HelenM

Originally posted by Metacrock:
I've had similar arguments on this same board. Two things I would like to ask skeptics to do:

1) prove to me why belief in God should be considered the extraordinary calim? I can see why miracles would be, but why just belief in God itself?

I think the quote is from a book about the scientific method. The scientific method does not 'detect' God.

That's why.

2) Show how you decide what is extraordinary? Because that's just a convient thing to raise the bar anytime evidence is offered. No evidence is ever good enough because its an "extraordinary" claim.

Ok - you have established through experimentation or observation of whether a mathematical/physical prediction holds out, that it does.

Well, then something breaks the observed pattern.

Either your [naturalistic] model is too simplistic and simply needs refinement; or you have observed something 'extraordinary'.

People often mistakenly label something as 'extraordinary' or 'supernatural' when it was merely that their model was inaccurate.

When you get to a point where no further refinement is possible, then perhaps you are getting towards 'extraordinary' or 'supernatural'.

I don't see evidence of people being there though.

love
Helen

Vorkosigan

I've had similar arguments on this same board. Two things I would like to ask skeptics to do:

1) prove to me why belief in God should be considered the extraordinary calim? I can see why miracles would be, but why just belief in God itself?

1) No evidence for the thing
2) violation of natural law
3) faith committments -- all claims based on faith committments should be considered extraordinary, since they are made without evidence
4) the field is rife with fraud.

2) Show how you decide what is extraordinary?

See 4 reasons I gave above and in earlier post.

Because that's just a convient thing to raise the bar anytime evidence is offered. No evidence is ever good enough because its an "extraordinary" cliam.

The reason is because you are unable to offer credible evidence; no bar raising necessary, there's nothing out there to support your claims.

Yet another example of an extraordinary claim, while we're on the topic, is one that would significantly affect the nature of reality, or the lives of all humans. Your worhsip-me-or-die deity definitely belongs in that column.

Vorkosigan

DMB

Scepticism about kangaroos would IMO have been justified until there was more evidence available than a few eyewitness statements. There were many dubious travellers' tales of things like men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders.

The point is that scepticism is in general a safe default position. It isn't the same as saying that you know something to be false. You are simply refusing to believe that it is true until much better evidence is forthcoming. In my experience, I have sometimes been pleasantly surprised to discover that something I was sceptical about was actually true, but much more commonly it would be shown to be false.

I was a rather sceptical child. I was born in England in 1940, just after the beginning of WW2. My early years were therefore spent in an exceptional time of family disruption and shortages of almost everything. Grown-ups around me would often refer to how things had been "before the war" and how we could expect the same things "after the war". But they also told me fairy stories and about Father Christmas. By about the age of 4, I had decided that FC didn't really exist, and I was very doubtful about fairies. I therefore tended to put the "before the war" stories in the same category.

The war ended when I was 5, and Britain was virtually bankrupt. Shortages were sometimes worse in the immediate post-war years than they had been during the war. I therefore felt confirmed in my assessment of the mythical character of "before the war", since "after the war" was so little different from what I had always known. After many more years, however, having experienced the slow postwar recovery and also having studied history, I realised that not all the stories I had been told were false (although selective memory on the part of the adults may have edited out some of the less pleasant aspects of pre-war life). But my point is that my scepticism actually proved a better preparation for coping with postwar life than the adults' optimism. They may have been telling me the truth as they saw it, but their predictions of the future were way off.

A sceptic should always be receptive to new evidence, i.e. to examining it, not necessarily accepting it as true. Sometimes the sceptical position may result in delay in the acceptance of a new truth, but it's still better than credulity.

Vorkosigan

To further with the extraordinary claims, Meta and Poly both seem to think this is something skeptics invented to deflate the credulous. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is normal procedure in most scientific endeavors -- the more unprecedented or involved the claim, the greater the evidence that must be supplied.

Think of the controversy over Plate Tectonics or Global Warming. The recovery of an 85% aluminum alloy chain from a third century tomb in China led to years of wrangling in the archaeological journals. Bergamini's claim that the events in Japanese politics leading up to WWII were stage managed by Hirohito is still not accepted by scholars, although Bix's recent book implicating Hirohito far more deeply in the war is finally beginning to break barriers to Bergamini (who had access nobody else has had before or since). In many cases, such claims fight entrenched political interests, part of the reason global warming, or Hirohito as war leader, take a while to get accepted......

Vorkosigan

CX

Well this is BC&A so I am not unjustified in presuming that your primary interest is not in discussing Kangaroo skepticism in the 16th century.

Not without appropriate evidence, no, but what constitutes appropriate evidence in this case differs from more extraordinary claims.

I'm not saying that believing in Kangaroos is justified only by travelling to australia and seeing one. I've never seen a Tasmanian Devil apart from the Warner Brothers cartoon character, but I have no trouble accepting that such an animal at one time existed.

No, I would not say the kanagaroo analogy constitutes an extraordinary claim for the simple reason that although unknown by a 16th century European and somewhat unusual, it does not represent a radical departure from known zoological phenomena nor would the existence of such an animal require a contravention of known physical laws or naturalistic mechanisms. If on the other hand it was claimed that this animal could be killed and come back to life, that it could magically teleport itself from one place to another, that it was born spontaneously out of thin air or that it could fly without benefit of wings or winglike structures, those claims WOULD constitute something extraordinary that would require substantial and extraordinary evidence beyond anecdotal accounts of said animals existence.

CX

Unless you define God further the question itself is meaningless. That being said let's assume you are using the traditional Xian theist definition of God. Under that definition it is not god's mere existence that is an extraordinary claim, but rather the properties attributed to god. God is able to contravene known physical laws and naturalistic mechanisms. God is a sentient being that has existed for all eternity. God is a sentient being that is omniscient. These represent extraordinary claims. If you disagree simply consider the similar claims made for Vishnu or Brahman or any other god which you don't believe exists. If I tell you that the true and only gods are the olympians ruled by Zeus I expect you are going to require some extraordinary evidence of that claim.

Nonsense. The extraordinariness of a given claim is contingent on what we already know to be true it has nothing to do with "raising the bar", but rather knowing what and where "the bar" currently is. Part and parcel of any critical thinking method is evaluating claims in light current knowledge. Given that, a claim can be considered extraordinary if:

1)It requires a contravention of known laws and mechanisms.

2)It requires the repeated occurence of extremely low probability events contrary to the laws of probability.

3)It requires the failure of extremely high probability events to obtain contrary to the laws of probability.

4)It contradicts well established knowledge and theories. This particular type of claim has not only to explain the phenomenon in question, but also provide an explanation for everything explained by the traditional theory it contradicts.

5)There is substantial and concrete counterevidence refuting the claim.

6)It is logically impossible or creates an unresolveable paradox.


7)It diverges wildly from common experience.

8)It is not independently repeatable or verifiable

These criteria are not made up with the sole purpose of rejecting belief in god, but rather derive from a process that has evolved over centuries which has shown itself to be a good method for determining truth and mitigating the fallibility of human perception and interpretation.

I cannot speak for all nontheists, but I do not lack a belief in god for any of the reasons normally attributed to nonbelievers by believers. Quite honestly I would dearly like to believe in an all-powerful, omnibenevolent god who has my best interests at heart, who will rectify all injustices and who will provide me an eternal utopian afterlife. It sounds great. It also sounds too good to be true and as yet I have not found any evidence of any kind to support the claim and significant evidence which seems to disconfirm it.

With that being said, this thread doesn't appear to be related to BC&A so perhaps it should be shipped off to EoG or Science and Skepticism.

madmax2976

Depends on how you define "God". If "God" is defined as a "supernatural" entity, not composed of any physical matter or energy then some arguments would be...

1. Anytime we have actually explained some phenomena, that explanation has resulted in a natural explanation, not a supernatural one.

2. Supernatural explanations, such as those for disease and insanity, have had to give way to natural explanations, but never the reverse. At best supernatural explanations are relegated to mysteries or the unknown.

3. All the evidence we have so far indicates that consciousness requires a physical brain. Presumably this entity would not have a physical brain, but would still have a consciousness.

4. We have not been able to confirm the existence of any supernatural entities or forces. While its still possible that such things do exist, our inability to detect them in any way sheds reasonable doubt on their existence.

<strong> An extraordinary claim could be defined as that which goes strongly against what is normally expected under given circumstances.

This is not to say that extraordinary claims could not be true. They could be. However, a higher degree of evidence is required to demonstrate they are true, as they go against what is normally expected based on current knowledge and experience. This is nothing unusual. Most of us work this way all the time.

For instance, lets say you invite a friend to a party and he arrives an hour late. If he claims he had a flat tire, this is not an unusual claim as flat tires happen from time to time. If, on the other hand, he claims he was kidnapped by aliens and experimented on for an hour, this is a highly unusual claim - a great deal of evidence will be required before it is believed.

Requiring a higher degree of evidentiary support for unusual claims is nothing unique. For mundane things that have little impact, we require hardly any evidence at all. For extraordinary things such as faster than light speed space craft, we would require lots of supporting evidence. Its completely reasonable and normal.

Kim o' the Concrete Jungle

I would say that your sixteenth century skeptic would be right to doubt this particular description of a kangaroo, because a kangaroo's head isn't really very much like that of a deer, and the way a kangaroo jumps isn't very much like the way a frog jumps.

This point aside, what your kangaroo analogy mostly shows is the need for a proof to be repeatable. We need a description of the animal that is keener and more sober than this credulous animal-built-out-of-spare-parts kind. We need independent verification. We need to observe actual specimens of the animal, and more than just one (Europeans were skeptical about the platypus even when they had an actual specimen to look at -- they thought it was a hoax, that someone had sewn a duck's bill onto the body of an otter or something).

In the end, it is only repeated observation and a multiplicity of proof that overcomes skepticism. That's how the Piltdown hoax was ultimately exposed -- no more specimens of this kind were discovered, which led to a skeptical reevaluation of the original evidence. That's the way it should be. A freakish, one-off experience of something is not sufficient to establish truth, be it an extraordinary truth or a mundane one.

Dark Jedi

This has seriously deviated from applicable topics. Polycarp: please make a BC&A point, or this will be moved to "Existance of gods".

NOGO

True.
The problem is that nothing does and that is why it is an extraordinary claim.


Care to give an example.

Speculation or rather wishful thinking.