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So Cameron Bertuzzi put out a two minute video of me called Good Gavin versus Bad Gavin. You can go watch it. I'll put a link to it in the video description. And he's got some lighthearted music playing in the background. And he's plucked out these tiny little snippets, 5 second or 10 or 20 second little clips of me trying to make it seem like I'm contradicting myself about arguments from silence. Like sometimes I'm in favor of them and sometimes I'm against them. But I thought it'd be a good chance just to address this issue of, you know, when are arguments from silence valid? Actually extreme, difficult question. But even just seeing the difficulty is valid here. So the basic point is simple. Arguments from silence can be either good or bad, depending on the context and depending upon the details. It depends basically on whether you expect the sources in question to be silent or not. And this is something I've always said about this. More than five years ago, when I was first getting into these kinds of conversations, I made this point in a dialogue first. I think arguments from silence actually can have plausibility value depending upon how much you expect the sources in question not to be silent. Here's how I put it in a more recent video giving a metaphor to try to make this point. Suppose that you're driving in your car and on the radio there's a reference to a school shooting, and the radio doesn't specify which school. So you're worried about your kids. You drive to the school your kids go to and you walk around campus and just ask people, have you heard anything about a shooting here? Now, if the school has 2,000 students and is on a 10 acre campus, and you interview 10 people and none of them have heard of such a thing, this will probably relieve you a little bit. You know, that will help you a little bit. It will reduce the plausibility to a certain degree. But if the school has only 500 students and is on a three acre campus, and you interview 50 different people from different parts of the campus, including several teachers and staff, and none of them have heard of a school shooting happening, your confidence and your relief will be much further. In neither case is it a logical deduction. You can always say it's logically possible that somehow has nobody heard of it. But the point is that the more you expect particular sources not to be silent about a particular event, the more relevant that is to the plausibility of that event. So, for example, to address some of the clips that Cameron played When Bart Ehrman gives an argument from silence about Joseph of Arimathea not being mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15, this is a weak argument from silence because we wouldn't expect a reference to Joseph there in light of who he is and in light of what First Corinthians 15 is. So when I point that out and I'm making that kind of argument, I draw attention to the nature of First Corinthians 15 and other factors like that. This is an extremely compact creedal formula that Paul is citing in 1 Corinthians 15 in verses 3 to 5 here I count 30 Greek words. Okay? It doesn't have to go into who all is involved. Of course, that additional context gets clipped if you're just plucking out a little 5 or 10 second little snippet. Now, this is very different from arguments from silence about the papacy in early sources of Christianity like the New Testament. So this is much more surprising because unlike Joseph of Arimathea, who's not one of the eyewitnesses to the Resurrection, that would have been more relevant to Paul's purposes. In 1 Corinthians 15, we're dealing with what is purported to be the head of the Church on earth and the source of the universe of the Church. And unlike a compact Creedal formula like 1 Corinthians 15, we're dealing with a huge array of different texts, the entire New Testament, various extra biblical literature. So the fact that in the first century, when this office was supposedly established, we don't have any mention of a Petrine office of any kind, let alone one that has supreme jurisdiction over the Church and capable of infallibility and things like this. This is much more surprising. Cameron plays clips about me talking about Ignatius, which, fine, you could explain that one. It's not a conclusive argument when you've got one text. But the point that I raise with Ignatius is I'm always saying even him who puts so much emphasis on the bishop, doesn't. But just, in other words, put Ignatius with every other source from that time and earlier, and the idea of any kind of Petrine ministry is just not there. And that is surprising given its alleged importance and the quantity of the text in question and so forth. So, point is, silence is much more problematic in that case. You have to look at the context to evaluate different arguments from silence. You can't just have a generic posture on arguments from silence in the academic literature on arguments from silence. That's why I thought it'd be helpful to address this, to kind of Help people just be alert to this. You got to take them on a case by case basis. The discussion in the literature on this argument is generally about when they have some degree of value. They're very rarely going to be conclusive, but sometimes they can be suggestive based upon factors. But you got to look at the particulars. There's an older article by John Lang. I'll give you his concluding paragraph here. Specific instances of the argument from silence have to be evaluated on their individual merits. There can be no wholesale conclusion from the foregoing, except perhaps that that the argument from silence cannot be logically conclusive, and secondly, that it can seldom be rationally conclusive, at least in interesting cases. On the other hand, some instances of the argument are more persuasive than others, and persuasiveness often depends on a subtle assessment of factors. And he goes on a little bit there. You can read the end of the article. So you can make the point obvious here with a metaphor. Suppose somebody said the Apostle Matthias is nowhere mentioned in the Epistle of Philippians, therefore he did not exist. Well, that's a pretty obvious example of a bad argument from silence, because you can see it's not really that surprising that he wouldn't be mentioned there. Okay, in the other direction, suppose someone said the Apostle Matthias was the chief apostle, he ruled the church in Jerusalem after James death. He eventually traveled to Australia and preached the gospel in Australia. And if you said there's no evidence for that, then no one should respond by saying, ah, that's an argument from silence. You're appealing to the lack of evidence, because in that particular case, the silence across all historical data for such exalted and specific claims is much more problematic. So hopefully the point is clear. When we're dealing with arguments from silence, you need to look at the context and take them on a case by case basis. And that of course requires more than just plucking out little five or ten second snippets that precisely serve to remove context.