Wannabe Scholars -or- What counts as evidence?

This last week I received a book
Evidence and Paul's Journeys by Jefferson White.

Jefferson is claiming to be a scholar who has spent many years investigating how "evidence" is used by scholars, especially as it relates to Paul's Journeys. He goes through a long diatribe as an introduction extolling the failures of scholars to look at real evidence and says that instead they look at theory and ideas and then try to present it as evidence.

He goes on to give a definition of evidence that he will use for the book he has written about Paul's travels. Listen to this definition of evidence:

1. The biblical record is assumed to be true unless it can be shown to be false.

2. if a contradiction is alleged to exist between the bible record and other historical evidence, and there is a reasonable explanation to account for it, the contradiction is not proved.

in other words, the bible is assumed to be true, period. Have you ever heard such utter crap? If I were to present you (him?) with the FSM Bible and said that my evidence for it being real is its claim that it is correct and that constitutes evidence unless you can prove it false, you would call me (rightly) nuts. I've done a fair bit of research into this myself (though I wouldn't claim to be a scholar) and I know very well how much the Bible was rewritten as needed over the first three centuries and how little of it is truly original writings of the claimed author (though some of Paul's letters were). Still, to say you know about "real" evidence and then to present such a ridiculous definition is pathetic at best.

How can people be so stupid/ignorant as that? And, I'm ashamed to say, he claims to be in Computer Science; if someone in computers can't get basic logic right and thinks evidence is a completely invalid assumption, how will we ever get the general population to understand?

Swearing on a Book in Court

AHA Article: No Bibles, No Quarans in Courts

A court of appeals in North Carolina is considering adding the Koran as a valid book to swear upon.

This AHA article talks about how absurd this is even if the intentions are clearly a support for religious diversity. Today non-theists or theists of any religion can take the stand in all 50 states. But, what does it mean when they have no Bible or Koran to swear upon?

Isn't it time we came up with some other means of saying we will tell the truth or should we just start relying on the justice system and the punishments for perjury to protect us? Maybe we should base this on swearing an oath to the constitution or some other politically based document rather than a religious one.

It seems to me that holding on to this old tradition of swearing on a bible is saying that we can't believe a person if they are not Christian or at least not religious; which is just blatantly false. Maybe a better solution is to base it on a person's reputation. We could have a system like the financial credit score system that tracks a person's reputation then you could gauge whether or not to trust a person on their reputation score. This solution sounds a bit ludicrous to me also and there are a lot of inherent problems in how we define the reputation score and who gets to manage it.

But, this is yet another aspect where Religion has played a valid role and we need to replace that capability with some secular solution.

I'd love to hear ideas on this, so feel free to comment on the post and make your own suggestion.