Mod-12 arithmetic is not where my thoughts would have intuitively gone.

Sigh. You don’t understand positivism, you don’t understand evidentiary arguments and you don’t understand falsificationism.

But fortunately, I can still tell a joke too complex for anyone but me to get!

On a more serious note, I don’t have a problem with falsification, remember? I’m merely commenting on its inadequacy as a tool to resolve all issues. If there’s anyone being to ensnared by zealous fervor, it’s someone who thinks that falsification can be used as a criterion for ontological meaning in all discussions, including religious ones.

As for a suggested toolset, how about we begin by dropping the assumption that religions are just “making things up out of whole cloth”? If that’s the only attitude we ever employ when looking at theology, then it ought not to surprise us if we never see the merit of that field of study or the conclusions it can come to.

And once we’ve got over ourselves and dropped the “whole cloth” act, we can start to look at a lot of other philosophical categories and toolsets that we might employ.

Remember how we started this latest round? I linked you to Fides et ratio. Start there. And once we’ve got through that primer, we can talk (again — I’ve discussed these toolsets before) about things like Francis Bacon’s “Two Books” framework, the Message-Incident principle, historical criticism and parallelism, eyewitness testimony and the traits and markings thereof, and so on and so forth.

If you don’t want to use falsification as a criterion for ontological meaning, then give us something better than “religious fervor” and making things up out of whole cloth.