Dogmatic Skeptics

[liamconnor]

Here is a (rather lengthy) quote from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy:

Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism-- the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence--it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, "Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles," they answer, "But mediaevals were superstitious"; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say "a peasant saw a ghost," I am told, "But peasants are so credulous." If I ask, "Why credulous?" the only answer is--that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland. It is only fair to add that there is another argument that the unbeliever may rationally use against miracles, though he himself generally forgets to use it.

Do you agree or disagree with the thesis that Naturalists are dogmatic about their exclusion of the miraculous?

[marco]

It seems correct to me that without knowing anymore there are three possibilities

• 1/ It is a hoax
  2/ It is some kind of error
  3/ It is true

You are confusing the content of the note with determination of its provenance. When we read what it written we can say it is either true or false. With no further info, we assign equal probabilities.
As to your analysis:

If it is a hoax, then it has been made up.
If it is some kind of error - dropped through the wrong letter box -it may still be true.
It may be true that someone was killed but not for the stated reason.
It may not be a hoax at all, nor an error but a piece of information given to put the receiver on a false scent.
The content may be true but with altered names.

Should we go on?

Given no further information we are like the donkey placed equidistantly between two piles of straw, unable to make up its mind, and so doomed to starve. The assigned probabilities, for what they are worth, would be 0.5. This is another way of saying: we don't know.

[Divine Insight]

It seems correct to me that without knowing anymore there are three possibilities

• 1/ It is a hoax
  2/ It is some kind of error
  3/ It is true

You are confusing the content of the note with determination of its provenance. When we read what it written we can say it is either true or false. With no further info, we assign equal probabilities.
As to your analysis:

If it is a hoax, then it has been made up.
If it is some kind of error - dropped through the wrong letter box -it may still be true.
It may be true that someone was killed but not for the stated reason.
It may not be a hoax at all, nor an error but a piece of information given to put the receiver on a false scent.
The content may be true but with altered names.

Should we go on?

Given no further information we are like the donkey placed equidistantly between two piles of straw, unable to make up its mind, and so doomed to starve. The assigned probabilities, for what they are worth, would be 0.5. This is another way of saying: we don't know.

I agree with Marco. If it's some kind of error, it could still be true. So all errors cannot be counted as false.

None the less if we allow every unverified story to be potentially either true or false with a 50% probability then we have the following:

Judaism: 50/50 true or false
Christianity: 50/50 true or false
Islam: 50/50 true or false
Myths of Zeus: 50/50 true or false
The Wicca Moon Goddess: 50/50 true or false
Buddhism: 50/50 true or false
Secular Materialism: 50/50 true or false
Fairies: 50/50 true or false
Big Foot: 50/50 true or false
Alien Abductions: 50/50 true or false
Lock Ness Monster: 50/50 true or false

As you can see this isn't a very valuable way to evaluate reality.

Not only that but we can even break most of these down further. Take Christianity as a prime example:

Catholicism: 50/50 true or false
Protestantisms,...
Amish: 50/50 true or false
Baptists: 50/50 true or false
Methodists: 50/50 true or false
Mormons: 50/50 true or false
Jehovah's Witnesses: 50/50 true or false
Fundamentalists: 50/50 true or false
Liberal Christians: 50/50 true or false

And the list goes on and on and on.

Clearly there is something dramatically wrong with thinking in terms of limited probabilities. This is just a very poor application of mathematical probability to be sure.

Just because something could be either true or false doesn't mean that there is a 50% chance that it's true and a 50% chance that it's false. There are actually many other variables to be considered.

For example, in the Case of Christianity that has well over 1000 disagreeing demoninations that cannot all be true, suddenly we have a probability of 1 in 1000 change that anyone one of them might be true. And even that assumes that at least one of them actually is true.

So Christianity has a probability of 0.001 (i.e. 1 in 1000) chance of being true. And that ASSUMES that at least ONE denomination of Christianity actually is true. If that assumption is wrong, then there is ZERO chance of Christianity being true.

The problem with probability is that it requires a very deep understanding of what is being studied. You can't just say that because something might be true or false that means that it has a 50% chance of being one or the other.

In fact, what is actually true is that it has to have a ZERO percent chance of being one and 100% chance of being the other. Because it could hardly end up being 50% of both.

So if something is either true or false, then it's not 50/50. It's actually all or nothing.

It's either true or it isn't. That's actually 100/0.

The tendency is to try to treat it like flipping a coin. The probability of flipping and head/tails cold is 50/50. This is because it hasn't happened yet and could come up either way. So there really is a 50% chance it could come up heads, and a 50% chance it could come up tails. So it really is 50/50.

But the case of whether or not a statement is true is not 50/50 because the statement is a claim about something that supposedly already happened. So there is no chance that it could come up differently from what it already is.

So it's actually wrong to even say that a statement has a 50/50 chance of being true or false. It's already one or the other. That is already a done deal. So there is no chance that it could be anything other than what it already is. It's either true or false 100%.

[marco]

[Replying to post 72 by Divine Insight]

I think you have neglected to consider a priori and a posteriori probabilities, DI. If we have absolutely no information on two eventualities then we cannot favour one over the other, which means that we regard one as being as likely as the other. In reality we often have some info.

Your example of the many belief systems does not negate this. If you are saying all these systems, including fairies, come to us with zero information as to background or content then of course we have to accept we know nothing. But you present some ludicrous belief systems and thus we KNOW something: the system is ludicrous, so we would not assign it a 50% chance of its being correct.

We calculate the probability of a coin or a die from symmetry. This probability might be reassessed if we had a sequence of say 12 heads. As for a statement being true or false: if we know it is true then the probability is 1. God may know a belief is true, but that doesn't help us much so we have to use whatever information we have, and if that is zero, we cannot prioritise true over false. We may consider that a religion presents outrageous claims or relies on the testimony of a lunatic, in which case we would want to reduce our probability for that religion being true. In practice we are never without some shred of information.

[Mithrae]

Most people have to work for a living and have neither the time nor the money to go around trying to personally verify all information that they encounter.

This has to be the biggest strawman argument I have ever seen in my entire life.

Why in the world would anyone need to go around trying to personally verify all the information they encounter?

You were the one explicitly disagreeing with the premise that for most of your knowledge, you depend on other sources of information. You even suggested driving around the cities of America counting houses and apartment buildings to somehow estimate its population.

Now suddenly, when I (again) point out in bite-sized detail how absurd it is to actually imagine someone trying to avoid reliance on others' information, you've decided that this has become 'the biggest strawman argument you have ever seen in your entire life.' Hyperbole much?

That would be totally unnecessary. In fact the vast amount of knowledge we do have is totally useless in any practical sense. And if 99% of it is actually false it wouldn't have any significant affect on our lives at all.

In fact, the only information that we do need to verify is the information that actually has an important affect on our lives. And you can bet your bottom dollar that we do indeed seek ways to verify important information. And we often get burnt if we fail to do so.

On the contrary, besides fairly immediate survival needs - home, work, friends and family - virtually all of the information most important to us is difficult if not impossible to confirm personally, even if we wanted to: Things like long-term health risks and rewards of many diet or lifestyle choices, the finer details of most investment opportunities, or the quality and performance of new purchases we're considering. Things like understanding of ecosystem depletion, climate change, and the impacts of consumerism. Things like global trade relations, international conflicts, balance of power and wealth distribution. Things like unemployment rates, national education standards and trajectories, and automation trends.

The things which we live by and vote on and the things which will determine not only national policy for a few years, but the very future of our species, are for the most part things which are virtually impossible to personally verify - things for which we ultimately rely on networks of testimonial evidence to confirm.


Edit: Well I guess in fairness those things may or may not be important to you. But they probably are to most of us, which is sufficient to make the point.

[Furrowed Brow]

It seems correct to me that without knowing anymore there are three possibilities

• 1/ It is a hoax
  2/ It is some kind of error
  3/ It is true

You are confusing the content of the note with determination of its provenance.

Am I confusing two different things content and provenance or am I correctly pointing out the issues of content and provenance are ....at first contact with the problem....impossible to disambiguate. I think I'm doing the latter.

When we read what it written we can say it is either true or false. With no further info, we assign equal probabilities.

Not if you leave the question of the provenance hanging ....no.

The point hinges on recognising the question of provenance is coupled to the question of whether there is a statement that may be true or false. The point becomes clearer if we look at this from a different direction. If what looks like a note is not a note and just a random piece of paper with black marks that accidentally look like a sentence then the piece of paper is no more meaningful than an autumn leaf blown under the door. In other words to form a statement that may be true or may be false there has to be an author. Recognising a proposition must have an author immediately introduces the problem of provenance. If content is a different problem to the problem of authorship then a note with a witness statement would not need an author which is absurd. Therefore the nature of the content is clearly dependent on authorship.

In a nutshell the sceptic evaluates the authorship of a claim along with the content. And this is not the sceptic getting confused.

If it is a hoax, then it has been made up.

Yes - so it is not true.

If it is some kind of error - dropped through the wrong letter box -it may still be true.

Wasn't quite what I meant. But it is irrelevant if the mistake amounts to the note posted through the wrong door. Maybe the note was posted at random. Really doesn't matter. But if it is true then it is true and there is only one way the note may be true and that is if Moe shot Joe to silence him.

However if it is false there are many ways it may be false. Maybe the writer of the note has the wrong names, maybe they wrongly identified the participants, maybe they witnessed something they misunderstood etcetera. If this is the provenance then the author made a mistake. And that is the second option.

An additional point has also just been made. As there are many ways a proposition may be false and only one way for it to be true this also - absent of further information - means the possibility of false weights more heavily than true. This is a different point to breaking down the options into three.

It may be true that someone was killed but not for the stated reason.

Yes. Then the statement is false for the reason that in logic True and False = False. So if there are two conditions upon which the truth of the proposition rests - if one of those conditions is false then the proposition is false.

It may not be a hoax at all, nor an error but a piece of information given to put the receiver on a false scent.

If the author is using truth to misdirect an investigation then the statement is still true.

The content may be true but with altered names.

Altered names = not true. If it was not Moe and Joe, but instead Fred shot Ted to silence him, that is a different statement. It is not the same claim. If the author saw Fred shoot Ted but just made a mistake over the names otherwise everything else is correct and the author is sincere - the statement is still not true. Maybe with more work there is a truth to be found behind the error and maybe there is a real investigation worth pursuing but that does not make the initial statement true. It is not true because it contains false information. If I said the value of Pi is 3 and 1/7 I'd be close but the claim is not true. The note under the door did not claim it looked like Moe shot Joe, or or I think Moe shot Joe. The note was not ambiguous in this regard. It was clear and the terms on which it can be true are therefore also clear.

Given no further information we are like the donkey placed equidistantly between two piles of straw, unable to make up its mind,

This is a false equivalence because the donkey can see the facts of the matter and has no one one advising him. An apt example would leave open the question whether there is any hay, and another brown donkey advises the grey donkey there is hay in the next field over and the then the brown donkey sits down as if they are not going anywhere. Is the hay where the brown donkey says? Is the donkey lying? Has he made a genuine mistake?

May I suggest the three basic question 1] is this true 2] is this a lie 3] is this a mistake, are three questions we ask all the time to assess new information about which we are not sure of the provenance. Take the following news paper headline for instance.

[center]

[mrow]Kim Jung un fed his uncle to a pack of dogs

[/center]
If you know nothing about Kim Jun Un and do not know if the newspaper is reliable - is it really valid to conclude a 50/50 chance of truth. I think not.

A different point - I would have to be honest and point out that this sceptical analysis means we have to negotiate a world in which everything should in first instance be treated as false as most things said and claimed are - strictly speaking - false, if we count inaccuracy as false. But it is worse than that.

Moe might say he drove home and kept to the speed limit. But maybe he went 1mph over the limit. Technical what he said would be false but not to the extent it changes very much. But plenty of people will go 5mph or 10mph over the speed limit and still insist they kept to the speed limit. Some may knowingly lie, some genuinely didn't realise, some existing in some vague world where part of their brain knows they went too fast but the other side of the brain denies it and they kind of ignore the discrepancy or do not think it is significant. Other people may have increasingly vague boundaries like 20mph or 30 mph and still not think the discrepancy is particular significant. There is I only has couple of drinks lie when Moe had four drinks and then there it was a couple of drinks when it was 20. Maybe its me but pretty much everything that people claim falls somewhere between 1mph and 10mph from the truth and a smaller but not insignificant minority run faster and looser with the facts. As I think we learn language not to tell the truth but as a social skill to fit in I see no reason to address witness statements any differently or start from a position of charity and assume accuracy or sincerity.

[Mithrae]

So I don't think the presumption of falsehood is a valid approach to testimonial evidence.

The presumption of falsehood with a curious mind is the starting point.

Let's see which part of the analysis we can agree upon.

Imagine you have no access to the witness or the facts. Imagine you are Chanderlesque gumshoe. You get home late one night and someone has slipped a note under your door. Here is the note.

[center]

[mrow]I just saw Moe shoot Joe dead to ensure his silence. Look into this. [font=Impact][i]Anon[/i][/font].

[/center]
You don't know Moe or Joe, you don't even know if they are real or this is a hoax. All you have is the note. It seems correct to me that without knowing anymore there are three possibilities

• 1/ It is a hoax
  2/ It is some kind of error
  3/ It is true

That is two ways the note can be false and one way it can be true. Given no more information I'd say the valid starting point to the enquiry is to give greater credence to the note not being true. This is because as yet each of the three options are not evaluated and their individual probabilities are still to be weighed against one another. So at the moment until further examination each option is just as likely as another option. This does not mean the note is not interesting and worthy of further enquiry but off the bat we don't assume the note is either true or it is false, the correct starting point is to add the probabilities of the two options which leave the note not true and that is 2/3. Thus the note at the very start of the investigation and before any more information is looked at is more likely false - but it is still curious.

Can we agree that or do we already differ?

I would say that the information is more likely false, but not because of some abstract principle-of-indifference reasoning. As I commented in my previous post, reason and experience both suggest that reporting perceived truth is both much simpler and much more common than making up a lie. However in the case of reported crimes, it has already become a known fact that someone will not be playing with a straight bat; it is already pretty much a given that there is likely to be deception somewhere, from someone. In your example that is further compounded by the unusual anonymity of the note, which again sets it outside the realm of normal expectations.

But suppose instead that you - hypothetically having no idea which bands are in town - are told by someone that they went to the Metallica concert last night. Wouldn't you suppose it probable that they're telling the truth? Unless you specifically suspected them to hate heavy metal of course... and depending on the strength of your suspicions, even then you'd probably take their word for it after a sceptical query (at least I would).

Admittedly, attendance at live performances by top artists is a little more common than the miracle claims which are the topic of the thread: Some 16% of Americans claim to have received a "miraculous physical healing" sometime in their lives which (given an average 80-year lifespan* and assuming only one 'miracle' per person) would be about 640,000 claims of miraculous healing per year; hence perhaps 800,000 to 1 million claims of all miracle types. By contrast over 25 years (1990-2014) the world's top 25 artists performed for an average of 9.7 million people each, so assuming that some 20% of those were in the United States that would be around 2 million people seeing top-25 music acts per year.

Since it's undeniable that many 'miracle' claims are implausible right off the bat, we might say that attendance at top artists' concerts is perhaps half a dozen times more common than potentially-plausible miracle claims. (By contrast, homicide in the United States at ~16,000 per year is fifteen to twenty times less common.)



* Edit: Come to think of it what actually matters is the average age of respondents to that survey, which was about 47 (question 277), but given much larger uncertainties such as 'potentially-plausible miracles' there's not much point correcting this for now.

[Divine Insight]

You were the one explicitly disagreeing with the premise that for most of your knowledge, you depend on other sources of information. You even suggested driving around the cities of America counting houses and apartment buildings to somehow estimate its population.

I'm only pointing out that this is possible to do. It's something you could verify if you really wanted to. Obviously it's not necessary to actually do this because the source of census information is trustworthy and credible.

Now suddenly, when I (again) point out in bite-sized detail how absurd it is to actually imagine someone trying to avoid reliance on others' information, you've decided that this has become 'the biggest strawman argument you have ever seen in your entire life.' Hyperbole much?

That's because you failed to realize the difference between something being possible and something being practical.

Just because you may not personally have the time to check something out doesn't change the fact that it is indeed verifiable.

That would be totally unnecessary. In fact the vast amount of knowledge we do have is totally useless in any practical sense. And if 99% of it is actually false it wouldn't have any significant affect on our lives at all.

In fact, the only information that we do need to verify is the information that actually has an important affect on our lives. And you can bet your bottom dollar that we do indeed seek ways to verify important information. And we often get burnt if we fail to do so.

On the contrary, besides fairly immediate survival needs - home, work, friends and family - virtually all of the information most important to us is difficult if not impossible to confirm personally, even if we wanted to: Things like long-term health risks and rewards of many diet or lifestyle choices, the finer details of most investment opportunities, or the quality and performance of new purchases we're considering.

So?

If things are unverifiable then you can't know them. Life is full of risky things that you can't know.

Who said otherwise?

What does that have to do with believing in things that are unverifiable?

You choices for health and fitness are indeed your own best guess. They might be right, they might be wrong. That's reality. In fact, you might even make all the right choices and become unhealthy anyway for any number of reasons.

Whoever said that everything is knowable?

Things like understanding of ecosystem depletion, climate change, and the impacts of consumerism. Things like global trade relations, international conflicts, balance of power and wealth distribution. Things like unemployment rates, national education standards and trajectories, and automation trends.

So what??? What in the world does any of this have to do with trying to make an equivalence between credible verifiable information versus unverifiable testimonies???

The things which we live by and vote on and the things which will determine not only national policy for a few years, but the very future of our species, are for the most part things which are virtually impossible to personally verify - things for which we ultimately rely on networks of testimonial evidence to confirm.

Or you could just vote on the policy issues you personally favor. Have you ever thought of that?

And if you have no clue which polices are best, then why bother voting at all?

Edit: Well I guess in fairness those things may or may not be important to you. But they probably are to most of us, which is sufficient to make the point.

Sorry, but now you're making insulting innuendoes again.

I do have policies I have evaluated and feel are the best course of action, and I have voted for those policies.

You seem to be suggesting that I should behave like a mindless idiot who needs to take politicians word for things. I don't go by what the politicians claim. I go by the policies I support. If a politician claims to support policies I support, then I'll vote for that politician. And if they lied, then I get stung, just like everyone else they lied to.

And besides, think about what argument you have jumped into in this thread.

G.K. Chesterton is arguing that Christian Superstitious Claims should be considered to be "evidence" just as much as the "evidence" that is presented in the natural sciences.

Surely you can't be serious about taking sides with that argument?

[Mithrae]

Admittedly, attendance at live performances by top artists is a little more common than the miracle claims which are the topic of the thread: Some 16% of Americans claim to have received a "miraculous physical healing" sometime in their lives which (given an [average age of 47] and assuming only one 'miracle' per person) would be about [1 million] claims of miraculous healing per year... By contrast over 25 years (1990-2014) the world's top 25 artists performed for an average of 9.7 million people each, so assuming that some 20% of those were in the United States that would be around 2 million people seeing top-25 music acts per year.

Since it's undeniable that many 'miracle' claims are implausible right off the bat, we might say that attendance at top artists' concerts is perhaps half a dozen times more common than potentially-plausible miracle claims. (By contrast, homicide in the United States at ~16,000 per year is fifteen to twenty times less common.)

It occurs to me that we might be able to estimate a rough baseline for the frequency of hoaxes, hallucinations, self-delusion and pareidolia by comparing alleged miracle events with alleged alien encounters. The prevalence of belief in alien visitation is around 60-80% of the prevalence of belief in miracles:

Belief in miracles 45% of the population (1990) to 55% (2012)
Belief in alien visitation 27% (1990) to 45% (2015)

Meanwhile the prospect of alien visitation to earth is physically and mathematically possible in all worldviews (unlike miracles) and depending on assumptions about the frequency, longevity and proximity of advanced technical civilizations may even be considered probable by some. Similarly the misperception/self-delusion threshold for seeing a 'UFO' is arguably just as low as for experiencing a 'miraculous physical healing.'

However the number of alleged alien encounters is only around 12,000 per year in the USA (2015) or 45,000 per year globally (2010). Even allowing for a low rate of reporting alleged encounters - a quarter, say - we'd be left with the following figures:

Alien believers - ~140 million (2015, USA)
Alien experiences - ~50,000 (USA, assuming 4x the 12,000 reports)
Relative frequency - 0.04%

Miracle believers - ~170 million (2012, USA)
Miracle experience - ~1 million (USA)
Relative frequency - 0.6%

So if we assume that:
A) Kooky believers in aliens are as or more prone to hoaxes, hallucination, self-delusion and pareidolia as kooky believers in miracles (which seems probable, given the large size and presumably considerable overlap between the groups),
B) Alien encounters have a similar or lower rational threshold to overcome in order for someone to believe or report them (again, seemingly probable), and
C) Alleged alien encounters are all 100% false, one way or another...

What we're left with is a baseline estimate that perhaps ~0.04% of 'believers' in a given year will be prone to reporting experiences which are definitely false, and can be dismissed out of hand. And again, that is only given the assumption that one hundred percent of alien reports actually are hoaxes, hallucination, self-delusion or pareidolia. But since ~0.6% of 'believers' report miraculous physical healing in a given year (~1 million in the USA), we undoubtedly might have a sound rational basis for dismissing one-fifteenth of those out of hand, but not necessarily any more.

Admittedly, in spite of my own comparison, I still would not object to an assumption that as many as half of them are simply implausible; largely due to the potential influence of hysteria-conducive church environments I mentioned to Liamconner, partly due to the assumption that many may be single-witness claims without the benefit of medical opinions. But by comparison to the alien baseline, I would say that considering only half of all miracle reports to be even potentially plausible is setting a very high standard of initial scepticism.

[Mithrae]

You still don't have empirical evidence in either case.

So when I repeat what I read, am I more, less or just as reliable as someone who is telling you he's personally seen a ghost?

That would depend on the sources (who the random someone is, and where you'd read whatever you're repeating) and the nature of the claims (how un/expected I find them to be). For example in our various discussions over the years I've always found you to be reasonable and your factual claims accurate: If you told me in all seriousness that you'd personally seen a ghost, I would probably consider it more reliable than a lot of things written in the Daily Mail, for example. If my father (a smart fellow and die-hard sceptic) told me he'd seen a ghost and from some questioning seemed unlikely to have gone off his rocker, I might consider it almost as reliable as stuff from a science magazine.

As a rule empirical evidence is certainly better than testimonial evidence.

This rule is kinda moot because apparently I don't have empirical evidence for black holes or Everest being the tallest mountain.

Not until you've been there or otherwise found them to be fact through your own observations However as I implied, in those cases the wealth of testimonial evidence from hundreds of surveyors, mountaineers, physicists and astronomers - people who have been there or seen that, who do have the empirical evidence - is overwhelming. You and I don't have the empirical evidence, but the testimonial evidence is far stronger regarding these than (for example) it is regarding Hitler's death.

I'm not sure a completely absolutist view on that is warranted, though it's difficult to think of good examples in which they would be in direct conflict...

*Insert flat Earth beliefs here.*

Good call, but I think we can make a reasonable and fairly obvious distinction between 'testimonial evidence' in the sense of people telling us what they believe (which is not evidence at all), and in the sense of people telling us what they have observed (which is). I don't think there's ever been testimonial evidence of a flat earth in the latter sense. After all, when I look at the earth what I generally see is lots of mountains and valleys; and while our visual acuity allows us to see mountaintops from over a hundred kilometers away, if we looked across the sea from a modest height we would be unable to see flat shores which are even a meagre 50km distant.

But in some cases such a 'consensus' is difficult to pin down. For example as I noted in my first post in the thread:

• In the case of healings for example, according to one unsourced claim in the Huffington Post "One survey suggested that 73 percent of U.S. physicians believe in miracles, and 55 percent claim to have personally witnessed treatment results they consider miraculous." (See also Pawlikowsky 2007, Southern Medical Journal; "Despite many skeptical arguments, a great majority in modern Western societies (including physicians) share a be-lief in miracles. 44–46".)

Do we therefore have something approaching a consensus that miraculous healings are a fact?

Sure, but why does it have to be supernatural?

This was an interesting point that you raised in post #17, which I was going to circle back to eventually: You said that if 'miracles' are real then they are material, and fit into materialism just fine.

I wouldn't put it quite like that of course. But if anything is real, then it is necessarily true that it must be in accordance with the nature of reality. It must be 'natural.' So the term 'supernatural' is essentially meaningless.

Assuming that it must fit into materialism is a bit of a problem, because that implies (or explicitly requires) that the cause is either molecular life (human or alien) or else non-conscious (deterministic or random). It excludes the possibility that the cause is 'god' or a higher power, in other words, and that assumption is not warranted. I would say instead that if 'miracles' are real then they are (probably) ideal, and fit into idealism just fine; same basic notion, but without presupposing that some possibilities are out of the question.



Edit: More fundamentally what I think you're getting at - and which DI eloquently explained in post #70 - is that given uncertainties in medicine and large numbers of patients with possible unexpected outliers, we can never be certain that 'miraculous' recoveries aren't simply human bodies doing what human bodies have the potential in some circumstances to do.

And that's true. Even if there was a god, still we could never be certain that a particular 'miracle' in medicine was the result of divine intervention. I would suggest that the same argument would still apply even in the case of an amputee regrowing his limb, particularly if there were more than one documented case; it would violate no physical laws after all, and we know that regeneration is already a biological fact in some species, and some believe it may be scientifically possible for humans in coming decades. So inevitably we'd be seeing endless questions and studies trying to work out what was unique about these handful of human salamanders.

And rightly so: We should research and study and even hope that such 'miracles' are naturally-occurring processes which we might be able to replicate more consistently. But unless and until they are known to be naturally-occurring processes, there remains the possibility that they were caused by some agency or external power. What kind of possibility in each case? 10%? 50%? That's the big and possibly unanswerable question.

[Furrowed Brow]

However in the case of reported crimes, it has already become a known fact that someone will not be playing with a straight bat; it is already pretty much a given that there is likely to be deception somewhere, from someone. In your example that is further compounded by the unusual anonymity of the note, which again sets it outside the realm of normal expectations.

Ok agreed - but at this point you have already moved forward into the process of assessing the merits of the claim. You started an agnostic and now your doubts have grown. I would want to roll you back to the moment before these kinds of doubts creep into your thinking. So to clear away some of the concerns that are already pressing in let's think about another note. This one is signed and is closer to your own example.

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[mrow]Moe went to last night's Metallica concert Joe

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You do not know either Moe or Joe or whether Metallica played a concert last night. However the example is more neutral as there appears to be little at stake here.

But I still want to roll you back to that moment just before you decide this note has probably been slid under the wrong door. You pick the note up and before absorbing the content you says to yourself "A note?". At that point what are the preconceptions that restrict your next response?

My first point is first to show the difference between a sceptic and an agnostic. The sceptic will say "A note?" and already have a three way preconception about the contents of the note i.e. Truth/Lie/Error. The agnostic will say "A note?" and start with the binary preconception True/False.

My second point is to defend the sceptics preconceptions. It is true the expanded sceptical options are in part maintained by jaundiced view of human. But it is more basic than that. There is an a priori aspect to scepticism. This is an a priori concern regarding the three legs to the stool of human authorship. Authorship require the possibility of a deliberate lie and the possibility of a genuine error and the possibility of the truth. If one of the negative legs of the stool is removed the potential for human authorship collapses and we are already ignoring the author. But a sceptic does not do that and human authorship is always front and centre to the way a sceptic thinks. And given no more information we are left with our a priori preconception leaving the two negative possibilities outweighing the possibility of truth. Thus, where there is an author it is always valid to start with the a priori preconception any propositions is more likely false. Once we begin to examine the proposition we may consider context, evidence, etcetera, and begin to evaluate the three possibilities and adjust our preconceptions. It is true the characteristic of a sceptical personality is the tendency to give greater weight to the negative possibilities, but that comes later and it means the sceptic is more likely to stick with the preconception the proposition is more likely false. However a sceptic does not have to have a closed mind. In a sense the sceptic is more open minded than the agnostic for the reason that in their set of preconceptions they do not ignore the role of the author.