Wed 31 Dec, 2008
I’ve been getting all kinds of interesting information out of the excellent 2008 Baylor Survey of Religion, published in the paperback What Americans Really Believe, written by Rodney Stark along with a large research team. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter on “The Godless Revolution That Never Happened.” It follows one of the few tables in the book with non-U.S. statistics, showing that in spite of strong atheist indoctrination, only 4% of Russians today consider themselves atheists. In the former Soviet bloc, that percentage varies from 1% (Poland, Romania, and Georgia) to 8% (Czech Republic).
The commentary on this is fascinating, and reminds of more recent attempts at atheist indoctrination. Beginning on page 119:
By far the most interesting data in this table are those for the former Soviet bloc. For more than seventy years atheists controlled the Soviet state and enforced an official policy of atheism. Beginning in the first year of school, and for each year all the way through college, students in the Soviet Union were required to take a course in atheism…. And it wasn’t merely education that atheism had going for it in the Soviet bloc. There was intense discrimination against religious people…. The result? In Russia itself the score is: God 96%, atheism 4%, precisely the same as in the United States….
In his very recent book The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in Secularization, Paul Froese demonstrates the utter ineptitude of the Soviet efforts to instill atheism. In part the educational program made no progress because it was staffed by, and the teaching materials prepared by, people who knew next to nothing about religion. The assumption was that since religion is nonsense, there is nothing much one needs to know to refute it. Hence, what the atheism faculty regarded as unanswerable criticisms of faith were, in fact, quite elementary matters of theology and easily refuted by the average church-goer.
Now, does that remind you of anyone else you know?
i.e., you’ve considered the impudent accusations of Mr Meyers with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship, etc., etc.? The irony here is palpable.
At any rate, Stalinism was just a secular religion, slavish, blind, and credulous, like any other religion. The only difference was that they replaced “God” with “The State” as their object of worship.
The masses went from one form of nonsense, to another, and then back again. How is this surprising? It anything, if confirms what Dawkins et al have been saying.
Amusing little ‘All the other (attempted) mass movements were bad! THIS one is good and different!’ claim aside…
I’ve always found it rather odd that, say… Norway will be pegged as a ‘tremendously atheistic country’, but the eurobarometer poll will show 32% believe in God, 47% some sort of spirit or life force, 17% neither, 4% unsure. I get the feeling people confuse liberal or secular leanings with atheistic.
On the other hand, I also suspect that the New Atheists care next to nothing about theism compared to social/political issues anyway.
Who is Mr. Meyers? Are you referring to Stephen Meyer?
Okay, now, how does this demonstrate any more actual knowledge of religion than what the Russians and Dawkins have shown?
Tom,
I always found it funny that some people can only see polarized irony: only on the “other side”, never on theirs.
People like Dawkins openly admit that they don’t study or consider the religions they criticize (e.g. his leprechaun-ology comment), and when someone makes a reference to the Emperor’s new clothes, they can’t see the flaming hypocrisy of it. If you’re going to attack a system’s beliefs, shouldn’t you know what they believe?
The point shouldn’t be hard to grasp: many of the vocal anti-religionists don’t know what they’re talking about – in fact, they revel in their ignorance by making up cute metaphors about why they don’t need to understand it. Or, they just move the goalposts to be sure that even the crimes committed in the name of atheism get blamed on “religion”.
Then again, such people are so secure in their own superiority that they don’t have to be consistent in their respect for learning. They’re so brilliantly gifted that they can dismiss entire categories of learning without actually having to know anything about them. Little wonder that they never really learn: they already know it all.
Indeed.
Exactly. Until Dawkins has trained in the shops of Paris and Milan, until he has learned to tell the difference between a ruffled flounce and a puffy pantaloon, we should all pretend he has not spoken out against the Emperor’s taste…
I know, right? I mean, we have entire schools dedicated to writing learned treatises on the beauty of the Emperor’s raiment, and every major newspaper runs a section dedicated to imperial fashion; Dawkins cavalierly dismisses them all. The sheer arrogance…
Jordan, do you not even recognize how you’re proving our point? You’re setting aside centuries of excellent thinking and equating it with ruffles and flounces. Calling it names and smirking at it is not answering it.
Tom, the whole point of the Courtier’s Reply is that it’s ok to summarily reject ideas that are transparently nonsensical. It’s ok to smirk at those ideas and call them names. It’s ok to have a nonsense threshold.
And your response, your feigned objectivity (which sometimes reminds me of Lee Strobel…) and your vague, blustering reference to “centuries of excellent thinking,” exactly parallels the Courtier’s Reply. I don’t think you realize how impractical and inconsistent you’re being. If we set the epistemic bar so low that Christianity deserves careful analysis, then we’ll end up spending our entire lives analyzing other, equally nonsensical ideas as well, and, no matter how long our frail species manages to delay its inevitable extinction, we’ll never even scratch the surface.
There is simply too much nonsense in the world to analyze all of it. The human brain doesn’t have the bandwidth to consider every possible explanation for every possible phenomenon; so, most of the time, we filter out the stuff that is obviously silly. Unfortunately, fear of death (or, more broadly, fear of the suffocating physical constraints reality) often compels us to selectively suppress our nonsense-filter. Hence the popularity of healing crystals, seances, tarot cards, homeopathy, etc. — and, yes, religion.
Well, I refuse to play that game. Christianity just isn’t worth studying. It is patent nonsense. It makes silly claims about invisible beings with supernatural powers, witches, unicorns, demons, etc. It’s the mythological finger-painting of an infantile culture stumbling into self-awareness. It doesn’t pass my nonsense-filter, and it shouldn’t pass yours either.
Jordan,
Some context. I’ve been writing for than just quick references to “centuries of excellent thinking” for four years on this blog. I’ve been reacting to book after book written by atheists and materialists. I’ve studied some of the best the atheists have been putting forward. I’ve been dealing with the real thing. I could call atheism “transparently nonsensical” (it wouldn’t be that hard), but I haven’t been and I wouldn’t, because I have too much respect for a) myself, b) atheism, and c) the centuries of genuine debate between genuinely thoughtful people on both sides of the issue.
You can continue to deal with Christianity as “patent nonsense” if you wish. That’s up to you. I grieve for you, for the life you are giving up thereby, but your decision is obviously yours to make.
And you’re still just calling it names and ruffles and flounces…
Jordan’s position is, on the other hand, very refreshing given that there is so much pretense among others for their reasoned rejection of Christianity.
Jordan,
It’s nonsensical to set the epistemic bar so low because it’s nonsensical?? I don’t think it’s accurate to say that your understanding of epistemology is SO self-evident that you don’t even have to justify the belief that it’s nonsense. Maybe it’s your life experience that justifies this belief, or maybe it’s something else.
I think, to add to the bit of back and forth here, that when you compare dawkin’s criticism of religion, which is based on not needing to know anything about it, with say, scott atran’s or some of the few other’s actually doing scientific studies of religion, its possible to walk away with the sense that dawkins courtier’s reply is merely a mask for him to make statements that run contrary to the scientific evidence, but are good for his overall propaganda.
Jordan,
The problem is you’re not setting an “epistemic bar” at all. You’re just picking and choosing when to be rational and when to be closed-minded. So, I actually agree with this:
On that basis, I reject the a priori rejection of Christianity, and religion in general, as though it was no more plausible than the Emperor’s invisible clothes. My nonsense threshold won’t accept the patently absurd idea that blind, mindless rejection is somehow better than blind, mindless credulity. How do you know that it’s “patent nonsense”, anyway? If you looked into it, then you’re expressing hypocrisy by claiming that it needs no investigation. If you didn’t, then you don’t even know what’s supposed to be baloney about it in the first place.
When you, or Dawkins, or anyone else makes the snide, arrogant assertion that Christianity is so obviously, clearly, overtly ridiculous that you don’t even have to consider an iota of what it suggests, then by your own rules you’re fair game for smirks and name-calling. Thank God that scientists, in general, haven’t applied that kind of foolish approach to their work. Otherwise, they’d have just ignored relativity, quantum, and so forth because they’re so obviously, clearly wrong. Same with evolution. Dinosaurs into birds? Nonsense! Why even look into it? Then again, there were a lot of atheists who rejected the Big Bang because it set off their baloney detector. The universe can’t have a beginning – that’s transparent nonsense, right?
The humor I find here is watching someone openly admitting their willing ignorance of a philosophy and simultaneously defending it as though it was a virtue. I actually laughed out loud when you tried to call Tom out for his “feigned objectivity”. What could be less objective than dismissing something without even examining it? Are you kidding me?
Given that, I’d be interested to see if you’ve ever tried to argue here about the evidence for, or consistency of, Christian beliefs. Given what you’re saying here, you’ve totally disqualified yourself from ever making any sensible comments about either. After all, you’ve never looked into them or considered them at all, right?
There’s no argument here that some things ping the “baloney detector” right away. But a person who tries to put Christianity in that category only shows how little they know about it, how little they care to know, and how irrational and prejudiced they are. Based on what you’ve said here, not only does that description apply to you, but you think it ought to be well and clearly stated. Sorry, but I’ll refrain from calling you names. I do have to agree with Tom, though, that this is exactly the kind of thing Christian apologists love to point to when we talk about how irrational the anti-religious crowd is.
But, you have convinced me of one thing. I reject quantum totally and completely now, on the basis of your arguments. It makes silly claims about invisible particles with magical properties, “special” rules, and so forth. It’s just the materialistic scribbling of an amoralist atheistic subculture who keep stumbling over evidence for God and just can’t bear to admit it. Investigating the claims of quantum-ites isn’t worth my time; there’s too much nonsense in the world to examine all of it, and you and I both know that all claims to the abnormal or unusual are exactly the same. It doesn’t pass our nonsense filter, right, Jordan?
MM,
The irony is that science takes some of the more common religious claims seriously enough to ‘waste’ precious lab time, money and resources investigating them. The softer sciences are guilty of the same. I guess they didn’t get the memo.
Actually, Christianity is every bit as ridiculous and implausible as the Emperor’s invisible clothes. This renders the rest of your post kind of irrelevant, I’m afraid.
I would, however, like to comment on one of your numerous failed analogies: You likened Christianity to quantum mechanics. The implication was that, since quantum mechanics is taken seriously in spite of its absurd claims, Christianity should be taken seriously as well. Leaving aside the blatant two wrongs make a right fallacy, note that quantum mechanics makes claims about the nanoscopic world, which most of us have no prior knowledge of, while Christianity makes claims about the macroscopic world of our day-to-day lives. This is what makes Christianity’s silliness obvious. To illustrate my point, look at these two propositions:
1) The other day, I entered the Earth’s orbit by flapping my arms and thinking positive thoughts.
2) Sometimes a particle will pass right through solid objects via quantum tunneling.
Can you spot the difference? Oh, and as a side note, did you look into 1 in depth before deciding whether or not it’s true?
Proposition 1 is absurd and no one believes it.
Proposition 2 seems absurd but physicists have shown it is possible.
So… what’s your point here?
Tom,
For the sake of argument, assume that physicists haven’t shown that proposition 2 is possible.
Proposition J:
Suppose I claim…
Proposition D: proposition J is “as ridiculous and implausible as the Emperor’s invisible clothes.”
Which proposition (if either) is correct? Why should anyone consider Prop J to have any greater validity that Prop D, or vice versa?
Here’s a few more propositions to consider:
1. Jesus was a man who lived around two thousand years ago.
2. Jesus died by crucifixion at the hands of the ancient authorities.
3. Jesus’ followers claimed that he rose from the dead.
4. Those same followers “turned the world upside down:” within a few centuries of non-violent campaigning, Christianity became a significant force in history.
Actually, those four propositions represent “Christianity”. Far from being the stuff of invisible clothing, they are almost universally acknowledged by historians world-wide. A Christian is simply someone who wants to participate in that revolution.
Doug, your propositions 1-4 are probably true, but they are mundane. Just look at the Mormons. Starting from a patently absurd belief, the Mormons built a giant religion, and many sacrificed their lives. How about the Scientologists? Same deal there, apart from the martyrdom. That people believe untrue things and will sacrifice their lives for such things is mundane. Christians are not people who simply believe 1-4, or else I would be a Christian too.
Christians believe that Jesus actually was resurrected. However, the belief that Jesus actually did rise from the dead is not mundane. That belief contradicts the 10 billion other experiences of people not rising from the dead. That’s the point of miracles of course. And what evidence for the Resurrection is claimed to outweigh the 10 billion data points? That lots of people in a deeply superstitious culture believed it at the time. Kinda like the Mormons believed Joseph Smith’s story. Is the story of Jesus more unusual than the story of the Mormons or Scientologists? Hardly. The belief that the Resurrection is true is irrational. That’s the point.
It’s completely missing the point to pretend that the atheist is criticizing the mundane claims of theists. The point is that theists make extraordinary claims, but fail to back it up with extraordinary evidence.
Well, actually, the point that I was addressing was
But we can have a go at your point if you like…
The point, for what it is worth, is that Christianity is rooted in the mundane. History is integral to Christianity. The first “definition” of Christian belief, that we call the “Apostles’ Creed”, includes:
To cast Christianity as invisible clothing is to imagine a non-existent line between the mundane and the extraordinary. The history of Christianity (indeed, the message of Christianity — i.e., the incarnation) is that the extraordinary has met the mundane and redeemed it!
It is true that the Apostles’ Creed also contains extraordinary claims. My favorite is quite miraculous indeed:
Jordan,
I think what you mean is that you don’t have a rational answer for the rest of my claims. Your attitude is simply not defensible, and I’m not surprised that you don’t even try. The whole point of taking the “it’s so silly I don’t even have to think about it” approach is to avoid considering that which you don’t want to be true. There’s no other way to see it.
Note that I didn’t compare quantum and Christianity in quite the way you did. I simply noted that you’re rejecting something purely on the basis of it being “absurd”. How is quantum any less absurd or making claims about the “invisible” – isn’t that one of your criticisms of religion? My point stands: you’re making a deliberately ignorant, unreasoned and irrational rejection (of a religious-philosophical system that’s been subject to better scrutiny than you could ever hope to muster for more than two millenia) without evidence or analysis. As I said, that’s indefensibly absurd.
You have no way to reject my rejection of quantum, evolution, or anything else purely by naming it “absurd”, in my own opinion. Yours is an approach that cannot be applied consistently or reasonably. You’re in exactly the same category as the person who says, “if men evolved into monkeys, there wouldn’t still be monkeys, so I’m not even going to think about evolution”. Actually, yours is worse, since you’re not even willing to make that much effort to consider the claims of religion.
Doug,
Huh?! What on Earth does that mean?
Rooted in the mundane?!!! 1/12th of the creed is mundane.
You’re saying there’s no line between mundane and extraordinary? So if I told you I flew to the moon on a broomstick last night and chatted with a magic rabbit, and woke up without physical evidence of the event, that’s not extraordinary? Is my story made mundane or convincing if I note that brooms are mundane, or note that I departed on my voyage from my mundane porch? Should I believe my own story?
No one is (or has been) able to fly to the moon on a broomstick, and no one has ever spoken with or produced evidence of a magic rabbit. People regularly hallucinate and fabricate. Do those statistics count for nothing in evaluating my broomstick claim? Are you merely agnostic about my broomstick claim, or do you think it is unlikely to be true?
Given your unwillingness to tackle the issue, I reckon you’re wearing the same threads as the Emperor.
DL,
Not true. In fact, the point that Doug was inferring, at least in part, is that Christianity was founded on the eyewitness accounts of those extraordinary things. For you to say that theists don’t provide “extraordinary evidence” is patently false. Jesus said He was God incarnate, and would rise from the dead. The extraordinary evidence of that claim was performing miracles in front of witnesses and rising from the dead.
Woah! Dude! What exactly are you on about? I may be many things, but unwilling to tackle issues is NOT one of them.
Just do me a favor: let’s not make the “issue” something that you made up out of the clear blue sky, ‘k?
Doctor Logic,
I’m afraid that when one looks at the scientific data concerning ‘truth-statements’ in religion (most of the specific experiments that i have looked at have been excluded to Christianity, but i believe there are a few others), shows that the sentences are neither true nor false, but rooted in the mundane, with a little twist: slight category violators that CANNOT be TOO weird (ie cannot discard more than say 1 semantic category)or else it will not be accepted. to propose, as i believe some people here are, that religious claims are truth-claims in the usual sense is to run CONTRARY to this (and some other) scientific evidence, and demanding that truth-claims must satisfy ALL semantic categories to be considered…well in that regard id be curious as to how many of our regular old truth-claims we would have to discard.
just my 2-cents
Quite so: THERE IS NO LINE BETWEEN THE MUNDANE AND THE EXTRAORDINARY
In fact, extraordinary things like art, love, beauty, language, forgiveness, kindness and music are so commonplace you may be forgiven for (incorrectly) considering them “mundane”.
MedicineMan,
Like Benny Hinn? Like Penn & Teller?
If eyewitness accounts are extraordinary evidence then you must have quite a menagerie of paranormal beliefs.
Doug,
Sigh. Commonplace = mundane in this context.
Did you really think that my argument was based on whether I think a belief is “weird” in an aesthetic sense? Or that I meant mundane to mean “not particularly valued”? Chemistry is pretty weird, but it turns out to be mundane. Love is highly valued, but mundane.
In this context it should be obvious that mundane and extraordinary relate to their Bayesian equivalents.
furthermore, we can make two statements:
There are particles that grossly violate our intuitions, we have never observed it but some people we trust have
Jesus Christ rose from the dead, we have never observed it but some people we trust have
all youre going to say, some of those people are more supersitious and some of those people have no supersitions, which i think is such an oversimplification as to not even be applicable to how people believe whatever it is they believe
finally, if i were to say “so and so has no evidence for their beliefs”, and they responded by saying “sure i do”, if i then said either “sorry wont look at it because its sophistry” or “sorry wont look at it because the statement is nonsense” is to be something of a bit intellectually dishonest.
DL,
I did not say that the accounts were extraordinary. I said that the events were extraordinary, and that they were evidence that the claims were true.
Are you rejecting all eyewitness accounts of strange or unusual events, now? It sounds like you’re trying to move the goalposts to pretend that there’s no evidence for Christianity, but you’re going to trip yourself up. Also, you’re making a pretty strong error of scale when you compare sleight-of-hand and emotional “slain-in-the-spirit” moments with instantaneous healing of skin diseases and resurrection of the dead.
What Jesus did wasn’t cheap magic. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that modern man invented the practice of illusion. If there was any way to chalk up what Jesus did to trickery, His critics would have done it. Instead, they tried to say He was in league with Satan.
What you mean to say is that the mundane has a Bayesian equivalent, while the extraordinary does not!
Your claims to the contrary notwithstanding, love is not mundane (if that which you have experienced is, permit me to engage in pity for you), neither does it have a “Bayesian equivalent”!
MedicineMan,
What does “they” refer to? The accounts or the events?
Nope. I am saying that accounts are evidence, but they are not determining when the phenomenon being described is more rare than the incidence of false accounts.
The same is true of my own personal accounts. I have to place some limit on the reliability of my faculties. There must be some interpretations of experiences that cannot be supported by uncontrolled personal experience because they are too rare (in light of all my other experiences) to be acceptable according to my own standards of reliability.
I hear this absurd argument all the time. How do you know? What controls were in place to detect fraud? Answer: none.
People in that era believed cheap tricks were real miracles. Even today, in Africa, people get hacked to death on the mere suggestion that they performed witchcraft. It’s not as if the Palestinian Academy of Sciences performed controlled tests of Jesus’s trickery to prove that it was genuine. Besides, it’s not as if a sect’s failure to support its superstitious beliefs with controlled evidence would stop them from practicing and proselytizing. What stopped such a group from existing were other equally ludicrous sects who hacked them to bits.
So you cannot bluff this one. You can’t say, “if the claims weren’t true, they would have been debunked.” That doesn’t even happen today. Look at the Mormons and Scientologists. Totally debunked, and yet their fraudulent empires are actually growing!!
How delightful: first neuroscience and now magic… two topics about which I know considerably more than Dr. L. (if anyone cares, my “cheap magic” credentials can be observed on YouTube). Sorry to disturb you with the truth, Dr. L., but what Jesus did doesn’t even smell like “magic”.
Doug,
Er, no. Childhood cancer is extraordinary. That doesn’t mean we cannot reason about it using Bayesian methods.
Mundane = commonplace, probable. Extraordinary = rare, improbable.
Equivocation.
How many people experience love? Almost everyone. That makes it very common. How common is it for people in close quarters to form loving relationships? Very common. Hence mundane.
You are (disingenuously) suggesting that I mean the term to mean that love feels tired, petty, and unimaginative. Ooh! Maybe I’ll reflect on my loving relationships, and let my passions distract me from reason… Naaah.
Doug,
Oh, my, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize you were an authority. I must believe you on that basis alone.
But might I humbly be permitted, oh so proud and majestic one, to ask how you plan to address my actual point?
DL,
“They” refers to the events, of course.
Question: if a man raised in the desert all of his life saw ice, should he reject all claims that it is “solid water” on the basis of it contradicting his repeated, consistent, well-established experience saying that water is only a liquid? It would be a violation of his standards of reliability, and it’s just too rare a thing to be believed. I guess he should never even consider the possibility. It’s not possible for something to contradict our expectations.
Plus, as someone said, the whole point of miracles is that they contradict the expected in such a way that they demand an explanation.
And I hear this juvenile question all the time. If you’re convinced that ancient people were infallibly credulous, incapable of rational thought, and so stupid that they couldn’t possibly question what they see, then feel free to wallow in your own self-serving arrogance.
Beyond that, what’s described in the Bible actually includes investigations of Jesus’ miracles. Thomas refused to believe that Jesus was bodily raised until he’d felt the wounds. The Pharisees investigated the claims of a man who claimed to have been cured of lifelong blindness. That you’ve never even heard of this (or at least, you’re acting as though you haven’t), means you really are in the category Jordan was creating: the willingly ignorant skeptic.
This…
…is anachronistic nonsense. Magicians are not a 20th century invention, and what made Jesus such a controversial figure (in terms of miracles) was that what He did wasn’t possible by deception. Again, reference the man born blind. That’s not the kind of thing a person claims to have healed because it’s too easy to debunk if it’s a lie. Then again, I guess you think ancient people were so stupid and foolish that his parents would have forgotten about their son’s eyesight.
The same goes for the resurrection. There were plenty of ways to debunk Christ’s physical resurrection, from producing the body to getting a confession from an apostle, and on and on. If the apostles wanted an un-falsifiable claim, they’d have said Jesus was spiritually raised. Instead, they said something that could be checked, and they weren’t the only ones who witnessed it.
So, you can’t bluff your way out of this by claiming that nothing could have possibly been debunked then. You’re just moving the goalposts so that no matter what was claimed, you can pretend that no one in Jesus’ day could have possibly had the intellect or ability to investigate it.
By your own argument, though, I guess we can understand why people cling to this “I don’t have to look at it, I just know it’s absurd” approach. Some people will believe whatever it takes to cling to their prejudices.
Dr. L.,
You are missing something quite fundamental. In order for something to be represented in a Bayesian framework, it is insufficient for it to have a label (i.e., “love”). It is a requirement for it to have a definition, i.e., it needs to be fundamentally grounded in physics. Now, while you might say that all human experience is grounded in physics, the jury is still out on that one
And until you come up with those physics-grounded definitions of language, meaning, and consciousness that you referred to on the other thread, I’ll not hold my breath that you’ll be able to do such a thing with “love”.
(sorry — couldn’t figure out how to reply to a reply)
No need to look any further than Jesus’ “biggest miracle:” his resurrection. Go ahead, Dr. L: explain why it is that this became so compelling if it were just “cheap magic”…
Actually, childhood cancer is very much
…which would make it mundane. (forgive me for finding it amusing that someone calling himself Doctor Logic should contradict himself within a single comment
)
The mundane was extraordinary before it became mundane proving that knowledge of the extraordinary MUST come first – even if you can’t prove it later by demonstration.
Eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrected body could know they were experiencing something extraordinary. Paul, on the road to Damascus, could know he was experiencing something extraordinary.
MedicineMan,
Well, I assume you don’t mean…
1. Accounts are mundane.
2. Events are extraordinary.
–
3. Therefore, the accounts are true.
which would suggest you have some hidden premise like:
2a. The more bizarre the event described by an account, the more likely it is to be true.
Of course, this is patently incorrect.
So I assume you mean something like this:
1. The people making the account are mundane with respect to the subject of the claim.
2. It is rare for mundane people to falsely claim extraordinary events about which they are indifferent.
3. The events claimed by the mundane witnesses were extraordinary.
–
4. Therefore it is likely that the claims are true.
Of course, (1) is false. Those claiming to believe Jesus returned had already risked their lives for his cause. They were filled with religious hysteria. They weren’t impartial witnesses.
But even if it were not false, you have to weigh (2) versus (3). How rare are the two kinds of event (accounting and the event itself) relatively speaking?
At what rate do people report false extraordinary events?
Accounting of false extraordinary events occurs on a DAILY basis. Yet actual supernatural events have never ever been seen to occur when the biases are accounted for.
Maybe you can fill in all the missing premises in your argument for me.
Absolutely correct. It will take more than one brief, unrepeatable appearance of ice to convince a rational man that water can be a solid in the desert. With controls and repetition, the belief can become rational.
But if he only gets to see ice briefly, one time, he would be foolish to believe he saw solid water.
Expectations are contradicted all the time, but we require the weight of evidence. The more extraordinary the claim, the greater the the weight of evidence has to be. If we have a massive weight of evidence saying X, then we need a correspondingly large mass of evidence to say ~X.
Sure, they do. But resurrection is not the only explanation, and certainly not the most probable one.
Tell me, what is the process by which Jesus would have been debunked? Suppose hundreds of people believed Jesus had magical powers. Who was debunking their beliefs? And what were they debunking them with? We’re they skeptics? Or were they saying miracles are real, but just not those of Jesus? Plus, who actually cared enough? The majority of the population lived in poverty. Did they have time for debunking? What would they do, publish their ideas in a journal? How well has this worked on the Mormons and Scientologists?
Ah, so this is what you consider to be controls, eh?
What journal was this published in? Oh yes, a religious text called The Bible. Who are the referees/editors? Christian believers. So it must be completely trustworthy and have independent verification.
Did you debunk the Mormon story yet? How’s that working for ya? Has the Mormon church collapsed yet?
And, um, no, the story isn’t verifiable because Jesus conveniently vanished after his resurrection. And disposing of a body was trivial at that time. I don’t think there was a CSI:Jerusalem. So they had a pretty safe bet from a (lack of) evidence perspective.
Doug,
So you can’t define love, but you know you’re in love?
Now that is a miracle.
And I find it ironic. I show you that the word “mundane” has multiple meanings, and accuse you of mixing up the meanings in this context. The relevant meaning in this context approximates to the first words of definition 2. Yet you then take the wrong definition (1) for this context, equivocating once again.
I would have thought that the concept of multiple meanings for the same word would be a pretty important concept to grasp if one were working in the speech recognition business.
deleted – should have been further down the thread…
DL,
Once I saw this…
…I knew there was no point in giving more of a response than this. Yes, oddly enough, I consider a group hostile to the truth of the event investigating the matter thoroughly to be a pretty good type of control. Really, you ought to be answering your own question:
After all, you seem convinced that debunking in that day and age was totally impossible. I can only assume that you don’t believe anything anyone ever said before 1500 or so. No one back then was capable of separating fact from fiction at all. Even worse, you think nothing can be debunked without a case study or publishing in a modern journal. You must have a really tough time separating gossip from news.
There’s no point in trying to reason with the unreasonable, or give rational answers to the irrational. You tried to claim that no one was doing any debunking at all. You also seem to think that everyone who believed did so with total credulity. In fact, it was the debunk-proof truths that made many believe.
I gave you an indication not only of who would debunk, but how and when, and you did exactly what I said you would: you moved the goalposts. Not only that, you persist in pretending that all claims to the supernatural are equally invalid, as a matter of certainty. You’re even ignoring the fact that non-Biblical sources mention Jesus’ miracles, and the failed attempts to explain them. I hope those blinders don’t chafe you too badly.
I’m not commenting on mundane or extraordinary, so you’ll have to try that line on the person actually pursuing it.
Nothing is ever going to be acceptable for you in regards to this issue. You’ve decided, as Jordan did, without a shred of consideration or thought for the evidence. Trying to talk about this with you would be like drawing a picture for a man who’s gouged his eyes out to avoid having to consider what I have to offer.
Amen, brother!
Au contraire! I took the correct definition for the context in question. Nothing that I’ve written on the topic makes any sense without that (correct, and primary) definition of the word!
This is all you need to know to see the bootstrapping problem associated with DL’s brand of logical positivism. The mundane experience of repeated exposure to solid water requires that you FIRST believe you experienced solid water briefly, one time – but that would be foolish to believe.
MedicineMan,
Ah. And the Pharisees published their results where?
Oh wait. They didn’t. Christians claimed the Pharisees checked it and confirmed the miracle. Do you really believe that’s the same thing?
Hmmm. Maybe I should get Extenze for male enhancement. They say it’s clinically tested and doctor approved. They say there’s no gimmick, just real science. Wow! You know there are controls when the manufacturer assures you that it’s tested by scientists, safe and effective.
Gosh, I hope you’re not in the medical field.
Steve,
Sigh. So if I pull out a die and cast it and get a 6, you should automatically believe it is a loaded die?
Do you have to BELIEVE it is loaded before the following rolls of the die convince you it is loaded?
Please.
No. You should believe you experienced X when your senses tell you you experienced X and the possibility that you are mistaken seems low.
In the beginning every experiential step is considered ‘extraordinary’ in that each has never been experienced before. You say it’s foolish to believe such extraordinary experiences, however that is an impossibility if a person is to use them to make inferences. Each of these extraordinary experiences must be believed to be real before a universal idea/concept can be believed (inferred) from the sum total of the individual experiences.
The universal concept of ‘loaded die’ can’t be demonstrated or proven unless you FIRST accept as REAL the sum total of all extraordinary beliefs that get you to that concept.
In summary: The mundane experience is built upon the belief that extraordinary experiences are real.
SteveK, it’s not a single extraordinary experience (like the frozen water for a desert-dweller in the scenario above) that should be rationally believed, but only the repetition of an experience and the resulting consistency that allows us to believe legitimately. If you only have one extraordinary experience that runs counter to a mass of contrary evidence, then the contrary evidence wins out, despite one’s naive intuitions.
There’s no bootstrapping, but just putting one brick after another until the pilings are deep enough.
DL, do you concur?
“SteveK, it’s not a single extraordinary experience (like the frozen water for a desert-dweller in the scenario above) that should be rationally believed, but only the repetition of an experience and the resulting consistency that allows us to believe legitimately.”
That lends itself to so many problems, it’s hard to know where to begin.
From how many beliefs become not worthy of belief due to their singular nature, to the fact that if followed consistently one would conclude that our world and everything in it is the result of design. Since design can, in principle, explain everything – particularly if you’re willing to take on a simulation hypothesis – and we have definite experiences with design on a day to day basis, while all claims of undesigned nature are unverifiable hypotheticals. Or we can go the Berkeley route and argue that our only experiences are with the phenomenal, while other theories – such as dualism, or materialism – postulate a kind of separately-existing ‘thing’ that we could never hope to be familiar with save through the phenomenal.
No. We can lodge certain contextual criticisms for accepting one explanation or another, but the standards you’re laying down simply don’t work out, nor do they lead to the conclusions you’d assume.
Paul,
Yes, you’re right.
Steve,
How would you know if the possibility you were mistaken is low?
You and everyone else on this site fail to think clearly about a few simple facts. At first, I thought maybe I wasn’t explaining it well, but I’ve stated and restated these facts in many different ways.
No one can doubt their raw experiences. Got that?
What I have been saying is that NONE of these raw experiences should be in doubt for you. Comprendez? Your experiences of seeming to see this things is NEVER in doubt.
What I am saying is that your INTERPRETATION (your inductive inference to explanation) of the experiences is ALWAYS in at least some doubt. ALWAYS!
I’ll say it one more time. Raw experiences are never in doubt. The inferred explanation of experiences is ALWAYS in doubt. At least a little.
Suppose you are experiencing flying to the moon on a broomstick. You can NEVER doubt that you are experiencing something that feels like flying to the moon on a broomstick.
But you have to doubt that the only explanation is that you actually are flying to the moon on a broomstick.
There are many possible explanations:
* the waiter slipped something into your coffee.
* you’re having a mental breakdown or psychotic episode.
* you’re asleep and dreaming.
* you really want to fly to the moon, and you’re deluding yourself.
* etc…
* you’re actually flying to the moon on a broomstick.
There’s no need to rule out any of these, a priori.
But in deciding which explanation is correct, you have to go by your past experiences.
* People get drugged on a daily basis. Odds are 1 in a million.
* Psychotic and delusional episodes are present in the population at a rate of at least 1 in 500.
* False awakening and lucid dreaming are common experiences in the population, with a large fraction of the population reporting having had at least one experience.
* No one has ever flown to the moon on anything less than a Saturn V rocket. No one can survive in the vacuum of space without a space suit. 1 in a trillion?
Now all the statistics above are the result of your past experiences. Many thousands of your past experiences.
So given these possible explanations, which is most doubtful? Obviously, the most intuitive explanation (that you are flying to the moon on a broomstick) is the most irrational to believe.
If you don’t acknowledge what I’m saying here, if you can’t see the difference between the infallibility of experience, and the constant fallibility of inference to explanation, then you’re not up to the challenge of this discussion, and you should pack it in. I’ve explained it way too many times for you to not see this distinction.
SteveK,
You have to laugh, I guess, at those who come into a conversation to defend the idea that they don’t have to bother knowing anything about certain claims in order to reject them, prove that they don’t know anything by their arguments, and then say this:
Don’t forget that what we’re seeing, despite the rhetoric, is an a priori, categorical denial of any possible claims to the truth of Christianity. We’ve even seen it in this conversation, in creating a self-serving fluid standard for what passes as attempted debunking or investigation.
It’s also important to recognize that, as is being stated,
…but they don’t doubt their interpretations at all. They’re so certain of their interpretations that they’ll defend willful ignorance on the basis of the overwhelming certainty of their a priori conclusions.
The circumstances, evidence, secondary evidence, and related facts surrounding the Gospel accounts create exactly the kind of statistical framework being mentioned, and that framework makes ideas like myth and credulity the least plausible explanations.
DL is not really doing what he says he’s doing. If he was the desert-dweller, he’d refuse to believe in ice, no matter what, because he’s already decided that it offends his sensibilities and is therefore never worth consideration at all. It’s too absurd. Show him ice, he’ll say that his experiences make it far more likely that he’s being tricked or is hallucinating. Give him a chance to talk to dozens of people who’ve seen and felt ice, and he’ll dismiss them all as delusional. His experiences make this too unlikely. Give him written statements from those who’ve seen and examined ice, and he’ll ask where the written statements are claiming ice does not exist. That people might not write down what they cannot confirm would never occur to him, since the whole idea is just to absurd to consider.
That’s the real dynamic here. Once the decision is made to reject something off-hand, each piece of evidence is ignored and never gets added to a pile that might start to counter-balance the weight of other prior experiences. What we’re seeing is selective application of the experience principle, as well as a refusal to acknowledge that (certain) extraordinary events can occur. More importantly, we’re dealing with a kind of critic who literally has no idea what they’re talking about: they don’t even know what evidence they’re rejecting because they’ve already decided that there can be no evidence. They won’t apply their statistical approach to the concept of eyewitness martyrs, overt miracles, and so forth. I’m quite sure those making these errors won’t do the same in regards to abiogenesis or naturalistic evolution.
Either way, my suggestion would be to take this kind of bluster for what it is:
That is, the posturing of a person who either will not or cannot apply consistent and rational analysis to that which he criticizes, and that which he wants to believe. As I said, it’s like drawing for a man who’s gouged out his eyes. It may be pointless, but you can at least chuckle when he tries to tell you that you can’t draw straight lines.
Sorry, MedicineMan, but your statements about me above are simply dishonest. I’ve been advocating a Bayesian view all along. My mind is not made up ahead of time.
Go ahead and state where I said this or even implied it. You’re saying I’m wrong for not advocating a Bayesian approach when that’s precisely what I have been doing.
The Resurrection does NOT survive Bayesian analysis. You and all the other theists here have consistently ignored effects of bias and human psychology.
When people tell stories or make claims in an effort to persuade, they embellish, they claim the stories are more independently reported than they really were, they claim that dispassionate third parties were also convinced by the evidence, that the experts were baffled, etc. You are basing your belief in the resurrection on a SINGLE SOURCE. You don’t have multiple independent witnesses. You have multiple collaborating witnesses AT BEST.
Your belief that the NT constitutes adequate evidence for the Resurrection is simply delusional. It’s not independent or unbiased reporting. It’s the most biased kind of reporting there is. It’s a document created by passionate religious believers in an effort to convert and persuade. You’re saying you cannot see how the NT could have been so persuasive to so many people if it weren’t true, and yet you ignore the fact that the Mormons and Scientologists (among others) have done exactly the same thing. You say that if the NT was false it would have been debunked. But for the Nth time, you’ve ignored the fact that other obviously fraudulent religions have been debunked but that doesn’t dissuade believers.
You seem to think that the witnesses to the resurrection were all independent witnesses who were dispassionate about the whole thing. In that case, if you knew that all of them had come to the same conclusion independently, you would have a stronger case. But we know that isn’t what happened. If having a certain experience boosts social standing within one’s group or meets a deep emotional need, one is likely to report having that experience. And one is more likely to report actually having had the experience later.
The supporters of Jesus were passionate revolutionaries. They knew all along that they were risking their lives for their religious revolution. So they were not dispassionate before their alleged resurrection experiences, but quite the opposite. If one person had a vision of Jesus resurrected, that person would be regarded as having a higher social status. (This happens today.) The social standing of the others would be boosted if they followed suit. Seeing a vision of Jesus would have been regarded as a blessing of some kind. Just as it would today in certain circles. But when these supporters describe their experiences, they’re not going to want to portray these dynamics in the most honest and introspective way. They’ll say that their visions were independent. They’ll say that they weren’t trying to have a vision. They’ll say that they took precautions to make sure they weren’t fooling themselves.
Do you have evidence to discount this simple alternative theory based on well-documented, testable human behavior? No, because you only have a single source. The one source the passionate religious jihadis themselves concocted. Resurrection is a 1 in 10 billion occurrence. If you got enough independent evidence and controls, you can still overcome those odds and prove a resurrection, by accumulation of evidence as you say. But you don’t have that. You have one single hyper-biased source. Even if you gave the NT 99.9999% reliability (wish is ridiculously high), you’re still 3 or 4 orders of magnitude short in reliability.
a few questions for DL:
are there any other early historical documents, other than the gospels, that provide accounts of seeing the resurrected Jesus? (especially ones were the individual/individuals lose social status in an in-group other than Christianity)
if the resurrection could be seen as having a higher Bayesian propability (because events like it happened more often), wouldnt you then claim it wasnt God simply because these events happened more often, and we understood why they took place?
are you espousing the acceptance of using the courtiers reply in light of our intuitive, Bayesian probability-drive for any certain event?
Here’s a quick test for DL to see if he knows anything at all about Bayesian inference:
Suppose there are two hypothesized outcomes of a certain test, A and B. Suppose that four trials have all come up “A”. What does Bayes say about the probability of the outcome B?
If DL gets the answer correct, then perhaps we can discuss what Bayes actually says about things like love, language, or even the resurrection. If not, we’ll know who is really bluffing
While we wait for DL’s calculations, may I recommend reading about Black Swans …
“Rare and improbable events do occur much more than we dare to think. Our thinking is usually limited in scope and we make assumptions based on what we see, know, and assume. Reality, however, is much more complicated and unpredictable than we think.”
Doug
I’m not a student of this kind of thinking, but I am a student of detecting BS, and all I know is experiences produce statistics while statistics *never* produce experiences.
If the Bayesian inference says I experienced a white swan, and my experience says I experienced a black swan, I’m going with black swan until another experience tells me otherwise – not some Bayesian inference derived from an ANN incapable of having either experience.
DL,
Sorry, but I cannot agree with this:
I’ve got you dead-to-rights expressing ignorance of what the Bible actually says, in a thread where you’re defending the idea that certain ideas are not even worth examining because they contradict experience. Simply put, you have no idea what you’re talking about, but you’re still trying to put a rational veneer on it. My baloney detector needle is spinning like an airplane propeller. There isn’t a shred of consideration in your approach, and all you’re doing is putting a good face on an unwillingness to consider what you don’t want to believe.
Just because you use words like “Bayesian” doesn’t mean you’re actually using that approach, or a rational approach at all. In fact, use of probability analysis implies that you can put semi-objective proportional likelihoods on certain events. How you can possibly do that when you don’t even know what happened, or what Christians claim happened, or what evidence supports it, is beyond me.
Case in point: The Bible is not a single source. There are many independent authors, and there are more sources supporting supernatural events than the NT. You’re assuming that I consider the NT as entirely sufficient evidence for the supernatural. I don’t, actually, but there hasn’t been anything in your comments to suggest that discussing extra-biblical sources would be worthwhile. You wouldn’t care anyway, and if I want to watch someone wiggle definitions around to suit their prejudices, I’ll turn on C-Span.
Similarly, you keep implying that because some people believe unsubstantiated things, and because some claims to the supernatural are false, then all such claims are equally false. I’ll see your Mormonism and Scientology and raise you galactic aether and steady-state theory. Since those are false, all other scientific claims must be false as well, I guess.
Even more so, you’re profoundly ignorant of the cultural and political climate of the apostles. Theirs was not a quest for acceptance, nor prestige. They weren’t revolutionaries – they were commoners who lacked the resolve to stick with their own leader when times got tough…until He rose from the dead. Even a liberal historian would laugh at you for suggesting that it was some clever conspiracy that spawned Christianity. You can argue that they were deluded or mistaken, but to suggest that they made it up is unsupportable.
This is a perfect example of moving the goalposts:
So, no matter what cultural, historical, or textual evidence, is offered, you’ve got an excuse to ignore it. If it supports Christianity, it must be biased and therefore cannot be considered. After all, you’ve already determined that it can’t be true, so there’s no other explanation for supportive texts than bias. Nice work. Too bad that what you said does not fit the culture, evidence, or claims. Like I said, there are reams and reams of info on this that any half-hearted attempt to examine the issue could uncover, but you have no real interest.
If I thought you lacked the intellect for this, I’d let it go, because there’d be no point in working over your head. But you’re more than intellectually equipped to look at this without such blatant prejudice. So, I’m just not going to let you off the hook pretending to take a rational approach when everything you say screams against it.
So you can stomp your feet and call me dishonest all you want, but what you’re doing is ridiculous. Using rational terminology does not make your approach rational. You’re convinced that these things cannot be true, and you’re making excuses to justify your belief. You’ve demonstrated ignorance of the very claims you’re trying to debunk – why argue lesser-known facts with someone who demonstrates a willing ignorance of commonly-known ones?
At least Jordan has the intestinal fortitude to just come out and say, “I don’t know or care what you believe, I don’t know or care what the evidence is, I just think it’s wrong.” He doesn’t pretend to know what the sources are, or dress his rejection up in mangled pseudo-rational double-talk.
j,
The Letters of Paul come to mind, but nothing outside the NT.
Do you think the Letters of Paul are independent of the Gospels? Are you saying the Paul was not exposed to Christianity before his conversion? He had no exposure to the claims of Christians? Are you taking his word for his independence?
That depends. If God were visibly present performing the resurrections, then it would be God. Suppose that whenever you get 100 children to pray simultaneously, God appears to all present (even those with video cameras), and God communicates with the pastor. The pastor begs for God to resurrect the individual, and God does so (or not) after explaining God’s rationale for the resurrection. In other words, God could make resurrection a repeatable thing associated only with a personal God.
In this case, there would certainly be something we would call “God” who responds to prayers, can be conversed with, and who resurrects people.
However, if you make resurrection more mundane, (e.g., if some random person got resurrected every year, without any appearance of God, then you would be right – the story of Jesus would again not be supported by the evidence. Why would all the other resurrections be natural, but Jesus’s resurrection be caused by God?
Actually, no.
However, I would say that there have been millions of paranormal claims, and perhaps a few thousand have been investigated to a conclusion. All of them have turned out to be fraudulent or delusional. That tells us what the noise level is for this sort of claim. If your evidence isn’t extraordinarily good, you’ll get swamped by the noise of human bias and fakery. 2,000-year-old stories from a single source are not going to provide signal to this noise. If all you have is non-predictive anecdotal evidence of past events, then you don’t have significant evidence.
Doug,
I really don’t know what you mean by “hypothesized outcomes” of a test. Do you mean the test output could be any number from 1 to 10, and A = 1 and B = 5? Or is the test more like a coin flip? I’ll assume you simply mean that there are two possible outcomes of the test in this example.
Bayesian analysis is going to tell us how to update confidence in our beliefs about the explanations for events. To do this, we need to be able to say something about conditional probabilities for our theories.
So, if we see four A’s we can devise many theories (an infinite number of them) to explain the outcomes. Also, explanation of the outcomes necessitates predicting future outcomes. For example, one theory is that the outcomes will all be B’s or all be A’s. Obviously, the theory that all outcomes will always be B’s will be ruled out. However, a theory that supposes B will occur one time in 5, or that the sequence is AAAABAAAAAA… is not ruled out, and I don’t think Bayes theorem has much to say between the all A’s theory and the AAAABAAAAA…AA theory. I assume this is your point.
However, there are several issues here.
1) What is a rational inference from past to the future? Bayes theorem isn’t the only element of rational thinking. Induction is a fundamental component of rational thinking. It is the assumption that the past is a guide to the future, and that past events dictate the likelihood of future events.
If all you have seen is AAAA, then AAAABAAAAA…AA is not an inductive inference from the past. A rational inductive inference is simply that B’s are no more common than 1 in 5.
There are lots of possible theories one can devise that aren’t distinguished by Bayes Theorem seeing just AAAA, but not all of the theories are rational inferences from experience. Rational inference involves some degree of “all things being equal” in one’s projections about the future.
2. You think the Resurrection is analogous to seeing history like this:
AAAAAABAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA…
with B being the Resurrection. But history actually looks like this:
AACAAACCAACCCAACAACACAA…
where the C’s are claims of supernatural events. While claims of supernatural events are mundane, actual supernatural events have never been seen when we account for natural human tendencies to report supernatural events even when they don’t occur.
Let’s talk about Black Swans, because this is the very same issue. You’re saying that just because all previously observed swans were white does not imply there are no black swans. Agreed.
But let’s imagine that half of all swans get dirty, and we can’t see whether they are white without first washing them. At what point can we say we have found a black swan?
You see, you have the situation reversed. By analogy, I’m not saying that swans cannot possibly be black. I’m saying that you lack evidence of having seen a black swan because all washed swans have been white, and dirty swans would look black anyway. Meanwhile, you are saying that one particular swan you saw that was very dirty was actually a black swan, but it flew away before you could wash it. You are irrationally claiming that all things are not equal for this one swan, but you have no basis for distinguishing this swan from any other dirty swan. You’re throwing out the “all things being equal” for this one swan, but you have no justification for doing so. And if you throw out the principle altogether, you cannot infer anything at all, and if you throw it out based on what you want to believe, then you’re deluding yourself.
So, there you have it. First, it is a rational inductive inference to think that mere claims of the supernatural are likely to occur (the happen all the time), but that resurrection (or any other supernatural event) is unlikely since they have never been confirmed. Since, to you and I, the two look the same, it is irrational for you to conclude that an actual resurrection was more likely than a false claim of a resurrection.
Second, you are the one making the strong claim, not me. You’re saying that even though an event looks mundane, it’s actually a super-improbable event. I’m saying that’s an irrational inference. It’s possible, but very unlikely, and it’s irrational for you to say this one event is special without special pleading.
Steve,
As I explained to Doug, you didn’t experience a black swan. You experienced a dirty swan, and you didn’t get the chance to wash it before it flew away. And yet every other swan that has ever been washed was white. So why are all things not equal in the case of your swan? Just because you were the one who saw it? Just because you saw it means you can conclude it was black without washing it?
DL says:
except that I wasn’t saying that at all.
when I wasn’t claiming that either.
when I was doing no such thing.
something I never claimed.
when I said no such thing.
At least most of what he wrote about Bayes was rational. The onslaught of zombie-strawmen is getting a little tedious, however.
MedicineMan,
If you think the NT has multiple independent sources, please explain. As far as I can see, the NT authors are as independent as you and Doug and Tom and Steve, i.e., not remotely independent. You are all drawing your stories from the same source. There’s basically no way for the NT to be an independent source because there were no controls. The NT was written by authors who shared their beliefs before composing their work, or by people who were later influenced by reading earlier works. For example, Paul is not an independent reporter. He claims independence (as does everyone), but if you think that is the same thing, then there’s no hope for you.
Second, you can bring up other claims of the supernatural too, but it will do you no good. Not because I’ve ruled them out, but because you are the one making the strong claim without evidence.
As I explained to Doug and Steve, this is indeed about black swans. The problem is that there are many many dirty swans that look black. And yet every dirty swan that has ever been washed was white. So why is it rational to think that there have been all these black swans out there, but we’ve just had poor luck because all the dirty swans we catch are white after washing?
You see, I’m not saying there are no black swans. I’m saying you haven’t found one, and you need much better evidence before you rationally conclude that the dirty swan that flew away was actually black underneath.
According to… the apostles? Oh, so it must be true.
Are you saying that the apostles had no idea that the authorities would want to clobber Jesus and his movement? Was it boredom that sapped their resolve to stick with Jesus? Obviously, they dedicated a considerable portion of their lives to Jesus before Jesus was arrested. Do you think they saw no danger? If they did see danger, what motivated them to take the risk? Religious devotion?
I’ll forgive this mistake because my silence on the issue may have suggested consent to the premise. I’m not saying that we ought not investigate claims. I am saying that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and anecdotal evidence without controls does not constitute extraordinary evidence. Having your opponent wade through mountains of rubbish is just obfuscation. If you had extraordinary evidence, you would produce it, but you haven’t.
Hi DL,
The others are doing a great job with you but I just want to interject one concern.
You keep saying things to the point that all investigated claims of the supernatural have been 1) disproven, or 2) not proven or 3) disproven in every case in which a conclusion was arrived at, etc.
This, as often ebfore, sounds like question-begging to me.
What does it mean for a few thousand supernatural claims to be investigated “to a conclusion”? What counts as a “conclusion” – only naturalistic explanations? Only “explainings-away”, I’d guess.
In other words, how many black swans have been scrubbed and didn’t turn white?
Are you not left with 1) white swans, 2) dirty swans which have been scrubbed to whiteness, and 3) black swans whose scrubbing has not resulted in whiteness?
If so, why are those black swans not black?
How many swans have been scrubbed and never came white, but for which you’d say “if we had a better soap, or warmer water, or if we account for the insolubility of the blackness better, then we’d be able to show that they are actually white”?
Charlie,
I’m using your definition of supernatural, not mine, and I believe that in your definition, all we have to show is that something doesn’t reduce to physics. There are plenty of ways of doing this repeatably.
But you are supposing that supernatural events only occur when they will be indistinguishable with faulty, uncontrolled experiments. That’s equivalent to the claim that black swans will always be covered in dirt, and you can never catch them to wash them.
The situation is that all your dirty (alleged black) swans flew away before they could be washed. In resolving claims of the supernatural, either the swan gets washed and is white, or the swan flew away but we found a feather that washes white.
So I’m not seeing the rational inference to the claim that some dirty swans are black underneath.
dr logic,
if i said Bigfoot was outside, would you expect some extraordinary type of evidence or would we just walk outside? im never really sure what sort of evidence one is referring to when one makes the statement you made (ie what constitutes evidence as being extraordinary or it not being so)?
so unless you yourself do a double blind placebo controlled study of x, you will not accept any statement anyone else makes about x?
why do you not accept solipsism? (in my view it is the only rationally justified philosophical position)
in relation to your comments on paul: are you saying that you will only accept… someone who has never heard of a man named Jesus rising from the dead but then saying(without having heard it from anyone else) they had met such a man… as an independent source?
Tom, medicine man, Doug, Steve (EVERYONE except Dl),
Dr Logic has directly said that he does not espouse using the Courtiers reply, have there been any indirect stating that he is for using it? (i agree with DL that there may have been some confusion due to his silence on the issue that he was for it)
also, i prefer not to gang up on one person in any theophilosophical discussion, anyway we can open this all up a bit more?
Edited by siteowner for language
DL,
If you believe this:
Then you can’t accept anything in modern historical, medical, or a host of other disciplines. People collaborate, compare, and cross-check. Therefore, what they say must be tainted to the point of unreliability. It’s just obvious that any contact between sources creates lies. It can’t create greater accuracy. Not only that, but sharing the same conclusions means a conspiracy, as well. I’ll say more about this after Tom, Charlie, Steve, and the rest of us finish our daily meeting to synchronize our minds. We believe the same basic things, you know, so we’re practically the same person…only a wierdo would think of us as separate sources.
Second? You, not I, brought up Mormonism, etc. as though they were a problem for Christianity. They’re no more problem for Christian claims than steady-state theory is for Big-Bang models. You continually imply that all supernatural claims are equal – again, an attidue you’d never apply in other fields.
What evidence there is, is irrelevant – you haven’t considered it, you won’t consider it, and you’ve indicated that that’s the case. There are basic facts about Christian support evidences that you don’t even know exist, but you’re claiming that they don’t work.
Actually, what we know of the culture, politics, and literature of the time comes from the fields of history and archaeology, and is independent of theological preferences. Once again, you demonstrate this pathological need to believe that every single thing a Christian believer knows about Jesus’ time comes only from the Bible. Not true.
The apostles didn’t demonstrate the kind of fortitude before the crucifixion that they did afterwards. Not only that, but there are aspects to your criticisms that don’t hold up to objective historical / cultural analysis, like the hallucination idea, or the “oh, me too” idea. What we know of the writings and culture in question makes those extremely unlikely, making it the responsibility of the critic to supply “strong” evidence that that was the case…none of which has ever been presented.
And…yet again…you decide that all possible evidence is “rubbish”. Take a wild guess at why I haven’t given a lengthy list of evidential sources. Hint: you won’t look at them, consider them, or treat them with the same consideration you would sources that support your preferences.
When you say “extraordinary” evidence, I think you mean, “more than whatever you’ve provided.” That is, you’ll always demand more than is reasonable, more than is possible, and more than is presented. There will never be enough. The examples you gave seem to support this: you’re far more skeptical of Christianity than you’d ever be with anything else. You’ve already moved the goalposts more than once in this conversation, I have no reason to think that you’d do anything different with Mishnaic or Pharisaical writings, information from Tacitus, Thallus, Josephus, Pliny, Lucius, or the Talmud.
More to the point, you’ve already indicated that any source which speaks positively of Christ must be biased, and so will be rejected.
So, I stand by my contention that, dressed up in pleasant terms or not, you’re not doing anything fundamentally different than Jordan. Your rejection is based in willful ignorance, and precedes any actual consideration of the evidence. You’ve delineated an approach in this thread that’s immune to reason, allowing you to deflect anything you don’t want to hear.
For an extraordinary claim – yes, or something similarly rigorous as a double blind placebo controlled study, but not necessarily done by oneself. The issue is not who does studies or experiments, but the proper procedures for doing them (such that they could be done and replicated by anyone in principle).
For a mundane claim, no. The only reason extraordinary steps must be taken to confirm claims is when the claim is extraordinary. The thing that makes the extraordinary claim extraordinary is the weight of massive evidence for the contrary, so in order to outweigh that massive evidence, you need a great weight (= an extraordinary amount or quality) of evidence. Otherwise, you’d be overturning claims with great evidence by claims with less evidence, which would be absurd.
J,
I think DL’s more than capable of defending himself. If he thinks he’s being treated unfairly, I’m sure he’ll say so, and in that case I’ll let the whole thing go. He’s not the kind of fragile intellect who’s going to be easily bruised, so I think we can let him proceed as he wishes.
In line with your idea, though, I would be interested in DL’s view of the Jordan / Dawkins, etc. view that ignorance of Christian teachings is not only acceptable but might even be preferable. We can argue evidential theories all day, but that’s sort of the main point of the post.
J.,
I appreciate your empathetic concern over the mob-like treatment of DL. If I had more time I’d get involved to even up the numbers but, alas, I do not, and in any event this routine is predictable.
Projection, as it turns out, is not just confined to movie theaters. It is alive and thriving here on this site.
Medicine Man, your refusal to list all these external, hostile sources who corroborate the NT authors reads like a bluff. Is it so hard to write them down?
Many of you act like you are unaware of the accounts from Antiquity of disturbed families whose children or loved ones become indoctrinated by a Christian cult. These accounts are eerily similar to families who see their children get pulled away by the Moonies and other, less well known cults that operate today. They are, contrary to Medicine Man’s assertions, evidence that contemporaries recognized Christianity as bunk.
Christianity is perhaps the world’s most successful human organization ever. I can’t think of any self-respecting historian who would say “because best of all their story is true!” is the reason.
Hi DL,
So you confirm that “by investigation that has been concluded” you mean “investigation where naturalism has been concluded”?
And that every black swan merely was improperly washed, correct?
If so, you really aren’t adding anything to the conversation or providing any kind of evidence when you say things like “of the millions of paranormal claims a few thousand have been investigated ‘to a conclusion’” since you’ve predetermined what ‘a conclusion’ is.
But this isn’t exactly news.
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20071107063101/#224680
j. is making a point about St. Paul which I find compelling and have suggested before.
It only makes sense that those contemporaries who wrote about Jesus were Christian believers. When you see a man raised from the dead or investigate the facts you tend to become a believer.
The better question is “where are all the hostile sources who say Jesus was not resurrected”?
Where are the critics who pleaded with early Christians to abandon their faith in the Jesus who never even lived, or had never been crucified, or who was still in His grave? Rather than demanding ever more sources confirming these facts where are all the ones denying them?
Why do we even have groups alien to and outside the apostolic tradition forming belief systems based upon Jesus and His Resurrection? Why would they accommodate their beliefs to this fact if it were not capably attested to?
Hey Tony,
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20071107063101/#224680
Speaking of that thread, why don’t you have a gander?
I know you can’t learn anything from me but it might be interesting to see how little changes and how my claims in our previous thread are borne out. DL will make the same claims about statistics and the supernatural today that he made last year and he’ll avoid the same evidences while calling his opponents irrational. Likewise you’ll see Paul contradicting himself and his own averred epistemology (as I’ve pointed out before). By the way, not only does he betray his verificationism in that thread, but in a subsequent one he retracted the idea that statistics equate to knowledge – although he defended it to the last in the thread in question.
You won’t get all the references to past conversations but you’ll at least be able to see that said history does exist.
Tony,
Was this comment (http://www.thinkingchristian.net/2008/12/the-russian-courtiers/#comment-10900) so hard to read? Excerpt:
I hardly think DL is being treated unfairly. I can’t help but note that you never seem to enter a conversation any more except to complain about it, and it always starts with “projection”. I’m beginning to wonder if you really know what the word means. Are you going to respond by providing the kind of textual evidence that we’ve been mentioning, or something similarly constructive?
Are you going to provide some of these accounts of “pulled away” people that you mention, or is that just a bluff? And if you are, is the fact that family members often disagree with each others’ religious choices somehow evidence that those choices are all wrong? By that kind of silly logic, I could say that the fact that some Christian parents are disturbed when their children are “pulled away” by atheism means that it’s clear that atheism is bunk.
How ironic for a person to gripe about projection, when they’re attempting to paint every expression of religious belief with an “eerily similar” brush as though they were all the same thing. Who’s letting their prejudices influence their opinions, again?
j.,
Thank you for your earlier comment about the “gangbang”. I appreciate it.
An extraordinary claim is a claim that contradicts reliable inferences from past experience. It also refers to claim that have been made far more frequently than they can be shown true.
Bigfoot has been claimed thousands of times, but no one has ever found any physical trace, or captured Bigfoot, obtained his DNA, etc. In many cases, Bigfoot evidence has been faked. All of these false claims constitute a kind of noise that obscures any real signal of Bigfoot. That means that in order for us to get through the noise, we need a Bigfoot signal that is very strong.
If you claim Bigfoot is outside, I have to account for the noise. It is more likely that what you are seeing is a deer or a guy in a monkey suit. It’s even possible that we both ate magic mushrooms and I’m hallucinating the same things as you by suggestion. But it’s also possible this is really Bigfoot.
What we need to do is collect as much information about Bigfoot as possible. Catching him would be ideal. Getting blood samples would be good. Tracking Bigfoot to his lair would be great. The advantage of evidence like this is that we can assure ourselves later that we weren’t on drugs, and we can convince others that our claim is true. The DNA samples will prove he isn’t human, but is still a close relative. Trapping or cornering Bigfoot means everyone can check the results. Collectively, these methods will assure us that we’re not just seeing noise.
With each test passed by our encounter, we become more certain that this is a real Bigfoot. Extraordinary evidence is evidence that overcomes bias and error. A single sighting (or a collection of single sightings) is not extraordinary evidence.
No, this is an exaggeration. Suppose x = “I am sitting at my desk.” There’s not a lot of noise in this claim. People don’t often claim to be sitting at their desks when they’re not. They don’t have a deep emotional need to believe they are sitting at their desks. And so, historically, our situational awareness is pretty ordinary and reliable.
But there are some claims that are extraordinary. There are claims for which people claim x far more often than it is true. In that case, we can infer that people would claim x even if it isn’t true, and so the signal is comparable to (or less than) the noise.
In these cases, just asking someone whether they claim x is not a good enough test of x. It is in these cases that you need to apply scientific testing.
Because solipsism is irrational. It violates one of the axioms of rational thinking, namely, the axiom that says that our experiences qua experiences are axiomatic.
No, that would be good, but it’s not all that I would accept.
Why did Jesus leave? Why didn’t he hang around for a thousand years? Occasionally, we could poison him (painlessly) and he could return again and again. Jesus could make his immortality a mundane fact. Jesus would be extraordinary among men, but that extraordinary nature can be a mundane fact. If Jesus wanted to rationally convince humanity, that’s how he could have done it.
Consider the platypus. Suppose that, before they had been reliably reported, Fred claimed there was such a thing as a duck-billed platypus. Most people would say that Fred was crazy and not believe Fred. However, Fred could get multiple platypuses, even live specimens, and everyone would be easily convinced. Skeptics could visit Fred and see the platypuses. The platypus would become mundane in the sense that we have huge amounts of data about the platypus, and can see them any time we want. At the same time, the platypus is highly unique among animals.
Now suppose the platypus had never been scientifically discovered. Suppose also that a group of people who worship a mythical platypus claim to have seen a platypus, but their platypus later escaped. Who will be convinced by their story? I say that only irrational people will be convinced by this story. Rational people will be convinced by a research program that finds the platypus and makes it mundane.
should we expect historical knowledge-claims to meet this concept (double-blind study) even though such a concept did not exist until extremely recently in recordable history?
i find it interesting that you, and some on here, are willing to trust the scientists who did the study “x”, why bother trusting them, especially given that you are uninterested in trusting some other people that lived at some other point in history?
my point is different: are theophilosophical “gangbangs” really the kind of intellectual climate we Christians want to be encouraging in any situation, given our principals?
i was unaware of these accounts; please provide a link or citation so that i can go take a look at them. thanks.
a friend of mine and myself were discussing this same question last night over billiards: why don’t the Jewish priests of the time just say to the nuts who think Jesus rose from the dead, “he’s buried right there you jackasses!”
some atheists say they have an intuitive feeling that Christianity at face value is BS and they then can provide evidence to support this first feeling,
some Christians says they have an intuitive feeling that Christianity is true at face value and they can provide some good evidence to support this first feeling…
is there anyway to stop just clashing evidence against evidence and hearing each side first say “look good evidence”; then “but no your evidence is —”?
edited by siteowner
DL,
as a card carrying philosopher, i find this very unconvincing against the argument of solipsism. if its the time and place, id ask you to unpack such a statement so we could find the real justification for believing it.
it is interesting that before you said this you said something along the lines of: “Jesus should be a platypus” (ie he should have stuck around), else no one is “rationally” justified to believe. why do you believe that “Jesus must be a platypus”, especially given that some on here are arguing that we shouldn’t and (usually don’t) force all knowledge-claims into that sort of framework ?
J,
I’m not insensitive to the fact that it’s possible to “gang up” on someone in an internet forum. I just don’t think that’s the case here. We’re not berating, insulting, or harassing DL. There’s a difference between several people pursuing a line of questioning and several people maliciously pounding someone. As I said, DL’s got plenty of noggin power to work with, so it’s not like we’re bullying an incompetent commenter.
I can only speak for myself, but I’ve been in situations where I was answering several people at once in much more hostile circumstances than this, and the last thing I would want or expect is pity or patronizing. Not that I think you’re patronizing DL, but if I didn’t think he was up to this, I’d never have said as much as I have.
You missed my qualification (“or something similarly rigorous”) as well as the context, which was an extraordinary claim. Many historical claims are not extraordinary (that is, as much as, say, the resurrection).
right, but this is my point…if asked what sort of rigorous evidence is needed to prove say my belief in the resurrection, all we keep hearing is “extraordinary evidence”, and the only specific kind referred to is double-blind trails or “something like it”, so what sort of historical evidence would be extraordinarily historical evidence?
no but we are making for a rather less-interesting lopsided conversation, where all the atheists get on one side of the room and all the christians on the other. so in trying to open things up a bit more…
are there any archeological finds that are pauls writings ALONE, or is everything we have for documents simply one ‘book’, the NT?
J, I don’t see any way around the fact that extraordinary events in history are at a relative disadvantage for being confirmed than current events, or experiments, etc. You can’t seek to level that playing field by sacrificing epistemological rigor. Truth comes first.
Note too, that ‘extraordinary event’ changes with time and the only way to maintain epistemological rigor is to apply modern-day methods of verification (that also change with time) to historical events. Nevermind that the event may have met the current standard at the time. That doesn’t count because everyone knows the ancients were dunderheads and we’re smart.
J.
I have to say your take on things is a breath of fresh air here. I’m enjoying your participation, so hats off.
When I talked about the cultish similarity to early Christian conversions I was remembering Perpetua (although I couldn’t remember her name last night) rebuffing her father and his grief at not being able to pull her back from her intended martyrdom. I read her account 20 or more years ago and that was the part that really got to me. I thought I remembered other similar accounts, but I can’t find other references online and I can’t find my old books right now so I’m probably just mistaken. Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that the those closest to the story — the Jews in and around Palestine — were the least likely to be converted by early Christianity.
The analogy I was trying to draw is that we all laugh at Scientology today. In 200 years, it could well be the world’s 3rd largest religion. Looking backward from that possibility, whose perspective should should future generations respect on Scientology’s validity, the few converts we make fun of today, or the vast majority who scoff at its inanities? (I mean that sincerely, and I don’t mean that I know the answer. I think it’s a question worth considering.)
Anyway, here’s the Perpetua section that I found so sad (the whole account is here: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/perpetua.html)
Hi J.,
Not sure what you were asking there about St. Paul and archaeology. Are you asking about extant ms of his epistles alone? The oldest seems to be the codex papyrus 46 from the 200s A.D.
http://www.bible-researcher.com/papy46.html
I believe the oldest existing NT document is from John’s Gospel and dates to the very early 2nd century.
The Gospels, of course, were known and circulating as a four-part codex in the 2nd century as well, as the writings of the fathers of the apostolic era indicate.
If I’m answering the wrong question let me know.
j,
How about I post something on my blog?
Historical accounts are rarely if ever extraordinary evidence because individual authors or collaborating authors are simply not that reliable. However, a historical account could make very detailed predictions the verification of which would constitute extraordinary evidence.
Suppose that the diary of an 18th century sailor describes an encounter with a 3 meter-tall bipedal lizard meeting the description of a T-Rex on Norfolk Island in the Pacific. (I’m just making up this example.) That’s an extraordinary claim. However, it almost certainly predictive. If we go to Norfolk island, we ought to be able to find non-fossilized bones, eggs, DNA, art, footprints or something to corroborate the story.
If these predicted evidences are not found, then the story isn’t credible. The frequency of false or mistaken accounts is pretty high, whereas the frequency of living dinosaurs is very low. The account might be correct, but it’s many times more likely that it is false. This situation gets worse when the author has deep emotional reasons for wanting to make his claim.
Also, historical accounts get less verifiable over time. The more time that passes, the less likely it is that the story is pure, the more likely it is that prior verifications were faked, and the more likely it is that undisturbed evidence of the account has decayed. So, typically, it becomes more difficult to obtain extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims as time passes.
But things are a whole lot worse when the historical account itself precludes verification of the story. If the sailor claimed that the lizard ascended into heaven, leaving no trace on Earth, then there’s no way the account will ever attain a credible status. The story would essentially say that the signal of the story being true is identical with the signal of the story being false or fictional.
In the case of the Resurrection, time has obscured the connections between the authors, and obscured what little evidence might have been predicted by the story. The signal of the story being true is the same as the signal of the story being false.
BTW, even stories about double-blind studies decay with time. If we dug up a 17th-century document describing a double-blind study performed in that era, even that document would have limited ability to make an extraordinary claim. This is because it is just another historical account, and it needs extraordinary verifiable predictions to justify an extraordinary claim.
Which confirms what I said here.
i will need the link, but yes, i will take a look at what you have to say.
so can we say that the key to good knowledge-claims is verifiable predictions? i would follow-up with, why- why does the concept of prediction take the day epistemologically?
i also think that StevenK is making a decent point (above me), however crudely, when he says that this sort of framework (especially if/when coupled with the courtiers reply) could often be particularly nasty (dawkins defiantly comes to mind here), are there any safeguards against such problems (again, i think of dawkins case, where, though he has been criticized by his peers, overall his backwater philosopropaganda is very successful)?
i will also ask again (because most of your beliefs are based on experiments you will never do in your life), why trust “the scientists” (inb4 i got an ipod, mommy)?
yes, i am asking what ms of paul’s epistles do have have alone, and from when? treating the gospels and the epistles as one source does not hold up (and i find it very questionable, in terms of motive, for someone to claim they should be treated as such, a very ‘extraordinary claim’ in my book)
tony hoffman, sometime this week i will review the perpetua, etc accounts.
can we get some sort of consensus on the courtiers reply? i personally find the concept intellectually terrifying *(again, blatant propaganda comes to mind)*
Because for the idea of truth to really mean anything, the fundamental aspect of truth turns out to be mostly succinctly sated, and reduces down to its essence, as a successful prediction. When we say we know something, we are inevitably also making a prediction.
Try it for a few things that you know are true and you’ll see that it’s possible to state that truth as a prediction.
Looking at knowledge and truth in terms of a prediction puts it in an operational realm that makes it very hard to argue with when something is true and makes it very easy to refute when something is not true.
Gotcha, j.,
I agree that Paul’s letters cannot be treated as a single source with the Gospels.
Not that I am completely onside with Gary Wills, but in his book What Paul Meant he makes the case that Luke was unaware that Paul’s letters even existed when he wrote his Gospel and the Acts. And Paul’s letters, starting a decade or more before Luke’s biography certainly didn’t rely on the Gospels – thus demonstrating their independence of one another (to Luke’s detriment, in Wills’ opinion).
paul,
i basically get you to be saying:
-truth = prediction (you dont get any points for using the word essence)
-knowledge-claims = always making a prediction
-try it all out on some things i “know” are “just” true
-if truth = prediction, knowledge-claims become impossible to argue against
i dont think any of your statements answer my question at all but merely just say truth = prediction, try it, it works. so ill ask again, why does prediction ALWAYS take the cake?
Charlie,
im not happy to bring in “motive” in regards to Dr. Logic (though if there is a psychological resistance we need to address that)…i do find it odd to say, because these “authors” (and i use this term loosely) knew each other, and because they seem to agree on something, and because we bind their works in one single volume today, they are to be treated as one single source. though i think we should give Dr. Logic some points for pointing out: either way, the reliability of their claims deteriorates after so much time (though i think the scientific evidence into say, oral histories, shows that they do not loose their veracity over time in the way we westerners would expect).
1. Could you explain exactly what you mean by “take the cake?”
2. Interpreting what I think you mean by “take the cake,” it does so just because there’s nothing else to truth besides prediction, truth is just a synonym for “making successful predictions.” Ultimately, it’s just a word game.
3. Can you offer an alternative way?
Hi j.,
The thing I find funny is that it is only with the passage of time that we suddenly think we can doubt such things as Jesus’ historic existence or the proximity of the Gospel writers to the events. The claims that time has erased our ability to trust the accounts relies itself solely upon the passage of that great time.
Clement certainly didn’t wonder about these things in AD95. The thousands of Jews in Jerusalem who became Christian didn’t ask these questions. The reason is that they were there and knew that you don’t suddenly start asking whether Jesus really was crucified.
The critics needed the fictitious time gap between the Crucifixion and the Gospels of many years as well as many miles, offered by post-Enlightenment critics, in order to make the complaints plausible.
They use the thousands of years intervening since as a way to say “well, we can’t know what happened then, and maybe it was all made up way later when nobody was around to argue about it”. But, of course, the accounts were not written hundreds of years after the fact and today the argument that they were written later instead of earlier merely means a couple of decades after the Crucifixion. The accounts were accepted then and the authorship attested to because the witnesses were still there. Nobody could have presumed to pretend that Luke was writing long after the fact and with no knowledge of the country because those hundreds of years had not yet passed and they, like Luke, knew the country he was writing about.
DL admitted as much himself in a conversation previously when I asked him why the accounts don’t just tell us that Jesus came down off the Cross and smote His antagonizers. To add to the point now, if the accounts were written to credulous listeners far-removed from the events with no historical or scientific acumen why not just say that Jesus drove the Romans right out of Israel and set up His own kingdom?
To the former DL responded sensibly by saying that there were witnesses who knew that didn’t happen.
Charlie,
Thanks for that link – I actually bookmarked it. (Funny, though, I don’t think it demonstrated what you think it does.)
J., thank you for your continued resistance to opening up attacks on motives, etc. You should check Charlie’s link out sometime if you want to see what he (and some of the others, and I don’t mean Paul or Dr. Logic here) seems to endorse as productive lines of inquiry on a discussion of ideas. The link Charlie gave me is: http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20071107063101/#224680
Regarding the Courtier’s Reply I agree that it can, at first, appear anti-intellectual and demagogic. But I think that on close review it’s the opposite. If someone says to me, “You don’t agree with me because you are ignorant of something that I know / you can’t understand,” then the argument is indeed closed. The Courtier’s reply is (an albeit confrontational and unpleasant) reminder that saying “I am convinced” is not the same thing as “Here is why you should be convinced.” If one side refuses to provide the evidence, but only the conclusions, then they deserve the Courtier’s Reply. (May it never come to that.)
There’s an easy reply to Dawkin’s pronouncements that Aquinas’s proofs are fallacious, by the way. Instead of vilifying Dawkins, I think his pronouncements should be refuted. (Maybe they have?)
Paul, I have to say that I am having trouble getting my head around truth = prediction. I don’t think that prediction works with the truth of my existence, for instance, and I don’t know about how that definition works with verification of (one time) past events, such as my coming into existence. Although I think I probably just don’t understand the issues yet.
Thanks Tony,
Always a delight. Your objectivity amazes.
Yes all, do check out the link. That’s why I provided it.
Tony, you may have something there. Perhaps there are some items that, as DL has said before, I think, that must be axiomatic. So are we left with axioms and predictions?
j,
I agree with Paul. Without predictions, claims are generally meaningless, even to the speaker.
Suppose I make some claim, C. If C makes no predictions, then what is my claim about? How would I know that it was true if it is true, or false if it were false? By what mechanism can I justify belief in C?
If C is a rational inference from my experience, then C must have predicted my past experience more than some alternative experience, and more than would be predicted by ~C. But if C predicts nothing (so ~C predicts nothing), then I can make no such inference.
There are also well-known, well-documented, cognitive biases that cause people to:
1) use of invalid sampling (e.g., accept confirmation but never disconfirmation),
2) see the past as having been more predictable than it really was.
Making documented predictions is a good way to defeat these biases.
In my experience, religious people (of the superstitious variety) fall prey to these when they think prayers are answered. They fail to predict the outcome of a prayer, but are willing to accept certain outcomes as confirmation that their prayer worked. However, nothing they could possibly see would lower their confidence in prayer. They’ve locked themselves in a mental prison.
They do the same thing in theology. They look back at events and say, “ah, yes, God wanted these things to happen for reason X.” However, they could not (and did not) predict those events in advance. They are fitting an infinitely complex function to the data with the benefit that they can never be wrong about anything because they never predict anything.
Science is successful because scientists don’t have to be trusted. To begin with, scientists are rewarded when they knock down an established discipline and replace it with a better one. Scientists work in adversarial groups for this purpose. Scientific results can be (and generally are) replicated. Scientific theories make specific predictions, and if those predictions don’t prove true, then the theory has to be limited to where it does work. Furthermore, the scientific process is transparent. Scientists don’t say they had a private revelation. They describe how anyone can verify their claims, and prompt others to do so.
Now contrast this with religious accounts of the Resurrection. The Resurrection predicts nothing because Jesus vanished by Christian accounts. The Resurrection predicts a signal that is identical with the body of Jesus being missing (which isn’t remarkable). There were no journals in that era, so we can’t see the debate between the various parties in their own words. The written documents about Jesus were written by advocates for Christianity. This is not the depiction of an adversarial system. (Everyone wants to portray themselves or others as initially skeptical but eventually won-over, but that’s not the same thing. If it were, we would believe product manufacturers instead of reading reviews.)
Suppose that 100 years from now, the Mormon church becomes supreme, displacing all other belief systems. The church destroys all relevant books except for their own. What will these books say? They’ll tell the story of Joseph Smith and how he convinced many Christians to become Mormons, and some to become martyrs. Their historians will say that Smith had many critics, and that no one would believe Smith if his story were not true.
The sad fact is that people believe rubbish even if the evidence is against them. The Mormon religion is a transparent fraud, but millions of people have fallen for it. And this is in a day and age where we have journals and libraries and criticism.
Now am I seriously to believe that 2000 years ago, when there was no formal criticism, no journals, no science, no public education, no newspapers, and widespread fundamentalism, people would be less likely to be taken in by paranormal claims? Are we seriously to believe that ancient peoples were far more rational and analytic that today’s humans? That these people intuitively understood probability theory even though it was invented in the 17th century? I think that’s preposterous.
If I had to sum up this debate it would be the battle here is between the skeptics and the credulous. The skeptics say that if we believe the Bible, we have to believe the UFOlogists, Mormons, Scientologists, and numerous other crackpots. Since the views of these sects are contradictory, it means that the epistemic methods preferred by sects of the paranormal are useless. The credulous say that if we’re skeptical about the Bible, we ought to be skeptical about science or rationality or other stuff we regard as necessary.
Of course, the skeptics are right. Assumptions about rationality are common to every rational sect, including naturalism. The assumptions made by the Christians is that their epistemic methods work in their case, but not in anyone else’s, and that’s just special pleading.
Charlie (DL to comment also),
I noticed in your comment to DL here the added requirement for a ’strong case’ in addition to the usual requirement for statistics to justify what we ought to believe. It makes no sense to talk about the need for a ’strong case’ unless it is something OTHER than statistical in nature.
DL didn’t cite statistical analysis as his reason for his disbelief in psi claims, he cited the lack of a strong case. In other words, if the case were strong then DL would accept the statistics and thus he would believe. Until then, he is justified in believing the opposite of what the statistics tell him he should believe.
This, however, is the opposite of what DL said later on in the comments.
Emphasis mine. In response to this comment I said:
Comments, DL?
Paul,
Sorry but when you say
you are not providing evidence for believing that prediction is key to truth but saying “it is because it is”; i hope you realize that wont fly.
Charlie,
i am skeptical of this statement because, given access to and dissemination of different types of information, i find it plausible that false statements can get into a population quickly and easily (even when good information is accessible, no one thinks to check it, im sure we could think of some good internet myths today that would superficially show this point)
however,
if im to understand you here, i do agree: in this regard, many skeptical knowledge-claims were leveled at certain parts of biblical stories (“there couldnt possibly be a galilie because only the bible says so”) turned out false.
Tony,
if i have understood the courtiers reply, it does not contain what you say, but instead:
“i believe x”, “x is clearly nonsensically false”,”but you havent looked this particular evidence for x”,” i dont need to because x is nonsense”. if you like, i can probably pull up specific instances were dawkins does this, and then of course resorts to the “emperor is naked” bit.
Dr. L,
ive let this slide till i had some time on my hands…are you aware of the large amount of experiments contradicting your baysianism, as well as the heavy criticism it has received in the journals (you seem to be pretty aware of the literature prior)? i think on face value, sure baysianism as an explanation for how humans reason, sounds plausible, but when held up to the light of science, it has proven to be false, am i correct? (if need be i can provide specific arguments against, as well as citations)
except you are trusting the ideal institution of science…you will likely never repeat ANY of the experiments…i agree that in principal the ideal sounds nice, but i dont see how its any more valid if i say “i trust the church, because the church loves me”, your answer to my question, in my ears, smacks of propaganda.
i give you this hypothetical, and hear you on this point (i disagree with charlie in this regards, as mentioned above).
are we to believe we are far more rational and analytic than they? i would seriously disagree on scientific grounds
though i think there is more going on here than this, this is a decent sum of some of the things going on. i will point out however, i am leary of you saying that science and rationality are necessary. aside from that, i find the epistemological justification for science to be wanting (though im not willing to discard it or its claims), and id also say, in mormonism and ufoism, there is a blind faith, however, the original hebrew word for faith was a legal term far different from the word we use today. i find the bible says do this radical form of faith and be reasonable. perhaps this will not interest you, i am unsure. i did spend time reasoning Mormonism (no courtiers reply here), Scientology as well (inb4 crackpot-tries-lots-of-religions). for whatever its worth, i do not find Christianity to be the same (though trust me, theres a lot of Christians running around that make it exactly the same).
sorry for the long reply, yall.
j,
If you’re saying that most people don’t reason in the manner we consider ideal, then I totally agree. People tend to form beliefs irrationally (or, at least, pre-rationally) using simple heuristics. Beliefs become rational knowledge when we go through a process of rational reflection on those beliefs. That process of reflection is also prone to heuristics and errors in thinking that render it non-Bayesian.
But I’m not sure I see the direct relevance of this line of argument. I’m not claiming humans are good Bayesian thinkers. I’m saying humans could be a lot more rational if they were more Bayesian in their thinking.
Well, first of all, the church’s love for you doesn’t mean you ought to trust it. Just because my sister loves me, doesn’t mean I ought to let her do brain surgery on me. Her incentive to do good for me doesn’t impart to her the skill of brain surgery.
However, scientific institutions do have processes in place to verify and cross-check scientific claims. They also have incentives in place to keep those processes running.
Also, even though I may not be motivated to verify a particular experimental result, others are. And for important results to be faked requires a massive conspiracy theory with no real payoff.
Meanwhile, the church has no such mechanisms.
I think that even the average Joe on the street is more rational than his counterpart in the first century. We live in a far more skeptical culture than was present in the first century. We read stories that explore this issue of credibility, false religion, fraud, doubt, etc. Consider televangelists and their cheap faith healing tricks. A lot of people are taken in by them, but a lot more live in urban areas where televangelist trickery is transparent. I think people are more skeptical today. We still have a very long way to go, but I think first century people had a lot less information, a lot fewer intellectual resources, and lived in a far less skeptical culture.
I’m glad to hear you are leery! We need more of that!
My view is that everything comes to us through subjective experience. Whether it is seeing a blue sky or adding two numbers together, these are all subjective experiences from which we infer rules about mental and physical reality. That means that we don’t simply do syllogisms but experience them, and in order to perform syllogisms, there are certain assumptions about experience that are implicit. I believe this leads to a generalized theory of induction in which induction applies not only to physical sensations but to mental experiences too. Physical induction is just a subset of the general form of induction which applies to all experience. Another implicit assumption of the rational thinker is that experiences are fodder for this induction, and experiences have to be regarded as true, even if our explanation for those experiences are fallible. (If I appear to see Bigfoot, it is true that I appear to see something looking like Bigfoot, but not necessarily true that what I am seeing is caused by an actual Bigfoot. Even if I show there was no actual Bigfoot, I can’t deny that I had the original experience.
If you have any thoughts or criticisms on this issue, I would love to hear them.
Hi j.,
I said:
And you replied:
Very true. But I am thinking more of the true statements.
What I mean to say is that the many thousands of Jews in Jerusalem didn’t have to stop and ask “did Jesus, the historical figure as opposed to the myth, really live? and was He crucified?” They didn’t ask this because they were there and they knew it to be true.
This is why we don;t have the question being asked until centuries and centuries later – when we are far enough removed from the event that we can question every little detail, like “did they even crucify people back then?”, “was there such a town as Nazareth?”, “did the Romans even demand censuses?”. These probing questions don’t show up in the literature of antiquity because nobody was asking them because they were known facts.
Yes, people can lie, and people can believe lies, but as we discussed above, where then are the contemporaries saying “those are just lies?”
yet bayesian thinking is prone to errors, why call these errors, why not say your bayesianism isnt a good descriptive model for how people reason (you even slip in your own statement: RATIONAL reflection has “errors” which render it nonbayesian)? given the scientific literature on this subject, there is heavy contradictory evidence to say people do reason like this, and i see no indication that we should be more bayesian (im now dropping your use of rational to refer to bayesianism, i do not view them as synonymous). you seem to gloss over my question on if you are familiar with the heavy criticism bayesianism has undergone as a descriptive model for nearly all types of human reasoning.
im not thinking of a massive conspiracy theory particularly, just some good old colonialism. you are trusting “others” because you *believe* they are committed to the same ideal, this is a moral feeling, not a logical argument, for trusting science.
i find this is only half the story, and a bit oversimplistic, but ill let that ride.
i fail to see your scientific evidence for this belief. i defiantly would present some to the contrary, aside from my personal reflections on Joe the Plumber.
ALL the information in the west comes from only, at best, a handful of sources. also, western newspapers have a 30 – 60 % error rate after say, a terrorist attack, often this % is not corrected with time. i do not see that we have more information or more intellectual resources (of course i would also say you are defining information in a very narrow, biased way to say earlier people didnt have as much).
right, except, as far as i can tell, scientific evidence has proven those “certain implicit assumptions” to be false (example, you said earlier in the thread that we are natural bayesianists, which you then took back in your last post). assuming you did not mean to refer to bayesianism as an implicit assumption, your call to inductive reason, i believe, doesnt hold up to the scientific research either as stated above, nor to the question, should we go about thinking this way a lot? i see no reason to say we should. forgive me if i ask again, why does prediction have claim to truth-statements (i remain unconvinced)?
i am afraid i cannot give you, on your own grounds, even the historical Jesus and his crucifiction. i feel you are failing to address my initial concern: even today, common myths are believed EVEN when mass populations have access to information to the contrary (lets think of the typical american’s knowledge of the war in iraq or anything leading up to it).
j.
With respect to DL’s claims, how can someone be described as ‘being Bayesian’ with respect to their reasoning when they know nothing about the subject? A child can reason without knowing anything about the underlying subjects. If reasoning can be done without knowing Bayes then I’m inclined to think it’s not necessary to “run the numbers” in order to reason properly. What do you think?
Hi j.,
I think I am on board with your initial concern. I think it is obvious that people can be deceived about a great many things and, of course they can buy into myths.
The question here is not of possibility of errors being believed, nor of presenting a proof that they weren’t. Rather, it is about evidence and a reasonable belief.
As to all those people who uncritically swallow only that partial information being fed to them there are several differences. For one, although they/we/I are fooled, the counter information is out there. Second, as in the 19th century charges against Luke, the believers are not in the vicinity of the happenings (Iraq war). The thousands of Jews at Pentecost were.
If the good charges against the disciples at the time were “there was no such person as this Jesus several weeks ago”, or “crucifixion, what’s crucifixion?” or “resurrected? but his body is right here” then I think it is at least reasonable to assume they did not have those charges to make, that Christianity, once checked, would not have sprung up right in the city where the events were alleged to have occurred or that there would be some contemporary writing against this ridiculous claim. The Talmud, for instance, instead of talking about Jesus being a magician of illegitimate birth would say something like “this foolish sect follows a fabricated man who died a fictitious death by a means that doesn’t exist”. Or “there was a movement starting but we pulled out the body, hung it in the public square again and quelled those rumours”.
J.,
I think yours is an unusual reading of the Courtier’s Reply; I don’t read (nor re-read it) as “I won’t look at evidence supporting conclusion x because conclusion x is patently absurd.” I think the CR demands that the evidence for x not be obscured, that it should be provided because x appears absurd, and that promises to deliver evidence for x are empty until proven otherwise. On the other hand, if your reading is correct, then it’s indeed unsupportable. If you get a chance, re-read it again and see if you still read it that way.
Charlie, you are ignoring the evidence that “Christians” covered a wide spectrum of beliefs in the 1st Century, including those who understood Jesus’s resurrection to be a spiritual one, not one of the body. It’s conceivable (I’d say it’s most likely) that Jesus’ followers splintered into competing theologies (same as political factions, vying for authority within their group and struggling to gain adherents), and these groups evolved their theologies, gaining and losing adherents as they competed for converts in changing milieus. That the canonical version of the New Testament we have today exists does not perforce mean that today’s Christian tenets (Resurrection of the Body, Trinity, etc.) emerged uncontested in a single doctrine as we now understand them. On the contrary, all the evidence points to a mish mash of competing interpretations, including fabulous stories that were circulated but later just didn’t make the cut.
You wrote:
Lots of people claim they just saw Elvis. Why don’t we go dig up his body? What kind of forensics could have even existed then where a post-mortem would verify someone’s identity? You’re ignoring a likely scenario, that Jesus’s death was probably an unimportant event to everyone with the exception of his few followers, and that Christianity did not gain significant traction until long after Jesus’ death, when claims of bodily resurrection could not be impeached (past the lifetime of all people alive at the time).
j,
I guess I haven’t been clear.
Let’s distinguish between how humans actually reason and how they ought to reason.
I’m saying most humans are capable of rational thinking at times, but that they are not predominantly rational. Humans are primarily using heuristics and conditioned responses. Humans tend to be reflectively rational only in narrow domains, often relating to short-term, practical activities. Humans aren’t very good at being rational. They’re better than other species, but that’s not saying much.
I am saying that Bayesian thinking is normative for rationality, not normal for humans.
Bayesian theory is not all there is to rational thinking, but I’m not aware of any situations where Bayesian thinking gives us the wrong answer. Are you? If so, I would like to hear about them.
Again, I think you misunderstood me. I wasn’t saying we are natural Bayesianists. We do Bayesian reasoning pretty poorly, but we also do rationality pretty poorly.
I don’t really know what scientific research could show that inductive reasoning doesn’t work. Maybe you’re saying that scientific research could never validate it either (which I think is true).
You can say there there is no rational explanation for induction, but there’s no rational explanation for rational methods at all.
If you have a case against calling induction a rational method (i.e., we can reason without induction), then I would like to hear it, but I haven’t seen that as yet.
Suppose I think that P is true. What does this mean? What is the difference between a belief that P versus a belief that ~P?
P must imply or predict something. One possibility is that P implies some other logical conclusions, Q. But then we ask the same question about Q. If the Q do not predict any experience except for the truth of other propositions, then we’re doing mathematics, and P and Q are not about the world of experience.
On the other hand, if P is about the world of experience, then P must imply something about the world of experience. It must predict something.
Tony, have you read a history of Christian theology? Do you know that there is actually scholarship on this topic? I suggest The History of Christian Thought: The Fascinating Story of the Great Christian Thinkers and How They Helped Shape the World As We Know It Today by Jonathan Hill. It’s a very honest and straightforward account of the very struggles and disputes you speak of. It turns out that after all the struggles had been gone through, the early church had good reasons—confirmed, not undermined, by that struggle—for landing where they did in the positions that have now become considered orthodox.
And have you read the book of Acts? Do you know when the first major persecutions of Christians took place? (In Jerusalem, it was in Acts 12, just a very short time after the events.)
Do you know when the authorities in Jerusalem were first publicly (embarrassingly) accused of killing Jesus, by spokespersons who said Jesus had risen? Do you think they would have been uninterested in producing the body if they could have? Do you realize this happened less than six weeks after Jesus’ death? (Acts 2:36, Acts 3:11-16)
And do you know of any reputable NT scholar today who would present your position as tenable in light of the historical facts?
@Doctor Logic:
No, P must correspond with reality. P is true if it corresponds to reality, even if no predictions can be made from P. That’s definitional of truth, as understood by nearly everyone except those who deny the reality of truth—which I don’t think includes you.
@Tom Gilson:
What is reality? What does it mean to say “P corresponds to reality”? If you cannot say precisely what it means, then it seems like an empty statement.
I’m providing an answer to these questions, but you are not.
If P doesn’t predict anything we experience, then neither does ~P. That would mean that P cannot mean anything in terms of experience.
Ah, now you’ve changed the subject…
But I’m heading out to a meeting so I can’t get into it any deeper.
DL,
How about the situation where Fred the defendant knows by experience that he is innocent even though the Bayesian analysis presented by an expert witness shows he is likely guilty? Even without filling in details, surely we can all imagine a situation where someone appears to be very guilty, yet they are not. It’s called being mistaken with good reason. (Yes, this is what we talked about before. No, I don’t think it was ever resolved)
J: What do you think of this example?
Hi Tony,
Why do you think I’m ignoring this claim? What does this have to do with the points I’ve made? You are arguing a rather separate point than the one I made as to the silence of the contemporary critics of Christianity. On your subject, their silence, ignoring the claim that can be disproved (Jesus was raised bodily) because someone else makes a claim for which there can be no evidence either way (Jesus was raised spiritually) doesn’t make any sense. It would still leave the dominant claim unanswered.
Which \competing interpretation\ would have anybody questioning whether or not Jesus actually lived or was crucified? And the \fabulous stories\ not only didn’t \later\ make the cut, but appeared later, after the cut was made. Their extravagance is exactly what I am talking about with regard to the real accounts. If somebody wanted to make up tales late enough that there was no one to contest them then why would they be as mundane and unembellished as the true versions? As I asked DL, why isn’t the story that Jesus was rescued from the cross by angels and that He smote His enemies? Answer: because this was verifiably false.
Again you charge that I am ignoring things. First you’ve lumped a likely scenario (relative insignificance to the populous of Jesus’ death) with a very unlikely one (Christianity gained little traction early on). Christianity gained traction within weeks of Jesus’ death – when claims of his bodily resurrection could have been easily impeached. If not, there would be no claims that His body was stolen, since this counter presumes the necessity of answering the bodily resurrection claim. If the idea of His bodily Resurrection surfaced years later the answer would be \funny you waited until any chance of producing evidence was lost\.
There is little argument in scholarship not only that Jesus lived, was Crucified under Pontius Pilate, was buried, vacated His grave somehow, and appeared to His disciples somehow. What is needed is an explanation of these facts. Resurrection is the best explanation.
Steve,
No, no, no! We’ve been over this before.
1) The Bayesian reasoning matches up when Fred and the expert witnesses have the same information. When they have the same information, they will both agree if they are rational.
2) Fred and the jury/experts only come to different conclusions in this example if they have different information.
3) If Fred and the jury have different information, they can both be totally rational and reach different conclusions.
4) The reason the jury incorrectly finds Fred guilty is that Fred is an outlier. The jury knows that, say, 99 times out of 100, the evidence that was presented correctly predicts guilt. However, Fred has private information that explains why he is an outlier, but he cannot share that with the jury (at least, not without some super reliable lie detector test).
So this is not a failure of Bayesian inference. Bayesian inference is telling the jury what is most likely to be true. If the jury just blindly believes the defendant, that is not rational because most of the time it will get the wrong answer.
Hi DL,
Out of fairness to j., before he spends any great time working on your use of the word “predict”, would you please define it?
This would be helpful here, nearer the beginning, than later, nearer the end.
Also, since you’ve said previously that 1) all knowledge (justified true belief) is based upon prediction, 2) all knowledge is based upon statistics and 3) all knowledge is based upon induction, will you be maintaining all three of these?
DL
Well, this is the epistemological question I keep trying to get answered: Who has access to the most accurate and relevant information about the experience and how do they know they have it? Does Fred have it or does the Bayesian analysis have it?
In the case of the mundane experience of committing a crime, Bayes can be wrong and Fred can know it is wrong. The person feeding data into Bayes has to reason their way through every piece of info – trying to determine it’s relevancy, it’s accuracy and it’s impact on the situation. This person doesn’t know if he got everything right or if he underestimated variable X or if he left out variable Y. He’s simply doing the best he can. But Fred has a unique advantage because he was there. Fred knows the impact of variable X and he knows about variable Y – at least moreso than the person doing Bayes.
Now, wrt mundane experiences, if Bayes can be wrong and not know it then why should Bayes be given epistemological priority wrt highly unusual experiences?
Tom,
I haven’t read Acts in 20 years. I am saying that the writers of the New Testament were not these somehow uninterested, dispassionate journalists. They were proselytizers, advocates, and political figures. It was to their worldly benefit to claim that Jesus was who they said he was, and that authority passed through directly to them, etc.
Of course there is a great deal of contemporary, historical accuracy in the New Testament. I am not disputing the existence of a man named Jesus, a group of followers, and documents all written in the 150 years following his death (with perhaps some later insertions of text).
No, I don’t. But I’m going to guess that the source isn’t an extra-Christian one.
I think the issue of the body is a red herring. People don’t dispute someone’s resurrection by digging up a body and employing forensics that didn’t exist. They dispute someone’s resurrection by ignoring the claim. Also, I think history reveals that debunking religious claims has very little to do with a religion’s advance. (Joseph Smith’s claims were clearly bogus, and yet look at how his religion easily found adherents and spread.) Lastly, if the authorities you mention really thought that Jesus had resurrected himself, might they not convert on the spot (I certainly would), write it down somewhere, send word to Rome, begin negotiations with this powerful group?
I believe that John Gager is considered a reputable NT scholar. Although I’d say that a reputable NT scholar is not the same thing as saying historian, and we’re talking about historical accuracy. I think a good way of judging a document’s value as historical (non-theological) document would be to count the number of times it is referenced in the footnotes of historical works of the period that are written today. I don’t know the answer to this, and how easily it can be researched, but I’d wager that the New Testament does not score very highly (if at all) as a historical reference, precisely because of the reasons (partisan agenda, fabulous events, lack of external corroboration, etc.) that I mentioned earlier.
Then you didn’t read the passages I linked to in my previous comment.
I think that would be a very revealing study. It won’t be in an index of cited literature, I’m sure, so you’d have to do the work yourself to track it down. But the Bible is used as a guide for archaeological research (the book of Mormon is not). And it’s used constantly for historical study of that period. Go ahead and check it out—I’m not at all afraid of what you’ll discover!
@Charlie,
Prediction means knowing what your theory implies. Prediction means explaining precisely what the theory implies about future experience, and setting definite criteria for what counts as evidence for the theory, and what counts as evidence against it. This inevitably requires us to consider alternatives in order to do a Bayesian analysis.
Here’s what doesn’t count as a prediction. Claiming that certain experiential outcomes are evidence for your theory, but simultaneously claiming that the lack of those outcomes is not evidence against your theory. Failing to explain precisely why your theory predicts the outcomes you say it predicts. Failing to account for the base rate of the outcomes – the rate at which the outcome would occur even if your theory were false. Failing to be precise in describing outcomes ahead of time, but then retroactively interpreting diverse outcomes so that they appear to be in your favor.
1) Gosh, I don’t remember saying that. I probably said that all knowledge is predictive. Even in mathematics. If you know that 6 + 5 = 11, this is not by assumption, but it is a theorem of your assumptions. “Knowing” 6 + 5 = 11 means predicting that you can prove this statement as a theorem of arithmetic. Just try it with huge numbers instead of smaller ones, and it will make more sense.
2) All knowledge is based on statistics? Hmm, I don’t recall ever saying this unqualified and in these terms. However, it’s essentially accurate, even if you’ve found a misleading way to state it. If I give you two very large numbers to multiply, you will probably make a mistake. So you’ll try the arithmetic again. And again, and again. You’ll have more confidence in the result you get most frequently.
If you say that statistics have nothing to do with it, then you might as well not bother to check your results or computations. Ever.
I’m sure you can see how this fits in with prediction, right? If you cannot say what outcome you’re more likely to get as a result of the multiplication, then you cannot say you know the result is what you say it is. What would it mean for me to say that 3 x 9 = 27, without predicting that if Charlie follows the rules of arithmetic, he will get 27 too? What would it mean to me if I said 3 x 9 = 27 and I didn’t expect (=predict) *myself* to get 27 if I retried the computation?
The applications of this to experiences of physical sensation are even more obvious.
3) Hmm. Again, an odd phrasing. Nevertheless, you cannot have knowledge without rationality, and rationality requires induction.
Please don’t confuse what I’m saying here with a proof of induction or statistics or prediction (although, by your standards, I probably have done so). I’m merely showing that abandoning these things leads to absurdity, which is not the same thing as a proof.
@SteveK,
Because Fred is rational, Fred’s conclusion is Bayesian.
Suppose Fred remembers his alibi as a trip to the moon on a broomstick. In other words, Fred has this one bizarre experience as his alibi.
However, Fred has a trillion experiences that show he is a normal human being. Fred knows that more than 1 in 10,000 human beings have cognitive failures that predict hallucinations of the type that would account for his experience of flying to the moon on a broomstick. Fred knows that no brooms can fly, that no humans can breathe in a vacuum, etc, and he knows that this is true to, say, 1 part in a billion (out of billions of humans, no one has flown around on a broom or traveled to the Moon without the aid of Saturn V’s 7.6 million pounds of thrust, etc). Fred weighs his single experience in the light of this evidence. The likelihood that Fred had a cognitive failure in place of an alibi is overwhelming even to Fred himself! Even Fred should not believe his experience was more than a dream or a hallucination.
Now, this is an extreme example. Sometimes, a witness will have access to the most accurate information, but the jury will not believe the witness because the jurors don’t trust the memories or the truthfulness of the witness. However, it is also true that some witnesses are irrational, and misremember or treat hallucinations as reality. Many experiments have been done in which different participants to the same event recall different impressions of what actually happened.
The point is that, assuming that Fred and the jury have the same information, and assuming they are both rational, they will both agree. Both Fred and the jury would know it was more likely that he hallucinated his moonbroomstick alibi than that it actually happened. They will both recognize that the evidence points to Fred’s guilt, and even Fred would have to believe he was guilty once his alibi is believed false.
But it seems to me that you are saying that you have to believe your dreams and hallucinations are always true, no matter how improbable they are. Is that what you are saying?
Suppose a disease sweeps across the world that randomly gives every person a hallucination with an average frequency of one day a year. Suppose you see Bigfoot in your back yard. Should you believe Bigfoot is actually in your back yard?
Wouldn’t you say there was a connection between the number of days a year you see Bigfoot versus your confidence that Bigfoot actually visits you (versus you hallucinating him)?
If Bigfoot appears to you once, ever, shouldn’t you have more confidence in the theory that you hallucinated Bigfoot than in the theory that Bigfoot actually came to visit you? Don’t you agree that this could change if Bigfoot visited very frequently, and other people saw him too?
Suppose you saw Bigfoot three days in a row. After this, you never saw any evidence of Bigfoot. If you initially believed Bigfoot actually visited you, wouldn’t you eventually come to doubt that he did? After 10 years? After 250 years?
Hi j.,
I hope you are still here and planning to continue your dialogue.
Hi DL,
I’m not confusing what you are saying for a proof – I don’t even know quite what you mean by that. What I am doing is asking if you hold to positions previously taken, and if you will be doing so in your conversation here. I am not actually interested in having that conversation again myself (as you know I quite disagree with you) but I am very interested in where you and j. are going. It looks as though there is more room for advancement between the two of you than what I’ve seen here before. Because I am interested in seeing how this plays out I want your positions as I remember them on the table to see what becomes of them.
re: Prediction.
That discussion is quite different from what has become of “prediction” and “predictive” in our past dialogues. I think it will be helpful knowing from the top what is being discussed.
You are not saying, for instance, that something a belief is predictive because it is “predicted to pass the test of truth”.
So you dispute, in some manner, my phrasing but you do, in fact, stand by these positions as I have attributed them to you.
Belief in things absurd obviously is not knowledge, I would posit. Therefore, to abandon induction, statistics, or prediction is to abandon knowledge [believe absurdities only].
So each of these is required for ALL knowledge, no?
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20071107063101/#224836
Irrational beliefs do not constitute knowledge, do they?
Looks like you are affirming the position even though for some reason you want to say I am being misleading by attributing it as I have.
Just to be sure this is not misleading, here are some of your attributions:
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20071107063101/#224675
You cannot know without statistics. Isn’t that what this means?
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20071107063101/#225260
Looks like a qualification to direct perception and experience, but that qualification goes bust when you continue.
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20071107063101/#224743
To even have knowledge by direct perception you require statistics as a basis.
I am cutting a long list of proof-texts and links right now because, 1) I likely won’t get past the filter and 2) I don’t want to poison these waters. I am hoping I’ve said just enough to help facilitate some meaningful dialogue between you and j.
DL,
This sure looks like the situation you were looking for when you asked,
Both Fred and the expert witness used rational Bayesian thinking and they reached different conclusions. Yes, there is a difference in information between the two thinkers, but you made no mention of that requirement so it fits the criteria for your question. In fact, I’d say there will *always* be an imbalance of information between the person who experiences something personally and an outsider.
The next question is, how do you determine which Bayesian thinker is most likely wrong – Fred or the expert witness? I can’t imagine it would be more Bayesian thinking from yet another witness.
To be clear, I’m limiting this question to what you are calling mundane experiences. If we can’t resolve the question wrt mundane experiences then we shouldn’t bother moving on to unusual experiences, so no more broomstick or Bigfoot stories.
Hi Steve,
I was going to make that point earlier, but even to a greater extreme; there will always be an imbalance of information between two persons, regardless. DL makes the point himself when he says that eye witnesses witness differently. Nobody has access identically to the same information as anybody else.
Charlie,
Knowing that you see colors and shapes is the direct perception. Knowing the meaning of the colors and shapes is not. Seeing an apple is not a direct perception. Babies can see colors and shapes, but they can’t recognize apples or motorbikes. It is the shapes and colors that are the direct perception, not the meaning of those things. But, hey, I’ve only explained this to you a million times, why should this time make any difference?
Hi DL,
No need to get sore just because we’re clarifying here.
So the baby has some kind of “knowledge” that he sees shapes and colours, but won’t recognize apples and motorbikes until he is doing statistics and making predictions.
And somehow this use of the word “statistics” justifies your claim that all knowledge requires/is based on/is justified by statistics such that you can say things like “we can’t know God if we can’t produce statistics about Him from an experiment”.
Like I said, I’m not arguing your positions, I just want them on the table in case you and j. continue.
So other than this little blurt I take it we are good on what you consider to be the basis of all knowledge – with my misleading comment and all.
excuse my absence, ive been rather busy (one of the days i was just horribly drunk and figured, best not to post, call that busy if you like).
i liked to address tony first off on the courtiers reply:
i went back through and gave a look at the original as well as the times its used in debate. because we can see it (as dawkins does) as a better version of his “i dont need to read up on leprechaunology to dismiss the existence of leprechauns”. the courtiers reply itself, as written by pz, is just a rather bad satirical attempt to use the emperors cloths in place of the metaphor. so basically, i dont need to read about x to dismiss x. i dont think the metaphor of the emperor should be used on any subject; i think it purposely masks the actual logical argument. either way, what you are talking about (which i think is different from the courtiers reply) is ok, though it doesnt sit well with me (ie unless a believer of x presents me with evidence of x, i can disgard the truth-statement). i personally just prefer to investigate for myself what some people cannot present evidence for themselves no matter what subject it is. however, if someone wont present you with their evidence, i am ok with *you* not paying much attention to their claim to x. again though, i think ive interpreted the courtiers reply correctly against the text (another version ive seen is, “i dont need a degree in leprchaunology to dismiss the belief in leprachauns”, which again sounds like, i dont need to study x to just know at face value that its bullshit).
If all are willing, i will attempt to return later today to figure out the best way of going about addressing Dr. L’s position.
Charlie, I’ll follow your lead and not try to argue the merits, but just try to clarify and put on the table DL’s position.
I think you have stated Dl’s position accurately, with one qualification. Dl said that it is an informal use of statistics. We conclude that a wall that we’ve never seen before is solid because similar walls we’ve seen in the past have been solid, and this is, in effect, a statistical conclusion, even though we may not conceive of it as such.
In regards to Dr. L,
first, i think Dr. L. is playing so fast and loose with the terms statistics and Bayesian, as to make them useless and somewhat deceptive.
second, Dr. L and i agree that *hard* statistics are good. Though i will say that even in the case of *hard* statistics, we can be informed by and even sometimes enlightened by these hard statistics, but even that is not necessarily the case, as of course statistics are always open for interpretation of the specific experiments and also of the numbers as well, not to mention the interpretation of probability itself (this interpretation of probably is no small point, Dr L, as i hope you are aware from the literature).
Third, Dr. L and i agree that people usually arent very good at natural Bayesianism. however, i disagree with him that Bayesianism is the hallmark of rational thinking (i put the burden of proof on him, though see my aside downbelow).
Fourth, it appears to me that, because Dr. L’s definition of statistics is so loose, he can then go on to do what he says people arent very good at: making intuitive knowledge-claims based on their perceived probabilities of events. take a look at what he refers to as statistics, throughout this thread. He presents no hard statistics but instead intuitive probabilities. most importantly, being aware that you arent very good at natural bayesianism doesnt mean you suddenly get to start doing natural bayesianism better. i would venture to say that most of the time, when Dr. L is venturing to use the word statistics to back up his own claims, he uses no numbers at all (let alone any rigorous scientific experiments), but is merely attempting to appeal to your natural-none-too-accurate-probability-drive from his own natural-none-too-accurate-probability-drive. which leads me to….
Fifth, i see no reason to assume we could ever definitively apply *hard* statistics to the vast majority of human concepts or statements. even in those cases when we can, i would again point out, statistics provide us with addition information, and are not the hallmark of rational thinking, let alone of reflection, ie statistics can inform and act as a piece of evidence, nothing more.
finally, i would like to bring out an example of a similiar framework (i hope this works): Sam Harris is frequent for his use of the words rationality, probability. A great example of this is the beginning of his book, the End of Faith. For those unfamiliar with the opening, he paints a nice story, (obviously his attempt at propaganda in my opinion), where he asks us to guess the religious beliefs of someone who has just blow themselves up in a crowd of innocents. For all Mr. Harris’ calls to being scientific, when he himself guesses what the religious beliefs of such a person would be, he is very wrong, as you may be, when actually looking at the *hard* statistics (Atran 2007). similarly, i would prefer in the future, when Dr. L makes probability claims, he presents the numbers and the specific research that lead to them, and not his intuitive guesses as to what the probability is.
as an aside…
i also got something along the lines of Dr. L to be saying the following main points:
1.) all spoken statements are predictions
his short justification for this belief doesnt do much to convince me (my main area of study was semantics for a very long time, for whatever thats worth). again, burden of proof.
2.) inductive reasoning is never wrong.
i can point you to a stack of literature that reems this opinion. most undergrads will be familiar with kuhns famous book.
3.) *any statement that is not predictive is meaningless*
again, this belief is very important because it highlights that ANY specific statement that runs contrary to Dr. L framework, **instead of calling into question that framework**, will instead be discarded as “meaningless”.
4.) any event which happens only once (here i am not concerned with the resurrection, this is not where my interests are, i am more implying events that happen to us personally perhaps or also some other historical claims), Dr. L would have us believe we can say nothing about these events (or at least nothing that isnt meaningless).
5.)
(though of course see de Finetti in 1990 and 1993 for subjectivism in gaining such knowledge from bayesianism in these situations) there also seems to be some examples where, even when they both have the same information, and the same hard statistics, they will disagree (see baratgin 2006)
6.)
im also curious as to the answer to this one.
excuse me, Dr. L, for not addressing you very directly throughout my above statements. i was trying to make things as understandable to everyone as i could, while also taking the opinions, hopefully, from the realm of your side / my side to attempt to discuss the issues as issues. ive thought many things over the past few days on this subject, hopefully i made some of them clear. i patiently wait your responses.
——————————————————-
(dont make the fallacy that just because i have a works cited here, that means what i am saying is correct necessarily)
Atran S 2007 terrorism and radicalization: what to do, what not to do
Baratgin J 2006 is the mind bayesian? the case for agnosticism
de Finetti B 1990 Theory of probability.
de Finetti B 1993 On the subjective meaning of probablity
j.
You’re not the only one to notice this. I’m glad to know you discovered it on your own.
Thanks Paul.
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20071107063101/#224796
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20071107063101/#225346
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20061031162820/#189415
By the way, on 1) prediction as a basis for knowledge:
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20061031162820/#189109
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20061031162820/#189128
Tom,
But I did read the passages. (I’m wondering if maybe they didn’t link to the correct passages?) They discuss Peter’s escape from jail and Herod’s death, that Jesus is Lord and Christ, and Peter admonishing those who did not believe. I don’t understand how that would counter my claim — that the story of Jesus’ resurrection and the consequent theological interpretations had political ramifications, and that these seriously undermine the value of New Testament accounts as historically accurate.
You act as if this is not a serious consideration among NT scholars. But here’s a passage from the Gnostic Gospels (page 42), talking about Ignatius, a bishop in Syria in the early 2nd Century who was a chief advocate of the hierarchical order then being established]: “…the distinction between religion and politics, so familiar to us in the twentieth century, was utterly alien to Ignatius’s in Syria understanding. For him, as for his contemporaries, pagan and Christian alike, religious convictions necessarily involved political relationships – and vice versa.”
All,
Regarding this question:
I have to say that I’m surprised it has gotten any traction. I’m pretty sure that DL’s trial analogy is a hypothetical situation used to illustrate the how a 3rd party vantage is useful in judging our experiences. He’s saying that both parties (impossibly, but it’s a hypothetical) have the exact same information, and that we should view our experiences from the standpoint of a jury, not as a witness, to validate the rationality of our experiences. I think he’s correct in referring to this as Bayesian because it’s basically saying that we should view any experience in the light of prior probabilities – isn’t that about as Bayesian as it gets?
Tom,
in regards to your worldly benefit concern…
i would agree that some later interpretations carried worldly benefit for some people, however, what was the worldly benefit to early Christians(base beliefs in those sects: man named Jesus, crucified, rose from the dead in some form)?
in regards your jury question…
the jury example is one i take hesitantly, not because juries are bayesian, but for the opposite reason. some of the scientific literature (and their accompanying experiments) have cast considerable doubt as to if juries are ever bayesian, even in the best examples we can give when we think they are being bayesian. so i am interested in two points:
1.) if in an intuitive face value way, we believe two groups are being bayesian, and yet they do disagree (mostly because of access to information), how ARE we to resolve such an issue (inb4 free up information, the jury question is exactly such a point, an event where such information cannot be freedup)?
2.) if an event comes about, and two scholarheads are both being bayesian in my strict use of the term (talking about *hard* statistics, etc) and yet they disagree, how are we to resolve this issue? (think of the current economic crisis, see Taleb 2008; we can possibly discuss the complexities of this example some more if need be, its not my ideal example, but it possibly applies)
——————————
Taleb N 2008 The Fourth Quadrant: a map of the limits of statistics
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/taleb08/taleb08_index.html
@Tony:
I stand by my previous statement: you missed the most significant aspects of these passages, showing how following Christianity was not something they did for their worldly benefit.
I don’t get the significance of your reference to the gnostic gospel. Could you give that another go, please?
J.
I think your question to Tom was meant for me, so I’ll respond.
You wrote:
Well, eternal life is an attractive claim.
I don’t doubt that Jesus existed, and that he was charismatic, and that he had a philosophy that attracted followers. (My reading of the New Testament leads me to believe that Jesus preached many attractive, and a few odd, philosophical tenets that seem more Eastern than anything else.) Jesus’ philosophy, in my opinion, was good enough to attract followers (without promises of eternal life), and after his death, this community was left without its leader.
A religious community like that is sort of like a shark, needing to keep moving forward or die. Following the death of its founder, the movement chiefly needed two things – a line of succession, and, more importantly, a set of beliefs that (in the absence of a true charismatic) would attract more followers.
So, the story of Jesus’ death, resurrection, and subsequent instruction to his apostles achieved virtually all of the required political needs: it create a theology that attracted more followers, it explained (justified) the line of succession and gave authority to those who were left and worked within that system. Without the story of Jesus death, resurrection, and instruction to his apostles, the movement literally had nowhere to go.
So, the worldly benefit was that it continued the movement.
And let’s not forget the power and promise of belonging to a movement during these times. I liken it to entrepreneurship – unlike anything else available, a movement gave great opportunity to those with no real prospects, while also providing the protection normally extended only to family and to the societies in which they existed. To survive, let alone flourish, in ancient times you had to belong. (The ultimate punishment was often not death – it was exile. Same thing, of course; without your community, you were as good as dead.) And like any good company, real opportunity was in growth. The greater the numbers, the more you could advance within the movement, increase support, etc.
Regarding your questions about being Bayesian, I have to say that DL’s analogy, as I understand it, isn’t about two different groups weighing different information, but about one group (you) weighing two different sets of information. So your first question, while a good one, isn’t really the point I think he was trying to make.
In your second question I believe it is impossible for two scholarheads, both being Bayesian with the same set of hard statistics, to come to a different conclusion; they should not ever do so.
I agree, of course, that issues like Economics are gallingly unresolvable. (I think of the Bloom County strip where a character is presented a nightmare from the closet of Economists who argue, with great force, diametrically opposite views of how to correct the economy.) But in those instance I think every case is because they do not agree on the probabilities; once the probabilities are set, the result is algorithmic, with no interpretation required or even allowed.
Tom,
Sorry, but the excerpts from Acts alone weren’t enough for me to see what you were saying – I went back and read more from around where you referenced and I think I see now that you were referring to Acts’ accounting of the happenings around the time just after Jesus’ death.
This is a little beside the point I was trying to make. I was trying to say that if one looks at the writing of the New Testament not as history but as followers of Jesus trying to create and solidify their political authority then the kind of thing that you referenced makes sense in that light as well.
My subsequent reference from the Gnostic Gospels was a follow-up to your query that no reputable NT scholar would posit such a thing, whereas I am contending that political considerations are not only necessary but that others (including NT scholars) consider them necessary as well.
What I am trying to say on that line is this: is it possible that everything (excluding some contradictions) happened exactly as it is described in the New Testament? Yes. Is it possible as well that some of these stories were invented, aggrandized, or “improved” because they were thought to have or proven to have value in proselytizing, settling political disputes, or validating authority of those who stood to benefit? I think that this is not only possible, but given what we know about other religious movements it is also likely.
J.
I enjoyed reading that article even though much of it went over my head. I noticed the same author wrote another article on probability, “Real Life is not a Casino”, here. A few snippets to whet your appetite….
….
Tony,
in regards the worldy benefit theory…
i find your theory interesting, but i will have to really take the time to process it through what we know in cognitive anthropology, amongst other fields, hopefully we will get an opportunity at some later date to further explore such an idea after i have thought about it some more. your ideas sound plausible, however, being slightly vague, we need to really get into the mechanics. again, ill have to think about it.
in regards of bayesianism…
there are some better and more simple examples available in the literature i cited earlier in the thread. i think there is experimental evidence to show your statement is false. try to dig up some of the articles. if you have any problems getting a hold of them, let me know.
in regards to acts…
you sound like you are basically concerned that, yes the apostles could have been for real, but they also could have just been trying to keep their community going and using whatever means necessary to do that.
if i am correct that this is your concern….couldnt we then turn this concern over to theological fulfillment as the criteria to determine one or the other?
j,
Let’s, again, not confuse what people do with what is normative. Actual people say things that they think are meaningful but which are meaningless, people get confused, and people make bad inferences. But if we study and inquire into meaning and inference, we can find errors. We can amplify reliability of inference and clarify meaning.
Your brevity leaves your meaning vague to me (sorry if I’m doing the same thing).
You could mean:
(i) Humans make statements that are not predictive, but which they believe to have meaning. (agreed)
(ii) It is possible for an ideal agent to make a statement, know what the statement means, but not know what consequences of that statement are, what experiences would add to or subtract from his confidence in the statement. (disagree)
(iii) Same as (ii) plus having justification for knowing the meaning or justification for confidence in the truth of the proposition. (triple-dog disagree)
Then I would love to see anything in that stack. I really don’t see how Kuhn invalidates inductive inference. If you’re saying that humans are sometimes poor at inductive inference, or that actual science is not equivalent to some idealized inductive inference machine, I’ll gladly grant you that.
Hmm. I’ve made what I believe are substantial arguments for this claim. If you cannot say what the experiential consequences of your claim are, then you would not recognize the truth or falsity of your claim if you saw it. If you have a counter-argument, I would love to see it.
The usual response is something like “P makes no predictions, and yet I intuitively know what P means, therefore, meaning is possible without having any idea what experiences P entails.” The problem with this response is that no justification is provided for why this position ought to be accepted. It’s just an appeal to the idea that human intuitions are infallible. But I think it’s obvious that just because I think P sounds meaningful doesn’t mean it really is meaningful, or that it is meaningful in the way that I think it is. The breakdown in meaning occurs because the agent is so vague in meaning that all meaning leaks away in to deep space.
And, of course, there’s an obvious connection with induction. If P never made any predictions, then neither does ~P, and so presumed knowledge of P cannot be an inductive inference from experience.
Since you are an expert on semantics, how do you account for the ability of a child to learn his native language? Isn’t this done through shared experience? There is some imprecision (as Quine explains), but it is shared experience that mediates the language.
If an agent constructs all possible grammatically-correct language sentences, how does the agent identify the meaningful ones from the meaningless ones? I fail to see how it is possible to have meaning without implication for experience.
Suppose I have data points on graph. I fit a curve to the data points, and start making predictions. The predictions are verified. The curve explains the data points for a long period of time.
Thanks to my experience, I can specify f as a function. It’s not just a label for a function I would like to have. I know the formula.
Then, I find a new data point at T that does not fall on the curve. Since all previous data points were consistent with my curve, the data point is unique. Maybe the data point is the result of an instrumentation failure, or maybe it is a sign of something never seen before, or some fundamentally random event. However, further data points fall on the curve as before.
Suppose that we lack any theories that explain the rogue data point. Then that data point is unexplained. The data point is NOT explained by saying
This is not an explanation. It’s just a restatement of the working theory plus the exceptional data point.
Suppose I try to cook up a more elaborate non-predictive story surrounding the anomaly at T.
This would be inane. So would this:
It’s inane because we’re still restating the anomalous data point with more and more layers of indirection and obfuscation.
The problem is that the special theories have infinitely many degrees of freedom, and so no amount of experience will ever give us knowledge of the theories.
This is the connection I am making. A non-predictive theory is so vague as to say nothing. It has as many degrees of freedom as there are anomalous events, and so no matter how much you experience, we never know anything about the cause of the anomalous events.
But the fallacy, the delusion, is to think that merely invoking the name “SPECIAL THEORY B” is the same as explaining the anomaly. That’s like me allegedly explaining an anomalous physical event by invoking the mere name of the (undiscovered) theory of everything, and making this case on the grounds that the theory of everything is defined as the explanation for everything. It doesn’t fly.
I think everyone should take a look at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the topic of Bayesian inference and objective versus subjective Bayesianism:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/
Then look at this paper by Goldstein which advocates for a subjective Bayesian approach and discusses what constitutes a pragmatic approach to subjectivism:
http://ba.stat.cmu.edu/journal/2006/vol01/issue03/goldstein.pdf
Goldstein says:
The point is that unless the witness and juror choose crazy priors as starting points, their massive volume of experiences with reality will bring their posterior probabilities into approximate agreement. I mean, what reasonable assignment of priors will make the witness assess posterior probabilities that flying to the moon on a broomstick is more likely than a mental breakdown after looking at any reasonable volume of data?
In other words, subjectivism argues for coherence of belief. This is a very difficult computation to do exactly, but lots of pragmatic assumptions can be made which generally reduce to common sense.
Finally, I’m sure you’re familiar with the classic medical diagnosis example in Bayesian reasoning. If a disease which has a frequency less than 1 in a 1000, and you have a diagnostic test for that disease that has a false positive rate of 5%, what is the likelihood that someone getting a positive result on the test actually has the disease? The answer is 2%. I assume you won’t dispute this.
Now the question is, would you not accept this as analogous to Fred’s trial? Personal experience is a pretty reliable diagnostic test, but it has a non-zero false positive rate. If an event is sufficiently rare, then a single personal experience is not adequate to make it probable that the diagnosis is correct. I simply don’t understand why this is such a hard issue for everyone on this board to understand.
We can argue about rates of delusion and self-delusion, and rates of occurrence of certain phenomena. However, would you at least grant the premise that the reliability of a diagnostic test limits our ability to conclude the diagnosis after just one test?
sorry i quoted myself, and went on and on in a haphazard way in this posting…
how can an ANY utterance lack meaning?
its alright, we’re on a blog having a difficult conversation; fun nonetheless
i strike out the word believe, and just say utterances which are not predictive but meaningful.
aside from assuming the basic semantic markers([+solid],[-liquid], etc) of their utterance (which folkknowledge implies but does not necessarily dictate), im unsure how an agent would go about obtaining the knowledge of all implied present or future consquences of statement x, and i would further ask, what causes some utterance x to imply some other specifc utterance y; utterances imply but cant they be made to directly imply ANY utterance we deem them to imply (also, see Atran 2002 (i think) for experiments in communities: homology vs inference)?
i just would argue that this justifcation does not have to be inductive, (and of course see taleb’s demon), while i would throw in: we better have some really good data and some really decent models (and even then….)
so………….
the point is that inductive reasoning is not the cake. there are other forms of accurate reasoning and other forms of reflection. the beginning of that stack, however, starts with hume’s dissection of induction, followed by poppers discussion, followed by goodman’s problem of induction, and woodward’s a priori probablity (i skipped quine because i find his discussion to be besides the point).
my counterarguement is what if we have a a statement that you deem meaningless (instead of letting it call into question your framework, you deem it irrational) about an event that is incredibly unlikely, which allows no predictions (notice you use the word consquences not predictions). we can say something very meaningful about these sorts of events, but only in hignsight and not as data for future predictions (have you read the black swan by nassim?). point being: any statement that might be nonpredictive say, youll deem as meaningless, and not worthy of your model, instead of updating your model by possibly throwing it out.
RIGHT! EXACTLY!
my understanding of the literature is that, though there has been the push to try to use shared experience, the chomsky school has still held strong, and i have never been much convinced by the statistical one. By what mechanism would a child draw the distinction between noun-identifers let alone verb-identifiers, or greater, let alone syntax, from shared experience. though, i have not seen, in all my reading, a very good account of how really we can inatly learn language, it appears to me that the shared experience idea cannot work.
and yet most everything we come in contact with will not be bell curves and cannot be predicted far out at all.
not knowing anything about the how does not mean we cannot know anything about the why (especially through aleatory uncertainty)
i agree, everyone should take a look at the links you provide for understanding our discussion. i wonder how many of the blog readers are familiar with any of this stuff.
and given that we are really s—ty probability detectors, what constitutes sufficient and data, and when do we have sufficient data? why, given instances when we do have sufficient data, do we still have an impossible time predicting? (ludic fallacy, taleb’s demon, and grue problems
(and occam doesnt save us from grue))
id point to some evidence in groups, where reciprocation of gestures has more to do with eventual agreeance than their semantic utterances. your appeal to group convergence, to me, is on horribly shaky ground (grue problems, and check out Haidt in Beyond Belief 2.0). also the problem is, what happens if we can rule out a mental breakdown?
theres that scary word, common sense (Haidt again).and you still havent explained….especially in cases lacking hard numbers, how do we get any better at intuitively guessing the probablity of something? even in cases when we do have the numbers and the models, we fail pretty hard (hurricanes anyone?)
no, like i said, i have no problems with the math, nor that sometimes, it works.
first, keep in mind, it may be difficult for many people to understand the concepts we are discussing and……
awesome, lets play house, md. you have a set of symptoms that match a handful of unrelated desises, and after many tests, you still cannot determine which desiase it is. what can we meaningfully say about the desease, after it has killed the patient because we tried some s—?
aside from the medical scene, is one personal experience ever enough to determine knowledge about one event, and can they say something meaningful about that one even that happened to only them?
and
i cannot highlight enough the ludic fallacy, taleb’s demon, and grue problems.
DL,
When you get a chance, I’d appreciate you responding to my question below (from here). I don’t recall you doing that.
I also have another question. When you said,
How is it that Fred’s conclusion is “Bayesian” when he doesn’t know anything about Bayesian analysis and he doesn’t do any calculations (mental or on paper) using hard numbers like the expert witness did?
steve,
check out the link that Dr. L provided for subjective bayesianism, or also just googlify.
j,
Sorry for the delay. Here’s part 1 of my response. Part 2 when I get a chance to finish writing it.
1. Scissors is greater than dinosaur squared.
There is no way to evaluate the truth of this statement since there is no way (as of my utterance) to fix what squaring a dinosaur might mean.
2. No true Scotsman would buy a Japanese camera.
In classic case (2), the speaker believes he is saying something about Scotsmen and Japanese cameras. However, he is mistaken, because he implicitly says that any Scotsman who buys a Japanese camera isn’t “true”. In fact, his statement is not about Scotsmen or cameras, but his own definition of “true Scotsman”. So the speaker is in error about the meaning of his own statement.
An agent making a general statement doesn’t have to know or imagine all of the instances that would satisfy the claim.
For example, if a speaker refers to “water”, the speaker is actually referring to the faculty in the speaker’s mind that recognizes water.
Indeed, in language, when we use abstraction like “something”, we are abstracting from specifics…
Bricks are heavy.
Cars are heavy.
Bricks are dull.
Cars are shiny.
Arithmetic requires mental effort.
Thinking about my sweetheart is effortless
to generalities like
Something is heavy.
Something is shiny.
Something is heavy and shiny.
Something is mentally effortless.
etc.
So our wildcards are abstractions from experienced, observable things. If we discard this restriction, then our language ceases to make sense. Words like “something” would lack definition.
But I’m sure you’re at least casually familiar with ordinary language philosophy. The point is that if you dissociate a term from all points of reference, then meaning evaporates. If you utter a statement and you disconnect all points of reference by applying no-true-Scotsman techniques and by applying contradictory attributes, then the statement will superficially sound meaningful, but actually be meaningless.
Hmm, I think you may be trying to say something slightly different. Do you mean “possibly throwing it out instead of updating your model”?
You are assuming that an outlier observation is not updating my beliefs, when it is. The problem is that when outliers occur so infrequently and without any regularity, they fail to register any significant accumulation.
Let’s go back to disease diagnosis. Suppose that a person has tested positive for a very rare disease (1 in a million) using a preliminary diagnostic test. The diagnostic test has 1% false positive rate. That means that, in spite of the positive test result, the odds that the person actually has the disease are only 1 in 10,000. But look at what happened to the probabilities. The odds that the person had the disease went from 1 in a million to 1 in 10,000. Suppose there are three other independent diagnostic tests with similar false positive rates. By giving the patient these tests, we can assure ourselves that the patient does indeed have the rare disease.
But this isn’t the kind of scenario we’re discussing on this thread. The thing about all the miracle stories out there is that they only happen once and in uncontrolled conditions. This is the equivalent of giving the patient only the one initial test. Or maybe giving the patient multiple tests, but being so sloppy in the application of the tests that all accuracy is lost.
Hearing a miraculous story is making it more likely that the described event is true than it was before, but just one experience or just a story-telling isn’t adequate to make us believe the story is likely to be true on balance.
Hmm. I would have thought this was obvious. Maybe we’re talking about different things. If you see a non-English-speaking tribesman holding up a rabbit and saying “gavagai”, you can theorize about the meaning of gavagai. It might mean rabbit, lunch, dinner, mammal, critter, success!, etc. But there are ways to distinguish between each of these theories. If you have salad for lunch, point at the salad and say “gavagai”, and the tribesman laughs, then gavagai probably doesn’t mean lunch. There are thousands of experiments you could do to select between your theories. Are you truly saying you can’t see any mechanism here?
What’s the difference between why and how? Doesn’t a why depend on a theory of motivation in the same way the how depends on a theory of physics?
Suppose you pick up a tomato and squish it into your CD-ROM drive. Not a normal thing to do, and something not easy to explain. If I say “You did this because you wanted to”, does that really say anything at all?
Compare this with an analogous physical experiment. Suppose a pot of water on my stove begins to boil without any heat being applied and without the pressure falling. How much explanation and theorizing have I done if I declare that “This pot of water boiled because the laws of physics dictated that it would (and I simply don’t yet know what those laws are)?
IMO, both statements are about equally empty. They’re just saying that whatever theory is used to explain these events has to predict these events. IOW, why explanations are how explanations unless they are empty.
This is question-begging on DL’s part: what IS “meaning”? What does it mean for something “have” meaning? (These are not just questions to practice word gymnastics—they are quite valid and quite crucial.) If I write the word “red” and the word “RED”, why is the meaning of each word the same? (From the purely mathematical perspective, one might consider the second word to “contain” more meaning because it’s mathematical bigger/more complex (which, when applied to species of living things, is a deep weakness of Darwinian theory: a bigger skunk is “more” of a skunk?!? A human being is “more” of a chimpanzee?!?). To counter this presupposes we know what it means to “mean” something. Moreover, what does it mean for any written word to “have” meaning? Is meaning in words like dirt in rugs, i.e., can one separate and extract meaning physically from a word like one can physically extract dirt from rugs? Then, what does it mean for a concrete and specific red rock in this concrete specific field to have meaning? Finally, what does it mean when we use the general concept “redness”.
There are solid responses to these questions. But those responses are not MES responses: think about it—one must have a non-scientific (but certainly sound, but certainly not statistically-determined, but certainly not MES-predictable) understanding of meaning in order to do the MESs. To respond to these questions with Bayesian or statistical arguments would be ludicrous—indeed, it would undermine the very epistemological foundations that make doing the MESs possible. It would be akin to saying: meaning has meaning because it’s predictable or statistically-based. Well, how can you say that? You’d be assuming meaning to “predictable” or “statistically-based” to establish what meaning means. In other words, it would be self-referential nonsense… and we’ve seen a lot of that here. For example, when DL claims, “There is no way to evaluate the truth of this statement [because it is not predictable or statistically-based or Bayesian-accessible or whatever],” he can’t apply that criteria back upon itself. In other words, in at least one case—just demonstrated—the criterion fails… in a bad way, in fact, for it fails to support itself!
It’s the same old positivist trap. DL often imposes upon the world his personal criteria of validity and truth (Bayesian analysis, predictionism, etc.— invariably scientistic because for him MES knowledge is at least privileged, but often times absolute), but is loath to follow through and apply his own criteria back upon themselves. When push comes to shove, he falls back on “we need some axiomatic knowledge” or something similar… which begs the question, whose axiomatic knowledge and what counts as axiomatic knowledge?
Consider another claim DL makes:
Doesn’t a why depend on a theory of motivation in the same way the how depends on a theory of physics?
Oh, brother! This distinction between “why” and “how” is not only philosophically inept, but DL is on record (two years ago) saying “why” questions have no meaning. (Don’t ask me to find it, but I did highlight and reference it in earlier discussions.) Equivocation anyone? Being that as it may, can one validly claim (by implication) that “motivation” is the same kind of thing as “physics”? When we infer the existence of neutrinos to account for angular momentum discrepancies in beta decays, and we infer design from an obviously-existing human artifact, are “design” and “neutrinos” the same kinds of thing, i.e., are they both material entities, i.e., do they exist in the same way? Are neutrinos in beta decays the same way design is in a car? No. So why don’t we follow the evidence and establish rules by which we study both—rules and methodologies and arguments that cannot be the same because the formal object (subject matter) is different.
Why should we force everything into the same epistemological tools as we use for investigating neutrinos? The MESs employ methodologies and instruments and data accessible to them to provide inductive/hypothetical truths about the world. Philosophy has methodologies, data (from the MESs AND reflection) and arguments that provide deductive and dialectical knowledge about the world. Theology has methodologies, data (revealed knowledge) and arguments (usually philosophical) to provide tiny insights in the nature of God, and all associated issues that come with that (His relationship to us, for example). ALL of these ARE sciences if “science” is understood properly: mediate intellectual knowledge obtained through demonstration To demand theology apply Bayesian analyses to what it does in order to gain “legitimacy” is as senseless as DL’s example “Scissors is greater than dinosaur squared”. To demand that the fundamental philosophical principles upon which the MESs rest be subject to the same observations, methodologies, instruments and analyses to which the MESs subject entities is (1) circular, (2) destructive of science.
Holo,
Well stated. I agree. We hear a lot about the value of prediction and confirmation as it applies to knowledge, but nowhere do we hear HOW meaning, which is a form of knowledge, creeps into that process. If you predict and confirm that doing X to a object Y produces outcome Z, what does that mean? You can’t get the answer from more statistical analysis, more prediction and more confirmation.
j,
On to the topic of grue, Taleb’s demon and the ludic fallacy.
Hume explains that the fact that induction”works” is not a proof of induction because that would be a circular argument. A related problem is that there are an infinity number of possible theories consistent with the finite past data set we have. In the curve-fitting example, even if we’ve seen a linear relationship for thousands of data points, there’s nothing to say that at the extremes we won’t find the curve becomes quadratic or order N (for any N) in the future. IMO, this is the grue problem. How do you choose among the theories consistent with past data?
Suppose that I have a box the outputs voltage pulses. I measure the output voltage pulses and they are 5 volt square wave pulses, 50 times in a row. This is consistent with the theories like:
1) Peaks will always be 5v square waves.
2) Peaks will be 5v square waves until T, when they’ll change to 4v square waves
3) Peaks will be 5v square waves until T, when they’ll change to 3v square waves
4) Peaks will be 5v square waves until T, when they’ll change to +1 million v square waves
5) Peaks will be 5v square waves until T, when they’ll change to -1 million v square waves
etc.
Yet (2) (3) (4) and (5) are not inferences from the data. They are possibilities that are consistent with the data, but consistency isn’t what induction is about. And this is what Ockham’s razor addresses.
The degree of deviation from the past in the grue problem is totally arbitrary, just as it is in the voltage pulse problem. That deviation is not an inductive inference. I think Kripkenstein is something along similar lines (though I’m no expert on that).
On to Taleb and the ludic fallacy. What does Taleb say about the voltage pulses? He says it is a mistake to assume that the output voltages are 5 +/- 0.001 v assuming a narrow gaussian distribution around 5v. For all we know, the voltage pulses are charging a system inside the box, and when the system acquires enough charge, the voltage will go to -100 v for the next pulse.
However, Taleb is discounting the only rational inference we have. In the worst case, Taleb is just being irrational. How can Taleb and induction be reconciled?
Taleb suggests we are better justified in predicting extremes when we’ve seen a few of them. For example, he says that if we think an extreme event might occur one every thousand trials, we should wait several thousand trials and verify the rate. But even this wouldn’t hold up against his general principle. We could say that the distribution is time dependent, or something like that. We can always imagine some way the world beneath our feet will change and still be consistent with past data.
Taleb is only useful in certain domains. There are some domains in which we know we’re in Extremistan, and where we know of mechanisms that will cause rare (but major) deviations. Taleb also warns us about complex payoffs that are very sensitive to deviations.
But I fail to see how this affects our discussion. Suppose that Fred experiences some “miraculous” event. And, all evidence of this miracle vanishes apart from Fred’s recollection of it.
By straight induction, we would expect the miraculous event to be extremely unlikely. Taleb would argue that, having never seen such an event before does not rule out the possibility that the miraculous event was going to happen all along. Perhaps the miraculous event was some sort of self-organizing criticality, like an avalanche, and so it was not unlikely per se.
As I said, you can make this argument about anything and everything. So it is nonsensical to treat Taleb’s claim in a naive fashion. Taleb is really saying we should not structure our payoffs so that they depend on there being only very small deviations from the past when we live in Extremistan.
But what are the payoffs and risks in Fred’s case? Fred is not building a critical house of cards by believing that he hallucinated the events in question. He is playing it safe. Fred is in Mediocristan, and his payoffs are simple. And Fred remains comfortable if sufficient evidence to believe his experience was real (instead of hallucinated) appears.
Taleb says:
You might be able to morph what Taleb says into some sort of Pascal’s Wager, but we all know that wager is nonsense, for many reasons.
@Holopupenko:
I’m not going to accept that gut instinct is infallible and cannot be analyzed. What a wonderful world you must live in. To be perpetually certain of everything. To believe that there’s no such thing as cognitive bias (or that you, at least, are immune). To ignore scientific results about human cognition.
I’ve addressed all your complaints a zillion times over. If you would ever dare to address the critical issue, maybe progress could be made, but I know you’re too closed-minded to do that.
Nonsense? Really? Hmmm… Of course, well-reasoned, sound, non-MES arguments must be in hand to support such a claim, no? (As opposed to the vague, throw-away and quite empty phrase “many reasons.”)
Ahhh, and there’s that “never go away” problem: call the wager itself what you like. But the results of actually choosing one way or the other given the wager? All of a sudden, the stakes become VERY real–not to mention the outcome.
Off topic, but since the reference was gratuitous the answer is a appropriate.
Pascal’s Wager is not nonsense, as this formulation will demonstrate:
Where does that quote come from, Charlie?
I couldn’t help but think of the atheist bus campaign, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” as it relates to the quote above from Charlie.
To put the bus quote in terms of the parachute example, I imagine it would read something like this, “There’s probably no way to survive. Now stop worrying and enjoy the last few minutes of your life in this nice airplane.” When you look at it in those terms, atheism is like quitting and giving up all hope.
SteveK, atheists don’t see the analogy with the parachute as appropriate because atheists don’t agree that we have a parachute.
.
Actually, Paul, there is at least one atheist who thinks the analogy is appropriate:
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tgilblog/E20070426161723/#208143
i can think of no less than three instances of this statements meaningfulness. is it a truth-statement? i would say, without a doubt. the requirements you give of, “within the utterance” are vague and silly.
in error about the meaning of his own statement? hardly. read your derrida: you cannot have error in figuring the meaning of something.
wrong. i wonder, where does meaning reside in utterances?
no. see baratgin 2007 and derrida 1965
yikes! your conception of how we go about learning language is little more than armchair philosophy. yikes again! see any basic undergraduate book on linguistics. (notice your belief that your general impressions have given you something to say about this subject, even though you lack sufficient data, though you think you do have some sufficient data.)
lets try to rangle all this in, because i think youre missing the point with your posts:
1) you have done little to show that induction is the cake, nor that it is not problematic, let alone that other ways of reflection cannot be equally as accurate.
2) you have avoided answering how youve managed to begin using your none-too-accurate-probablity drive with fine-tuned accuracy give that in nearly all situations we cannot have sufficient data, cannot know the space of probablities, lack unvague theory, any models, and cannot even account for the variables, amongst many other concerns.
like i said, im not arguing that the math and models dont work sometimes, but usually, they dont.
and
your frequent appeals to your “general impressions” from (propaganda-like) sources have done nothing to convince me of your position, let alone that you are capable of making *ANY* specific truth-claims (in fact your frequent irrational appeals have left me fearful of any specific truth-claims you will make).
j,
Wow! So every grammatically correct proposition is meaningful? That’s just nutty. It’s like saying that a random string of digits is a meaningful proposition to someone (or some alien), somewhere, in some situation. Well, that’s a crazy definition of meaning. The issue is whether the speaker knows what his statement means. And, frankly, I don’t know what “scissors is greater than dinosaur squared” means. I could redefine my terms to make a meaningful statement (e.g., by making dinosaur refer to the number two, and scissors the number 5), but that can be done for anything, including a random string of numeric digits!
Check out the concept of a One-Time Pad in encryption. That’s basically what you are doing with my proposition.
Oh, boy. You’re a postmodernist. I should really quit right now.
Maybe you’d like to debate the merits of postmodernism with your Christian pals on this blog.
All in all, you’re the one who has failed to produce any evidence of your assertions. The papers you have cited don’t help your cause.
You’re basically re-interpreting everything you read to validate your own postmodernist views of reality. Papers about how humans actually think are being interpreted to mean that humans ought not think in Bayesian terms. Information about general-purpose, innate grammars is being reinterpreted to argue against empirical reference-fixing. And the Black Swan is being re-interpreted to suggest that we can’t know any probabilities whatsoever (I noticed you didn’t respond to my comments on this topic at all).
Your claims to being conservative and empirical in your attitudes aren’t plausible. If you had any actual examples of your counterclaims, you would have cited them instead of citing literature that doesn’t support you.
Sorry, but this seems disingenuous. You’re not just saying that math and models can turn out to be wrong, or that a rational conclusion could turn out to be wrong. Those things are true within my view. Instead, you are citing reasons that math and models should always be considered unreliable, and those cited reasons invalidate all mathematical/probabilistic models and even truth. What you really mean when you say math and models sometimes work is that they work when their predictions are actually true. Well, even guessing works on that basis. Indeed, even pure irrational thought processes would work on that basis.
Other ways of reflection? Like what? Again, you have nothing to show.
And in response to my probability arguments, you say that my probability estimates are “none-too-accurate”. Well, they’re conservative estimates of the order of magnitude of probability, which I have explained in detail, and which you have refused to rebut.
Your postmodernist views make clear why you refuse to engage in any serious conversation about reasoning and probability.
So, once again, we’re left with the standard Christian argument. Gut cannot be challenged. Every statement is meaningful, even if we don’t know what it means yet. Humans are infallible when it comes to semantic interpretation and intuition about metaphysics, etc. It’s a recipe for believing what you want to believe.
Wow–up to that last paragraph I was with you all the way, Doctor Logic!
Dr L,
again, your comments miss the point (and calling me a postmodernist or a relativist isnt going to work much, especially since i reject nearly all postmodern thinkers, the ones ive retained from the period are two heavy weights: habermas and derrida)
wonderful evidence and argument against my views on language or more intuitive feelings?
again, missing the point; lets also remember who the burden of proof goes to.
like ive said, we can use Bayesian terms to success sometimes , we can use empirical reference-fixing to success sometimes, we can know probabilities to success sometimes, but lets not pretend those are the only accurate ways of human reflection. also, i skipped responding because, i think your missing the point of where im trying to go.
have you checked atran’s work yet? i mostly aligned with him in regards to many matters; his experiments in language are rather interesting. how do you respond that your understanding of language isnt empirically based? again, i would say the literature overwhelmingly allows the main points i have highlighted.
in the right circumstances, math works, models work, prediction works. those conditions exist less rarely than you are willing to concede. also, from the evidence, irrational thought processes do often work, and sometimes, even better than rationalistic ones (atran 2007, david sloan wilson 2006.
i was hoping to stimulate your thinking-drive so you could explore the literature and ideas, instead of just providing you the answers. im not here to win, sorry.
sigh. you have done little explaining in detail, and more appealing to your own beliefs based on your intuitions.
how does one get better at intuitive probability figuring again?
*gut should always be challenged* but theres no indication that science as a discipline “has *all* the right answers” (again atran makes some good comments on this subject) or that its the only good tool in our kit. it is, however, hilarious for me to see how you hear me saying one statement about the philosophy of language, and you proceed to align me with a camp (postmodernist) and every philosophy they may or may not have promoted. calling me a postmodernist and dismissing my claims about language wont much validate your intuitions about how language works, especially in concerns of truth-statements.