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?

[Divine Insight]

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

I disagree with the thesis you presented in the OP. This is because the author of that thesis seems to be allowing for the testimony of "miracles" to be held up as "evidence" that a miracle had actually occurred.

That therein lies the problem.

I'm 68 years old. I haven't heard a compelling anecdote of a miracle in my entire life. And especially not one for which there was any evidence beyond hearsay testimony.

What many people tend to call a "miracle" I would simply call a coincidence. There's just no reason to call it a miracle.

I have never seen any genuine evidence for any actual "miracle". Therefore I do not dismiss miracles base on any dogma. In fact, I personally not even a "Materialist". I am agnostic. I have no clue what's going on. There could be a mystical magical essence to reality. I just haven't seen any evidence for that. And hearsay testimonies is NOT evidence.

I think even people like Richard Dawkins as explained a similar view. Although Dawkins probably embraces a belief in pure materialism more so than I do.

In my case, I'm open to the possibility of the "supernatural". Because after all, science has not, and cannot rule that out.

But just because the supernatural cannot be ruled out doesn't make every testimony of a miracle true.

Just think of how many people have given testimony to all manner of unrealistic things. From having been abducted by aliens to having personally seen Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster, etc.

And not only this, but when it comes to religions we'd need to accept that there is then evidence for just about every God and Goddess anyone has ever believed in. Because there are "testimonies" for the existence all of them. Including people who claim to have not only seen fairies but have conversed with them on a regular basis!

I mean, if you're going to allow that personal testimony = evidence, then you're going to need to believe in a whole lot of things from boogiemen to every God and Goddess imaginable.

Personal testimony that cannot be verified cannot be embraced as "evidence" for anything more than the fact that someone either had some sort of experience, or is at least claiming to have had an experience. I mean, we can't even be sure they aren't making the whole thing up.

I've known religious people who will clearly say anything to try to convince other people of their God. Sometimes the fallacy of their claims is so blatantly obvious it's embarrassing. Or at least it should be for them.

[liamconnor]

[Replying to post 2 by Divine Insight]

I disagree with the thesis you presented in the OP. This is because the author of that thesis seems to be allowing for the testimony of "miracles" to be held up as "evidence" that a miracle had actually occurred.....I'm 68 years old. I haven't heard a compelling anecdote of a miracle in my entire life. And especially not one for which there was any evidence beyond hearsay testimony.

Note the underlined word...

Two cases:

1) A man is found dead; two of Chesterton's 'peasants' testify to have seen the murder and both identify him in a line-up. Is this 'hearsay'? Evidence?

2) Two years later, a corpse is buried in a modern tomb; later it is found empty, and soon after those same two peasants claim to have had an encounter with the deceased involving all the senses, visual, auditory, and tactile. Is this 'hearsay'? Evidence?

Now of course we could go back and forth tightening up the two cases with details: i.e., did the peasants have a grudge against the accused? Did the peasants suffer a cognitive dissonance?

But let's focus on the obvious point: in both cases we have claimed eyewitness testimony. Is the testimony stronger in the first case?

[Divine Insight]

And especially not one for which there was any evidence beyond hearsay testimony.

Note the underlined word...

Two cases:

1) A man is found dead; two of Chesterton's 'peasants' testify to have seen the murder and both identify him in a line-up. Is this 'hearsay'? Evidence?

2) Two years later, a corpse is buried in a modern tomb; later it is found empty, and soon after those same two peasants claim to have had an encounter with the deceased involving all the senses, visual, auditory, and tactile. Is this 'hearsay'? Evidence?

Now of course we could go back and forth tightening up the two cases with details: i.e., did the peasants have a grudge against the accused? Did the peasants suffer a cognitive dissonance?[/quote]

Ok, no problem. Toss out the word "hearsay" it's totally unnecessary. That work really does imply a repeating of something someone heard from someone else. And that's not really what I meant. I actually meant to use the word "unreliable".

So replace "hearsay" with "unreliable" and please accept my apologies for having chosen the wrong word to begin with.

But let's focus on the obvious point: in both cases we have claimed eyewitness testimony. Is the testimony stronger in the first case?

No.

In fact, you have even brought up the case of eyewitnesses picking someone out of a line-up. We already know for certain that this is an unreliable method of determining guilt. It might put us on the right track. But it can also be wrong.

There have been people who have been found guilty of crimes precisely because there were eyewitnesses who believed that they saw this person either committing the crime or near the crime scene.

However, DNA evidence has revealed that often times those eyewitnesses had actually been wrong. Possibly even outright lying. And this lead to an innocent person being sent to jail for many years.

So no, eyewitness testimony is definitely not credible 'evidence'. And demonstrably so.

And besides you seem to have totally ignored this:

Just think of how many people have given testimony to all manner of unrealistic things. From having been abducted by aliens to having personally seen Big Foot or the Loch Ness Monster, etc.

And not only this, but when it comes to religions we'd need to accept that there is then evidence for just about every God and Goddess anyone has ever believed in. Because there are "testimonies" for the existence all of them. Including people who claim to have not only seen fairies but have conversed with them on a regular basis!

If you are going to accept eyewitness testimony as credible evidence, then you are going to need to start believing in every God imaginable, plus all manner of other things from the boogieman to fairies, etc.

If that's your argument so be it. Surely you can see how such an argument isn't going to single out any particular religion or belief as being favored?

[liamconnor]

[Replying to post 4 by Divine Insight]


I do not think you have understood Chesterton's point. I shall put it another way.

Ten unrelated people witness a murder; their descriptions corroborate; no one disputes it.

The same ten unrelated people say a man levitated in a small gas-station--the store attendant confirms this. All their descriptions corroborate; no one disputes it.

The question is, are testimonies regarding a murder AUTOMATICALLY thrown out? Are testimonies regarding levitiation AUTOMATICALLY thrown out?

[Divine Insight]

The question is, are testimonies regarding a murder AUTOMATICALLY thrown out? Are testimonies regarding levitiation AUTOMATICALLY thrown out?

There's nothing AUTOMATIC about it.

It has to do with reality. Period.

Murders are a common occurrence. Not only are they common but they are expected. In terms of real life you could even say they are "mundane".

So testimonies concerning witnesses to a murder are far more believable.

Moreover, even in the case of a murder isn't there usually a requirement to see the dead body?

If there's a dead body involved then claims that the body was murdered seem REASONABLE. Not AUTOMATIC.

In the case of a man who supposedly levitated the claim is EXTRAORDINARY.

Where is this man now? If a man can levitate how about having him step forward and demonstrate this feat so we can all see it? Also, don't magicians perform levitation illusions? Perhaps the man was an illusionist???

Finally, if no murder was committed and the claim is simply that some man APPEARED to have levitated why should anyone care?

So an amateur illusionist found a gullible audience. Nothing to write home about.

What are you going to do with this "testimony"?

Are you going to accept that this guy actually levitated?

Why would you do that? There are tons of rational explanations for how such a trick could have been performed. And you didn't even see the trick yourself.

So surely you're not going to accept this unreliable eyewitness account as concrete evidence that levitation is possible?

How can you even be sure that the man wasn't using some sort of technology?

Maybe if you had been there you would have seen the 'trick'.

~~~~~~

Here's an eyewitness testimony for you:

I once worked with a woman who came to work one day and said that she believed to be the cause of a power failure the night before. I asked her what she had done that she thought she was the cause of the power failure. Strangely enough all she was doing was playing with the dial on her stereo receiver. She was searching for a good station when the power when out and felt as though her actions caused the power failure.

I realize this is ridiculous. But she was serious!!!

So this just goes to show how people can easily come to believe that something they had experienced was far more than it actually was.

Just because she was fiddling with the frequency dial on her radio at the time of the power outage she thought she had caused it.

It's amazing what some people can imagine.

[Mithrae]

It has to do with reality. Period.

Murders are a common occurrence. Not only are they common but they are expected. In terms of real life you could even say they are "mundane".

So testimonies concerning witnesses to a murder are far more believable.

The homicide rate in the USA is around 5 per 100,000 people per year. That's around 1 homicide for every 20,000 people per year, or in a given lifetime (80 years), around one per 250 people. From my experience, I get the impression that the numbers of people who claim to have personally experienced something 'supernatural' are probably more like one per five or ten people.

That's obviously a very rough guess, and presumably that figure would vary between different demographics and by 'type' of event: 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."

Of course we should allow for the relatively high religiousity of America (and to a much lesser extent my own country), but even shortly after the collapse of the staunchly atheist Soviet Union, an average of 15% of people in Russia and East Germany believed in miracles (a greater percentage than believed in God or the Bible). That's around one in seven, and if we were to extrapolate from the ratios in the US it could imply some one in twenty or so claiming to have experienced a miracle, even in those countries (again, this compares to a lifetime murder rate of around one in two-hundred and fifty in the USA). It seems clear that reported experience of the 'miraculous' is far, far more common than homicide.

[Bust Nak]

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 believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them.

But they also reject the same kind of evidence for miracles of other religion / even different sects of the same religion. This is a double standard.

The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them.

If the insistence for logical consistence, rationality and skepticism are dogmas then so be it.

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.

But I don't believe an old apple-woman's testimony to a murder, when there is no empirical evidence of 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.

Right, but you are asking me to trust peasant A's word more than the landlord's word. That kind of bias does not come natural to me.

Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both.

So would the landlord, so why believe one over the other?

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.

Which is why I am calling you out for double standard when you believe in some supernatural but not others.

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...

This doesn't hold because I trust the peasant and the land lord equally.

or you affirm the main principle of materialism-- the abstract impossibility of miracle...

That doesn't hold because if there are indeed ghosts, then it follows that ghosts are material and fits into materialism just fine.

Let me suggest a third alternative - I reject the peasant's story about the ghost because he has no empirical evidence of ghosts.

[Divine Insight]

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 believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them.

But they also reject the same kind of evidence for miracles of other religion / even different sects of the same religion. This is a double standard.

Exactly. This kind of approach to support a religion is the epitome of hypocrisy.

If they want to claim that merely believing in a miracle or supernatural event is "evidence" for the event then they need to give equal credibility to all religions.

And not just religions beliefs, but they would need to give the same credibility for all manner of experiences people believed they have had. The boogieman, fairies, ghosts, demons, extraterrestrials, Big Foot, the Lock Ness Monster. Etc, etc, etc.

These kinds of arguments aren't going to do anything to help support any specific theology.

[Mithrae]

[Replying to post 8 by Bust Nak]

Have you personally seen empirical evidence that atoms consist of protons etc, that black holes exist, that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, that Everest is the tallest mountain and that your biological grandparents were who you thought?

Or in the case of 90+% of the things you believe to be true, do you accept the testimony of other people and the reliability of the information and images they convey?

The way I reason it is as follows:
- For most of my knowledge, I depend on other sources of information
- 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

While there are more nuances to it than that, broadly speaking I simply don't see any other rational, coherent justification for the way we function and accumulate knowledge (particularly in the 21st century). If you or anyone else can think of something, I'm all ears.

But otherwise, it is a conclusion of that epistemic approach that reported observations of phenomena which are confirmed by multiple, independent sources must be considered seriously rather than simply dismissing 'testimony' in favour of an arbitrary criteria of empirical evidence which we don't apply to any other knowledge we acquire. Which maybe means that we shouldn't profess to "know" that alien abductions don't occur. It means that maybe some of our certainty about the world and our place in it should be dialed back a notch.

It does not mean that we have to be credulous fools who believe in goblins and fairies on the presumption that a dozen people have claimed to see them: But where the available evidence is really quite compelling (eg. the medically-unexplained rapid cures of serious illnesses thoroughly documented at Lourdes) we should recognize that there's a fairly high probability that some or many of these are genuine 'miracles' even if that doesn't sit too easily with an existing metaphysical perspective.