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?

[Mithrae]

I'd be interested in your (and others') insight on this: Should we speak of evidence 'for' something, as if the conclusion were somehow implicit in the raw data, or is it more reasonable to say that evidence is simply the available facts and information providing context for the evaluation of hypotheses' plausibility?

Or something else entirely?

Well.... ...hmmm.....well.

I'd say the conclusion is implicit to the interpretation of the data. There are facts and the there is a conceptual framework we impose to try and fit the data.

That sounds more or less like my view.

But I think the real point about evidence is that we just need to be more forensic in our assessment of the role of a witness statement.

• Stage 1: Moe says "the cat is on the mat"

The first stage is evidence that Moe wishes us to believe the cat is on the mat. At stage 1 and before any assessment the statement is not evidence for or against whether the cat is on the mat.

• Stage 2: What Moe says is assessed for other it is in error, a lie or true.

It is only at stage 2 once the statement has been examined and assessed does the witness statement became evidence for or against the cat being on the mat. A minimal assessment will simply note the claim may be in error or a lie or true. At that stage and given a a three way choice with two false options reason dictates we proceed on the assumption the claim is false until additional examination is attempted. As to whether we can start to believe the claim might be true and then how strong or weak we find the claim will depend on further assessment. So long as that assessment does not arrive at 100% certainty and the assessment reaches the level of mathematical proof then the claim will fall into the category of evidence weak through to strong.

This sounds a lot like the reasoning I advocated in my 'position of ignorance' thread. Just you wait to be howled down by every man and his dog But in this case we're not talking about a position of ignorance with three interchangeable options: We have a lot of experience providing us with a basis for anticipating how folk usually behave, and reporting perceived truth is much simpler and much more common than making up a lie. The same goes for accurate perception compared with hallucination. Based on experience, lies and hallucination should be presumed to be a fairly small possibility, perhaps 10 or 20%, in the case of any average/random testimonial report. I'd be surprised if the percentage was even that high in our day-to-day social interactions. In some particular cases they may be a much stronger suspicion (eg. investigation of crimes, when it's already a known fact that someone won't be playing with a straight bat), but not as a general rule.

The biggest and most common source of uncertainty comes from the potential for misperception (eg. optical illusions, pareidolia) but how likely that may be as a possibility would be highly dependent on a case by case basis: A reported UFO sighting based on an "unusual bright light hovering over the horizon" could easily be Venus, while a reported sighting of a large craft descending fifty meters away would be much harder to explain as misperception.

So I don't think the presumption of falsehood is a valid approach to testimonial evidence. Instead testimony, like all other data available, simply provides the context for evaluating hypotheses' plausibility: All else being equal, it is better for a hypothesis to coherently explain the available observational reports (whether as truth, deception or error) than to ignore them. I think it was you who earlier referred to crime shows, and while I've mostly just watched a few seasons of NCIS the pattern certainly is not simply presuming the falsehood of testimonial reports. Instead even seemingly far-fetched reports are investigated seriously and sought to be explained, one way or another. Even the fact of a person lying through their teeth, if that were known to be the case, is a fact potentially relevant to the issue in question.

[Mithrae]

No, your belief that there is empirical evidence is based on testimony. You are the one seemingly equating your belief in empirical evidence with that empirical evidence itself.

Lets say I read an article in New Scientist, I see passages allegedly from a published paper, I see quotes allegedly from the authors of the paper, but I never bothered to check the paper itself. I could have been lied to, either by New Scientist or the paper, but I trust their "testimony." Do I or don't I have empirical evidence? I then read the paper, ruling out deception from new scientist, now do I or don't I have empirical evidence?

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

If we could be bothered to look we could easily find plenty of claims about empirical evidence for 'supernatural' stuff: Videos of levitation, ghosts, angels and so on; before-and-after x-rays or other medical data of miraculous healings; strange circular formations with radioactive traces 'discovered' near purported UFO landing sites... Some of that stuff, like the videos, we could probably even see for ourselves, but for most of the rest we are thoroughly assured that the empirical evidence does exist and is incontrovertible. So are those cases of overwhelming empirical evidence for the claims, or merely testimony about alleged evidence?

It's better than none, but the point was there is strong empirical evidence against, we get these levigators to perform and their fail, we have stage artists who can reproduce the same effect and so on. So these alleged evidence and testimony can be dismissed.

Unless you see it for yourself you're relying on testimony. Aren't you? So the question is simply how strong and widely-corroborated that testimonial evidence is, relative to its in/consistency with our expectations and existing knowledge.

Empirical evidence always trumps testimonial evidence, before any kind of corroboration even enters the picture.

As a rule empirical evidence is certainly better than testimonial evidence. 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. For instance, one of my go-to examples is imagining a bunch of medieval folk witnessing a feather falling at the same speed as a lead ball - seemingly absurd testimony which (unless they knew how the trick was done) further empirical testing would perpetually refute. However since we do know how the trick is done, we know that the testimonial and empirical sides are not really in direct conflict. Or suppose a group of highly respected scientists saw and provided testimonial evidence of a particular phenomenon, but the measuring and recording instruments at the site (empirical evidence) failed to register anything unusual. Instrument failure or shortcomings might explain the discrepancy, but if we assumed that to be the case there wouldn't be a direct conflict since we wouldn't really have empirical evidence against the scientists' testimony.

I wasn't thinking specifically about them directly contradicting each other, simply their reliability as individual sources of information. But even in the case of direct contradictions, considering that in some fields as many as three-quarters of peer-reviewed papers have results which cannot be reproduced by other researchers, if I were well-acquainted with someone experienced and trustworthy in a particular field I can certainly imagine taking their word directly over that of a random paper. Peer-reviewed work has the advantage, obviously, of having at least been glanced at by some reviewers in addition to the author/s, which in theory should weed out many of the worst problems (though on the other hand it has the disadvantage of possible confirmation bias; often only the most exciting positive results are published to the exclusion of negatives). Can you really not imagine scenarios in which an individual's testimony might be considered equally or even more reliable?

No! At best it would lead me to do some more research on the topic to see who is right myself. Side note, re: what you said about peer-review papers with result that are not reproduced - along the similar question above, was your claim based on empirical evidence or testimony?

My knowledge of surprisingly high percentages of non-reproducibility in peer-reviewed papers is based on the evidence of others' testimony.

Fair enough - which always seems to be the end result of our discussions I often find your views to be somewhat extreme, but at least generally consistent.

Thanks, consistency is very important to me.

In this case, it seems that what you are saying is your expectations/current knowledge are so firmly set that the available (somewhat weak) testimonial evidence and (extremely weak) empirical evidence regarding alien visitation don't merit its consideration as even a remote possibility. Is that a fair assessment?

That's fair.

If so, can you explain how you form or calibrate those yardsticks, and how they are measured against the available alien evidence? Obviously these will be fairly subjective measures which we rarely even consciously think about, so I for one would have difficulty trying to answer it, but it's still interesting to attempt.

Always go with the scientific consensus, and if the consensus turns out to be less than accurate, that's fine too, you now have a new consensus to go with.

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?

[Mithrae]

but perhaps if you take some time to think about this really carefully, you might understand that at this point what we are talking about are the third and fourth points of what I said to Bust Nak all the way back in post #10:

• 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

I don't have a problem with those points save for possibly the first point. I personally suggest that you have more sources of knowledge than you might suspect. It's not like you are living in a closet and only have information provided to you by other people. You can actually step out into the real world and even drive around and look at larges masses of people in various cities and other locations. You actually have the ability to make some pretty good estimates concerning how many people might live in a city yourself actually. You don't need to count actual individual humans. You can count houses, traffic, etc.

So I am not in agreement with your first premise, at least in general.

Could your first premise be true for YOU? Sure it could. But that doesn't make it a valid principle for the argument overall.

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. But more importantly, I think it holds true even in the rare case of obsessive-compulsive millionaire scientists who do try to personally verify as much as they can. Consider the questions I asked Bust Nak earlier:
What is the largest land animal?
What is the largest animal?
In what regions are rhinos indigenous?
- What is Antarctica like?
- What is the Sahara like?
- What is Siberia like?
Roughly how many people live in the USA?
What are a few of the world's biggest cities?
Which country has the largest population?
- When was the American Civil War?
- Who were the main belligerents in WW2?
- Which European country first colonized Australia?

We probably all know the answers to these, but how many have you personally verified? These are just very vague outlines of just a few fields of human knowledge; ecology, geography, demography, history. We could easily add dozens of widely-known general knowledge questions to each of these fields, and equal numbers of questions about other fields; psychology, molecular biology, paleontology, astronomy, climatology, chemistry, electronics, information technology, medicine, sociology, popular culture... Unless he willfully chose ignorance and disbelief about everything until he could personally verify it, it's probable that even our hypothetical obsessive-compulsive millionaire scientist would find himself knowing far more facts than he could possibly verify in a single lifetime.

But even if you would like to imagine that this millionaire scientist could somehow verify a majority of what he knew, such a hypothetical is pretty much irrelevant to the rest of us.

We all depend on testimonial evidence for the overwhelming majority of things that we know. So in those cases, the question is simply how strong and widely-corroborated that testimonial evidence is, relative to its in/consistency with our expectations and existing knowledge.

[liamconnor]

[Replying to post 63 by Mithrae]

To intrude on a debate:

Much or our knowledge is based on 'report'; and, whats more, appeals to report are NOT invalid?

[Mithrae]

[Replying to post 63 by Mithrae]

To intrude on a debate:

Much or our knowledge is based on 'report'; and, whats more, appeals to report are NOT invalid?

They are not invalid, no, but given the potential for error or deception any individual report is quite weak evidence (and on a case-by-case basis, potentially very weak). In the case of general knowledge this is offset by widespread corroboration, such as multiple news outlets reporting on the same event.

In the case of specific unusual events, as a general rule and bare minimum I would not give any real credibility to a report unless multiple people confirm their own direct observation of it, and it's not from a situation conducive to hysteria (eg. emotional religious gatherings). That then would not automatically make it a plausible report, but it at least might be worth wasting time considering it.

[Divine Insight]

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?

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.

How in the world is your strawman argument supposed to help the points made in the OP?

The point is that scientific knowledge (or laws of nature) are verifiable.

And outrageous testimonies of supposedly supernatural events are not.

So it really doesn't matter how much time you have to check things out. The bottom line is that some things can be verified, and others cannot.

Which of those two categories of knowledge are you going to bet your life on?

[marco]

Law is a metaphor, and rather a bad one. The medieval "inclinations'" was far better. It better connotes "here is what we see happening", while law connotes "here is what HAS to happen, though all we have for this is what we have seen happening".

I see where you're getting your idea from that law is a metaphor. The principal meaning of law is a rule and there is no hint of figurative usage when we talk of the laws of motion. A metaphor is the employment of a word or phrase with a meaning it does not have, but one that can be deduced from the associative qualities. Jesus was a lamb is a metaphor. In assessing miracles we examine the laws we know to work perfectly well and discount them on the basis that they defy what we have deduced by reason and common sense. Metaphor has nothing to do with it except to confuse a simple issue.

And again you are assuming laws are built on experience, from what we have seen happening and is likely to happen again. Yes, we speculate from observation, most of the time, though Einstein's theory required him to move outside of what one experiences. After speculation comes proof, else we remain with a theory.

Philosophy can say what it wants; physics gives us a way of getting to the moon and back.

Yes, experience. And from this, we conclude a universal. This is a faith maneuver: in my experience and other's, this is how nature behaves; therefore, nature CANNOT behave in any other way.

You are completely wrong here. Empiricism is not proof and this is not how things are done in formulating laws.

A silly counter example. But I will bite: how do you know that the elliptical paths of these objects are not merely the current paths?

Hmmm. It wasn't a counterexample.

We know the equation of an ellipse and why everything happens as it does. We can calculate to the tiniest detail what will happen when we send a missile into space and return. And it does happen as we calculated. We can calculate when cosmic bodies will appear again, after hundreds of years, and they do. We base all we do on such detailed knowledge, not guesswork.

Reason? Does reason mean "everyone attests to a habitual universe; even those who attest a rare exception to its habits will maintain that they are rare exceptions; therefore, the world behaves regularly without exceptions"?

You are on the losing side of an argument if you want to include miracles as unexplained exceptions to the laws that govern what we do. Mercury's orbit was an exception that defied prediction - a tiny amount was missing in all calculations. Then Einstein's theory explained the anomaly. But the difference here is we could see what Mercury was doing. Miracles are simply claims, usually from the past that cannot be investigated. It is rather silly to compare scientific method, and its rigour, with belief in miracles, accepting both as examples of dogmatism. One is reasonable; the other unreasonable.

[Furrowed Brow]

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 think if we do differ that will mean you start from a position that the note can be true or false and you don't add in the third option. If so the difference betweens us is that the analysis I prefer recognises when investigating a witness statement we are negotiating both people who tell stories and facts, while to assume the note is true or false is to only recognise we are dealing with facts or lack of facts. I think this the demarcation between a sceptical mind and an agnostic mind. It is people that make an agnostic a sceptic.

Worrying about people also shows that the sceptic is less focused on naturalism or metaphysics. The problem is less a philosophical abstraction and more a social and psychological issue. Question of the supernatural is a people problem before it is a metaphysical problem.

[Bust Nak]

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?

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.

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.*

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?

[Divine Insight]

"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."

For me this is not the slightest bit surprising. In fact, I blame this on our educational institutions. Educational institutions do not teach mathematics and probabilities very well at all, and the majority of students fail to understand very simple truths because of this.

The problem is that medicine and treatments are based on trials where a large percentage of a sample group responds to treatment in a positive way. There are ALWAYS outliers from these results.

So when the doctors graduate and start seeing actual patients they have experience with these outliers. They people for which the treatment actually has adverse affects (and don't seem to think that those events are "miracles") even though they can see that the treatment works for the vast majority of their patients.

But then when they see the exception to the rule in the opposite direction (i.e. a patient that appears to recover very quickly from a condition they though might be beyond recovery they think "miracle". But in truth all they have witnessed was an outlier from the norm. There's no reason to call that a "miracle".

And let's face the TRUTH. We don't see any doctors running around proclaiming to have seen a REAL MIRACLE (i.e. someone miraculously regrowing a limb that they had lost.

These so-called "miracles" that doctors claim to see are typically things like people's disease or condition responding to treatment far better than they had expected, etc. These are just outliers from the norm. They don't represent actual miracles.

And this is why we never see headlines of doctors reporting an actual miracle (i.e. someone growing a limb back) etc. Instead all we see are doctors reporting "behind the scenes" that they consider some patients recoveries to have been a miracle. Moreover, the doctors who make these claims are typically religious themselves. So it shouldn't be surprising that they bring their religious beliefs into consideration when they see someone who recovers from a situation they consider to be extremely abnormal.

And remember, they DON'T do this when they see a patient who is actually adversely affected by the treatment. Or who declines in health from a given disease at an abnormally fast rate. They just caulk that up to a weak patient, or whatever.

So they only attribute "miracles" to the abnormal patients who tend to response abnormally well. So their choice of what to call a "miracle" is actually biased even though they don't realize it.

If they have a patient who dies in an unexplained way during a routine procedure, they don't call that a "miracle".