributed to cuisine or to culture, he did bring up "social reform" or also known as changes in institutions and common customs. Julius Fromm is another example. And before anyone accuses me for being partial to the NSDAP régime, after they expropriated the factory from him, they didn't close it down, they kept it going as if the production was licit, and just deprived him of his profit. Like making Al Goldstein a pauper but allowing Screw West to keep going.
Phil is a coach, and as he believes my positions to be beneath abject, he thinks he can mistreat my arguments by multiple strawmanning and missing the point. Just to give me an education. Given I do take his CV at face value, I'll blame University of Kansas for it. Or perhaps the cultural environment he had in Japan, and I don't mean cuisine or kawaii aesthetics.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Ignatius of Loyola
31.VII.2026
Romae natalis sancti Ignatii, Presbyteri et Confessoris, qui Fundator exstitit Societatis Jesu, atque vir fuit sanctitate et miraculis clarus, ac religionis catholicae ubique dilatandae studiosissimus; quem Pius Undecimus, Pontifex Maximus, caelestem omnium Exercitiorum spiritualium Patronum constituit.
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