AJ113

Koy's post on page 2 of this thread is forceful, IMO. By the grammar and vocabulary used it is easy to picture him shouting the words into my face from a range of two inches. Yet his view on evolution, for example, is not held by everybody who contributes to this forum.

Well actually, I do not say that it is right or wrong but it does surprise me.

Yes, you are right, but now that you good people have taken the trouble to explain things, I can accept that the only common factor between you is non-belief in god(s).

Again, I agree with you. But as a relative newcomer to these boards, it may interest you to know that the apparent unwillingness to take issue with fellow atheists on certain subjects gives the impression that all are very much in agreement with each other. I now know that this is actually not the case, and that fact will help me greatly in the future when reading other threads.

AJ113

Koy:

In the interests of brevity, I think, with the utmost respect to you, your post can be summed up in your final statement:

I do not have an argument, I have made a series of observations with an invitation to comment, however, in answer to the question:

Yes, that is what I am saying. I think there are two types of evidence: some and none. Evidence is evidence to me, and I cannot see how it can be graded by placing an adjective in front of it.

Koyaanisqatsi

Then I certainly hope we get into a small fender bender sometime in the near future.

You'll make a wonderful witness to bolster my own case!

"Your honor, he states that the evidence I presented of my dog being the sole eyewitness is just as good as anything else, which means of the two of us, I'm the only one who has an eyewitness!"

"Case closed! Pay the man...and his dog!"

Then your understanding of what constitutes as "evidence" is, IMO, sorely lacking and you are only here attempting to justify some form of willful ignorance on your part.

Obviously if I say to you, "I have a cousin who knows a guy who has a friend that told his buddy that he saw Elvis at a Stucky's some months ago somewhere," you aren't going to rush right out and declare to the world, "I have definitive proof that Elvis is still alive!"

Not unless, of course, you're an idiot (and I mean that in its literal definition).

If, on the other hand, I say to you, "AJ113, I want you to meet...Elvis" and I actually produce the man in the flesh and he agrees to go before the world press and subject himself to DNA and fingerprint analysis, etc., in order to firmly establish beyond a reasonable doubt that he is still alive, then, again, short of you attempting some sort of trivial semantics game, you would have to agree the differences between those two standards (or levels) of evidence are significant and tangible.

So, which is it? Are you simply trying to semantically justify what is obviously and demonstrably just a low standard of evidence in order for you to reconcile an otherwise absurd belief you may (or may not) have, or are you seriously attempting to argue that there are no and worse, should be no hierarchical standards of evidence?

If the latter, what would be your argument? That since it's ultimately up to each individual to accept or deny the evidence presented before them, it is irrelevant how detailed or otherwise hierarchical that evidence is?

That therefore nobody should care about rigorously testing a new theory and diligently gathering the most conclusive evidence possible so that the new theory or claim will command assent?

Again, I may be wrong and kindly continue to correct me if I am, but it certainly seems to me as if all you're alluding to is some form of lame, unsupportable justification for people--such as theists--to simply believe whatever they want to believe about anything they want to believe in without sufficient standards of evidence; or any standards for that matter.

Which, if you are, is perfectly valid for those individuals, but certainly not if those individuals then try to force those beliefs unto others or in any way, shape or form act upon those beliefs in a manner that could be considered or demonstrated to be detrimental to other people, yes?

Believe the stupidest things you want--like a two thousand year old carpenter created the entire universe ex nihilo in order punish us all for not obeying his father--just don't act on those beliefs or influence others to believe without somebody stepping in and asking for a little proof that the snake-oil your pushing doesn't contain whiskey, snake venom and pig urine, yes?

All evidence is not created equally and you know this to be true in every other aspect of your life, so, if I'm correct in my assumptions regarding your motives (and again, if I'm not, then please forgive me and correct me accordingly) then you would have to be an exceedingly dishonest person to even think about trying to justify a low standard of evidence in one aspect of your life simply because that attempt is borne out of the fact that you simply cannot meet a higher standard.

Yes?

So, again, I'll ask, have you stopped lying to yourself?

(sorry, you had asked us to be gentle, but believe it or not, that's about as gentle as we New Yorkers get )

[ August 02, 2002: Message edited by: Koyaanisqatsi ]</p>

Jamie_L

First, I have seen at least one poster in these forums who is such a die-hard naturalist that he insists nothing which can be experienced in the natural world could be convincingly argued to have no possible natural origin. Thus, in his opinion, no evidence would ever be sufficient to prove god to him, because he could always postulate powerful aliens or something that could do the same thing.

My stance has always been: if god exists and is omnipotent, he can make me believe. That's implied in the word omnipotent.

Now, on evidence, I think analogy works well here:

Suppose a co-worker comes to you and tells you that he spilled coffee on his desk. You have no other evidence. Do you believe him?

Now, suppose the same co-worker comes to you and tells you that a gremlin crawled out of his desk, bit a hole in his computer, and then ran into the women's restroom. You have no other evidence. Do you believe him?

In both cases, the evidence is the same: the word of a co-worker. Is that evidence equally sufficient to support both assertions? Or, are you more likely to require additional evidence for the gremlin claim, while you accept as true the claim of spilling coffee?

Me, I accept the belief of spilling coffee because the word of a coworker is sufficient to lead me to believe something as mundane and common as a coffee spill has occurred. However, I would require significantly more and better evidence of the gremlin attack.

Now, suppose your coworker comes to you with a story about an all-knowing, all-seeing God who has a set of rules that you need to live by...

Jamie

GunnerJ

I should perhaps clarify my position. Can you give an example of an opinion expressed by one of the atheists here which, because of its forcefulness, implies that the author thinks all his/her fellow atheists here hold it? I don't think you can, simply because the "forcefulness" of an expression of opinion is not indication of whether the holder of that opinion thinks he speaks for everyone like him in some way. It's why I asked if a "forceful" Muslim cleric presumes to speak for you, as a theist, simply by the virtue of the "forcefulness" with which he expresses his opinion.

...you're surpised that disbelievers in god(s) tend to agree with each other in discussions about the existance of god(s)? Hmmm...

I was only kidding around here, though. Lighten up a bit!

Smashing! I'm glad you understand better now.

This I will grant you; to an outsider, the fact that many atheists agree on certain issues can make it look like we're all adhering to some common, universally agreed-upon dogma. I apologise if I've slighted you for making an understandable mistake.

AJ113

Koy and Jamie_L:

Your posts are similar and have similar analogies, so I will answer in general terms.

In the case of the Elvis/Gremlin analogies: It is obviously easier to believe evidence regarding a mundane spilled cup of coffee because acceptance of the evidence as truth does not require you to change your views or beliefs.

The reality is that the quality of his evidence is exactly the same in either scenario. Of course it is more difficult to accept his evidence re: Elvis/gremlin for the reason described above.

But this does not completely negate his testimony as viable evidence. What if two other workmates give similar testimonies and there are visible clues to support their claims? Does the claim seem a bit more acceptable, now?

In court cases, each side usually presents many different samples of evidence, none of which on their own prove the case, but they are called converging lines of evidence, and the sum of the whole is greater than the individual parts.

So whilst your workmate's testimony may not be enough for you to believe what he is saying, you may well accept that he could be telling the truth, especially if there was some kind of other evidence to back up his words.

Now, if this is what you mean by extraordinary evidence, then I agree with you. But I have always taken "extraordinary evidence" to mean 100 foot high words in the sky, etc.

Koyaanisqatsi

Ok...

That's not the question. The question is, what are your views or beliefs predicated upon?

Which scenario? The one in which you've only heard somebody tell you about something that may or may not have happened to somebody else, or the scenario in which the reality of Elvis is literarly staring you in the face and teams of trained personelle are conducting tests to verify he is who he claims to be?

Then employ my standards and the question is rendered clear.

Yes, actually, it does.

If you have a witness who states that I am a black man in my late forties and you have two or three other witnesses that state I am a white man in my mid thirties and then you have blood tests and DNA tests that confirm that I am a white (caucasin) male in my mid thirties, then you have a quality (i.e., standard of evidence) that proves to you that I am, in fact, a white male in my mid thirties.

You can then determine whether or not the first witness was incorrect in his or her assessment of my ethnic makeup, yes?

Then it would be reasonable for you (as the allegedly impartial judge implicit in your hypotehtical) to conclude that the two workmates' assessment is more trustworthy.

You're leaving out the salient point, which is that the two override the third, which means that the third person's testimony is dismissed accordingly.

So, in the case of the synoptics, where does that leave us? Two of three are telling the truth and the other third is discarded as, at best, unreliable; at worst, deliberate lies?

Well, we basically know that Matthew and Luke were little more than revisions of Mark, so that means that Mark was the orginator of the myth. What then does that mean for Matthew and Luke, especially since it can be established that Mark was most likely not a Jew and Matthew, at best, was correcting Mark's mistakes while Luke was written so many decades later, it no longer matters?

You have one person who relates a story forty to fifty years after any alleged facts and then you have another person who corrects and embellishes the first person's story ten to twenty years later; and then you have another author revising it all almost a hundred years later.

What, then, can you conclude?

So you agree that there are levels of evidence?

In other words, a hierarchy of standards that are intelligently applied to the circumstance.

Well, since that is what everyone has been discussing, why did you ever challenge such an agreement?

You are confirming the poetic quote, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidance."

Which should be no problem at all, considering the fact that such evidence would not even meet your own standard, which was that the evidence fit the claim.

A claim that a mystical fairy god king magically created the universe ex nihilo in order to punish us because we don't obey him would not even begin to match the low level of "proof" the above standard addresses.

Right?

AJ113

Koy:

You have misunderstood much of what I have posted, and I take responsibility for that, so I will attempt to clarify.

On the two scenarios, I meant:
1 A guy testifies that he has seen a cup of coffee spilled.
2 A guy testifies that he has seen a gremlin.

The quality of evidence is exactly the same in both scenarios. It is not that we accept the spilled cup of coffe as the truth, it is simply that we do not care, as it is inconsequential. But if you are genuinely prepared to believe the spilled cup of coffee as the absolute truth, then in order to be consistent, you have no reason to reject scenario 2.

"Two other workmates give similar testimonies." I said similar, not different. In other words, they are backing up the first guy. So you would have three people all giving testimony of the gremlin.

The court case analogy:
What if the spilled coffee was somehow crucial to the hypothetical case? How strong is one man's testimony now? It is exactly as strong as one man's testimony of the gremlin. They are both the same. If one man gave testimony in court of a spilled cup of coffee, it would not be useless as evidence, but it would not be as good as three guys testifying the same thing, plus coffee stains on the desk. Is this extraordinary evidence? No it is not, but it is pretty convincing.

What if we had three guys testifying about the gremlin, and there was a bite taken out of the desk, too? The evidence is still just as convincing, but it is no more extraordinary than the coffee evidence.

Koyaanisqatsi

I sincerely doubt that, but we'll see.

Big of you.

Nice try, but false, which I'll get to in a minute.

Also false, but again, I'll get to this in a minute.

And there's your fallacy. Nobody just accepts things as true without question, as you demonstrated just prior. We accept the spilled coffee as truth because it is inconsequential.

You're attempting to equate disparate levels of believability based solely upon the notion that the manner of testimony (in this case eyewitness) is equal, therefore one's acceptance of the claim should also be equal. I have every reason to reject scenario 2 over scenario 1, because I have no further information to assess the more extraordinary claim; i.e., that the person saw a fictional character.

I have seen cups of coffee spilled before and coffee before and cups before, so anyone who claims that they saw a cup of coffee spilled does not necessarily require more evidence for me to believe this person is telling me the truth.

<ol type="1">[*] The level of the truth claim being proffered is trivial and therefore easily acceptable[*] The evidence of spilled coffee would be simple to independently verify[*] The truth claim does not invoke any necessary further questions[/list=a]

Scenario 2, however, meets none of these simple, automatic criteria that everyone employs the minute a truth claim is proffered.

<ol type="1">[*] The level of the truth claim being proffered is extraordinary (a fictional creature factually existing) and therefore very hard to merely accept[*] The evidence of a factual gremlin sighting would be very difficult if not impossible to verify[*] The truth claim does invoke necessary further questions[/list=a]

Unless, of course, you're an idiot (and again, I mean that literally).

You know this is true as you demonstrate precisely what had to happen next in the chain of evidence, so I can only conclude that I was correct earlier and that you are simply attempting to justify a low standard of evidence when it comes to your beliefs because you know you cannot meet a higher one; one that would actually support the veracity of the claims of your beliefs.

In other words, you are subconsciously aware that your beliefs are not supportable and that the exceedingly poor quality of evidence does not justify continued belief, so in order to maintain your beliefs (instead of discarding them as untenable precisely because the evidence is so poor), you are doing everything possible to come up with an excuse for the poor evidence.

Great. Who cares? As you well know, we're ultimately talking about the synoptic Gospels; whether you do so directly or indirectly is just a matter of annoyance, so please don't continue to be under the false impression that you are in some way making a relevant point to that end.

I'll demonstrate with your next observation:

And what happens when the two workmates give contradictory testimony? In other words, they are not backing up the first guy, they are stating something different happened?

And what happens if you find out that the first guy to see the gremlin saw it two hundred years ago, but waited forty years to write about it?

And then you find out that the second guy read the first guy's account of seeing the gremlin and in turn wrote a conflicting account of the gremlin ten years after the first guy wrote his account of seeing the gremlin and it can be demonstrated that the second guy didn't actually see the gremlin, he just based his story on reading the first guy's story?

And then you find out that the third guy did the same thing only he didn't write his version of the first guy's account until almost a hundred years later!

What do you have then?

Well, then you have the questionable recollection of just one possible eyewitness decades after any alleged facts and you have two people who will be charged with perjury.

We're not morons, AJ. We know exactly what you're trying to do and what it alludes to and it doesn't wash on any level.

You do not have three people who all witnessed the same event and wrote their "similar" stories down. You have one possible witness who, nowhere in his story claims to be a witness and does not write his story as if he were a witness and writes about things he could not have witnessed (such as Jesus and Satan in the wilderness) and then years later, two fraudulent (and conflicting) revisions of this story.

Then further corroborating evidence would be required (such as photographs of the spilled coffee; the coffee cup that was spilled; etc.).

Bullshit!

The veracity of the truth claim is commensurate with the truth claim as you stated yourself!

The manner of the testimony (i.e., this is eyewitness testimony) is not the question; the question is what is the nature of the claim and what corroborating evidence is there to support the testimony and if there is only the testimony, then how believable is either the claim or the person giving the testimony?

If as you state the spilling of the coffee is crucial to the case in that without establishing that the coffee really was spilled that this will either acquit or indict the defendant and we have only the testimony of one person as to the spilled coffee, then it would be extremely easy for the defense to simply state the evidence is circumstantial and indict the witness.

If you add into the mix that the prosecution has introduced two other "witnesses" who you show are offering fraudulent testimonials that are evidently based upon the first witness' testimony, then you will most likely win the acquittal for your client based on the lack of evidence and suspicious nature of what the prosecution attempted to fool everyone with.

So you do agree that there are deeper levels of evidence that serve to corroborate truth claims.

Was this an extraordinary claim?

True, if that were the case, which it is not. For your coffee spilling analogy to be applicable at all to the synoptics, you would have to use my own criteria and not your deliberately simplistic, false analogy.

Then the bite would serve to independently corroborate the truth claims!

You are arguing my position and proving with everything you write that there are necessary levels of evidence based upon the truth claim and the circumstances involved in that truth claim.

THE CLAIM IS WHAT IS EXTRAORDINARY.

This is pointless, disingenuous stupidity. You know and have proved you know damn well that a simple claim of "I saw spilled coffee" that has no other addendum and no other circumstance (i.e., prima fascia truth claim) is readily accepted because it is trivial and requires no further corroborating evidence and that a simple claim of "I saw a gremlin" that has no other addendum and no other circumstance is not readily accepted because it is not trivial and demands further corroborating evidence.

If you see no qualitative difference and make no distinctions between someone who comes up to you and says, "I saw spilled coffee" and someone who comes up to you and says, "I saw a gremlin," then you are an exceedingly gullible person and you have my pity, but if you have a moment, I can turn your pity into wealth by letting you in on a nice little piece of American history. It's not the Brooklyn Bridge that I own, but it's close! I happen to have in my possession a genuine piece of the actual Statue of Liberty cast by the French but never assembled by an unfortunate oversight. She was supposed to be wearing glasses!

And since I am telling you the truth and you make no distinction regarding my truth claim, you must therefore send me a thousand easy payments of 29.95 each for the rest of your life and you will own the Lady Liberty's glasses!

You believe me, right? After all, my having Lady Liberty's glasses is no more incredible than a spilled cup of coffee to you.

Right?

(edited for formatting - Koy)

[ August 05, 2002: Message edited by: Koyaanisqatsi ]</p>

AJ113

Koy:
The points that I raised are borne out of a general philosopy of life. It may well be that my faith has something to do with it, but not to the degree that you are suggesting in your posts.

I do not subscribe to the "respect has to be earned" mentality. I think that respect should be given without reserve to every individual, until such time as that individual gives me cause to withdraw the respect.

So if a stranger tells me he saw a gremlin, then I am prepared to acknowledge that at least he believes that he has seen a gremlin. He may have actually seen a real gremlin for all I know. Who am I to judge the guy as a liar?

If I never see the guy again, then the situation remains "open." There is a chance that he may have seen a gremlin. I don't know for sure, because I wasn't there at the time. But at least I gave the guy some respect and didn't brand him a liar without even knowing him.

This is not the same as being gullible and believing everything everyone says.

Now, if time passes and no evidence from other sources surfaces to disprove the guy's testimony, then the original acceptance of his sincerity remains.

However, back in the real world, something usually happens to give me cause to dismiss the claim. The guy's true colours ultimately show and he does something, or further evidence is presented, that gives me cause to re-assess his character as untrustworthy. At this point, my acceptance of his gremlin testimony would be swiftly flying out of the window.

Conversely, it could be that his actions reinforce his genuineness, or further evidence to support him surfaces, and as a result my acceptance of his gremlin testimony is strengthened.

After all, if the person closest to you in your life told you they'd seen a gremlin, would you dismiss their claim in totality?

Much is said on this forum of the courage needed to be openly atheist in the face of so much opposition. I can relate to that, because where I live, it is the opposite way round, most people are atheists, not because they sat down and thought it out, but because they don't give a sh1t anyway, and most people have the life view of "trust no-one, not even your own mother."

But I hold on to the views described above, because I beleive it is the right way to treat people. Personally I do not lie, and I hate being distrusted, so I make sure that I do not treat other people in that way.