Clutch

bd-from-kg,

Great post. You rock.

NOGO

Good post bd-from-kg.

I think that I now know where Polycarp is getting at.

1. Christianity
...
10. Judaism
...
20. Islam
...
30. Other

The order here may vary. What Polycarp wants is to lower the bar so as to place Christianity in the "oridinary claim" classification so that "ordinary evidence" is sufficient while leaving all the other religions in the "extraordinary claim" classification.

Thus, Mohammad's plitting of the moon is extraordinary and requires extraordinary evidence while Jesus' miracles are ordinary and the evidence is sufficient.

Polycarp

Quote:

Originally posted by bd-from-kg: Polycarp, this isn’t rocket science. It’s just a shorter way of saying “The more extraordinary the claim, the better evidence is required to justify rational belief.” There’s no magical point at which a claim becomes extraordinary and the standards of evidence suddenly change accordingly. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is not some arbitrary principle invented by skeptics to justify their rejection of Christianity. It is part and parcel of rationality itself.

Sorry, I’ve been away for a bit. Time is short these days. I’ll reply to bd-from-kg since I think it best represents the skeptical view.

We don’t really disagree on what you said in this paragraph. The issue is in who controls the spectrum of “extraordinary-ness”.

Quote:

Now any sane person recognizes that somewhere between Report 1 and Report 362 the thing reported to have occurred has gone from being rather ordinary to being rather extraordinary. But it doesn’t matter where you draw the line; whether you say that Report 130 is “ordinary” but Report 131 is “extraordinary”, or whether you say that even Report 359 is “ordinary” but Report 360 is “extraordinary”. The point is that, if you’re sane, you will require a lot more evidence for Report 131 than for Report 1, and a lot more evidence for Report 362 than for Report 131. In fact, you’ll require somewhat more evidence for Report 131 than for Report 130, more for Report 132 than for Report 131, and so on.

My sanity is questionable, but I’ll still address this. Your analogy is correct. However, as I’ve said before and as the answers given by skeptics demonstrated, there is no standard. Skeptics believe it is more intellectually noble to believe fewer truth claims. When it comes to questions related to theism, they just keep climbing up the ladder. Most of the world believes it is an extraordinary claim to say, “I believe god does not exist”. Why can’t theists just say that, by their standard, agnosticism/atheism is an extraordinary claim? I’m not trying to claim that truth is determined by the majority, so let’s not have any skeptics go there.

The “Jesus-myth” issue is a case in point. Have you ever wondered why, among non-Christian historians of the last 100 years, more than 99% of them have believed in the existence of Jesus, but among skeptics here at the SecWeb it is a much lower ratio. There’s something going on here (I’m generalizing, and realize there are exceptions), and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. It’s not skepticism, it’s hyper-skepticism bordering on total epistemological agnosticism.

Quote:

The Christian position, in essence, is that this is all true up to a point - that it is reasonable, for example, to require more evidence for Report 131 than for Report 1 - but that it is unreasonable to require more evidence for Report 362 than for Report 1. In other words, they agree that it is reasonable to be skeptical of a claim that an unknown runner broke the world record, but they think it unreasonable to be skeptical of a claim that a person performed unheard-of feats that clearly violate all known physical laws after being dead for some time.

Could you elaborate on this? I think you’re stating the view of some Christians, but it’s not my own view. Are you trying to say that the “Christian position” is that miracles are only done by God for the benefit of Christians (or Jews)? If so, then you’re completely wrong. All you have to do is read the Bible to see that Christians (and Jews) believed that violations of natural law occurred among non-Jews or non-Christians. I think you’re mistaken in your assumption, but maybe a further explanation will help.

Quote:

The plain reality is that the kind of evidence that exists for Jesus’ alleged deeds would be hopelessly inadequate even to establish that an unknown runner had broken the world record for the mile, yet Christians think that it’s reasonable to believe, on the basis of such evidence, that He rose from the dead, walked through walls, and ascended bodily to “Heaven”. This is literally insane.

So now you’re labeling Christians as behaving as if they are “insane”? And then you expect them to have a reasonable discussion with you? Oh well, that’s about par for the course around this place.

Sauron

Don't play the wounded martyr, Polycarp. You don't do it very well.

The plain fact is that you want to pretend that the claims made about christianity and Christ are somehow in the "fuzzy middle" of reasonableness, where the boundary line between ordinary and extraordinary can vary from person to person.

However, the claims about christianity are at the extreme outer end of the credibility spectrum, because they are claims:

1. for which no direct supporting evidence exists;
2. for which substantial contradictory evidence does exist;
3. that contravene all of human history and experience; and
4. contradict the known laws of science; and
5. are not falsifiable or testable;

You are using the existence of a "fuzzy middle" to try and claim that no standard exists at all. That's nonsense.

Moreover, you are taking a set of outrageous, unproven, and blatantly supernatural and extraordinary claims and trying to sneak them in the backdoor, and get them accepted as "ordinary".

How? Not with evidence. Not with rational explanation. How then?

By claiming that since the "fuzzy middle" isn't well defined the same way for each & every person, then there really isn't any working definition in the first place. So it's impossible to state that *any* claim is extraordinary.

This is nothing but an elaborate re-make of a flawed reductio ad absurdium argument. The inability to define the fuzzy middle in the same way for every person does *NOT* mean that the extremes on the spectrum cannot be safely categorized as ordinary or extraordinary.

Anunnaki

4 whole pages of nothing but running around in circles. Polycarp is never gonna get it.

[ July 06, 2002: Message edited by: Anunnaki ]</p>

Family Man

If I understand Polycarp properly, he's basically saying (among other things) that the claim that God exists is ordinary because lots of people think he exists.

Can anyone say argument from popularity?

Sauron

He's learned too much about special pleading from Nomad and Layman to ever "get it".

bd-from-kg

Polycarp:

No, that is not an issue. The question of what constitutes an “extraordinary” claim is just a matter of linguistic preference. The issue is what level of evidence is required to justify rational belief in the Christian claims. These claims are obviously more extraordinary than a claim that an unknown runner set a world record in the mile, and so the evidentiary burden is at least as great for the former as for the latter. My point is that the evidence for the Christian claims is hopelessly inadequate even to support the latter claim, much less to support a claim that a dead man flew through the air and walked through solid walls.

No. Most skeptics are skeptical because they have learned from experience that a reasonably high standard of proof is needed to avoid believing vast numbers of falsehoods. Skepticism is the rational product of knowledge and experience. Almost everyone becomes more skeptical as they get older. Unfortunately many people refuse to apply it to their most cherished beliefs, like the belief that they will never really die.

Nope. They just recognize that the claim that the Christian God exists is very far over on the “extraordinary” end of the spectrum.

Not so. Very few people consider the statement “I believe God does not exist” to be an extraordinary claim. Lots of people believe that God does not exist; why should the claim that I do be considered extraordinary?

In fact, most people believe that the Christian God (which is, after all, what you mean by “God”) does not exist. So they can hardly regard this as an extraordinary claim.

And even if it were true, so what? Most of the world regards lots of true things as “extraordinary” claims – for example, that space and time are two aspects of the same thing, or that a single particle can pass through two different slits at the same time, or that humans are descendants of fish.

Finally, rejection of the claim that God exists does not entail acceptance of the claim that God does not exist. Lots of people have neither a positive belief that God exists nor a positive belief that He does not exist. Do most people (or YOU, for that matter) consider it an extraordinary claim that the evidence for the existence of the Christian God (or any god, for that matter) is insufficient to compel rational belief?

What’s your argument here? That some non-theists are irrational, so it’s OK that theists are irrational? This is like arguing that some people who don’t believe in astrology also don’t believe that Bill Clinton lied under oath, so believing in astrology is just as rational as not believing in it. Besides the fact that this is a ridiculous argument, you haven’t even begun to make a case that the “Jesus-myth” theory is so absurd that it is irrational to take it seriously.

Sure. Lots of Christians are fond of quoting Romans 1:19-20:

What Paul is saying here is clearly something that the vast majority of Christians have always believed: that those who claim to disbelieve in God “really” know deep down that He exists but reject Him, and so deserve to be punished in Hell for eternity. In fact, most Christians have always believed that it’s not enough merely to believe in God’s existence; one must accept Jesus as one’s Savior or suffer eternal torment. This only makes sense if the evidence for Christianity is so strong that any reasonable person who evaluates it objectively must conclude that it is true. Otherwise God is subjecting people to infinite punishment for evaluating the evidence rationally.

How did you arrive at this interpretation? It bears no resemblance to what I said.

No. I’m saying that the idea that belief in Christianity is remotely close to being rationally justified by the available evidence is insane. Of course, those who hold this insane belief may be otherwise sane. But there’s no telling when this sort of belief might lead them to do something obviously crazy, like flying airplanes into tall buildings.

By the way, it won’t do to get too offended at the suggestion that the idea that belief in Christianity can be rationally justified is insane. Christians believe far worse things than that about non-Christians. They believe that we reject Goodness, Mercy, Justice and Love Incarnate out of pure pridefulness. They believe that, unless we mend our ways, we will deserve to be tormented horribly for all eternity, so wicked are we. So let’s not get into a shouting match about whose beliefs about the other are the more insulting.

Vorkosigan

<img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" /> <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Polycarp complains:
The “Jesus-myth” issue is a case in point. Have you ever wondered why, among non-Christian historians of the last 100 years, more than 99% of them have believed in the existence of Jesus, but among skeptics here at the SecWeb it is a much lower ratio. There’s something going on here (I’m generalizing, and realize there are exceptions), and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure it out. It’s not skepticism, it’s hyper-skepticism bordering on total epistemological agnosticism.

I love the way you guys always bring this up when arguments start to go the wrong way for you. When you make remarks like this, it's a sure sign you've lost the argument.

It’s not skepticism, it’s hyper-skepticism bordering on total epistemological agnosticism.

I'll buy this, as soon as any believer puts up a credible methodology for extracting truth from fiction in the 35 or so gospels. But that's the one crucial thing NT scholars entirely lack, isn't it?

Vorkosigan