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Who needs Occam's razor when God has time travel?

If God can reverse the laws of causality (the past predates but somehow influences the future), by showing visions or giving words to ancient prophets before they happen, then technically, an ancient source can quote a future source. But then all bets are off, and we can throw away Occam’s razor (the law of parsimony, or avoiding multiplying entities beyond necessity) because God has a time machine. In this case, “with God, all things are possible,” except the laws of causality and logic. (“Plagiarism isn’t plagiarism.” “Evidence against belief becomes evidence for belief, magically, somehow.”)

(This is not a straw man: one apologetic theory, popularized by Hugh Nibley, states that the Holy Spirit of God gives the same words to all his prophets.)

However, if you accept that God has blessed this one community with such a time-bending miracle, and you expect others to take your point of view seriously, it falls on you to carefully consider and demonstrate (without resorting to circular reasoning based on assumptions in your community, but soley from normal evidentiary means) that all other similar visionary and prophetic claims are also false, namely: the visions of other early Christian revelators; the visions of Mohammed in the Quran; the visions and writings of Joanna Southcott; Jakob Bohme; Emanuel Swedenborg; the Christian Gnostics; and John Hughes (1807); the substantial (long) works of Andrew Jackson Davis, self-proclaimed “Seer of Poughkeepsie;” The Urantia Book; Oahspe: A New Bible; John Dee, etc. If you take none of their claims seriously, for obvious reasons (or out of laziness) then why should we take your claims seriously?

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