Yep...

It’s easy enough for you to simply reject Mightyboosch’s version of reliabilism. The caveat being you can’t then attack believers of other religions—Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Taoists, Buddhists, et al—with the same epistemic hatchet. That’s not an issue for Religious Pluralists, but it is for those religious adherents who claim an exclusive source of truth. For instance, I don’t think a Christian, whose belief is based on personal experience, could reject Mightyboosch’s epistemic standards and then claim: Jesus is the way […], full stop. I think he’d need to qualify the claim as: Jesus is the way […], for Christians. The ripple effect is that it makes it kind of hard to justify attempts to convert people from one religion to another, indoctrinating children in a particular religious creed, public prayer, etc.

Something like that, but in theist speak I’d replace “suddenly” with “by grace.”

Imagine if you took up the mantra “God loves me,” did you best to keep it at the forefront of your mind at all times, and when doubts surface, you go back to the mantra. Eventually, any doubts you have will subside and lose their force due to a lack of attention. So in terms of your attitude of mind, you’ll believe “God love me” and won’t doubt that he doesn’t. At that point, you’ve opened yourself up to experience “God loves me.” When that happens you can say, “I believe God loves me because God loves me,” without being charged with begging the question. That is, the experience in the second sense grounds the propositional belief in the first.

I think of changing beliefs in two ways. The first way is based solely on perception. This is similar to what you are describing in that you change your perspective of reality based on your current level of awareness. You are looking at reality at a different angle.

The way I encourage when it comes to the metaphysical is expanding your awareness. This is like looking at something in a microscope and it is clearly one thing and then zooming out and making it something completely different. This is much more reliable because you are working with more information and your beliefs update naturally.

To me, the first way is like deciding ahead of time what you WANT to believe. The second way is exploring truth and adjusting your beliefs based on discovery.

I'm not sure I agree with everything here. To begin with, I think it depends on what you mean by "attack" other believers. I try to respect everyone, since I acknowledge we all carry with us a conviction to hold different views. I believe they are wrong, but I can step back and objectively see that I believe one thing, and they, another, and I'm not any better.

Now, it also depends on what you mean by "rejecting" MB's standard. I don't think it's the best way to process things, but I by no means insist or force anything on him personally, and understand if he wants to continue in it, and again like before, I objectively see we simply see it differently. With that said, I'm not sure I follow on why I wouldn't be able to claim the divinity of Christ in the same breath. I don't attempt to convert people, because I don't believe I have that ability, but I don't see why I wouldn't share Christ with people I care about, if I believe in Christ myself. For example, if I am having a conversation with a drug addict who is reaching the end of his rope, I feel it would be selfish of me to not share Christ with him, as I have been in his shoes, and have benefited from Christ. In cases like these, I think it entirely depends on your motives.

What if I changed the "extraordinary claims" to "claims of events that as far we know are impossible", what epistemological mistake am I making?

I don't understand why the possibility of immaterial eggs existing and being eaten by god for breakfast is inscrutable, but Jesus performing acts that couldn't happen unless there really is a divine agency, isn't.

Miracles are impossible as far as we know, but I can observe something material and wonder what it's made of, or wonder why people don't fall off the planet, and eventually get to Gravity and Atomic Nuclei, but how do miracles have any possibility of being real? I have no reason, other than a 2000 year old account, to believe that they are. They could be nothing more than a figment of our imagination, and is that enough to assign a prior probability?

Can I make it clear that I'm not trying to show why you and OrP wrong, I'm trying to understand why you're right.

If your claim is that these events are as far as we know impossible what changes the "as far as we know"? On what grounds do we determine that these events are impossible and if their status is subject to change what would be necessary for us to change our position that they are impossible.

I get that this is pointless if I'm still on ignore but whatever.

Supernatural claims are not logically impossible, so I take you mean nomologically impossible. I see "nomologically impossible" as directly equivalent to "probability = 0". So if you think miracles are impossible, then you are assigning a probability to them - a probability of 0. But you want to deny that it's ok to do this.

Also, it would be helpful if you just answered questions rather than answering-a-question-with-a-question.

For the sake of brevity I'll just retract this point and say that ALL supernatural claims can be assessed probabilistically. If someone has a good counter-example I'll happily accept it, but I don't want to waste more time thinking up a better example.

See previous on relationship between possibility and probability.

We're making two simple claims:

1) One should be more confident in claims that have evidence to back them up, than claims without evidence.
2) Written records are a form of evidence.

And one slightly less simple claim:

3) The previous rules apply even to very very unlikely claims.

Tbh, I have no idea how you aren't just accepting these pretty obvious truisms and moving on.

The phrasing "as far as we know" is simply a placeholder for the things that you're doing wrong. Specifically, you've given no means by which one can change the status of "as far as we know."

As far as we knew around 1900, atoms were probably like plum pudding. Having alpha particles bounce off of them was not physically possible under the existing models.

There are reports of miracles throughout multiple cultures across multiple periods of human history. There are even plenty of contemporary reports.

Notice how you're giving yourself "could be (imagined)" a probability when you say this. Hence there's a "could be (real)" that is the complement probability (unless you think that there's something else between could be imagined and could be real, in which case you only get an upper bound on the probability).

One of the things you seem to struggle with is letting go of your assumptions. You complain so much about religious people and their logical processes, but you hold on to your "intuition" as tightly as many of the religious fundamentalists hold their beliefs. You seem mostly unwilling to allow for any sort of possibility of a framework that could possibly put a religious statement in a positive light. You only pretend to be open-minded about things when you introduce your religious conspiracy threads.

Or look at your first responses in the ISIS thread. You were clearly unjustifiably taking the position that it was a religious sympathy thread. Again, if both theists and atheists are posting in a thread that you're wrong, the odds are very good that you're wrong. But you don't seem willing to accept that.

Mostly, it appears that make your conclusions first, and then come up with reasons later. OrP called you out on this, and I think it was in this thread.

Can someone please define 'miracles' as it relates to this discussion?

Ex: if someone sees a faith healer then recovers from cancer, is that a miracle?
If both of the american missionaries with ebola recover, is that a miracle?
If a fish evolves into a man over millions of years, is that a miracle?
If someone observes that a person turns an object into another object, is that a miracle?
If someone has an addiction, prays, feels God's presence, and is no longer addicted, is that a miracle?
If the cleveland browns go 16-0 and win the super bowl, is that a miracle?
If this thread ends with everyone suddenly realizing that scientology is the right and true religion, is that a miracle?

I'm using Hume's definition, and I think everyone else is:
http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/al...meMiracles.pdf

It will be interesting to see if MB reads that link and quickly changes his tune on the acceptability of probabilistic arguments against miracles....

Hopefully he reads it, it's a concise enough summary though I suspect any change in position will be just enough.

I prefer to let things unfold as well, but most people seem to prefer the devotional path. At the end of the day, I think the only requirement is that the approach can knock off one of the legs of the tripartite stool of seer, seen and seeing. From there, the experience seems to occur by its own accord.

If you believe the water is cold and I believe it’s warm, and we’re relying on our immediate subjective experiences to ground our respective beliefs—how can you maintain I’m wrong? Unless you think I’m lying, dysfunctional or delusional, the nearest option seems to be that we’re experiencing the same thing from different perspectives.

I don't think you're lying, dysfunctional, or delusional, since I could also be all of those things, I simply understand that from your perspective, it is warm, but I believe it is cold.

This may not be the best analogy, unless you purposely selected it because warm and cold are subjective.

If I believe it is 1, and you believe it is 2, and it can't be both, then I have to assume one of us is wrong. For me to commit to my belief of 1, I need to believe that it is not 2, even though I acknowledge it may be 2, or even 3.

I think a lot of people are overthinking this. Miracle is not a precise word and even when it is precise, the situations it describes are not necessarily seen similarly.

Your question is equivalent to asking which of "girl runs over boy" or "girl meets boy" qualifies as an accident; the answer could vary between all and none.

Thanks for the link, wish I'd known about that before and I agree with everything said in it. I don't think it changes anything about what I've been trying to articulate though, that miracles are logically possible is what I was alluding to with the Ontological argument question, it doesn't make them real though. My "claims of events that as far we know are impossible" question was intended to elicit exactly the type of understanding that I now have about that part of this.

So, I accept that I can't say that miracles are impossible, but I've been saying as much all the way through this whilst pointing out that since we also can't say that the FSM is impossible it adds nothing to theistic claims, and I can't say that the biblical accounts of miracles don't at least marginally increase the probability of them actually having happened, but I'm also fine with that as long as NR and any other theists accept that all such accounts (including the Qur'an) have at least that same effect on their respective accounts, so it adds nothing to admit those accounts increase probability, and since they're contradictory, they actually weaken the argument for biblical proof which is the point I've been trying to make to NR and is mentioned in the PDF you linked - 'so the force of each claim to miracles destroys the force of the others'.

And I guess that last point is why we're still talking about this, but now I have a better, more logical understanding rather than just an intuition, so thanks for that. I'm not being a smartass here, I genuinely appreciate it.

This isn't correct. The biblical accounts of Jesus performing miracles do count as evidence, but it's extremely weak evidence (think about how much of the bible you simply reject as not being intended to be taken literally) and since the claim is of something that would be supernatural, the evidence needs to be good.

Simple, that you can't reject the Qur'anic accounts of Islamic miracles simply because it contradicts what you'd prefer to believe true. There are many other such accounts, such as Hindu miracles, and as the PDF says 'the force of each claim to miracles destroys the force of the others', which I agree with and which is why I've been pursuing this with you. I think that you accepting contradictory miraculous claims undermines the bible as the source of your convictions, and I could understand why you wouldn't want to do that, but I don't see how you can avoid it.


So you're uncertain about what you believe, but you can't be saved unless you accept the truth of Jesus and not only believe but, I dunno, believe 'harder' than other people? You've made being saved sound like it's an issue of how strongly you believe, but you admit to uncertainty. You can understand how this might appear contradictory to me.


I really hope you read it, I realise that it having been the catalyst for my view that cognitive biases undermine personal experiences might be off-putting for you, but I think it's just worth a read anyway. I'm now much more aware of many biases that I exhibit and it's changed how I see many things. Confirmation bias is the one I fight the most.

I don't reject the possibility of any of the gods actually being real, you keep talking about your god but don't forget that from my PoV you've simply chosen one god from the many available and rejected the rest, you're atheist with regard to all the other gods, so my answer would for you think about why you epistemically reject all those other gods. What would it take to convince you that Ganesh actually exists?

That was an irrelevant digression though. The point being discussed when you responded to me was not about logical impossibility, but about the relationship between probabilistic confidence and evidence.

That's not strictly true; the claim "God made a married batchelor is logically impossible, and I believe most theists agree.

Firstly, that two events are both possible doesn't imply that they are equally probable. So for your FSM example, the quality of the written record matters. We know (from written records!) that the FSM was invented. We don't know that Jesus' miracles were invented.

See above, If NR has good reasons to think that the authors of the New Testament are more reliable than that of the Koran, then he doesn't need to give equal confidence to both.

Ok,I understand this now.

I meant 'I accept that I can't say that miracles are logically impossible'. Sorry, just being imprecise.

Yeah I was aware of the somewhat fatal weakness in the comparison, not sure why I used it. I think I was trying to use something that I was sure NR would never agree was real, but couldn't deny was possible. We can just substitute a roughly equivalent example. The Hindu gods and the accounts of Hindu miracles will do.

Ok, not necessarily equal confidence, but neither can he so easily discredit it as a source of accounts wrt Islamic miracles that act as evidence that increase the probability of those miracles having happened. If it's not equally as reliable as the bible (and that's debatable, although it's not a debate I want to have), it's at least very close and 'close' is good enough for my purpose of making the point that these contradictory claims weaken the overall likelihood of miracles being real.

Why are we stating the obvious? It is patently clear that MB is implicitly arguing that N_R should view them as equally reliable. Saying that he doesn't is a response, it is repeating the posed problem. It is also a good point. The Bible and the Quran are relatively similar in both content and historicity. The only thing brought up as an answer in this thread is "mystical states", which incidentally (and very handily) can't be expressed in words; basically "you can't argue with me, because I'm me and you are not". The only problem of course is that we know such reasoning fails abysmally for any venture that actually has measurable consequences.

I don't mean to be rude, but I think even YECs state their case better. At least their arguments are substantial.

They may state their case better but their case is weaker. NR has consistently stated he may be wrong the YEC aren't.

My position during this thread, which has subsequently led to MB having me on ignore, is that if MB wants to discuss someones personal experiences he should approach it from a perspective of trying to understand rather than confront. There was a pretty reasonable discussion available to both and that they didn't have it is in part down to the approach both have taken. If I tell you an experience happens to me and you accuse me of lying to myself just how constructive do we expect the conversation to be?

I don't doubt N_R's sincerity I do doubt his account and I think the manner in which he has raised it may be indicative of the vagueness of the experience. I also understand that others who claim to have god revealed have had much clearer experiences and the blog OrP referenced somewhere above included a pretty decent argument against the arguments provided by personal experience. But he's kind of put himself out there discussing some personal stuff and whatever we may feel about it we do better to approach it respectfully.

We can respect his attempt to share the story without respecting the story.

It may be obvious to you, but it's clearly not obvious to MB. Which is why his argument has tried to say* that the Flying Spaghetti monster/ Jesus / Mohammed have the same epistemic status etc. (Paraphrasing cos the thread is a clusterfudge of mixed analogies and wotnot).

So I think it's worth a little of my time to point MB in the right direction (getting NR to properly defend the reasons he has for thinking the New Testament is more reliable than the Koran. Specifically, I'm concerned that this exchange:

... both misrepresents NR's claims, and is moving MB away from better arguments he can make.

OK

At this point it just sounds like you and NR are both making as yet unjustified claims:

NR: The NT is more reliable than the Qur'an.
You: Maybe, but they are at least close in reliability.