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]

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.

The premise we are working with is that we have zero information as to truth or non-truth. If we take into consideration where the note was found and how it was delivered, we are already in possession of some information. I am saying, and saying correctly, that if we have absolutely no information then we cannot favour false over true.

Just as my donkey may be a false equivalence your tale of the delivered note is also falsely equivalent to a basic statement on which we've zero information. We have a lot of peripheral information, as you ably demonstrate. For me it illogical to take a statement about which we know nothing and favour its being false. Your example introduces a triple possibility only because you are considering attendant circumstances and so you are departing from the premise of no information.

It is unsafe to rely on a chosen example from which we draw conclusions and offer these conclusions as valid in the general case. They're not. But it is an interesting problem.

[Bust Nak]

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.

And the lack of empirical evidence doesn't bother you at all?

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.

There are lots of people who have had experience of God, yet I see you label yourself non-religious. Is that not inconsistent?

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)...

That's the thing, they have observed things that should not be visible beyond the horizon; they have observed things disappearing bottom up on a perfectly flat surface; they have observed the horizon remaining level no matter how high they go; they have observed the lack of any drop when they aim a laser across a large body of water.

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.

Let me go there too, if God exist, then he is material. I use materialism and naturalism interchangeably.

...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.

I am going further than that, if it was the case that there is a God healing these people with divine intervention, then that too would be fine and fits into materialism.

[Mithrae]

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.

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.

[center]

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

[/center]
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. . . .

It's difficult to imagine a position of real ignorance here because communication, moreso than concepts generally, is necessarily rooted in some sense of context. If 'Joe' is communicating that information, I would assume it to be more likely than not an accurate communication of truth as Joe sees it, for the reasons above (though on the other hand, again given the method of delivery, 'Moe' and 'Joe' could be pseudonyms meaning that considering it truth would be an error in my interpretation).

But for the sake of argument let's assume that position of ignorance is a valid concept to apply in the case of communication: Is it correct to suppose that there are three logical options? Since first encountering C. S. Lewis' trilemma I have generally supposed so. But really, aren't the logical options
intentionally false (deception)
unintentionally false (error)
intentionally true
unintentionally true (coincidence)?

If so, then assuming a position of ignorance you would be right there with Marco (and me, whenever I can wrap my head around hypotheticals of complete ignorance) in concluding a 50/50 possibility either way. Logically speaking.

Naturally, we would then rightly suppose that in most cases coincidence is actually much less than a 25% possibility, but once we're in that further assessment stage we'd also have a similar basis from experience for supposing that deception is also less than a 25% possibility, all else being equal (and depending on context, error is potentially much less or potentially a little more).

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.

Again for the sake of argument, let's ignore what I've suggested above; a) the difficulty of supposing a position of ignorance in the case of communication and b) the fact that even introducing intentions would still leave us with a 50/50 of logical options from that position of ignorance.

Let's suppose that in the case of human communication, the default assumption is only a 33% plausibility of said communication being true.

Then let's go back to my first two posts in the thread:

• Post #10:
  - Any single source of information has a non-zero possibility of being incorrect
  - Multiple converging sources have a much smaller possibility of all being incorrect
  - Information can be considered reliable relative to the breadth and unanimity of the sources confirming it
  
  Post #7:
  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".) According to the 2007 Baylor religious survey, 23% of Americans claim to have witnessed and 16% claim to have received a "miraculous, physical healing."

If an average of ~500,000 Americans per year (or their doctors) provide potentially-plausible testimony (ie. we've already dismissed half of them out of hand) about miraculous healing, and by default we then suppose a 67% probability that any given testimonium is false or erroneous... then our default conclusion would be that there certainly have been many miraculous healings.

Literally, with a 67% chance that each is false or erroneous, by the time you've encountered the first 30 testimonies it's a 99.9994% chance that at least one is true, from a position of ignorance. So after a very high standard of initial scepticism (dismissing half the claims out of hand), from ~500,000 remaining testimonies per year it would remain essentially certain that some 15,000-20,000 are neither deception nor errors. Logically speaking.

Obviously, further evidence might compel us to believe otherwise.
But I have not yet seen such evidence.

[Furrowed Brow]

The premise we are working with is that we have zero information as to truth or non-truth. If we take into consideration where the note was found and how it was delivered, we are already in possession of some information. I am saying, and saying correctly, that if we have absolutely no information then we cannot favour false over true.

If we have no empirical evidence what does the a priori say?

Your example introduces a triple possibility only because you are considering attendant circumstances and so you are departing from the premise of no information.

Here we differ. The idea that an author is just added information is wrong. A statement that can be true or false is a proposition and a proposition is a language artefact. Moreover they are a very specific conception of how language works. It is clear we cannot have a statement without an author versed in the language in which the statement is generated. Thus the concept of statement and author are coupled together, as one presupposes the other. And therefore recognising there is an author is not adding new information to our basic presuppositions.

My point is that the triple possibilities are implicit to the concept of an author. If we remove the possibility the author is lying or is in error then we remove the author entire. If we do that a collection of marks on a paper or a series of sounds lack an author in which case a sentence is not formed and if a sentenced is not formed a proposition is not formed, and then those marks or sounds cannot be true or false. In short the possibility of true or false depend on the present of an author and an author is not present unless the possibilities of lie or error are also present.

True, it is easier and often more practical to just go straight to is true or false but this binary conclusion is reached by a short cut that ignores the full conceptual framework.

I'd say the agnostic is simplifying without acknowledging all the presumptions they rely on to assume something is true or false. Which is fine but it would be misleading to insist that binary true/false logic is fundamental and comes before questions of lying and error.

[Mithrae]

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.

Let me go there too, if God exist, then he is material. I use materialism and naturalism interchangeably.

...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.

I am going further than that, if it was the case that there is a God healing these people with divine intervention, then that too would be fine and fits into materialism.

Like I said earlier, extreme but consistent But if there were 'god/s' - that is, consciousness/es underpinning all reality - wouldn't idealism be a better term? For the word 'materialism' to have any meaning at all (distinct from simple 'monism' or other monist views like idealism), it has to exclude consciousness as a ubiquitous aspect of reality. If your views do not necessarily exclude it, maybe it would be more precise and less confusing to simply describe your views as monism?

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.

And the lack of empirical evidence doesn't bother you at all?

It's always better to have empirical evidence than not. But not everything in life is certain, and some things are considerably more uncertain than others. Stuff from a sensationalist newspaper targeting a particular demographic will be subject to much more uncertainty than stuff from a science magazine whose selling point is reliable facts (though the magazine in turn will probably be subject to less scrutiny than stuff from a peer-reviewed journal, generally, and hence have more uncertainty). Information from a source I've known for decades and have excellent reasons to trust will be subject to less uncertainty than information from a source I've known for years and have merely good reasons to trust.

Of course it would be preferable to have some kind of verification, and of course I probably wouldn't stake my hypothetical life or my fortune on even my hypothetical father's ghost testimony, but would I be justified in dismissing it out of hand? In assuming that he must be lying or deluded, that those are 90- or 70- or even 50% probabilities in spite of all my previous experience demonstrating the soundness of both his ethics and his mind? No, that would be irrational. If there are good reasons to conclude the reliability of the source/s, the unexpectedness of the claim might introduce some additional doubt, but all else equal hardly proves it to be false!

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.

There are lots of people who have had experience of God, yet I see you label yourself non-religious. Is that not inconsistent?

Observational experience? Our bible-quoting friends would tell us that no-one has ever seen God. As far as I'm aware in most cases this is not really the same question as observational testimony, and straight off the bat is subject to a much greater probability of mistaking common emotional or psychological states for a 'spiritual' experience (even assuming there is such a possibility as a real spiritual experience to begin with). Furthermore such alleged experiences are difficult if not impossible to even communicate clearly and coherently. Within that limitation, it should also be noted that similar types of experiences have been had by avowed atheists and sceptics as well as the deeply religious. Ultimately I don't particularly know what to make of them.

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)...

That's the thing, they have observed things that should not be visible beyond the horizon; they have observed things disappearing bottom up on a perfectly flat surface; they have observed the horizon remaining level no matter how high they go; they have observed the lack of any drop when they aim a laser across a large body of water.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here; are these genuine observations alternately implying a flat earth and a round one? I'm not familiar with the laser trick if so. But if so, that's a good example of apparent conflict between these testimonial evidences and the further empirical evidence proving the roundness of the earth (one of the few instances in which I can say I've personally verified it; it's even on my resume ).

But would you say that any of those testimonies are disproven or invalidated by further empirical evidence proving the roundness of the earth? I would not: Given sufficient credibility of the 'testimonial evidence,' it is not automatically trumped by empirical evidence - instead in many if not most cases, the two are somehow reconciled and both are found to be valid data, even if newly-interpreted.

[Mithrae]

If an average of ~500,000 Americans per year (or their doctors) provide potentially-plausible testimony (ie. we've already dismissed half of them out of hand) about miraculous healing, and by default we then suppose a 67% probability that any given testimonium is false or erroneous... then our default conclusion would be that there certainly have been many miraculous healings.

Literally, with a 67% chance that each is false or erroneous, by the time you've encountered the first 30 testimonies it's a 99.9994% chance that at least one is true, from a position of ignorance. So after a very high standard of initial scepticism (dismissing half the claims out of hand), from ~500,000 remaining testimonies per year it would remain essentially certain that some 15,000-20,000 are neither deception nor errors. Logically speaking.

Obviously, further evidence might compel us to believe otherwise.
But I have not yet seen such evidence.

To expand on my own thoughts again, it's been my opinion/conclusion for some time that there are two 'levels' on which we must consider collective testimony:
- Variables/uncertainties which affect an entire group alike and
- Variables/uncertainties which vary individually

A 'supernatural' example of the former would be the supposed 'miracle of the sun' at Fatima, which involved factors like the heightened anticipation and religious fervour at the time, the disorienting/perception-altering effects of staring at the sun, and the impossibility of collecting all alleged 30,000+ 'corroborating' testimonies (and divergences in detail between many which were collected. These variables all apply more or less equally to all alleged witnesses as a group, so if they introduce say a 60% possibility of alternative explanation/s, that would limit the possibility of a 'miracle' to 40% overall. A secular example of the former would be, say, testimonies in North Korea about the virtues and wonderful leadership of Kim Jong Il. Again, the cultural circumstances are of a kind which would cast doubt on all such testimonies as a group.

A secular example of the latter is the obvious possibility that any given person - say, in the field of climate science - is motivated by concerns other than truth and honesty, that they are deliberately providing misleading information in exchange for personal gain of some kind. The possibility of deliberate deception is rarely (if ever) something which can be considered a variable affecting a whole group. So while it is a non-zero possibility in all cases, it must be considered in each case individually. A 'supernatural' example of the latter is the specific possibilities of pareidolia or self-delusion in such reports: Again, a non-zero possibility in all cases, but it it would be invalid to suppose that just because Jack is very prone to misperception, Jill must be equally prone.

What I tried to do in post #78 was to deal with the first point of generalized uncertainty. To estimate a collective, one-size-fits-all probability of lies, hoax, self-delusion etc.; to quantify the cultural and innate biological/psychological tendencies which all members in a given society (the US in this case) can be reasonably expected to share. For my two cents alien beliefs & encounters seems to be the best point of comparison for establishing that baseline, though if anyone else has any better point of comparison that would be super. I then extended that much, much further (from 1/15th of miracle reports all the way up to 1/2 of them) simply based on the assumptions that many of those reports would be single-witness examples and/or associated with hysteria-conducive circumstances: Which was somewhat arbitrary and unjustified, but better than ignoring those possibilities entirely, and certainly much better than simply dismissing all reports out of hand.

Then, we're left with the uncertainties inherent to individual reports, as above. I'm not sure that Furrowed Brow's 67% "default" estimate is valid - I'd be inclined to suspect that it's considerably lower - but considering both how widely and thoroughly confirmed the occurrences of 'miracles' actually are, in the end it makes little difference. They have been reported not only in the United States or in mostly-Christian countries, but in all regions of the world in all periods of human history.

As far as I can tell, there is simply no logical basis and no evidentiary basis for supposing that miracles do not occur; they almost certainly do.

[Bust Nak]

Like I said earlier, extreme but consistent But if there were 'god/s' - that is, consciousness/es underpinning all reality - wouldn't idealism be a better term? For the word 'materialism' to have any meaning at all (distinct from simple 'monism' or other monist views like idealism), it has to exclude consciousness as a ubiquitous aspect of reality. If your views do not necessarily exclude it, maybe it would be more precise and less confusing to simply describe your views as monism?

That would depend on the nature of said god/s should they exists. Right now materialism describe my views accurately.

It's always better to have empirical evidence than not. But not everything in life is certain, and some things are considerably more uncertain than others. Stuff from a sensationalist newspaper targeting a particular demographic will be subject to much more uncertainty than stuff from a science magazine whose selling point is reliable facts (though the magazine in turn will probably be subject to less scrutiny than stuff from a peer-reviewed journal, generally, and hence have more uncertainty). Information from a source I've known for decades and have excellent reasons to trust will be subject to less uncertainty than information from a source I've known for years and have merely good reasons to trust.

Of course it would be preferable to have some kind of verification, and of course I probably wouldn't stake my hypothetical life or my fortune on even my hypothetical father's ghost testimony, but would I be justified in dismissing it out of hand? In assuming that he must be lying or deluded, that those are 90- or 70- or even 50% probabilities in spite of all my previous experience demonstrating the soundness of both his ethics and his mind? No, that would be irrational. If there are good reasons to conclude the reliability of the source/s, the unexpectedness of the claim might introduce some additional doubt, but all else equal hardly proves it to be false!

I am still surprise at the unwillingness to just dismiss claims and assume lying or delusion.

Observational experience? Our bible-quoting friends would tell us that no-one has ever seen God. As far as I'm aware in most cases this is not really the same question as observational testimony, and straight off the bat is subject to a much greater probability of mistaking common emotional or psychological states for a 'spiritual' experience (even assuming there is such a possibility as a real spiritual experience to begin with). Furthermore such alleged experiences are difficult if not impossible to even communicate clearly and coherently. Within that limitation, it should also be noted that similar types of experiences have been had by avowed atheists and sceptics as well as the deeply religious. Ultimately I don't particularly know what to make of them.

Okay, I have nothing to add here.

I'm not sure what you're getting at here; are these genuine observations alternately implying a flat earth and a round one?

The green bits are alleged observations that supports a flat Earth. The blue bit is an alleged observation that supposedly debunk the usual go to evidence for a round Earth. We tell them things disappearing bottom up can only mean one thing, they are disappearing behind the horizon, they argued otherwise because supposedly things on a perfectly flat surface also disappear bottom first as the distance between the object and the viewer increases. These observations are genuine in the sense that they truly believe they saw it, but not genuine in the sense that the observations can stand up to any scrutiny.

I'm not familiar with the laser trick if so. But if so, that's a good example of apparent conflict between these testimonial evidences and the further empirical evidence proving the roundness of the earth (one of the few instances in which I can say I've personally verified it; it's even on my resume ).

But would you say that any of those testimonies are disproven or invalidated by further empirical evidence proving the roundness of the earth? I would not: Given sufficient credibility of the 'testimonial evidence,' it is not automatically trumped by empirical evidence - instead in many if not most cases, the two are somehow reconciled and both are found to be valid data, even if newly-interpreted.

They are disproven and invalidated simply because they can't back it up empirically when challenged, no matter how many of them claimed to have seen it with their own eyes.

[marco]

If we have no empirical evidence what does the a priori say?

The a priori position is one of total ignorance, so we are unable to place one outcome as more likely than the other. I can't see what you're arguing about here.

My point is that the triple possibilities are implicit to the concept of an author. If we remove the possibility the author is lying or is in error then we remove the author entire.

The statement is either true or false. You are examining motivation and intention. It makes no difference why a statement is false or why it might be true. If you want to examine authorial integrity, you are no longer in a situation of ignorance. Subdividing the false category and then arbitrarily assigning to your choices equal probabilities to all three is completely unjustified. If you want, you can divide the 50% probability into two categories, though why you'd want to I cannot fathom.

True, it is easier and often more practical to just go straight to is true or false but this binary conclusion is reached by a short cut that ignores the full conceptual framework.

It doesn't ignore anything but it does take account of the situation of no information. We do have a binary position; your additions provide a subset of possibilities for the statement being false.

I'd say the agnostic is simplifying without acknowledging all the presumptions they rely on to assume something is true or false. Which is fine but it would be misleading to insist that binary true/false logic is fundamental and comes before questions of lying and error.

I would say you are trying to extract a non-zero from a zero. Complexity arises when we have further information. You painted a scenario where we do have extra information but you're examining it as if we are in total ignorance.

Anyway, simple or not, the binary situation applies where we are concerned with a statement being true or false.

[Divine Insight]

Anyway, simple or not, the binary situation applies where we are concerned with a statement being true or false.

I see a potential problem with the above statement. This line of thinking appears to be viewing a given statement in a complete vacuum. In other words, from a purely philosophical perspective, given a statement in isolation where we have no other knowledge, then what you say above is clearly true because we have no additional information to consider.

However, this is not the case in the real world. Usually when we are giving a statement it can be evaluated based on many other things that we already know about the world in which we live. And because of this, the "binary" situation of a statement being true or false no longer applies.

We now have many other things to consider.

Especially if we are sticking to the topic of this thread, the OP, and the original quote by G.K. Chesterton that is supposed to be the subject of this debate thread.

G.K. Chesterton is talking about Christian beliefs and Christian "testimonies" being considered as "evidence". With that additional knowledge and the a very long history of Christian theists making all manner of provably false claims, suddenly a claim of having a miraculous experience coming from a Christian is far from having a potentially binary truth value. It's far more likely to be false. Even if nothing more than a sincere belief on the part of the Christian that is simply mistaken.

For one thing, we already know that Christians attribute "miracles" to everyday events.

A horrible auto crash occurs where 6 people were in the car. Five of them die and one walks away without a scratch. "It's a miracle!", the Christian proclaims.

Sorry, but that's hardly evidence for a miracle.

By the way, have you ever noticed that if the sole survivor of the crash is the Christian's young daughter then "It's a miracle!"

But if the young daughter had died in the accident, and a nasty man who was trying to abduct her had survived, then it's not a miracle at all. It's just dumb luck that the SOB managed to survive the accident.

[Furrowed Brow]

But for the sake of argument let's assume that position of ignorance is a valid concept to apply in the case of communication: Is it correct to suppose that there are three logical options? Since first encountering C. S. Lewis' trilemma I have generally supposed so. But really, aren't the logical options
intentionally false (deception)
unintentionally false (error)
intentionally true
unintentionally true (coincidence)?

Good point. You are paying attention. I like the way you think.

I left out the fourth option because in the end whilst it adds a wrinkle I don't think it makes a significant difference to the basic argument. In natural language there is likely a good reason why the ideas of lying and error are natural concepts easy to grasp whilst the idea of a witness making a claim that was coincidentally true looks odd if not spurious.

Let's assume Joe just guessed and does not know Moe and has no idea whether Metallica were playing a concert last night. Joe's note could then well be false, but what are the chances he got a lucky hit. Coincidences by definition carry with them a smaller probability. So: there is a greater probability of a lie than a coincidence, there is greater probability of an error than a coincidence, and there is a greater probability of a deliberate truth than a coincidence. Whilst there are now four option to consider one option by definition is of less value than each of the other three options.

These numbers convey the basic asymmetry. From a position of ignorance we start with the probabilities: Deliberately true (1/n), Lie (1/n), Error (1/n), Coincidently true (1/m, where 1/m is always less than 1/n), and then: 1/n + 1/n +1/n +1/m = 1.

Naturally, we would then rightly suppose that in most cases coincidence is actually much less than a 25% possibility,

Compare the possibility of an error to coincidence. Given the number of things that can go wrong of which only one thing is needed to go wrong for there to be an an error compared to the number of things that must go right for a coincidence. In the probability model coincidence sits on top of the sombrero hat of improbabilities and an error is found at the bottom.

Again for the sake of argument, let's ignore what I've suggested above; a) the difficulty of supposing a position of ignorance in the case of communication and b) the fact that even introducing intentions would still leave us with a 50/50 of logical options from that position of ignorance.

Part a) is not so difficult it really amounts to asking what are our a priori preconception before we start any enquiry. I have given an account across the last few posts as to why a proposition depends on the presence of an author. We can ignore the author but that does not mean they are not there.

Intentions is a bit of a red herring. To give all four possibility a priori equal probability is to ignore the definition of coincidence.

Then let's go back to my first two posts in the thread:

• Post #10:
  - Any single source of information has a non-zero possibility of being incorrect
  - Multiple converging sources have a much smaller possibility of all being incorrect
  - Information can be considered reliable relative to the breadth and unanimity of the sources confirming it

This analysis follows on after any a priori presuppositions. My basic argument is that scepticism is a priori before looking at the evidence.

But now here there is room to question your analysis. Let's first talk about something more mundane and consider a lottery.

Lottery winners have to prove a win. We don't take their word. The ticket is the source of the winning not the words of the eventual winner. I think your analysis glosses over this distinction. Try demanding winnings from the lottery without proof of winner. Let's say Moe looses his ticket and can't identify the store where the winning ticket was purchased but feels sure he had the ticket with the winning numbers. Hmm. I'm sorry Moe but . So what if a larger group of people claim they won the lottery and none have a winning ticket. In this instance do multiple converging sources really have a much smaller possibility of all being incorrect? Really? This is clearly a bunch of chancer and maybe people in genuine error. So the larger this group the greater the demonstration of human fallibility. An increasing group that prove fallibility does not increase the probability of the real winner who lost his ticket coming forward. In this instance the size of the data set is a red herring and its size is to be ignored because this self selective group is dominated by people who are certainly in error. And so in this instant breadth and unanimity of the sources is meaningless.

Here is a different line of thought - the probability of someone winning the lottery is 1/n. If there are x tickets sold we find the sum of all this probabilities and the solution to x over n i.e. we find the value of x/n. The answer gives the probability of a winner this week instead of a roll over.

Any single source of information has a non-zero possibility of being incorrect

Ok this means every source could be a wrong claim. That is like saying any lottery ticket could be a loser. But if convergence means a rising probability something else occurs. A series of summed probabilities that increase the probability of a winner is like saying every ticket could be a winner I.E

[center]1/n + 1/n + 1/n +1/n + ... = x/n, and x/n is greater than 1/n.[/center]
If saying any ticket can lose is the same as saying any ticket can win this mean the probability of a miracle is bound to increase the larger the data set if and only if there are no tickets that can never win. With that restriction the math can never generate the zero answer. That is like saying the possibility of every ticket never winning is not considered. In other words the calculation ignores the question - what if there is no God?. This is like considering the possibility that there is never going to be a lottery draw and someone is defrauding everyone who buys a ticket. Not sure how we build that possibility into the calculation. But this is exactly the wrinkle the calculation does not permit. Unable to produce a zero result the calculation fails to be unbiased. Applied to miracles it already presumes strong atheism must be false but it does not presume theism is false. Hardly objective.