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Badsidhe ~

WR: "An alternative solution is of the Slice-The-Knot variety: simply observe that Solomon was told that there would be no one like him, /not/ that there would be no one better."

Badsidhe: "Then this is a total non-statement by God. There could be countless people wiser than Solomon before Solomon, and countless people wiser than Solomon after Solomon."

Precisely; that's the weakness of this alternate solution. I did not mean to give the impression that the alternative solution and the other one are both true, only that both solve the difficulty (though to different degrees of satisfaction in this case).

B: "The text says "I have given thee a wise and an understanding heart", not "Solomon accumulated wisdom the hard way", so I think iam8 is correct here and Watterrock is not."

Maybe I was unclear: I'm not denying that God gave Solomon special wisdom in a special way. I'm saying that the initial gift was not the /full/ gift; Solomon's wisdom increased as time went by.

Yours in Christ,

Waterrock

Badsidhe ~

B: "If it is not true, then it does not solve the difficulty."

Well, yeah, but here's the picture: the skeptic who posits a contradiction is simultaneously positing the non-existence of any resolution; otherwise we'd have just questions about apparent discrepancies, not claims of actual contradictions. The contradiction-claim is not "Solution A doesn't solve the problem," it's "There is no solution to the problem."

To draw an analogy: the objector's claim is not "This road does not lead to that city." His claim is "No road leads to that city." But if I can point to two, or three, or half a dozen roads, none of which the objector has explored, then logically his claim must be said to be unproven. And this is true even if I can point to an untraveled road with a fork in it: if one way is right, the other one must be wrong, but as long as the objector has not shown that neither way leads to the city, his objection is unproven, and the question of whether or not there is a road leading to the city remains open.

Meanwhile: it might be tangential to get into my reasons for thinking that Solomon got wiser (I think his dabbling into paganism for the sake of his wives served, in the end, as a sort of slingshot toward greater wisdom than before -- the kind of wisdom that comes from bad experiences), but, here's something else to consider: it doesn't seem unlikely that Solomon understood the "none like you" promise as applying not to human beings in general, but to /kings/ in charge of the government of the land of Israel. First Kings 3:13 and the parallel in II Chronicles 1:11-12 suggest this, and the formula employed in First Kings 3:12 (the "none before or after" stuff) is used elsewhere to describe kings; in such a context the term "arise" seems to signify a rise to power, not mere birth.

Yours in Christ,

Waterrock

Badsidhe ~

WR: "the skeptic who posits a contradiction is simultaneously positing the non-existence of any resolution;"

B: "That does not follow. I don't understand your logic here."

~~ It /does/ follow. If someone says, "Statement A contradicts Statement B," he is implying that either A is false, or B is false, or both are false. If his claim is correct, then it is impossible for both A and B to be true. ~~

B: ... "We do not say there are no possible solutions."

The last time I checked, the working hypothesis of the SAB was that the category-names mean what they say: "Contradictions," not "Possible Contradictions," and "Injustices," not "Feasibly Unjust Incidents," and "Absurdities," not "Conceivably Absurd Statements," and so on.

B: "Nowhere in here do I see the step where skeptic claims that no resolutions are possible."

Just run through the ramifications of the sentences between the "~~" marks above. The skeptic who posits a contradiction is saying that no resolutions are possible. (If he thought a resolution was possible, he'd either drop the claim, or use some other word other than "contradiction.") So if a resolution appears, in which the two statements are shown to be capable of agreement, the claim that no resolution is possible dissolves.

Yours in Christ,

Waterrock