John, isn't there a non-zero chance that we're all living in the Matrix and the programming could always be changed so that pigs do fly and amputated arms are "magically" re-attached?Great question!
Wouldn't this make the possibility of absolutely anything and everything non-zero?
I've mostly been persuaded by Louise Antony and Dan Lambert that Bayesian analysis doesn't help when it comes to historical one-of-a-kind events, especially of the miraculous kind! If correct, Christians are using this math illegitimately. We must not follow suit. If correct, this kind of analysis of "miraculous" historical events is faddish and will pass.Since that initial comment I've been in a debate about Bayes for most of this month on Facebook. To set the record straight, I was initially wrong to say "it's technically true that every claim, no matter how bizarre, has a nonzero probability to it." More on that in a moment.
Second, while it's technically true that every claim, no matter how bizarre, has a nonzero probability to it, some claims can be said to be so far out of bounds the most accurate thing we can say is that such an event is impossible. This is something mathematician James Lindsay has persuaded me about. To continue to act and speak as if a certain miracle has a degree of probability to it, out of the numerous multitudes believed to have taken place, is a misuse of normal language. So when Ehrman says the miracle of the resurrection is impossible, he's correct. What other word are we to use? When does a 99.9999% improbability (or some other higher than high percent) become a possibility?
Possibilities count if an omniscient omnipotent god exists, you see. We encourage the mind of the believer to continue believing if we grant it's possible, when everything we know says it's impossible. We should avoid Bayesian analysis in historical events and stick to normal language and say it truthfully as Ehrman does, that it's impossible. Yep, impossible. The reason Christians use Bayesian math is because they can force us into admitting miraculous events are possible, and that's all they need to keep on believing. Get it?
Third, to go on to compare other bizarre alternative explanations of the resurrection hypothesis (aliens, seriously?) is an exercise in futility, since bizarre stories are by definition bizarre. Even owning an interstellar spacecraft is far more reasonable in this day than an impossible event, by far!. Are we really going to stoop so low that we have to argue the resurrection hypothesis has less explanatory power than alien interference, before we've made our point? Nonbelieving scholars have adopted this Christian language game in response to the dominance of Christianity in academia. This must stop. The best explanation of the data, BTW, is Richard C. Miller's.
Fourth, there are no posteriors that can make an impossible event (see above) a probable one. Ehrman was correct even if he fails to understand Bayesian math. In other words, Ehrman doesn't have to know Bayes Theorem to know it's impossible that Jesus raised up from the dead. He's a historian. A good one. And he's absolutely correct. So why are some nonbelieveing scholars nitpicking him to death on this issue when he's right? Or, are we saying only philosophers of religion who have been trained in this Christian language game can properly reject the resurrection hypothesis? Surely we don't want to say that. Otherwise, let these philosophers reign too. ;-)
Save the ChildrenDon't miss the rest below:
Somebody has to tell them. We can’t keep quiet. Stridency is in order here. Tell the believers they have been hosed. They were sold a bill of goods as defenseless kids, and that's the only reason they uphold religious myths and negative judgments of out-groups. Why for example, is condemning others to eternal gruesome pain in some Omnipotent Prick’s never-ending medieval torture chamber politically correct? Why is it considered a normal facet of religion? Why is it allowed, unchecked, unchallenged? Why do we fill kid’s heads with these medieval fantasies? No more. All this from the religion of love: “God loves you, But, if you don’t believe what I believe, what we believe, or believe it in just the same way we do at our church… you will burn forever and deservedly so!” Religions convince kids this is real, normal, accepted. You wouldn’t buy it for a minute as an adult. That's why religions go for kids. It is reprehensible. What a crock. Nobody in a believer's immediate circle, even if they might think for a moment that condemning others is reprehensible as hell, (pun intended) dares to tell them, or even dares to think it for more than a moment.
But we non-believers can tell them, should tell them. Daily. Refute it. Constantly. Stridently. It is up to us. And we are telling everyone, and at unprecedented levels in the past decade since the beginning of the New Enlightenment. Never before has the skeptical freethinking non-believer community come out so strong, so vocal, so visible as in the past decade. But a generation ago, folks like Madalyn Murray O’Hair were doing it all on their own, ostracized, hated, and on the fringe. The vast majority of atheists were in the closet. You wouldn’t dare bring up atheism in mixed company, and if you did you were immediately associated with those dastardly commies: Chairman Mao, Khrushchev, Stalin and Lenin. Atheists were monsters that persecuted Xians and took away prayer and Bible reading in our schools. Now, non-belief and the critique of religion is mainstream and everywhere. We can now do more to reverse the damaging effects of child indoctrination on eternal damnation and all the other arrogant thoughts they have been conned into.
Once, while in downtown Chicago I got close to a kid in a street corner demonstration who was holding up a sign typical of Xian evangelists street preacher groups that said "Fornicators and Faggots Burn in Hell", or words to that effect, and patted him on the shoulder and nicely said “It’s all bullshit, pal.” I said it kindly. I was as nice to this late adolescent as I would be with any other human as they deserve respect, but I was not in the least bit respectful of the often cruel, religious ideas he was displaying, which deserve none. Somebody has to tell them. Every seed you plant can be another nagging twinge of cognitive dissonance. The religious aren’t stupid, merely hosed. And the hosing started when they were young: captive, vulnerable, trusting and unsuspecting.Religion just gets in the way. At best, it is a harmless diversion if kept to one’s self, but most often it is the prime if not only source of misogyny, homophobia, science denial, and division left in the modern world, at worst the world’s main source of xenophobia, dehumanization, and horrific violence toward women and non-believers. We don’t need this shit. Tell believers, at the risk of not being PC, tell them. They were coerced into it as unquestioning children or vulnerable adolescents. It is not their fault. You wouldn’t let your friends drive drunk, tell them not to try to run the world deluded by blind adherence to whatever brand of bullshit they were taught as children. Don't let your friends drive Xian or Muslim either.
Unlike what has been foisted by Carrier, Ferguson et al in these threads, prior probability in evidentialist statistics is far more subjective and typically may require/include field expert determination and any number of other inputs beyond assessment of rationality and logical validity, quite the opposite of the "anything goes" mentally we've seen exhibited here in such tiresome fashion. This is particularly true where there exists a relative paucity of informative statistics to aide in establishing prior probability, e.g., with the resurrection tale.
Interesting here, John Loftus and I are the only ones here to have studied in seminary with William L. Craig and his camp. We recognize the apologistic tactic a mile away. They rhetorically have already won. They selected Bayes then gave their mythological proposition an non-zero prior probability. Everything after that is meaningless smoke and mirrors meant to distract the masses. They've already quietly succeeded. All they needed to do, according to their camp, is show that their fairytale world is possible. Done! They've tricked you into allowing this step to frame the debate entirely to their own essential success. A more careful look at Bayes, however, shows this step to be utterly false.
Take the identical wording of your comment above, and instead of “miracles” insert words like unicorns, leprechauns, elves, ghosts, angels, vampires, werewolves, witches, mermaids, etc. – anything really for which no credible evidence actually exists or ever has.Mattapult:
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Personally, I think it is somewhat miraculous that the Catholic Church was able to cover up, and get away with, the sexual abuse of SO MANY altar boys over so many decades. I’m sure this wouldn’t meet the Church’s standards for defining something as a miracle, but it demonstrates to what extreme lengths they will go to protect the Church. Might they not be similarly disingenuous and extreme in their methods when trying to establish something as a true “miracle”?
If there is no methodology to asses these claims then you are doomed to remain agnostic on the topic forever. We can assess the claims and falsify them, but we cannot establish that the claim is actually true. Miracle claims can be investigated by science, and science can potentially show a natural cause to the event in question. What science cannot do is show a supernatural cause is behind the event. You have to rely on ignorance for that.The last quote deserves some discussion on its own, by Rosa Rubicondior: "How can science address a claim that, by definition, violates the laws of nature, and so for which there can be no evidence."
Lourdes is famous for its miracles though despite the millions that go there, and the countless miracle claims, only 69 (up to the year 2015) have been declared officially to be sound examples of possible miracles. The miracle reports were more common in decades gone by. The reason for that is that improvements in medical science are refuting miraculous explanations. The miraculous is heading towards redundancy.
The real issue at hand is whether the Gospel narratives are mainly history or mythology. Krischins are fond of pointing out that "Teh Bible isn't a science text and should not be read as such!" The response should ALWAYS be: "Teh Bible isn't a HISTORY text and should not be read as such!"
When responding to the Realists and Camps and Torleys of the world I keep the tone sarcastic to signal that we're not having anything approaching a real discussion. I don't regard it as a question of 'shutting down communication' which assumes there's some real communication taking place. The responses we get from the resident apologists aren't the results of reasoned textual interrogation but canned material from apologist blogs and (my personal fav) Christian "think tanks" to which we are often referred. Whether their responses cohere with anything else the New Testament says isn't a question that occurs to the apologetic mindset; it's all ad hoc argumentation anyway. It helps to remember that Christian advocates are used to proselytizing the ignorant, the emotionally vulnerable, and the gullible, and that they assume they'll find some similar audience here. It seems rarely to occur to the true believer that most here who have reconverted have "been there, done that," and have heard it all before.
I also proselytize among the ignorant. By educating them. I appeal to the emotionally vulnerable who are offended by the monumental hypocrisy of Christian preachments. However I don't pretend I can sway the gullible--there are some people, lots of people, who are just born to be swindled.
Every small child knows what faith is; they just have different terminology for it: “Let’s play make believe!”
I am not sure that one can utilize math or reason or probabilities when dealing with claims of miracle or magic. After all, any event that can be seen as statistically possible would then not be magic. Resurrection -and John flying to the moon through self propulsion- are impossible without magic, but would certainly be possible if magic was possible. Once someone shows definitively that magic is possible, THEN the statisticians can review their estimates!On Facebook Richard Carrier has been arguing that every claim, except a logically impossible one, has a non-zero probability to them. He said:
The only thing that has a zero probability is that which no amount of evidence (none whatsoever) would ever warrant believing; not a thing for which we don't have that evidence, but a thing for which no such evidence can even be conceived. The only thing that qualifies, is raw uninterpreted present experience. Everything else we can be wrong about, such that some amount of evidence, *if it were presented* would warrant believing it. But when it isn't presented, we aren't warranted in believing it.When it came to the resurrection Carrier said,
I literally actually believe the probability is nonzero, and not only because I can imagine evidence that could convince me, although that's the big point to note here. I don't think resurrection happened because no such evidence has appeared. Not because no such evidence can even be conceived.John W. Loftus: Nonzero as in
How can I believe that what they do is not important, but what they call it is important?To say the word "faith" is to say fideism or faithism, they have the same exact meaning. That's what we're saying, despite their claims to the contrary.
Let's look at a few examples: Don Camp says that if you pray a lot, and look for times when your prayers seem to be answered, then obviously "God" is answering them. That is a counting-the-hits fallacy.
Realist1234 seems to think babies being killed by "God" is ok, because "God" is perfectly moral and will even things out sometime in the future.
Vincent Torley often argues that philosophy answers empirical questions. Enough said.
When confronted with these fallacies, the rational approach would be to re-evaluate the evidence.
Then there's the Ken Hamm's of the world, and the Westboro Baptist Church, Evangelicals, Mormons, and so on. Not only do they experience difficulties -- as you suggest -- they cannot even convince each other their god is the right one, and the others are wrong. With so many different conceptions of god, how can we believe they are all taking a rational look at the evidence?
We know geographic coincidences, indoctrination, and emotional manipulation play important roles in their belief systems. How is the belief guaranteed to be rational when there's such heavy irrational influences?
When the behaviors differ so drastically from the definition, how can the definition be right?
Is there no word in the Christian lexicon that describes a belief not grounded on proof or empirical evidence? My question is directed to all Christians. My point is that the common Christian wouldn't know the word fideism. In fact, the lay Christian, who is coached by those who know the weak arguments, quotes Hebrew 11:1 to bat-down the "atheist" definition of faith. When cornered about the lack of proof or empirical evidence, Christians respond with faith as a reason; for if they had evidence, they would state so without relying on faith.I like these thoughts. How about the word "Faithism" the belief in belief itself? And then say it's equivalent to how "Faith" is used by believers. Or, that it's all faithism? "Fideism" seems to be a a good word as well, the view that knowledge depends on faith. We could say it's all fideism. The word "faith" is therefore equivalent to the words "faithism" and "fideism." Discuss.
