Comments on The Secular Outpost: Does Hume Commit a Fallacy?

When we talk about the probability of some event o...

2012-01-18T15:22:49.099-06:00

When we talk about the probability of some event or hypothesis A, that probability is always
relative to a body of background information B. So we speak of the probability of A on B, or of
A with respect to B.

So in order to figure out the probability of the resurrection, let B stand for our background
knowledge of the world apart from any evidence for the resurrection. Let E stand for the specific
evidence for Jesus’ resurrection: the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances, and so on.
Finally, let R stand for Jesus’ resurrection. Now what we want to figure out is the probability of
Jesus’ resurrection given our background knowledge of the world and the specific evidence in
this case.
B = Background knowledge
E = Specific evidence (empty tomb, postmortem
appearances, etc.)
R = Resurrection of Jesus
Pr (R/B & E) = ?
Pr (R/B&E)=

Pr (R/B) × Pr (E/B&R)
_________________________________ Pr (R/B) × Pr (E/B&R) + Pr (not-R/B) × Pr (E/B& not-R)

Pr (R/B) is called the intrinsic probability of the resurrection. It tells how probable the
resurrection is given our general knowledge of the world. Pr (E/B&R) is called the explanatory power of the resurrection hypothesis. It tells how probable the resurrection makes the evidence of the empty tomb and so forth. These two factors form the numerator of this ratio. Basically, Pr (not-R/B) × Pr (E/B& not-R) represent the intrinsic probability and explanatory power of all the naturalistic alternatives to Jesus’ resurrection. The probability of the resurrection could still be very high even though the Pr(R/B) alone is terribly low. Hume just ignores the crucial factors of the probability of the naturalistic alternatives to the resurrection [Pr(not-R/B) × Pr(E/B& not-R)]. If these are sufficiently low, they outbalance any intrinsic improbability of the resurrection hypothesis. Bayes has the form of x/x-y which means that as the explanatory power of the resurrection tends toward 1, and as the explanatory power of the naturalistic explanations tend toward zero, then any initial intrinsic improbability can be overcome.(Taken from William Lane Craig’s debate with Bart Ehrman).

What is truly unfortunate is that we keep being pr...

2012-01-17T09:28:23.336-06:00

What is truly unfortunate is that we keep being promised a "demonstration" and keep not getting it.

It is unfortunate that this wasn't more obviou...

2012-01-13T17:41:08.176-06:00

It is unfortunate that this wasn't more obvious to you, but it is Hume's IN PRINCIPLE argument against the identification of miracles that is demonstrably fallacious! His IN FACT argument revolves around four claims that do try to pull off what you said (congrats for that)...As far as your attempted parity of the resurrection with appeal to crazy things like aliens, bigfoot and the like, the burden of proof is on you to show that the evidence for the resurrection is on epistemic par with these other 'weird' events. Lastly, your appeal to recent findings in cognitive psychology trades on the a word play between 'some' and 'all.' Just because 'some' people may display various psychological features that help us understand why they believe strange things, it doesn't mean that 'all' of them do. So, once again, if you actually think the evidence used in the case for the resurrection can be explained by appealing to mob mentality, suggestibility, false memories, or what have you, then you have to actually explain why this is probable with respect to the historical specifics of the case udner consideration, it is not enough to merely make an appeal to possibility.

PATRICK In the New Testament we can find reference...

2012-01-12T04:26:38.629-06:00

PATRICK
In the New Testament we can find references to experiences of other miracles than the Resurrection that amount to first hand testimonies of these events.
They can be found in Romans 15,18-19...

CARR
Here is Romans 15:18-19

I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done— by the power of signs and wonders, through the power of the Spirit of God.

This is so vague that only a Christian could possibly regard it as evidence.

Paul also claimed to have gone to the 3rd Heaven. ...

2012-01-12T01:32:33.179-06:00

Paul also claimed to have gone to the 3rd Heaven.

Presumably that was also first-hand testimony....

Paul's encounter with the risen Jesus convinced him that 'the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.'

Even Acts is adamant that Christians would see things that other people present could not see.

Just look at the examples of Stephen and Paul in Acts, for obvious examples of Christians seeing and hearing things that other people present could not see or hear.

As for miracles, Paul in 1 Corinthians pours scorn on Jews for expecting Christianity to be served up to them as a religion that told them about miracles.

We can easily compare miracles done by Jesus to other figures.

For the simple reason that the Christian frauds who wrote the New Testament plundered the Old Testament for plots and stories, in much the same way that Muhammad and Joseph Smith plundered the Old Testament looking for stories they could recycle.

Hiero5ant: “We are dealing with anonymous, hearsay...

2012-01-11T17:03:41.376-06:00

Hiero5ant: “We are dealing with anonymous, hearsay reports (sometimes hearsay reports of hearsay reports!) of "facts".”

In 1 Corinthians 9,1 and 15,5-8 the apostle Paul speaks about his encounter with the risen Jesus; it is clearly a first hand testimony. One might ask if Paul had any reason not to tell the truth. Not only was his testimony the cause of much hardship (see 1 Corinthians 4,9-13, 15,30-32, 2 Corinthians 11,16-33), but in addition he had to fear that in the end he would turn out to be a false witness about God (1 Corinthians 15,15). According to Philippians 3,3-10, before his conversion Paul was a well-respected member of the Jewish community, so he didn’t have to become a Christian to win fame. From 1 Corinthians 9,3-18, 2 Corinthians 2,17 and 1 Thessalonians 2,9 one can see that Paul was not looking for financial advantage. Therefore, such a motive for his activities can also be ruled out.

In the New Testament we can find references to experiences of other miracles than the Resurrection that amount to first hand testimonies of these events. They can be found in Romans 15,18-19, 1 Corinthians 12,9-10, 2 Corinthians 12,12 or Galatians 3,5. These passages wouldn’t make sense if no miracles or miracle-like events had happened. In addition they imply that the addressees of the respective letters had experienced such events, so there were quite a number of witnesses.

Hiero5ant: “The Jews, including the disciples, believed in the same miracle-working God the apologists believe in. But none of them at the time of crucifixion expected a miraculous resurrection.”

In my view if a miracle wasn’t expected the respective account of it is even more credible.

Keith Parsons: “In general, Hume attributes the generation of false testimony for miracle claims to the “knavery and folly” of mankind. In particular he notes, what is simply undeniable, that humans love hearing and passing on tales of the marvelous, and that when the “spirit of religion” synergizes with that natural appetite for the wondrous, then all sorts of wild stories can take wing.”

The following quote from page 103 of the book “Jesus and the Constraints of History” (Philadelphia 1982), written by A. E. Harvey, may show that at least in Antiquity the Biblical miracle accounts were quite unique and consequently such accounts were not common outside the Judeo-Christian culture (source: http://christianthinktank.com/mqfx.html):

“It is in this light that we must judge the accounts we possess of other miracle-workers in Jesus' period and culture. We have already observed that the list of such occurrences is very much shorter than is often supposed. If we take the period of four hundred years stretching from two hundred years before to two hundred years after the birth of Christ, the number of miracles recorded which are remotely comparable with those of Jesus is astonishingly small. On the pagan side, there is little to report apart from the records of cures at healing shrines, which were certainly quite frequent, but are a rather different phenomenon from cures performed by an individual healer. Indeed it is significant that later Christian fathers, when seeking miracle workers with whom to compare or contrast Jesus, had to have recourse to remote and by now almost legendary figures of the past such as Pythagoras or Empedocles."

/"rug OF A prior"

2012-01-11T16:12:48.078-06:00

/"rug OF A prior"

In my view the prior probability of the occurre...

2012-01-11T16:11:27.771-06:00
In my view the prior probability of the occurrence of a miracle depends on the probability of God’s existence.

The Jews, including the disciples, believed in the same miracle-working God the apologists believe in. But none of them at the time of crucifixion expected a miraculous resurrection.

So it would seem belief in an Abrahamic god is neither here nor there. Just because you believe in a miracle working God doesn't mean you believe he performed any and every miracle anyone ever said he did!

What you mean to talk about is, prior belief in a god who would do this specific miracle. But this belief only arises from a theology which accreted centuries after the alleged "fact". To say you believe in the sort of being who would do this sort of thing is a textbook example of begging the question, since you've simply swept the improbability under the rug prior which essentially restates your conclusion in its full description.

In my view the prior probability of the occurrence...

2012-01-11T12:16:33.396-06:00
In my view the prior probability of the occurrence of a miracle depends on the probability of God’s existence. As far as I can see no one has so far been able to show that the probability of God’s existence is low.

Now the respondent’s argument is that Hume fail...

2012-01-11T11:26:16.889-06:00
Now the respondent’s argument is that Hume failed to consider how improbable it must be that we would have all of the evidence for the resurrection—the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances, the disciples’ belief in the resurrection, etc.—if the resurrection did not occur.

In fact we have no such evidence at all, and this needs to be pointed out loudly and often.

In the next paragraph you indeed note that what we are dealing with is "testimony about" these alleged events, but you don't emphasize it nearly enough, and so, the apologist looks like he's got the atheist on the ropes -- he has all this "evidence" on his side, and the skeptic is on the defensive, frantic to come up with some way, any way, to handwave it out of court.

But not only are we not dealing with any "facts" of the empty tomb, appearances etc., we are not even dealing with testimony about them! We are dealing with anonymous, hearsay reports (sometimes hearsay reports of hearsay reports!) of "facts".

Any response to apologetic flim-flam that allows talk about empty tomb and resurrection appearances as "facts in evidence" to go unchallenged is doing a disservice to scholarship and argument.

Hume had an excuse because probability calculus...

2012-01-11T11:14:32.021-06:00
Hume had an excuse because probability calculus hadn't been fully developed in his day...

Geez louise, what is the deal with the apologetic fetish for pseudomathematics and the anti-apologists' depressing willingness to play along?

"If it didn't rain last night, then why is the driveway wet?"

Do we seriously need a formalized treatment in terms of Bayes' theorem to have a rational discussion of other reasons why things might get wet?

P.S. Keith, I can see that you want to restrict yo...

2012-01-11T07:17:37.657-06:00
P.S. Keith, I can see that you want to restrict your claims to ones that you can make a strong argument for. But I think that leads you to make only the weak and relatively uninteresting claim that rejecting miracles is consistent with your priors. On the other hand, if you make the stronger claim that it's right to have low priors for miracles (and therefore right to reject miracles all things considered) your argument will be more difficult and less convincing. It's a dilemma!

Also, I made a mistake in relating my "all the way back" to the lifetime of an individual. I should have related it to the history of the human race. Knowledge (and particularly scientific knowledge) has been accumulated by the human race as a whole. And the effect of science in reducing supernatural beliefs can be seen more clearly at the level of the human race than at the level of individuals.

Keith, --In that case, if you are trying to show ...

2012-01-11T04:52:16.338-06:00
Keith,

--In that case, if you are trying to show me that a miracle has occurred, you have to address my priors, not yours. If you only meet your own burden of proof, my response will be a shrug and yawn.--

I have a problem with this. Are you just talking about what it would take in practice to persuade you (regardless of reasonableness) or are you talking about what it's reasonable to believe? It seems to me you're doing a mixture of the two. You're addressing the question of what it's reasonable to believe, given your priors. But you're refusing to address the question of whether it's reasonable to have those priors. It seems to me, therefore, that you're failing to argue that your rejection of miracle claims is reasonable all things considered. Also, are you really only discussing what it's reasonable for you to believe? Don't you mean also to question the acceptance of miracle claims by others?

After all, when we pitch an argument at a theist, we won't be impressed if he rejects it on the grounds that his priors for his religious beliefs are 99.9999%, and therefore it's reasonable for him to be almost immune to contrary evidence. We will probably suggest that those priors are not reasonable.

I'm not unaware of the difficulties of epistemology, and of saying what it means for a belief (or priors) to be reasonable. I take a more-or-less reliabilist, naturalized approach to epistemology. That means I'm in the business of making a judgement about the reliability of the processes that went into the formation of the belief (or the prior) all the way back. So I ask, if someone was exposed to the best possible knowledge and education from birth, and all his cognitive processes were operating optimally, what would he probably believe (or what would his priors probably be)? My judgement is that a person exposed to enough science, having practised enough scientific thinking, and applying scientific thinking consistently, will tend to have low priors for supernatural claims. I can give some rough arguments to support low priors for supernatural claims, based on considerations like parsimony. But they're not deductive arguments from uncontroversial premises. They require a large dose of good epistemic judgement to get the right (as I see it) answer. Epistemic judgement is not just a matter of making and accepting arguments (including probability calculations). Much of it goes on at a subconscious level. And I would say that the subconscious epistemic processes of a supernaturalist are not of the sort to make reliable judgements on this subject (even if there are no deductive errors in his arguments).

I think it's meaningful and useful to say that we are justified (in some reasonable sense) in assigning low priors to supernatural claims.

One in a million? The New Testament also has Mose...

2012-01-11T00:46:44.263-06:00
One in a million?

The New Testament also has Moses and Elijah return to Earth.

Shouldn't we now cube that 1 in a million?

How likely is it that Moses would return to the Earth and no Jew would mention this for 30 years?

How likely is it that Muhammad would return to the Earth and no Muslim would mention this for 30 years?

How likely is it that Joseph Smith would return to the Earth and no Mormon would mention this for 30 years?

The whole idea of the disciples seeing Moses return from the grave and not being overwhelmed by the experience is preposterous.

Even I would be transformed, and I'm not even Jewish.

How can grown people believe this stuff?

How likely is it that converts to Christianity wou...

2012-01-11T00:37:43.881-06:00
How likely is it that converts to Christianity would scoff at the very idea of their god choosing to raise corpses if their god had raised a corpse?

In 1 Corinthians , Paul has to deal with Christian converts who certainly believed Jesus was alive, but were scoffing at the idea of a corpse being raised - 'With what sort of body do they come?'

How likely is it that Christian converts would scoff at the idea of corpses rising if a corpse had not risen?

I think Dr. Parsons is wrong on both counts: (1) t...

2012-01-10T23:30:06.201-06:00
I think Dr. Parsons is wrong on both counts: (1) the prior probability of the resurrection is, I think, pretty high, and (2) the evidence given in the NT for that event is remarkably strong. I don't see how these two points could be adequately explained in less than a book, though: I will not try to do it here.

I am, though, intrigued by these comments:

"How low can I reasonably put my priors for the occurrence of an event that I regard as physically impossible, like resurrecting a dead body? Well, pretty much as low as I like. If I want to put it at one in a million, I can put it at one in a million. Show that I can’t. Prove that this would be unreasonable. If you can’t (and you can’t), then that is the burden of proof you have to meet: one in a million."

Does this mean you are that confident that your honesty and clarity of thought are superior to those of intelligent believers who have thoroughly examined the evidence for miracles, or who have experienced them themselves, critically examined those experiences, and come to the conclusion they were real? Or who have examined the evidence for God in general, and concluded that it is solid? You think there is a less than one in a million chance that they have observed accurately or thought more clearly, than that your own view of the universe could be wrong?

I wonder if one could justify such self-confidence on any objective grounds? Beginning, perhaps, with a theory of evolution that would bless one man with such vast cognitive superiority over his fellows, in a single generation?

I hope I don't sound too sarcastic; I am serious about the question.

I have a question. Can we ever meaningfully discus...

2012-01-10T15:38:14.178-06:00
I have a question. Can we ever meaningfully discuss the appropriateness of a given prior for a supposedly one-off event such as this?