Toto

Hector Avalos comments on his debate with Craig

After detailing some egregious errors on Craig's part, Avalos says

Oxymoron

It's actually called "look at me I can do Bayesian stuff I must be right"

It's actually all over the place. Firstly, Evidence doesn't get "explained", it's data used to evaluate the certainty a hypothesis given an existing model of (un)certainity

Second, Bayes' formula embeds includes the term P(R), the probability (degree of certainty) that the resurrection is true having seen no specific evidence. We can pretty much assume that this is P(R|k). This is spectacularly low, because not once has anyone unambiguously seen dead people get up again. Given a hypothesis space H={h1,...,hN, R}, consider



(ie h* is the hypothesis that maximises the a priori likelihood) in the context that no other resurrections have been seen, it's simply not the case that h*=R. Inevitably, Bayes' Formula is based on real data, not theoretical symbols, and the real data says "no", so Craig's attempts to pull Jesus rabbits out of science hats is laughable.

~M~

That was not my approach.


oh? How about i quote professional philosophers and logicans who use the very same language that i did?


Tell me, need i do that in confirmation theory?





I'll give you a lesson in Bayes later today.

Oxymoron

I wasn't referring to you.

How about it?

Need you do what?


That'll be funny / interesting.

~M~

John Josephson offers a rudimentary example on page 5 of Abductive Inference: Computation, Philosophy, Technology (or via: amazon.co.uk). Johnny states:

‘D is a collection of data (facts, observations, givens)’ [evidences]
H explains D (would, if true, explain D)
No other hypothesis can explain D as well as H does
Therefore, H is probably true.’

Peter Lipton in his book entitled Inference to the Best Explanation (or via: amazon.co.uk) states on page 57 that there is the most likeliest explanation and the most loveliest. The loveliest is the explanation that ‘provides the most understanding...” of what you may ask? The most understanding of the evidences, of course! On the back of the book, it states “According to the model of ‘Inference to the Best Explanation’, we work out what to infer from the evidence by thinking about what would actually explain the evidence, and we take the ability of a hypothesis to explain the evidence as a sign that the hypothesis is correct.”



Want more? Sure, let us turn to IIDB’s beloved:

Carrier:


http://www.infidels.org/library/mode.../resurrection/



Martin:


http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...urrection.html


Sandoval:

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...al/daniel.html


Had enough yet, bud? If I am somehow lacking, then so are some eminent philosophers and some of IIDB’s best. You can bite the bullet on this and we can continue our discussion on it or retract your statement.



Next time I post in this thread, I’ll show you how to get around the low probability of the resurrection.

Oxymoron

Yeah, I've had enough of you agreeing with me to the point of sycophancy and then concluding that you are correct and I'm wrong :thumbs:

Still: evidence is data that changes the a posteriori probability: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posterior_probability

That'll be even funnier.

~M~

are you taking issue to the formalization? such like P(h/k&e) rather than P(e/k&h)?


How on earth can you reconcile this statement to my quotes?


What's funny are people like you who think philosophers are settled on matters that Humean type reasoning is sound and that we cannot get past the low intrinsic probablity of miracles.

Oxymoron

Like most philosophers, you can't seem to distinguish what it is you're trying to explain using what as data. In this case, p(R|e) is the probability in the real world of the resurrection given the observed evidence. That conditional is everything. It doesn't work backwards. On the other hand, p(e|R) relates to a (potentially fictional) universe in which the resurrection has occured and gives us the probability that we would see the evidence e. It's the difference between observed and inferred, see?

What's amusing is philosophers pretending to pwn science, and making fools of themselves to those who know what they're talking about - not just the gullible who swallow their disingenuously complex apologetics.

~M~

For the above, I'll have to review my books.

It's not something I bumped across before, but it seems suspicious that those who I agree with on these matters like Rodney D. Holder, a philosopher of science who published a paper within the The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, (Vol. 49, No. 1. (Mar., 1998), pp. 49-65.) entitled "Hume on Miracles: Bayesian Interpretation, Multiple Testimony, and the Existence of God" would somehow skip what youre claiming to be true.

Considering such that these theories have also been in the domain of logic & philosophy for at lease 30+ years, I find it quite unlikely.

But, at the moment, I'll have to neither deny nor confirm your claims until i check them out.

juergen

Message for ~M~: What reading would you recommend me to check out?
Thanks!

juergen