Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

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Paul of Tarsus
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Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

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Post by Paul of Tarsus »

I've watched the Ehrman vs Craig: Evidence for Resurrection debate video on YouTube several times, and as usual I am less than impressed with the polemics of Bart Ehrman. This time his fallacy involves the historicity of miracles and in particular the miracle of Christ's resurrection. His reasoning goes something like the following:

1. Miracles are the least likely correct explanation for any supposed historical event.
2. The story of the resurrection of Christ is a narrative of an event that if true requires a miraculous explanation.
Conclusion: Any naturalistic explanation of the story of Christ's being raised from the dead is more likely correct than an explanation that allows for the supernatural.

Is it true that miracles are so unlikely that any non-supernatural explanation for a claimed event is more likely true? I'm not sure why Ehrman seems to think miracles are so unlikely. While it's true that miracles are evidently rare, how probable they may be depends on the evidence for them. Ehrman seems to maintain a naturalistic view of miracles based more on an atheistic assumption than on any kind of evidence for them. That's not good reasoning.

I'd like to conclude this OP by pointing out that since I've been debating atheists, I can see that their reasoning is often as bad if not worse than the arguments made by apologists. It seems to me that there would be more atheists in the world if people stopped trying to disprove God.


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Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #91

Post by AgnosticBoy »

nobspeople wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 6:45 am
AgnosticBoy wrote: Tue Mar 02, 2021 9:22 pm It would be ideal if the criteria for a supernatural explanation was one that ensured that it wasn't some unexplained natural event, but if that were the standard, then we could never label something supernatural.
To me, the supernatural is something that happens(ed) that we don't fully understand, nothing more. So, in that sense, that doesn't change what's labeled SN or not to me.
I take it then that you don't believe that the supernatural exist.
nobspeople wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 6:45 am
AgnosticBoy wrote: Tue Mar 02, 2021 9:22 pmI think we need to scale our standards and expectations down to what's reasonable and practical...
I don't think we should scale down anything or we stop learning. Everyone should be skeptic of every 'miracle' like thing and work from there. IMO of course.
When I mentioned scaling down our standards, I'm referring to not expecting to have absolute certainty. Some of the standards for supernatural that's being thrown around here seem to expect that level of certainty but that isn't even available in science. All fields dealing with knowledge acquisition have scaled down standards in the sense that they don't ensure absolute certainty, and they still progress in our understanding about the world.

If anything, there are levels or standards of skepticism that say even knowledge is impossible, and having your skepticism that high would also stop learning. We must scale our skepticism to a level that's practical to learn about the phenomenon or events that we want to know about. For instance, if my standard for accepting some history as fact was that it had to have some empirical or testable information, then that would rule out a lot of history, and make it impractical.

All skeptics should consider how their standard is practical given the event or phenomenon that they're inquiring about.
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Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #92

Post by Mithrae »

bluegreenearth wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 8:56 pm [Replying to Mithrae in post #90]

I had edited my previous post to include the content below, but you had already begun responding to the original post:

If you observed an unidentified flying object (UFO), there are numerous things you could imagine that object might be. Of the list of things you are imagining that the UFO could be, which of those candidates have already been demonstrated to exist outside your imagination and which have not yet been demonstrated to exist outside your imagination?
You're still trying to create a dichotomy where none exists. If we speculate that I somehow misidentified a commercial airplane, obviously those have been 'demonstrated to exist' with ~100% confidence. If we speculate that it's some high-tech classified government spy craft, depending on the circumstance and its behaviour such a thing might have anywhere from 5 to 99% plausibility of existing. Strictly speaking, this secret government spy craft has not been "demonstrated to exist," right? An alien craft even less so, perhaps somewhere in the range of 1-40% (perhaps more for some folk depending on the confidence they place in alleged observations of their existence); but if what I'm seeing is the size of a skyscraper, not aerodynamically shaped, no visible means of propulsion but is zooming up and down and back and forth and shooting laser beams around the place... maybe it is not a natural or human phenomenon despite the low prior confidence in the existence of alien spacecraft.

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Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #93

Post by bluegreenearth »

Mithrae wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 11:45 pm You're still trying to create a dichotomy where none exists. If we speculate that I somehow misidentified a commercial airplane, obviously those have been 'demonstrated to exist' with ~100% confidence. If we speculate that it's some high-tech classified government spy craft, depending on the circumstance and its behaviour such a thing might have anywhere from 5 to 99% plausibility of existing. Strictly speaking, this secret government spy craft has not been "demonstrated to exist," right? An alien craft even less so, perhaps somewhere in the range of 1-40% (perhaps more for some folk depending on the confidence they place in alleged observations of their existence); but if what I'm seeing is the size of a skyscraper, not aerodynamically shaped, no visible means of propulsion but is zooming up and down and back and forth and shooting laser beams around the place... maybe it is not a natural or human phenomenon despite the low prior confidence in the existence of alien spacecraft.
Clarification: For this thought experiment, the UFO is not the size of a skyscraper or shooting laser beams.

The commercial airplane you imagined as the possible explanation for the UFO has been previously demonstrated to exist outside your imagination. You know that high-tech classified government spy crafts also exist outside your imagination because several of them have been declassified over the past few decades. Therefore, you can know that commercial airplanes and high-tech spy craft are possible explanations for the UFO. Because they are possible, you can also proceed to abductively infer their respective probability of being the explanation for the UFO. Even though you know commercial airplanes exist outside your imagination with 100% confidence, you can only be less than 100% confident that a commercial airplane is the explanation for the UFO because it is unidentifiable from your current perspective on the ground. Similarly, even though you know high-tech spy craft exist outside your imagination with 100% confidence, you are slightly less confident in the spy craft explanation than you are in the airplane explanation. So, whether airplanes and spy crafts exist outside of your imagination is a true dichotomy but your level of confidence in them as explanations for the UFO is not.

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Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #94

Post by nobspeople »

[Replying to AgnosticBoy in post #92]
I take it then that you don't believe that the supernatural exist.
I've had experiences that point to the supernatural. I don't believe the supernatural is something 'magical' just simply unknown and unexplained.
When I mentioned scaling down our standards, I'm referring to not expecting to have absolute certainty.
Ah ok. Thanks for that clarification and apologies if I misunderstood originally.
All skeptics should consider how their standard is practical given the event or phenomenon that they're inquiring about.
I think that's a good point. Sometimes people are skeptical "just 'cause" or that they don't want to believe. Which, I suppose, is fine for them. But that's not how I personally operate.
Have a great, potentially godless, day!

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Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #95

Post by Mithrae »

bluegreenearth wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 8:49 am
Mithrae wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 11:45 pm You're still trying to create a dichotomy where none exists. If we speculate that I somehow misidentified a commercial airplane, obviously those have been 'demonstrated to exist' with ~100% confidence. If we speculate that it's some high-tech classified government spy craft, depending on the circumstance and its behaviour such a thing might have anywhere from 5 to 99% plausibility of existing. Strictly speaking, this secret government spy craft has not been "demonstrated to exist," right? An alien craft even less so, perhaps somewhere in the range of 1-40% (perhaps more for some folk depending on the confidence they place in alleged observations of their existence); but if what I'm seeing is the size of a skyscraper, not aerodynamically shaped, no visible means of propulsion but is zooming up and down and back and forth and shooting laser beams around the place... maybe it is not a natural or human phenomenon despite the low prior confidence in the existence of alien spacecraft.
Clarification: For this thought experiment, the UFO is not the size of a skyscraper or shooting laser beams.
Of course, you need an example which is readily explained as a human or 'natural' phenomenon; otherwise it stops making the point you want to make about arbitrarily excluding certain explanations on the basis of low prior confidence in their occurrence.

I don't think you ever did answer my question about the people convinced they're in contact with aliens, who beam messages into space requesting a kilogram of gold to be materialized at their location, and in some cases a kilogram of gold is indeed materialized before them, with independent observers confirming that there was no human trickery involved. Pending further information the leading and obvious explanation is that the aliens answered some of the requests; it would be absurd to claim that it is not the current leading explanation, wouldn't it?
bluegreenearth wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 8:49 am The commercial airplane you imagined as the possible explanation for the UFO has been previously demonstrated to exist outside your imagination. You know that high-tech classified government spy crafts also exist outside your imagination because several of them have been declassified over the past few decades. Therefore, you can know that commercial airplanes and high-tech spy craft are possible explanations for the UFO. Because they are possible, you can also proceed to abductively infer their respective probability of being the explanation for the UFO. Even though you know commercial airplanes exist outside your imagination with 100% confidence, you can only be less than 100% confident that a commercial airplane is the explanation for the UFO because it is unidentifiable from your current perspective on the ground. Similarly, even though you know high-tech spy craft exist outside your imagination with 100% confidence, you are slightly less confident in the spy craft explanation than you are in the airplane explanation.
I don't know that this spy craft or one compatible with these observations exists. That is at best an educated guess, more likely wild speculation.
bluegreenearth wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 8:49 am So, whether airplanes and spy crafts exist outside of your imagination is a true dichotomy but your level of confidence in them as explanations for the UFO is not.
The existence of alien spacecraft is a 'true dichotomy' also, but that's irrelevant since our knowledge of their existence is not a dichotomy at all; the "demonstration of their existence" is not a dichotomy unless you are specifically drawing a line at say 98% confidence. You claimed that "An imagined thing can either be demonstrated to exist outside our imaginations or it cannot" and now it seems all you're doing is trying to shift the goalposts to actual existence rather than demonstration of existence, in order to pretend that you weren't wrong.


Instead of trying to shape an example question around your predetermined conclusions, is there anything in my actual response of post #89 that you disagree with?

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Re: Atheist Bart Ehrman gets the historicity of miracles wrong.

Post #96

Post by bluegreenearth »

Mithrae wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 3:26 pm Of course, you need an example which is readily explained as a human or 'natural' phenomenon; otherwise it stops making the point you want to make about arbitrarily excluding certain explanations on the basis of low prior confidence in their occurrence.
If you want to use an example of a skyscraper sized UFO shooting lasers, that would serve as the demonstration of such a thing existing outside your imagination. Whether it was piloted by aliens or not would still need to be demonstrated for you to know they can exist outside your imagination. How would you rule-out the claim that the UFO was piloted by intelligent time travelers from the distant future rather than aliens from another world? Both of those imagined explanations would remain imaginary until one or both of them have been demonstrated to exist outside your imagination.
Mithrae wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 3:26 pm I don't think you ever did answer my question about the people convinced they're in contact with aliens, who beam messages into space requesting a kilogram of gold to be materialized at their location, and in some cases a kilogram of gold is indeed materialized before them. Pending further information the leading and obvious explanation is that the aliens answered some of the requests; it would be absurd to claim otherwise, wouldn't it?
The difference there would be the fact that you are trusting someone else's testimony instead of having your own experience of the reported events. In other words, the claim would still be just a claim and doesn't become evidence just because other people are reporting an unexplained event. For a testimony to be taken seriously, it must have an implicit empirical basis established by demonstrating the described phenomenon can exist outside your imagination. One way to accomplish that task would be if the claim makes a novel testable prediction you could test to know if it is false or not. For instance, you could place those people in a laboratory setting where all the variables are controlled, predict that a kilogram of gold will materialize upon their request to these supposed aliens, and observe if the prediction comes true or not. Without that kind of evidence, it would be more reasonable to presume those people either provided a false testimony or were genuinely mistaken in what they experienced.
Mithrae wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 3:26 pm I don't know that this spy craft or one compatible with these observations exists. That is at best an educated guess, more likely wild speculation.
I didn't dispute that point. However, you don't have to know this specific UFO sighting is explained by a spy craft to know that it is possible for it to be explained a spy craft. You seem to be conflating the probability with the possibility.
Mithrae wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 3:26 pm The existence of alien spacecraft is a 'true dichotomy' also, but that's irrelevant since our knowledge of their existence is not a dichotomy at all; the "demonstration of their existence" is not a dichotomy unless you are specifically drawing a line at say 98% confidence. You claimed that "An imagined thing can either be demonstrated to exist outside our imaginations or it cannot" and now it seems all you're doing is trying to shift the goalposts to actual existence rather than demonstration of existence, in order to pretend that you weren't wrong.
Whether an alien spacecraft can be demonstrated to exist outside your imagination or not is a true dichotomy. If the available evidence provides you with 98% confidence, then an alien spacecraft has not been demonstrated to exist outside your imagination because it is not your confidence level that determines whether something exists or not. For example, if you didn't know anything about optical illusions, you would be 99.9% confident that the following image is moving and be completely mistaken:
Image
Mithrae wrote: Thu Mar 04, 2021 3:26 pm Instead of trying to shape an example question around your predetermined conclusions, is there anything in my actual response of post #89 that you disagree with?
Mithrae wrote: Wed Mar 03, 2021 8:40 pm For example if the NY Post alone reports on a scandal in the Biden family, concluding it to be accurate will be a much weaker inference than if CNN, the BBC and NY Times all reported on the scandal (assuming for the sake of illustration that they're independent observational reports in all cases); or given the extraordinary and counter-intuitive claim that the volume of our bodies, tables, chairs and everything else is not solid at all but mostly 'empty space,' it would be much more difficult to accept if only a few fringe weirdos stated it to be so than if hundreds of experts confirmed it. The reasoning of course is what underlies the scientific process, peer review, journalism and so on: Any individual source will to greater or lesser extents be subject to biases and sources of potential error or falsehood, but the likelihood of the same individual errors afflicting two or dozens or thousands of sources becomes increasingly small.
What underlies the scientific process is the principle of falsification. By first attempting to disprove the falsifiable hypotheses they've imagined, scientists mitigate for potential sources of bias. When scientists fail to falsify their own hypotheses, they invite everyone and anyone else to try and falsify them. A primary goal in science is to demonstrate where someone else's hypothesis is false or at least inconclusive. When a hypothesis continues to survive every attempt to falsify it, it is conditionally accepted as the most reasonable explanation but never proven true. It doesn't matter how many people are convinced by the hypothesis or not. When Einstein first proposed his idea of special relativity, most of the scientific community dismissed it because there was no way for them to know if it was false or not at the time. It wasn't until Einstein's hypothesis could be tested to determine if it was false or not that other scientists began to take it more seriously. Then, when the predictions made by the hypothesis were observed to be correct, the scientific community had no choice but to accept it as describing something that must also exist outside our imagination.

People who advocate for miracles, alien abductions, and ghosts are often accused of being influenced by confirmation bias because their claims are typically unfalsifiable or they failed to try and falsify their own claims before publishing their conclusions. Instead, many advocates who believe in the "paranormal" or the "supernatural" actively try to prove their claims are true and subsequently reason themselves into believing their claims are true by collecting and evaluating evidence that seems to confirm their claims. Meanwhile, many of their claims cannot even be tested for anyone to know if they are false or not. This, of course, invites sources of bias rather than mitigates for it. Then, when such errors or limitations are pointed out to them, these advocates falsely accuse their critics of being closed-minded or dogmatic materialists. I expect nothing less from people who become personally invested in a claim they believe is true (i.e. the sunk cost fallacy). The consequence is that the more these advocates try to defend their claims, the more attached they become to those claims, and the less inclined they are to consider where they may have made reasoning errors or other mistakes.

I would happily accept paranormal or supernatural explanations if they could be sufficiently tested for me to know if they are false or not. Can you offer a method by which that outcome could be achieved for miracle claims? How could I know if it is possible for a miracle to be the cause of an event or not? For instance, if someone's cancer inexplicably goes into remission, how would I test the claim that a miracle was the cause of that event as compared to the claim that the cancer went into remission on its own?

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