Brother Daniel

The choices seem to be:

1. Miracles don't happen. (Consequence: Traditional Christian claims are false.)

2. Miracles happen, and we have no way of judging their probability. (Consequence: The study of history is hopeless.)

3. Miracles happen, and every imaginable kind of miracle is equally likely a priori. (This is nonsensical. Is the miraculous appearance on my kitchen floor of a red unicorn-footprint from which emanates the melodious strains of Debussy's "Sunken Cathedral" equal in probability to the miraculous appearance on my bathroom floor of a blue unicorn-footprint from which emanates the wild riffs of Led Zeppelin's "Black Dog"? Consider the different floor areas of the two rooms; the larger selection of spectra which strike the human eye-brain ensemble as "red" as compared to "blue"; and the degree to which a piece of music can be modified while remaining the "same" piece of music - arguably greater in the pop music scene than in highbrow musical culture. More generally, the problem is that there are countless parameters that can be modified within any proposed miraculous anecdote without essentially changing it, and no well-defined way of defining the relative "density of states" with respect to each parameter. So the idea degenerates into incoherence.)

4. Miracles happen, with emphasis on my own personal favourite miraculous claims. (Consequence: My own personal favourite miraculous claims may be true, but most others are impossible.)

Exercise for the student: Show that those who pick #4 (e.g., Christians) are disqualified from accusing those who pick #1 of applying a double standard.

Roland

Forget about history. People can't even seem to agree on what actually happened in recent times. In the news right now is a perfect example. A group of people - his boatmates - testify to the fact that John Kerry was a hero in Vietnam. Now we have another group of people claiming he isn't and that his heroic acts were somehow trumped up. Yet the people on both sides of this issue claim to be relying on "eyewitness testimony" of sorts.

Now, if we are having this much trouble uncovering the "truth" about something that happened a mere 30 years ago with people still around from that time, imagine how hard it is to uncover the truth of something that happened 2,000 years ago!

Roland

The miracles Jesus allegedly performed are probably the LEAST reliable aspect of his whole biography - and not merely because we have never seen a man walk on water or raise people from the dead. The real reason is because it is so poorly attested to in the literature itself. Neither Paul nor any of the other New Testament epistle writers make any mention of them. Neither, in fact, do virtually any Christian writers prior to Justin around 150 A.D. That leaves only the gospels and the Book of Acts, none of which are explicitly mentioned until Irenaeus in 170 A.D.

Thus, simply using the historical method, we can safely conclude that the concept of a miracle-working saviour named Jesus Christ is quite a late development in the history of early Christianity.

Vorkosigan

We have literally thousands upon thousands of documents relating to Columbus, from an age when things were printed, from himself, his relatives, employers, co-workers, and independent witnesses and enemies. In addition, we have other archaeological and historical evidence.

We have nothing from Jesus nor from anyone who knew him. Nor do we have any documents from his enemies, nor is there any credible independent confirmation of his mere existence. The evidence simply isn't comparable.

Vorkosigan

Celsus

Realists, all of you. Repent and accept an antirealist conception of history! Every narrative is a fiction, and the person must make a conscious choice which narrative to accept. But historical reality is incommensurable with historical narrative.

Pyrrho: you should have a look at this article.

Joel

Pyrrho

The article makes several statements about Hume that are unsupported in Hume. Such as:

Hume discusses whether or not one should believe in testimony regarding miracles; he does not discuss whether or not one should believe if one saw a miracle for oneself. (Reppert admits this himself in the next paragraph, so from his own article, one can know that he goes too far in his claim.)

The problem is, Reppert is comparing the probability of any error in the paper with the probability of winning the lottery, which is comparing the wrong things. He should be comparing the number of times that they have incorrectly identified the winner of the lottery with the number of times they correctly identified the winner. Unless the editors of the paper are grossly incompetent, they get it right far more often than they get it wrong, so odds are that the report is accurate, and therefore one should believe it is probably true. So Reppert is just wrong.

Reppert’s later remarks about people dieing for a false cause miss the mark completely. True, people probably don’t tend to get themselves martyred for a cause that they don’t believe is true, but, in fact, we know that many get themselves martyred for causes that are not true, because people get themselves martyred for positions that are contradicted by other positions for which people get martyred. That is, there are Christian martyrs, there are Muslim martyrs, “pagan� martyrs, etc. And each of these can be further subdivided, as Catholic martyrs killed by some Protestant group, various denominations of Protestant martyrs killed by the Catholics, etc. Since their religions contradict each other, they cannot all be true, and therefore we know that people get martyred for things that are not true. It is also worth remembering that many people are irrational when it comes to their beliefs, and therefore even if someone should have known their beliefs were false, it does not follow that they actually knew their beliefs were false.


Reppert also engages in a good deal of speculation, which he is honest enough to admit in at least one place:

Reppert also ignores several relevant aspects of Hume’s essay, such as the majority of part II of his essay in which he discusses the problems with the testimony for miracles that have actually been given.

Frankly, I am very unimpressed with Reppert.

Vorkosigan

The map is not the terrain. And yet, it may be useful in negotiating the terrain.

Celsus

Though the terrain does not exist? Whose map is it anyway?

Joel

Vorkosigan

The terrain is social reality. The map therefore -- is power. <evil laugh>

Victor Reppert

Pyrrho may feel free to dbe unimpressed with my paper, and he probably will after we're done, but there are some misinterpretations of my paper that I wuold like to correct.

1) While Hume's argument was about testimonial evidence, so the fancy attention-grabbing story at the beginning doesn't strictly speaking apply to Hume's argument, I have heard comentators make the further claim that you shouldn't believe in a miracle even if you see one your self. Consider which of the following would be stronger evidence.

A. Seeing a miracle yourself.
B. Getting the testimony of a panel CSICOP investigators, including James Randi, who now has to pay up, say that, yep, this one's for real.

I can't see how it makes any sense to say that no amount of evidence of type B could be enough to support a miracle claim, but if you saw one yourself, that would be different.

2) The discussion of the report of the lottery winner from the Arizona Republic is an attempt to show what kinds of absurd results come from the direct application of Hume's mathematical probability theory as presented in "Of Miracles." Hume was not a mathematician and probability theory, in particular Bayesian probability theory, has come a long way since Hume's time. The problem I pose for Hume is how you set up an objective probability theory that gets Hume's results, based on frequencies or based on anything else. The work I did in graduate school under Bayesian theorist Patrick Maher suggest to me that there are no objective priors.

3) The Argument from Martyrdom is used, and used only, as a rebuttal to the "theft theory" which alleges that Christianity was founded on a deliberate fraud perpetrated by disciples who stole the body. It is not a proof that the Resurrection actually occurred, and would do nothing to refute, say, a hallucination theory.

4) I make no attempt to argue that the testimony to the miraculous that has actually been given (i.e. the case for the resurrection of Jesus) is at all adequate. The evidence of particular miracles needs to be assessed on a case-by-case basis, and so a rebuttal to the points in Part II of "Of Miracles" lies outside the scope of my paper, as I believe I indicated pretty clearly in the paper.

As I said, you may well be unimpressed anyway. But hopefully this will give you a more accurate picture of what fails to impress you.

Victor Reppert