I recently viewed Dr. David Wood’s video, Scooby-doo and the Case of the Silly Skeptic. The target of Wood’s criticism was Dr. Michael Shermer (pictured above), who defended a principle which he referred to as “Shermer’s Last Law,” in the course of a debate with Wood on October 10, 2016. According to this law, any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God. The reason is that technologically advanced aliens could easily produce effects that would look like miracles to us. As Wood puts it (paraphrasing Shermer’s argument): “They might be able to cure diseases instantly, or regenerate limbs, or change the weather. These kinds of things would seem miraculous to human beings, and so from our perspective, aliens who could do these kinds of things would be indistinguishable from God.” So if we saw something miraculous, how would be know that it’s God and not aliens?
In the debate, Wood fired back at Shermer, asking: “If you did want to know that God exists, wouldn’t you want some method to figure out if He exists, something that would lead you to the truth about that? According to Dr. Shermer, there can be no such method, because [for] anything God could possibly do, you could say, ‘Aliens did it.’ … So it’s built into the methodology that you could never know whether God exists or not. If it’s built into your methodology [that you can] never know the truth about something, then I have to question the methodology.” In his video, Dr. Wood added: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Finally, Wood administered his coup de grace against those who demand proof of God’s existence: “When I use an atheist’s methodology against him, he can’t even prove his own existence,” since advanced aliens could make me believe that I am arguing with an atheist when in fact I’m not, simply by messing with my brain.
Wood also attacked Shermer’s hypocrisy for asking why God doesn’t detect amputees: even if He did, Shermer still wouldn’t be convinced of God’s existence. And how reasonable is it, asks Wood, for Shermer to believe the evolutionary naturalist myth that life originated from non-living matter, while at the same time insisting that the regeneration of a limb from living matter would somehow constitute proof of God’s existence?
Is Shermer simply being willfully perverse, as Wood seems to believe? Much as I profoundly disagree with Shermer, I would argue that his position is at least intellectually consistent, even if I also consider it to be unreasonable. Here’s why.
Why I think Shermer’s skeptical position is an intellectually consistent one
1. Philosophically speaking, there is nothing inconsistent in the position of someone who refuses to believe in God’s existence unless she has proof, or at least good evidence, that God exists. (Arguably, the person who says, “I won’t believe in anything unless I have proof or good evidence that it’s real,” is being self-referentially inconsistent, since there are some things – e.g. the external world – whose reality we just have to accept as given; but the skeptic who restricts the scope of this evidentiary principle to supernatural beings is perfectly consistent. Such a restriction might strike many people as rather ad hoc, but inconsistent it ain’t.)
2. There is also nothing obviously inconsistent in a skeptic maintaining, on independent grounds, that for any extraordinary effect E (e.g. the instantaneous regeneration of an amputated limb), the hypothesis that aliens produced the effect will always be more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. [And what might those “independent grounds” be? Perhaps the skeptic might argue that the existence of an all-knowing Being Who is absolutely simple – as classical theism insists that God is – is fantastically improbable, on antecedent grounds, as it is difficult to see how an utterly simple Being could give rise to the sheer variety and complexity of things that we see in this world.]
From these two premises, it follows that no effect, however extraordinary it may be, can provide good evidence that God exists. What this means is that if a theist is going to defend the reasonableness of belief in God when arguing with a skeptic who accepts the above premises, then it would be advisable to stick with ordinary effects, and then deploy a philosophical argument (say, the cosmological argument or the teleological argument) to show that the best explanation for these effects is God. But I digress.
What if the same skeptic mocks religious believers, asking them why God never heals amputees? (Or does He? See here.) The question is a perfectly legitimate one, since the absence of such healings is, on the face of it, puzzling if God exists. But if the skeptic goes on to admit that even such a healing wouldn’t convince her that God exists, is she being inconsistent? I think not. She is simply making two independent points: (i) the best sort of evidence that could possibly be adduced for God’s existence (namely, well-documented evidence for extraordinary miracles, such as the instantaneous healing of an amputee) appears to be lacking; and (ii) even this evidence wouldn’t be enough to show that God is real, anyway, since the antecedent probability of the existence of the God of classical theism is far lower than the probability of advanced aliens existing.
Let’s go back to Dr. Wood’s remark: “If somebody says to me, ‘Prove to me that statement X is true,’ but an examination of his methodology shows that he won’t allow anything to count as evidence that statement X is true, how can we take that demand for proof seriously?” Dr. Wood’s point is a rhetorically powerful one, but it seems to me that Dr. Wood is guilty of an equivocation here. For the skeptic is not saying that nothing could ever count as evidence for God; rather, what she is saying is that according to her own epistemic principles, any effect that would qualify as evidence for God would simultaneously as even better evidence for the existence of advanced aliens, since their existence is antecedently more probable than God’s. In other words, the classical theist’s definition of God is epistemically self-defeating, since it makes the task of establishing God’s existence with even a high degree of probability an impossible one. “Don’t blame me,” the skeptic might argue in her defense. “Blame your definition of the Deity. That’s where the real problem lies.”
Refuting the skeptic
So, what’s wrong with the skeptic’s two-step argument? I’m not going to attack the skeptic’s first premise. I think that for someone to argue that we ought to believe in a supernatural being, he needs to produce good evidence that such a being exists. In the absence of such evidence, I see nothing wrong with someone believing in such a being, simply because this belief makes his life meaningful. Fair enough. Far be it from me to scoff at beliefs that people hold onto, because their very sanity depends on their continuing to believe them. That’s not wishful thinking; it’s psychic self-preservation. If giving up your belief in the supernatural would make you sad, that shouldn’t deter you from pursuing the truth, even if hurts your feelings. But if you think that giving up such a belief would make you go crazy, then you’d be best advised to let sleeping dogs lie. So I don’t think fideism is necessarily irrational. However, if someone wants to tell me that I ought to accept his supernatural belief, then I think it is perfectly reasonable for me to demand good evidence – particularly in an age when different people’s beliefs about supernatural beings mutually conflict.
Where I would find fault with the skeptic is in the second premise of her argument: that for any extraordinary effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced it is always more probable than the hypothesis that God did it. Even if we judge the existence of aliens to be antecedently more probable (given our background knowledge of the world) than the existence of the God of classical theism, we need to bear in mind the following:
(i) it doesn’t follow from this that for any effect E, the hypothesis that aliens produced E is more probable than the hypothesis that God did. There might be some highly specific effects (which I’ll discuss below), whose production by God (assuming He exists) would be vastly more probable than the production of these same effects by aliens. In that case, the degree to which these effects tend to confirm God’s existence might outweigh the antecedent improbability of the existence of God, when compared to aliens. That would tip the balance in God’s favor;
(ii) unless one is claiming that God’s existence is logically inconsistent with some known fact F, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence, while low, is not zero or even infinitesimal. Given that the number N of events that have occurred in the observable universe is finite, and given that none of these events is logically inconsistent with God’s existence, it follows that the antecedent probability of God’s existence (from what we know about the world) will also be a finite number which is measurably greater than zero. Indeed, I would argue that for any simple hypothesis H, we should always rate its antecedent probability as greater than or equal to 1 in 10120, which has been calculated by Seth Lloyd as the number of base-level events (or elementary bit-operations) that have taken place in the history of the observable universe. In a post I wrote several years ago, I argued that the antecedent probability of the existence of some supernatural agent(s) should be assigned a value of at least 1 in 10120: “…[I]f we imagine embodied particle-sized intelligent beings scouring the cosmos from the moment of creation onwards, the maximum number of observations they could possibly make of naturalistic occurrences is 10120, hence by Laplace’s sunrise argument, the prior probability they would rationally assign to a supernatural event would have to be 1 in 10120.” That being the case, belief in a supernatural agent could be rendered reasonable by evidence which favors theism over naturalistic hypotheses by a factor of more than 10120 to 1. How might this happen? The mathematician Charles Babbage (1791-1871), in Chapter 10 and Chapter 13 of his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, makes the perspicuous observation that whereas the evidence against miracles increases an an arithmetic rate as non-miraculous occurrences accumulate over the course of time, the evidence for a miracle increases at a geometric rate, as the number of independent eyewitnesses increases. It therefore follows that even a vanishingly low antecedent probability of a miracle can be overcome by the testimony of a sufficient number of independent eyewitnesses;
(iii) theism is not the same as classical theism. Most people who believe in God hold Him to be omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent (although they might quibble amongst themselves about exactly what these terms mean). But when we look at the other attributes of the God of classical theism – changelessness, impassibility and simplicity, for instance – I think it is fair to say that: (a) most people care little for these attributes; (b) Scripture is at best an ambiguous witness in their favor, and the reasons why Jews, Christians and Muslims came to insist on God having these attributes are largely philosophical; and (c) today, however, many philosophers and theologians would dispute the claim that these attributes are an “all-or-nothing” package. Hence even if someone had what looked like a solid argument against one of the attributes traditionally ascribed to God, it wouldn’t necessarily constitute a good argument against God Himself.
I suggested above that even if the existence of advanced aliens is vastly more probable on antecedent epistemic grounds than the existence of God, the production of this or that miracle might turn out to be readily explicable only on the hypothesis that God exists, and astronomically improbable on all other hypotheses. But what sort of miracle are we talking about here? I’ll let a New Atheist answer that question.
Miracles that would overwhelmingly point to God rather than aliens as their cause
(The following section is excerpted from a previous post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)
[New Atheist Professor Jerry] Coyne has conceded that if he found the phrase “Made by Yahweh” in every human cell, he would tentatively conclude that God was responsible. In a post titled, What evidence would convince you that a god exists? (July 7, 2010), Coyne explicitly declared that if scientists found messages in our DNA, it would be reasonable to infer that God or other supernatural agents were responsible:
Over at AlterNet, Greta Christina describes six things that, if they happened or were observed, would convince her that God exists. These including magic writing in the sky, correct prophecies in sacred texts, accurate information gained during near-death experiences, followers of one religion being much more successful (in ways that couldn’t be explained by economic and social factors) than followers of other faiths. Go read it: she qualifies and explains all of these things in detail…
Making the same point, I provided my own list in a critique of the claim that science and faith are compatible:
There are so many phenomena that would raise the specter of God or other supernatural forces: faith healers could restore lost vision, the cancers of only good people could go into remission, the dead could return to life, we could find meaningful DNA sequences that could have been placed in our genome only by an intelligent agent, angels could appear in the sky. The fact that no such things have ever been scientifically documented gives us added confidence that we are right to stick with natural explanations for nature. And it explains why so many scientists, who have learned to disregard God as an explanation, have also discarded him as a possibility.
In a subsequent post titled, “Shermer and I disagree on the supernatural” (November 8, 2012), Professor Coyne was even more explicit, writing that he would “provisionally accept” the existence of “a divine being” if scientists discovered confirming messages written in our DNA:
I’ve previously described the kind of evidence that I’d provisionally accept for a divine being, including messages written in our DNA or in a pattern of stars, the reappearance of Jesus on earth in a way that is well documented and convincing to scientists, along with the ability of this returned Jesus to do things like heal amputees. Alternatively, maybe only the prayers of Catholics get answered, and the prayers of Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, don’t.
Yes, maybe aliens could do that, and maybe it would be an alien trick to imitate Jesus (combined with an advanced technology that could regrow limbs), but so what? I see no problem with provisionally calling such a being “God”; — particularly if it comports with traditional religious belief — until proven otherwise. What I can say is “this looks like God, but we should try to find out more. In the meantime, I’ll provisionally accept it.” That, of course, depends on there being a plethora of evidence. As we all know, there isn’t.
In an earlier post, titled, Can there be evidence for God? (11 October 2010), Coyne challenges New Atheist P.Z. Myers (who said that no amount of evidence for the supernatural would budge him) on this very point, appealing to the virtue of explanatory simplicity when pressed as to why he would take certain public signs (such as the healing of amputees by a man descending from the clouds who identified himself as Jesus) as evidence for God. In this post, Coyne specifically mentions healed amputees, but his point about there being an abundance of documentation would apply equally well to the discovery of a “Made by Yahweh” message in every human cell, which he mentioned in the passages cited above:
Now you can say that this is just a big magic stunt, but there’s a lot of documentation – all those healed amputees, for instance. Even using Hume’s criterion, isn’t it more parsimonious to say that there’s a God (and a Christian one, given the presence of Jesus!) rather than to assert that it was all an elaborate, hard-to-fathom magic trick or the concatenation of many enigmatic natural forces?
And your evidence-based conversion to God need not be permanent, either. Since scientific truth is provisional, why not this “scientific” truth about God as well? Why not say that, until we find evidence that what just happened was a natural phenomenon, or a gigantic ruse, we provisionally accept the presence of a God?
Coyne’s attitude here strikes me as eminently rational, and what I would expect from a man of science.
Are there any special miracles that can unambiguously be ascribed to God?
As we noted above, Professor Coyne would tentatively accept the existence of God, given the (well-documented) occurrence of certain specific miracles. But can we go further, and point to miracles (such as the resurrection of a man from the dead) which could only be caused by God, and which could therefore be unambiguously ascribed to God?
(The following section is an excerpt from an earlier post of mine on Uncommon Descent, written in 2014.)
[Thomistic philosopher Edward] Feser thinks that the resurrection of a dead body would be a clear-cut example of a supernatural event or miracle that in principle, only God could have caused:
Christ’s resurrection from the dead would be a paradigm case of such a miracle. But establishing such a miracle in turn requires a lot of philosophical stage-setting. It requires establishing God’s existence and nature, divine providence, the possibility in principle of miracles, the possibility in principle of a resurrection, and so forth. All this groundwork has to be established before the occurrence of a miracle like the resurrection can be defended. (Again, see the post just linked to for discussion of this subject.)
While I would agree with Feser that only a supernatural Being could raise a dead person back to life, as such an event would constitute a massive violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I have to disagree with his implicit claim that a well-documented case of a corpse coming back to life could only be ascribed to God. For the problem is that what looks like a resurrection might not actually be a resurrection. Consider the following scenario. Suppose there is an advanced race of aliens who are capable of very quickly moving bodies wherever they choose, using technologies beyond our ken. The aliens are also capable of transforming one person’s appearance (including the DNA of their cells) into that of another person, in the twinkling of an eye, although such feats of course require an enormous amount of energy. To simulate a resurrection, then, all the aliens would have to is quickly remove the corpse from the scene, transform another individual into a replica of what the deceased person looked like while he/she was still alive, and rapidly transport that person to the place where the corpse was before – all in the space of a fraction of a second. Ridiculously far-fetched? Yes, of course. But is it demonstrably impossible? No.
Nor is there any reason in principle why an alien could not tamper with our visual systems and/or our memories, making us think that we had seen a dead person come to life even though nothing extraordinary had taken place.
To make matters worse for Feser, there is another possibility that he has to consider: that demons may be able to bring about or at least mimic the resurrection of a dead body. Consider the following passage from Exodus 7:
10 So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron threw his staff down in front of Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a snake. 11 Pharaoh then summoned wise men and sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians also did the same things by their secret arts: 12 Each one threw down his staff and it became a snake. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs. 13 Yet Pharaoh’s heart became hard and he would not listen to them, just as the Lord had said. (NIV)
Commenting on this passage in Exodus, St. Thomas Aquinas, writing in his Summa Theologica, vol. I, question 114, article 4, reply to objection 2, was willing to allow that demons can transform inanimate objects into frogs, using “certain seeds that exist in the elements of the world.” And although he went on to argue that demons could not raise a dead man back to life, he added that demons were perfectly capable of creating a “semblance of reality” so that “something of this sort seems to be effected by the operation of demons.” Demons are capable of producing collective hallucinations too: “the demon, who forms an image in a man’s imagination, can offer the same picture to another man’s senses.”
The point I’m making here is that even when evaluating miracles, we have to adopt a balance-of-probabilities approach. Yes, one might imagine an advanced race of aliens pulling off a stunt like that. But it’s not rational to suppose that aliens would do such a thing: first, we haven’t discovered any aliens; and second, even if they existed, it’s extremely unlikely that they would bother to pull religious pranks on us. And for all we know, demons may be capable of causing us all to suffer hallucinations. But we have no special reason to believe that they would – and if we believe that the world is governed by Divine Providence, such a scenario would seem especially unlikely. The most obvious interpretation of an event such as a dead person coming to life is that it’s a supernatural sign from Heaven. And that should be enough.
[Case study: the Resurrection]
The best defense of the Resurrection of Jesus on Bayesian probabilistic grounds that I have seen is The Argument from Miracles: A Cumulative Case for the Resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth by Professor Tim McGrew and his wife, Dr. Lydia McGrew. What the authors attempt to demonstrate is that there is “a small set of salient public facts” that strongly supports belief in the resurrection of Jesus. Taking into account only the eyewitness testimony of the women at the tomb of Jesus, his twelve apostles and St. Paul, they calculate that the facts in question are 1044 times more likely to have occurred, on the assumption that the Resurrection of Jesus actually happened, than that on the assumption that it did not. However, their argument makes no attempt to calculate the prior probability of a man rising from the dead.
(In my post, I go on to argue that using Laplace’s Sunrise argument, the prior probability of a man rising from the dead in the first century A.D. can be calculated as about 1 in a billion, rather than 1 in 10120. Since 1044 is much greater than one billion, the evidence supporting the Resurrection vastly outweighs the antecedent improbability of a Resurrection occurring. In any case, given that there were actually 500 witnesses to the Resurrection, we could still establish the reasonableness of belief in this miracle, using the lower figure of 1 in 10120. In another post, titled, Good and bad skepticism: Carl Sagan on extraordinary claims, I also deal with the common skeptical objection that the witnesses to the Resurrection may have been the victims of mass hallucination.)
Conclusion
Dr. Shermer’s skeptical point that any extraordinary effect could have been either produced or simulated by advanced aliens is a valid one. But the inference he draws, that belief in God is never warranted by the evidence, is a faulty one. God may not be the only possible explanation of any particular event, however extraordinary. Nevertheless, He may be the only reasonable one.
“…for asking why God doesn’t detect amputees…”. Omniscience left without a leg to stand on.
FWIW, I basically agree with your conclusion. I’ve said much the same stuff on a concurrent thread (though not as thoughtfully or in as much detail). Thanks.
haha
The only thing I would modify is the title. It’s not that skepticism is silly, it’s that some skeptics have a ridiculous and incoherent view of the principle.
I think in the end it’s a common psychological reflex people engage in, to rationalize away things that contradict some already held belief.
To be fair, the same problem exists among religious believers who will engage in the same kind of endless ad-hoc rationalization to save their current beliefs from evidential falsification.
You often find these types of responses to the evidential arguments from evil. For every case offered as an example of gratuitous evil that a moral person would be expected to try to intervene and prevent, the believer will concoct some sort of rationalization, of course entirely ad-hoc, to try to explain away why God would allow such a thing to happen while still be a perfectly morally good God. This on occasion culminates in the quintessential and most vacuous of all possible ad-hoc rationalizations, that it’s all just part of some grand plan we can’t know about because “The Lord works in mysterious ways”.
It seem to me the way the very conception of God has developed over human history is in essence sequence of such rationalizations, eventually leading to God defined as pretty much undetectable in every way imaginable. Can’t see God? He’s invisible. Doesn’t leave footprints? Well he’s immaterial, no physical body. Makes no sounds or no effort to communicate? Well that’s because (insert part of the plan-response) or “you are not sincerely seeking God”. Etc. etc. Rather than turtles and crocodiles with magical powers, wind and mountain-gods, sentient suns and so on, as these ideas became untenable, so did religious concepts and memes evolve and adapt to the skepticism of the to-be-converted.
So much so, that within the last few millenia, God has finally become this entirely fickle, almost undefinable concept. Heck, today even some denominations insist that God is intrinsically incomprehensible in almost every aspect. You couldn’t possibly make it any more vacuous and ad-hoc than that. I’m reminded of the parable of the invisible dragon in Carl Sagan’s garage. What practical difference is there between an undetectable and literally incomprehensible entity that can deliberately decide to use it’s omnipotense to hide from you, and an entity that simply doesn’t exist?
Religion and theism, observed through the lens of history, looks like one long sequence of increasingly absurd, ad-hoc rationalizations to try to save belief from falsification.
I had tried to suggest pretty much the same thing with
but my comment was ignored…..of course!
It seems to me that if we continued to gather evidence we could start to distinguish between the 2 possibilities of God vs Aliens. For example, if the miracle worker(s) continued to claim to be God, at some point we’d have to consider the unlikelihood that super-intelligent aliens would try an deceive us in to believing they are God.
The process of gathering evidence for a proposition always involves narrowing down the possibilities from a wider group of propositions. Again, I think Wood is being downright dishonest.
This is only a problem for theists who believe God heals the sick through miracles
I searched the protein database and found “Yahweh” all over the biosphere, from non-ribsomal peptide synthetases to valine-tRNA ligase to glycosyl hydrolase….so God may actually exist.
I think we’ve learned enough about ourselves, our history and the universe as a whole to recognize that the notion of the universe as a created object is a deeply flawed categorical error. Its just a particular mythology from a particular culture.
That is exactly what Shermer says you can’t do. Here is his “law” again in case you missed it
quote:
Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God
end quote:
According to Shermer there is absolutely no way to distinguish between the two possibilities. That is the point
If you think you can do so then you might be a skeptic 😉
peace
Vincent,
I’m with you all the way except for the bit about the alleged miraculous restoration of an amputated leg and the alleged eyewitness evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.
“So I don’t think fideism is necessarily irrational. However, if someone wants to tell me that I ought to accept his supernatural belief, then I think it is perfectly reasonable for me to demand good evidence – particularly in an age when different people’s beliefs about supernatural beings mutually conflict.”
This precisely captures my position. I have no credible evidence that any deity exists. If someone else says they do, good for them; I will not criticize their position. BUT if they try to impose some moral or rational obligation on me to adopt their beliefs, then they have given me permission to critically consider their position, and to demand better evidence. Given the sometimes-violent disagreements among theists, no one’s personal testimony constitutes “credible evidence”.
BTW, wouldn’t an actual deity BE an “advanced extraterrestrial intelligence”? Just sayin’…
sean s.
Coyne is a lair (at least PZ Meyers admits his refusal to think), if the clouds suddenly formed to say, I am God, and I am real, I guarantee Coyne would say it was a scientific stunt, and we just need to find out who did it and how.
And anyone who doesn’t think he would say that is a sucker, and would believe Donald trump when he says he will create jobs and help the middle class.
Haha, fooled you.
I have to say the ‘500 witnesses’ thing is one of the more amusing entries in the ‘It says so in the Bible therefore it’s true’ category.
Imagine pulling that shit in court –
“Your honour, the defendant was seen escaping in a time machine by 500 witnesses!”
“Who are these witnesses; can we can cross examine them?”
“We don’t know who they were and they’re all dead. But your honour….500! Seriously, how many more do you need?”
This seems plain wrong to me. First off, I don’t think that would be the prior probability for the supernatural, but for the non-natural, whatever that means. Might be paranormal, or sub-natural…
Also if there’s an infinitude of potential non-natural events, and the probability for each of them is non-zero, and assuming those are independent events, then the probability of *some* non-natural event is exactly 1 every time. So we should be seeing non-natural stuff going on all the time, which seems obviously wrong
Well, scrap that. My math is clearly wrong because the sum of an infinitude of non zero independent probabilities doesn’t have to be 1. Silly mistake on my part
Miracles of healing are claimed to happen every single day, cancer cured, blindness cured, crippled limbs healed. And yet to ‘prove’ god does not hate amputees we have to go back into history to find a single case.
So god does hate amputees, at least compared to brain cancer sufferers who it cures at a remarkable rate.
The page linked to notes:
So there you have it. If you find a tale from the 1600’s unlikely you are a morally corrupt idiot. Yes, if you don’t swallow it wholesale you are a silly skeptic. It’s written down, therefore it must be true!
What rot. No wonder they are so convinced by the tales of sheepherders.
You can finde people alive to day who will swear they were abducted by aliens, in other words they are first-hand accounts by people still alive, who claim to be the very subjects of these experiences.
You can find people who swear they saw David Copperfield make the statue of Liberty disappear before their eyes.
I believe neither actaully happened. Why would I accept a written account from the 1600’s where I can verify nothing? Not to mention millenia old accounts with even less going for them?
Your flippant dismissal says more about you than the evidence
Scholarship universally holds that it was written in the mid 50’s and at that time this would have been easily verifiable. Correspondence from Corinth to Jerusalem was close to routine and many folks in that congregation would have had deep connections with the Jewish community in Palestine. All that was necessary was to ask
peace
So history doesn’t exist?
Genres matter. Some accounts are fairy tales, lies, deception, mythology. Others are historical documents. In old times, the different genres were combined, because only a few special people were literate and they wrote everything at one go. Skeptics didn’t believe Iliad described real events and places until the ruins of Troy were found. The historicity camp was right.
Not to the Frediean skeptic. When the skeptometer is at 10 no evidence whatsoever would suffice
peace
What a preposterous remark. Who says “history doesn’t exist”?
The claim isn’t that history doesn’t exist, the claim is that some historical claims aren’t rationally believable. The content matters.
If it can’t be verified and violates well-established principles of how the world normally works, then yes skepticism is entirely rational.
That’s why it’s rational to doubt my claim that I can fly and shoot lightning bolts from my fingers. Because, normally, human beings can’t fly and shoot lightning botls from their fingers, so it takes more than my mere say-so to prove that I can.
Suppose I now say my great great grandfather could fly and shoot lightning bolts from his fingers, and all his friends saw him do it. Because it says so in his diary. Maybe it even says so in one of his friend’s diaries too. But he’s dead, and so are all his friends. Do we believe it? I don’t.
The more extreme or unusual the claim, the less believable it is and therefore the greater the amount and/or quality of evidence for it is required.
And some historical documents were written by people who suffer all the usual and normal human cognitive biases, not to mention outright mental health problems or braindamage. The literature is ripe with people having vivid religious experiences while suffering epileptic seizures, just to pick an example.
I’m glad people changed their minds in light of substantiating evidence. If only we could actually get that…
Actually, your claim was, “Why would I accept a written account from the 1600’s where I can verify nothing? Not to mention millenia old accounts with even less going for them?” Looks like you are saying, the older it gets, the more nonsense it is.
I’m sure that Iliad is nonsense, according to you. If you were honest. And if you had read it.
Established? Old writings, documents, artefacts and stories that we know are the way they are. That’s what I call established. That’s how the world works.
“Your Honour I realise I can’t bring a single one of those 500 witnesses before the court but I could have! Why won’t you just trust me?”
“Get out of my courtroom”
That’s not a claim, that’s a question.
No, that’s not at all what it looks like I’m saying. Anywhere. It is a curious fact that in your attempt to make my position look ridiculous, you first have to alter it. That should tell you something, that my position isn’t ridiculous at all. Otherwise you wouldn’t have to alter it to make it appear as such.
What I’m saying is that the older it gets, the harder is to verify the claims it contains. And since I have also said before that that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, a text several millenia old containing extraordinary claims are not believable on their mere existence.
I haven’t read it. You might be right, I might think it’s total nonsense. Not because of it’s age, but because of it’s contents. It’s age might just make it even harder to establish the truth of.
That’s very confused. People writing something down does not establish that what they write down is actually how the world works.
Them writing it down only establishes one thing: that it was written. It is thereby established that… they wrote it down. That’s it. Yes, people write things down and “that’s how the world works”. That doesn’t mean what they write down is how the world works, as in it actually transpired, or that it happened in the way it was written.
Your standard seems to amount to: if it’s written at some point in history, it’s established as fact and it really happened in the way it was written. What an extremely gullible position to take.
I guess it’s time to evaluate our Christian friends’ skepticism. Applying exactly the same criteria you apply to the resurrection, why do other myths fail to pass the same test? Considering the relevance of the topic, have you explored rigorously all the resurrection claims and all other alleged miracles for all religions out there?
But how do you decide what is extraordinary? Based on how the world works for you right now, right?
Except that in times of e.g. Iliad, there were not many writings unlike Iliad. So in its own context, Iliad was nothing extraordinary. It was quite ordinary and, on top of that, was eventually archeologically verified too. Even before that verification, the historicity school was right with the perspective how the world worked back then, not how it works today.
I think you meant to type “rife,” but Yes. Erik should read Anna Robeson Burr’s classic Religious Confessions and Confessants https://www.scribd.com/document/80477511/Burr-Religious-Confessions-and-Confessants
Packed with the same sort of insane baloney that apparently motivates a number of posters here. As I mentioned on the other thread Fred is quite reasonable to suggest masks, animatronics, puppetry, whatever–before finally yielding. After all, he’d seen fakery in hundreds of prior episodes. The idea that credulity is a virtue when it comes to supernatural claims is just silly.
Using Bayes theorem. See here:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2012/06/20/extraordinary-claims-require-extraordinary-evidence-ecree-part-1-the-bayesian-interpretation-of-ecree/
And here:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/secularoutpost/2016/09/10/repost-extraordinary-claims-require-extraordinary-evidence-ecree-part-2-is-ecree-false-a-reply-to-william-lane-craig/
ROFL. In it’s own context it was nothing extraordinary?
Well fuck me. That settles it. Praise Osiris, Ra, Anubis, and Horus!
Again, you’ve shifted. Would it NOT SUFFICE or might someone not know in advance what would suffice? Those don’t mean the same thing.
Equivocation is something I’ve seen you do before, but here the goalpost manipulation is also a matter of repeated, blatant, intentional misrepresentation.
Disappointing.
Also, this is not only about the alleged resurrection. Let’s not forget that we’re talking about a God incarnated in a baby born of a virgin who performed all sort of miracles, died and resurrected 3 days later to then ascend into heavens.
How a full grown men or woman of sound body and mind can believe that is beyond me
Erik thinks he can distinguish those as “folklore” or something. Like a careful sheepdog, he’s got the good, real stuff segregated on one side from the bad, unreal stuff on the other.
How does he do it? Well, unsurprisingly, one batch is Judaeo-Christian and the other stuff is not. (Hallelujah!) It’s quite clear that the attitude just betrays an unhealthy combo of hubris and neediness.
My example was Iliad. Nothing Judaeo-Christian in it. Maybe you got a different impression when you read it. Elaborate.
When Gautama Siddartha was born, he walked, and lotuses instantly grew from each place he’d set down one of his feet.
Fine. Do you think the remarks about, say Apollo, in the Iliad are true? I don’t think you do. You save your supernatural love for Yahweh and Jesus.
Rather than “true” and “false”, historians deal with categories historical versus not. There are frauds and forgeries; those have to be eliminated. And there are documents of little impact and import. Iliad is none of those.
You don’t know what you are talking about. And you don’t know who you are talking to. Nothing I ever said here justifies what you impute on me.
Ugh. His apartment must have been a complete mess
Nice dodge Erik. Nice.
The question isn’t whether it’s being categorized as historical or not by historians, the question is if you believe the events happened as they are depicted. Do you?
That’s precisely how an impartial scientist (or rational skeptic) does NOT approach historical documents and artefacts. Otherwise you project your own preconceptions on it.
You can be unscientific if you want. I won’t.
Why do you have such a hard time answering such a simple question? Do you believe the claims about Apollo or not? It seems to me this is a yes or no question. Heck, you can even say that you only believe them weakly, or you can assign a propability to it if you want. Either way, that would be an answer to the question.
Erik,
You can’t possibly believe in incarnations, right?. How do timeless, immaterial, immanent, transcendent beings materialize?
I know I’m talking to someone both full of hubris and religiously extremely needy. Ich habe genug.
It may seem so to you. That’s why you are not a historian and likely never will be either. Ideological pre-conceptions must be dropped when you approach the material.
To be sure, Christian apologists tend to do bad history too. For example William Lane Craig regularly says that the books within New Testament are independent accounts. In truth, the fact that they are within New Testament means they are not independent accounts. They are closely woven into each other. And just like Iliad, New Testament was not written with the priority on historicity, but rather with mythology/theology in mind. Which doesn’t mean that events described in them didn’t happen. It means that any possibly actual events went through the mythological prism first and were written down only then. So there.
What happens when things go through mythological prism depends on what you take mythology to be. It’s clear that you cannot be trusted on this. You don’t have the sobriety required to investigate these issues.
Yes, and it’s clear what YOU take mythology to be: any supernatural claim that is not Judaeo-Christian.
So do you believe them or not? You as a great dispassionate historian approach the material with your christian ideological preconceptions “dropped”, and … do you end up believing it?
Right, silly me. But you do of course.
Yeah, Erik. What is it that you believe exactly? You keep talking without clarifying anything at all. And can you answer once and for all if you think the immaterial classical theistic God can materialize and incarnate in a human body? Because it sounds like a blatant contradiction. You keep telling us demanding evidence for God is nonsensical, so apparently if Jesus came back and started performing miracles and fulfilling biblical prophecies we should reject that as convincing evidence for God’s existence. Is that right?
Erik has a demonstrated inability to directly answer questions about his beliefs on matters of fact. If you get an answer on this topic, try asking about a global flood.
I’d like to thank everyone for their comments. Many readers have weighed in with powerful and well-reasoned objections to some of my arguments. I thought of answering them in the comments, but instead, I’ve decided that it would be better to address them all in a new post, which I intend to put up in the next few days.
Erik isn’t a Christian and he’s never described himself as one.
I’m not sure he’s been entirely honest about that myself. He gives special weight to Judaeo-Christian claims in any case. When they make them, it’s philosophy, when anybody else makes them, it’s folklore.
I get that he WANTS to be thought of as a theologist rather than an apologist, but the proof is in the pudding.
There is a host of issues involved in understanding ancient texts. Age doesn’t necessarily make texts less trustworthy (many Greek and Latin texts can be well verified, while later Grimm fairy tales cannot be), but genre matters (the Iliad is no historical text, although some historical facts are related), and accounting for bias is important. Even Roman histories are generally considered to be rather loaded for or against certain factions, and they’re not (generally) about any sorts of miracles.
The last thing one can properly assume of the New Testament is that it is unbiased and non-sectarian. The Gospels probably are best understood as histories, but there’s no pretense at being even-handed. They exist so that you will believe. What is more important than that, in the writers’ eyes? So they try to fit prophecies into the narratives, sometimes rather weirdly, like having Jesus ride two donkeys on Palm Sunday in Matthew. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of concern for chronology, and some religiously important ideas seem to lead to stories like Mary, Joseph, and Jesus going off to Egypt (Matthew again, I think) soon after Jesus is born, a story that scholars generally dismiss as a kind of recapitulation of Israel going into (eventual) captivity in Egypt then being delivered during the Exodus. There is either one demoniac, or two, depending on which Gospel you read.
So we aren’t really all that impressed by even the non-miraculous details. Meanwhile, miracle claims are routinely doubted in other sources, from Herodotus to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. I don’t know what one is supposed to make of “500 witnesses” to Jesus’ resurrection (or actually, they’d be witnesses to seeing Jesus post-resurrection), except that it sounded good to Christians. There’s always the possibility that Jesus didn’t die (swoon, then recovery), of course, but then some of the stories of the encounters have a kind of magical quality that could suggest hallucination (usually in fairly small numbers).
I’m not sure of what to make of it, but I do know that 500 claimed witnesses 2000 years ago affirmed only in a very sectarian text doesn’t seem like sufficient evidence for the kind of event that has not been verified in much better documented circumstances. Even if the Resurrection occurred, it’s forever beyond any sort of good verification, unless heavenly beings or aliens can provide us with verifiable pictures (although how they’d be verifiable I really don’t know).
Glen Davidson