@@EmersonGreen I agree that the standard for identifying evidence is relevance. But I don't see any facts that are relevant to the existence of god, where every fact equally indicates naturalism, cognitive bias, or social utility. The fact that most people believe in god equally indicates cognitive biases relating to agency, fear, and uncertainty. The authors of sacred texts have many motives for promoting religion other than factual accuracy. Also, one needs to define what "god" means before deciding whether any fact is supportive of that hypothesis, which is problematic, since there are many definitions of "god", and most of them cannot be demonstrated. Theism is falsifiable because it is false. That doesn't imply there is any evidence supporting it. Some things are just false. Testimony can be evidence, but not when the testimony is too vague to support the (also vague) thesis and is equally explained by cognitive bias. Your point on belief and "lack-theism" is good, but you should mention that indecision about the existence of god is common, reasonable and traditionally called "agnosticism". There are more agnostics than there are atheists (which is why atheists are so eager to claim them). The lack of any concrete examples of "evidence" supporting theism in the program is notable. Perhaps some theists can provide it /s.
@@EmersonGreen Would you mind if I clip the "lacktheism" segment of your video out and upload it on my channel with some framing about why it's relevant to people who aren't interested in philosophy at all?
@@EmersonGreen Thank you kindly. Ten years ago, a retired philosophy professor explained why lack of belief doesn't make sense and I realized why I was wrong. Now it's something of a pet peeve for me, especially when it's defended so dogmatically. You do a great job of explaining it.
*Can you imagine being asked "What would persuade you of the existence of square circles?* This is what many atheists experience when asked "What would persuade you of the existence of God?". I have had this experience before I understood the incoherence and/or ambiguity of the term, since in general conversation the term is not a singular claim, but a category of claims and thus one is not actually engaging some particular, but is instead making a variety of assumptions when speaking to any particular individual UNLESS one takes the time to establish what is being denoted as God. --- I would not denote the atheist as being unreasonable, but he didn't present what I suspect most would need to give charitable consideration. I am assuming he holds the idea that the concept of God is incoherent and thus there can be no evidence. I am assuming most wouldn't argue for there being some possible evidence for square circles. One of the issues that I think he is referencing is the idea of the Bible (or any such error laden and/or muddled presentation) being the presentation (or even reasonable associated) of a supposed omniscient omnipotent entity. The very idea can strike some as an absurdity given sufficient knowledge of the falsehoods in the Bible. So, just as the problem of evil is an issue for theism so is the problem of incompetence which might be considered a subcategory of divine hiddenness.
Being persuaded of square circles is WAY WAY EASIER than being persuaded of God. Both the properties "square" and "circle" are *observable.* So all I need is to somehow observe that a given geometric shape is both a square and a circle, and then I'll be convinced! I can't imagine _how_ that would happen, but at least I know which signals I'd have to be receiving to conclude that. On the other hand, "omnipotent disembodied mind that created the Universe" is very much *unobservable,* in its every aspect. I don't know how to observe a mind without a body. I don't know how to observe _that_ it doesn't have any body anywhere. I don't know how to observe something being created out of nothing, and even if I did, I wouldn't be able to correlate it with the disembodied mind's intentions (because I can't observe its intentions), etc.
@@user-qm4ev6jb7d Right. Instead of a "square circle" it's more of "unsprongticable prongticum". I made that up, it sounds silly and that's the point. And this type of language is often used in theism "the mystery that contains all truths" and things like that.
@@juanausensi499 I think it was Rudolf Carnap who first publicly called it out, claiming that things like "What is the foundational principle of all existence?" are simply meaningless pseudo-questions. Now, I don't fully agree with Carnap here, I would rather say such questions are "meaningless until proven otherwise", instead of immediately dismissing them as "meaningless by construction".
Ngl, if God stepped out from the heavens today, and was walking around bathed in holy light with cherubim choirs in tow, I would be quite open to accepting that God is real And, in the event that the entity which stepped out were not God, I would still be ready to drop the topic nonetheless. Either way, if some celestial entity arrives on Earth, the "does God exist" conversion is absolutely over for me.
Good stuff. I especially like the point that if all evidence must be scientific evidence, then virtually all convictions were wrongful. That’s a nice way to put that point
It's called "withholding judgment due to lack of information for either proposition." it accurately described my position for years after I lost my faith. I have moved on from this position, but it is a real position that I honestly held for years, hoping for theists to demonstrate their claims.
I also think that's a perfectly reasonable position to maintain. I myself maintain a relatively unorthodox position: beyond God being real or not, i think the existence of God is not relevant.
Its worthwhile to take atheists to task when they make bad arguments but a lot of this gives too much credit to theism. The main problem is theism is often hoplessly vague, poorly defined, and endlessly malleable - it isnt strictly a philosophical claim, its a huge collection that is just packaged under a single term. Also falsifiability isnt exclusive to science. In a sense it is a way to measure information content. An unfalsifiable statement is effectively vaccuous - it cant provide information (it can still serve some other purpose). More broadly, if all this intellectual labor was an honest and rigorous search for truth show me the theist that carefully evaluated each individual question and only held onto a set of beliefs that were epistemologically justified... The overwhelming majority of theists are working backwards, searching for justification of already held belief. How else does the supposed importance of an itinerant preacher in ancient Palestine factor into discussions of first causes and "fine-tuned" universes?
Yup. When a statement is “hopelessly vague, poorly defined and endlessly malleable” how can one even start to evaluate if something is evidence for it?
@@scambammer6102The issue is many theists don't define their claims. They define God in ways that allow them to rely on mystery. If you point out the Christian God commanded genocide, they will say it's not bad if God does it. Theists refuse to define their God in any meaningful way.
@@WaterCat5 I know, but there are pretty well defined definitions of god in theology and philosophy that can be debunked. But there is no way to debunk a claim that the claimant refuses to define.
This was really well done and much needed! It's part of the reason why as a atheist I often wince at some of the stuff I see on line. I've also been guilty of a couple of those and it was epistemology that `corrected me.` Keep in mind though, we're talking about a very broad topic in "theism" There are few people that simply believe there is a god, without a whole bunch of other stuff. Depending on what that stuff is, makes a difference.
Genuine question: using these definitions, are rainbows evidence of leprechauns? If rainbows didn't exist, it seems like leprechauns are less probable. I can't put my head in this mindset. It seems theists are simply defining God as a universe-maker, consciousness-maker, DNA-maker, morality-maker, etc. and therefore universes, consciousness, etc. all count as evidence for him. And conversely, if the universe, etc. didn't exist that would make God less probable?
There are MANY explanations for the things we see in the world. Some kind of deity/god, maybe a computer program, aliens etc. It's pretty much impossible at this point to know the true answer. There is no evidence for a god and yet also boundless evidence for god. Same applies for just about everything. The issue is that most religions make claims that conflict with science and how we understand the world as well as sometimes supporting things today we see as highly immoral such as slavery. And for that last point if the universe did at one point never exist at all then neither did the cause and effect rule so theoretically anything is possible to occur without a cause. It doesn't make god any less or any more probable than what many theists claim. It just also means the universe could have came into being causeless without any kind of deity.
I agree. I majored in philosophy. I saw the word epistemology, and clicked. As you say, rainbows are not evidence of leprechauns. I'd like to see your question answered.
When it comes to theological philosophy, the arguments are usually in regard to X versus Y or X versus all non-X. For example, the universe is expanding, and appears to have had a beginning, which is obviously greater evidence for a divine creator than a universe that is static, and appears to have always existed. Other similar attributes are order and chaos, or simplicity and complexity. A universe that is nothing but a single neutrino is much more likely to generate spontaneously; especially, given our understanding of virtual particles than a universe of over a dozen types of quantum particles that assemble into numerous forms of complexity.
Ok, but you are just complaining that colloquial speech is different than academic speech. As a practical matter, any "evidence" that is not "good" enough to change a mind, might as well not be called "evidence" at all, especially by the person whose mind we are talking about. Similarly, the "lacktheist" hangup is motivated by practical interactions when a theist asks an atheist to "prove that god doesn't exist," as opposed to just "give reasons why they are an atheist." Theists like to pretend that "believing in god" is somehow "the same" as "not believing in god." But the whole point is that to believe in god is have a standard of evidence that is so low as to be laughable.
@@scambammer6102 that's exactly my point - "proper" is relative to a situation, isn't it? And not all situations demand this level of pedantry, do they?
I mean, sure. I definitely understand your point. I would argue though that the “lacktheist” has affirmed a position on the matter in either context, so it really doesn’t come down to knowing what’s standard in academia. You know that you don’t “lack a belief” in God like an infant or some inanimate object does. You have a stance. Stand by it. Why exactly should this not be recognized as the case in colloquial speech? Ofc in a practical setting, your beliefs don’t demand justification, but then just say “i don’t need to justify anything to you.” That’s perfectly fine to say to a mean aunt at a family reunion or whatever, but saying you lack a mental state on a topic that you clearly do not isn’t true in either a graduate level course, or the comfort of your living room.
@@on.periattt Every atheist I have ever met can most definitely explain "why they are an atheist," as in explaining what is their reasoning and the evidence they used to come to their conclusion. This isn't an issue. The issue is when a theist hears this and replies with something pedantic like, "Oh, you mean you are an 'agnostic!'" as if that is some profound insight and then wants to go into how we are both "open the possibility...blah, blah." I think the big picture is simply that atheists are tired of the whole ridiculous conversation, in both colloquial and academic settings. At this point, its like theists are speaking their own language which they just mindlessly repeat ad nauseam.
48:54 - I think it's fair to say two things simultaneously: 1. I believe that the evidence for God is insufficient to warrant belief. 2. I believe that the evidence *against* God is sufficient to warrant *disbelief*. Number one is the bare minimum requirement to not be a theist, and it doesn't require any positive evidence against God, it only requires a lack of evidence *for* God, hence "lacktheism". This is the bare minimum which, IMO, many forms of theism haven't overcome. That being said, I agree that most atheists are not *just* lacktheists, I think they do have some evidence in mind against God which informs their beliefs, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for such people to sit back and say, "Look, I don't see sufficient evidence for theism, so I'm not even going to bother proposing evidence *against* it: it would be a waste of time and effort at this point. I am going to act like a lacktheist until given reason to do otherwise."
" I agree that most atheists are not just lacktheists" he didn't say that, and it isn't true. "The number of atheists and agnostics found in common surveys tends to be quite low since, for instance, according to the 2019 Pew Research Center survey they were 3.1% and 4% respectively" (goddam I am good)
@@irish_deconstruction modern pop atheists have muddied the word "agnostic" to the extent it's clearer to just use "lack-theist" even though it sounds awful.
@@scambammer6102 I'm not sure that's actually true in broader society. In certain places online such as the r/atheism subreddit, probably. But not necessarily if you're just talking to a random neighbor or something. I'd actually be interested to see a survey on this topic.
15:15 - I don't think theists are claiming to do science, I think they're doing what you go on to describe, which is why, depending on the brand of theism being proposed, I do accuse them of making their beliefs unfalsifiable, and thereby unsupportable. Frankly, I don't hear many if any atheists using this idea in the way you initially described it.
@@thomasthellamas9886 Not really. Evidence is facts consistent with a view. Falsifiability needs potential facts which are inconsistent. For example, if I say my next coin flip will be heads or tails that's consistent with a fair coin but not a testable prediction.
This is a strawman. You slipping in that "therefore dragon" is just dishonest. If there was a fuzzy video of something flying in the sky, this is something we would expect if dragons did exist. This is very different from saying that the fuzzy video decisively proves the existence of dragons. However, the video is more likely to be evidence for something less improbable, such as an airplane or a helicopter or some other probable flying object.
@@irish_deconstruction theism is just a belief in a god or gods, evidence is not required, theism exists. What you need is evidence for a god or Gods.... got any?
When you are talking about evidence, I think it is important to note most people are not high minded epistemologists whether theist or atheist, in the common man's understanding of evidence, there is no evidence or verifiable evidence at the least for theism. Things like fine-tuning, and the universe supposedly having a beginning, etc are what I would and the common man would consider arguments for theism, but not "evidence" in the common man's parlance. This is a topic not only debated by epistemologists.
I agree with you, it's all in the context of conversation or debate. When your debating evidence for gods existence I think most people know what "evidence" means in that context. You can claim anything as evidence I suppose but it doesn't make it true.
Theists can say this same thing to atheists. Emerson (I don't watch him a lot) made this point that both "meta-worldviews" can rationalize the same things in different ways.
It's not that hard to understand what "evidence" is. Take any proposed fact. Assume it is true. Does it make the claim more or less likely? If so, it is evidence.
There is the small irony in Emerson complaining about people redefining what "to believe" means (i.e. differently than in academic epistomology), then redefining "evidence" from what 90% of people would regard the word as meaning. I don't think his complaint is necessarily wrong, but if there were one group of people who I would accuse of needlessly redefining words to suit their argument, it would be philosophers (see modal ontology).
There's a fundamental difference in testimonies about the existence of god and of table being made of atoms: If you wanted to do so, there's a clear path which you could follow and observe the latter yourself, hence your knowledge of it will stop being purely testimonial. However, you can never go back in time to meet Jesus, hence all the knowledge you have about him will always necessarily be testimonial. This option of going beyond the testimonial is what separates the two groups of knowledge
On one level, all evidence is testimonial. Your memory is another form of testimony (and unfortunately not particularly reliable). I'd say that the number of independent and methodologically rigorous testimonies is the key difference. But the amount of contradictory testimonies is also significant.
You’re presupposing that if God exists it must be Jesus. Probably because you live in a Western secular culture. If Jesus is not God it doesn’t logically follow that God doesn’t exist. It only proves the Christian God doesn’t exist. For someone to move from being an atheist to a Christian one must first resolve whether God exists and if he’s immaterial and exists outside of nature as he’s is the grounding of all reality. Once that objection has been answered then they can study Jesus to get that question answered. In other words it’s downstream of whether or not God exits.
@@irish_deconstructionI guess because apart from intuition, observation is the fundamental way in how I perceive the world. If I don't believe in it, there's nothing else to believe
Suppose a criminal investigator said there is no evidence connecting a suspect to a crime scene. According to this epistemological version of the concept that would almost surely be false. At least something in a complex crime scene would fit this definition. For example, the crime occurred in a house. It’s more likely this person did it given that houses exist. So there is some amount of evidence he did it. But that’s clearly not what we mean. That’s ridiculous. Yet that’s kind of the low standard that we’re appealing to here. I’m not sure exactly which definition we should be using. I’m not sure exactly which definition of evidence would make the atheist claim “there is no evidence for Gods existence” to be roughly correct. Maybe there is none. But I think focusing on the particular notion you’re bringing up kind of misses the point. I probably wouldn’t say “there is no evidence”. But I don’t think it’s too far off in some colloquial sense. Suppose we just said, the reasons to believe in God are very very bad. Colloquially that would mean almost the same thing. The difference is that it doesn’t use the exact term “evidence” and it doesn’t use the categorical “there is *no* …”. Yet that could just be ascribed to phrasing and reasonable hyperbole. I just don’t think it’s correct to overanalyze such a statement. Don’t get me wrong, the Bayesian account of evidence is probably the best one we’ve got. But that doesn’t mean it’s the one we intend with such a simple statement.
I'll add this. I think when people use language in practice, very often they simply say words while meaning something that would require inserting extra qualifiers if we wanted to be pedantic. So "there is no evidence" can reasonably be intending "there is no good evidence" or "there is no sufficient evidence" or "there is almost no evidence" or something like that. I'm not saying people actually have a more complete sentence in their mind and just leave stuff out, but rather that they probably just render words from some black-box mental process and they've come to associate various ideas and examples and situations with those words. Even more they've probably heard someone say the words and now thy repeat them. So in a philosophical analysis the question really becomes if the person uttering the words can think reflectively about the concepts involved. How would they answer certain followup questions. If they say they're using the Bayesian definition of evidence you suggest and they also say "there is no evidence for God", then you'd be reasonable in pushing back on that and giving trivial counter examples and challenging them on it. But maybe they'd describe evidence in some less sophisticated way. Then you might be reasonable in trying to teach them about subjective Bayesian probabilities as a model for reasoning and convincing them that this is what they should be using. That's probably a noble goal. Good luck! If they don't have a well thought out definition of evidence, maybe you'll just have to empirically test how they use the term by asking them many many questions.
@@HyperFocusMarshmallow One problem is that many atheists have a stronger definition of "god" than apologists that argue this. The bigger problem is that this epistemology also must admit that there's evidence against god.
Evidence requires experience. If want to know whether a fact is evidence for my hypothesis, I must evaluate its probability. But where do I get my probability distribution? From statistical data, i.e. experience. Always. No exceptions. This is a problem for theism: Nobody has experience with a god creating stuff, so we don't know if stuff existing is evidence for such god. Of course I could *imagine* what a god could do, but that's just me defining "god" to have every property I like (e.g. human-like intelligence) and discard every property I don't like (e.g. the fact that humans require brains).
nope, evidence has nothing to do with probability. It has to do with relevance. Assume the proposed fact is true. If it tends to prove or disprove the thesis, it is evidence.
Very intuitive, I'm an atheist and I applaud you for making these profound points. I've encountered several hardcore atheist who's solely restricted to their worldview and is not interested to lend their ears to the other side.
You're confusing evidence with hypothesis. There are no testable, falsifiable hypotheses afaik that would confirm or deny theism. There are poorly constructed hypotheses, but these aren't evidence. An hypothesis itself cannot raise the probability for theism; only evidence that can support a testable hypothesis. Once the hypothesis test is satisfied, this is evidence.
6:03 discussion of probability of a hypothesis. THAT's NOT WHAT A HYPOTHESIS IS. It's a plan for testing. There's no probability until you test it. That's the whole point.@@pleaseenteraname1103
This video seems to hint at a lack of respect for skepticism. The idea that a person might lack belief is treated as ridiculous, while a skeptic would say that a lack of belief is wise. Beliefs are not necessary or even helpful. We can act in the world while withholding judgement on what is true. No matter how much evidence we think we have for God not existing, there could still be some sort of God hidden out there somewhere, and no productive purpose would be served by jumping to the conclusion that God does not exist, so what use is there in ridiculing people for withholding judgement?
If we say beliefs and truth judgments are unnecessary, we very quickly arrive at the "There are no absolute statements" problem. Do we believe that beliefs are unnecessary? Do we judge true the claim that we don't need truth judgements? We may try to say "We don't need X type of beliefs," but then we need to justify both why we don't need ~X, and why we do need X. We may also justifiably say "I have not seen sufficient evidence to make a determination for or against Y," but that is necessarily on a case by case basis.
@@billcynic1815I don't believe we "need to justify" in general. It is sufficient that beliefs are good enough to make good enough predictions. It doesn't matter what's under the water when you're trying to sail a boat.
"there could still be some sort of God hidden out there somewhere" no there couldn't. "god" is just a word used by humans. But you are right that he didn't sufficiently respect agnosticism.
Great video. Cameron promoted it and im hoping to see a theist do something similar. It could be a helpful resource for each side, progressing the coversation more towards truth and not tribalism.
I'm hoping there can be a conversation between apologists and non-believers. My biggest problem with modern apologetics is that they argue for a prime mover / first cause and never want to talk about the specific God they believe in. JMike, do you know of any apologists on TH-cam giving strong apologetics for their specific religion? Maybe it's Islam running "The Quran is perfect" or people running the minimum facts? It seems apologists who are willing to fight for their God are fewer and fewer these days. We get more and more Darth Dawkins....
@@malirk The first step is to argue for the existence of God. Specifics come later. I am always baffled when I hear people complain about Cosmological Argument by saying that it doesn't prove Christian God to exist, when the purpose of the argument is to make people agree with something which would lead to arguing for some specific religion.
Your channel is almost as good as Joe Schmid for majesty of reason. It’s funny how you and Joe both put in the hard work and research and when you provide this Contant. however people like Matt Dillahunty and Aron Ra and not to say they don’t put hard work into their contact but when it comes to their research it’s laughable and embarrassing to say the least. Yep they have hundreds and thousands of subscribers and they make thousands upon thousands of dollars. And you don’t even have 5000 subscribers yet you were obviously more philosophically competent than they are and also much younger. Well you know what they say life just ain’t fair.
Interesting video, but I disagree on a lot: No evidence for theism: I stand by the statement that there is no evidence for theism. The major problem with theism is that it makes no predictions; it merely observes our world/universe and then tries to construct a hypothesis that fits the data it sees. Theism never says "if theism is true, we'd expect Y and not Z," where Y is some novel prediction. You may say that not all evidence must come in the form of novel empirical predictions, but the only other kind of evidence is correlational, meaning we have past examples of X and Y being correlated so that discovery Y makes X more probable. This fits the murderer/knife example. But we have no examples of gods existing or doing anything, so we have no such correlational examples. What we have with theism is akin to flipping a coin 10x, getting a random sequence, and then hypothesizing that there's a maker of programmed coins that programmed that coin to flip that sequence and then claiming that the fact the sequence happened is evidence for the programmer hypothesis. The only way one can say that there's evidence for theism is by cherry-picking data and ignoring any disconfirming evidence, and believers do this almost instinctively. An example might be when theists pray for someone who's sick and they get better. You might argue that's evidence since you'd expect intercessory prayer to happen under theism; but then you have to ask whether it happens more often with or without prayer (or with/without prayer in different religions), and multiple studies on intercessory prayer have shown little to zero to inverse affects. When theists are confronted with counter-examples, they'll then rush to make excuses such as "God works in mysterious ways" or "it's part of God's plan," basically retreating from the from prediction to begin with. You can't just pay attention to the "hits" and ignore the "misses," because that's how "psychics" fool people. Theism is falsifiable: I think the subject of falsifiability follows from the above. Because theism doesn't make any strong/novel predictions, it is basically impossible to falsify it. There's no way to, eg, confirm that 2k years ago a person wasn't resurrected, which is the central claim of Christianity; there's similarly no way to prove that there isn't some omnipotent creator beyond our universe that created it/us with a purpose. There's no tests to prove any of religion's central tenets false, and this (to theists) is a feature, not a bug; though to any rational person it should be a bug and not a feature. Testimony isn't evidence: I would agree that testimony is evidence, but "evidence for what" is the question. Testimony is evidence that the testifier had an experience; it is not evidence for the cause of that experience. I've found that people liberally mix up these two things, conflating the experience with the hypothesis that could explain the experience. In the case of The Bible we don't even have testimonial evidence; we have anonymous claims of testimonial evidence, the evidential equivalent of hear-say, decades after the supposed facts would've occurred. Given what we know about legendary development we can pretty easily conclude that such "testimony" indeed isn't evidence since we'd expect it just as much if it were false and, even according to theists, all other such claims from other religions throughout history would be false. Intuition: Intuitions are cognitive short-cuts formed by evolution to conserve our computational brain power for other more intensive tasks. They're geared towards survival and reproduction, not truth. Now, truth can be useful in terms of survival and reproduction, but not necessarily so, so intuitions lead to as many "useful fictions" as they do to correct beliefs. The important thing with intuitions is to ask and answer why any particular intuition would've been useful for survival reproduction. Sometimes, those answers will pertain to truth, but just as often they will not. So, eg, the intuition/instinct to be wary of heights is "truthful" in the respect that we fear a very real existential threat. The intuition for seeing agency behind events is merely a useful bias because even when it's wrong it doesn't cost us anything, but if it's right then it would probably help save us from predators, or even help us to understand the motivations of other tribal members. I also strongly disagree with Mike in his explanation behind why it's OK to trust intuitions because, hey, even the Kolmogorov axioms reduce to axioms that we intuitively trust. Well, no, mathematical axioms can be used to model how empirical reality operates, and when they model it well we tend to trust those axioms because of that. They also easily map on to tons of real-world examples. If you were to come home to a ransacked house and forced to explain why "human burglars" was a more probable explanation than "alien burglars" then it's obviously because the latter require many more assumptions that all have some probability of being wrong. Things like Kolmogorov complexity and probability theory model/explain this mathematically: every assumption you add is another probabilistic point that can be wrong, so when you continually add such point the overall probability of your hypothesis must go down, not up. I mean, to suggest that we can't know human intuitions are bad at probability based on humans failing probability tests (like the conjunction fallacy or the Monty Hall Problem) because probability theory is just based on intuitions seems absurd to me and would lead to complete epistemic chaos and completely glosses over how we distinguish "good" intuitions from "bad" intuitions. I assume there's more to the interview, but that was a pretty awful take just based on that clip. Lacktheism: I don't feel strongly about this. I tend to refer to Dawkins's Spectrum of Theistic Probability and say I'm a 6 on that scale. This does away with the ambiguities of trying to define a complex spectrum of confidence with just three vague terms. I will, however, say that I think "lacktheism" came from the perception of so many theists thinking all atheism was the equivalent of "strong atheism" or a "7" on Dawkins's scale. Often such misunderstandings lead to equally inaccurate backlashes.
I love seeing these types of videos. More atheists/agnostics need to speak against this New Atheist tendency that treats philosophy as a closed vacuum, especially because it paints us as being pontificating asshats. Thank you for doing this, Emerson.
Not just atheists. This was an excellent video but every bit as pertinent to theists who I see make all the same mistakes. We could all benefit from taking a step back from our beliefs and biases and taking a more considered approach based on sound epistemology.
"If E is evidence for H, then it follows that not-E is evidence for not-H." Except the evidentiary strength of not-E for not-H might be nearly 0, even when the evidenciary strength of E for H is high. Not-E might only increase the probability of not-H from 10% to 10.0000001%, which is worthless. This means you can never use this principle you stated. Here's one counter example: "If newyork didn't exist, that would be evidence against spiderman being real, therefore the fact that newyork exists is evidence for spiderman". The existence of newyork might raise the probability of spiderman from 1 in a gajillion to 1.5 in a gajillion, but that's not good enough to actually count as evidence.
Awesome work, man. Only one area where I would push back: At 16:05 the video seems to conflate "falsifiability" with "verifiability." Here's the difference as I see it. Take: 1. P(H) 2. P(H|E) 3. P(H|~E) In relevant cases: 2 >= 1 >= 3 These three probabilities may lie at varying distances from each other. H is "verifiable" to the degree that 2 > 1 H is "falsifiable" to the degree that 1 > 3 Thus, A. To the degree that 1 is far from both 2 and 3, H is both verifiable and falsifiable. B. To the degree that 1 is far from 2, but close to 3, H is verifiable, but not falsifiable C. To the degree that 1 is close to 2, but far from 3, H is not verifiable, but is falsifiable. D. To the degree that 1 is close to both 2 and 3, H is neither verifiable nor falsifiable.
Hi. Longtime listener to your podcast, “Counter Apologetics”; I just stumbled across your channel here. So, I want to wrap my head around this idea that theism is NOT unfalsifiable. I'm not sure if I'm even understanding the whole concept well enough - it was something I had trouble with from the first time I ever heard the word, “unfalsifiable”. But you have this quote, “suppose you have two theories... with one being much more falsifiable than the other... Suppose also that... neither one of them makes any false predictions...” It feels to me that “falsifiable” is used here as a thing; that there is something one can do to demonstrate the falsehood of the hypothesis. But is that really true? What is one of the things necessary to elevate an hypothesis to a theory? You have to be able to test it, right? Make predictions. Now, I notice the quote says “neither one of them makes any false predictions”, but not whether either one makes any true predictions. Well, if neither one of them makes any false predictions, and that's the extent of your testing the hypotheses, exactly what would make one of them “much more falsifiable”? The only way to infer that one of the hypotheses is “wrong” is to test it and see if it's “right”, i.e.; makes true predictions. And if all you know is that neither one of them makes a false prediction, what other falsifiability is there beside more testing, which is available to both? Moreover, is there any way to test the hypothesis that God exists? I'm not aware of one that would stand up under clinical trials. And isn't testing it the only way to falsify something? And wouldn't that mean that theism is unfalsifiable? Am I getting something wrong here?
Is the fact that wood exists evidence that Jesus was crucified, and therefore that the resurrection happened? Not being snarky, I really think that may be the case.
@@scambammer6102 if there was no evidence that wood existed, then it would be less likely that crucifixion happened as reported. Therefore, evidence of wood existing makes the hypothesis more likely to be true than if there was no evidence of wood existing. H is more likely on e than not e Where is the fault in this?
Imo it does. If there were no wood, being crucified on a wooden cross would have a probability of 0 and I think most people would say that the actual probability is at least slightly greater than 0.
@@MsJavaWolf If there were no wood, the probability of someone making up a false story of a crucifixion on a wooden cross would be 0, since the concept of wood would not even exist. Because there is wood, the probability of someone making up a false story of a crucifixion on wood goes up. Since the probability of a false story and a true story of a wooden cross crucifixion are both increased by the existence of wood, the existence of wood has no evidentiary value for establishing a crucifixion. The material specified by the storyteller has no relevance. There is, for all meaningful purposes, a 100% probability that the storyteller would specify some actually existent material, whether the crucifixion story was true or false.
Great video; I recently tried to address a similar question to your first one on my channel. You probably did a better job haha. Theists can make these mistakes too.
"Epistemology is hard." Excellent. It is my view that there are two types of knowledge. In the first case knowledge comes from careful observation and reason. The second source of knowledge is "making shit up." The latter type is very popular because it is easy, answers every conceivable question, and produces irrefutable truth. The first type is hard, has no answers at all to many questions, and oftentimes has to be modified or even rejected as new observations come into play. I try my best to adhere to the first type but must admit guilt in engaging the second type. One great mistake made by those who value the first type of knowledge is not realizing the futility of arguing with someone who is using type 2 knowledge. When someone tells you that "there is nothing you say or show me that could make me change my belief," that is a big hint that you are not going to have a lot of success by appealing to evidence and reason. Thank you an excellent video. I am tempted to write much more but will resist.
@@bipslone8880 I agree that this should be the null hypothesis, but I want to believe in true things, so I appreciate Emerson helping me develop my epistemology and helping me gain a better understanding of how I get an understanding.
@@bipslone8880 Ok, this reeks of no true Scotsman. I subscribe because he has such different beliefs from me, I subbed after watching his capital punishment video and how he got to the same place as me but by a completely different route. I also find it interesting to see things from a panpsychist point of view, even though I am a physicalist that views atheist panpsychism as less likely that theistic idealism (though I think both are more likely than dualism). I don't want to just get the perspectives of people who agree with me, am an atheist because I want to seek truth and I believe the best path is to challenge every belief that I hold. Only the strong ideas should survive.
Your first example was 4 situations, all involving probabilities. I am not putting 100% faith in a probable situation. As an atheist. The evidence I need doesn't exist, plus according to the stories in the Bible, I don't want that arrogant, violent, overly sensitive god to exist. We aren't making mistakes, but we are just stating we don't believe.
Why are you discussing probability of theism (belief in the existence of a god or gods). People believe in god or gods....that's a fact. What is the probability of a god or gods and how would you calculated something that is non-demonstrable?
Methods to demonstrate the existence of Mr. Yahweh are baked right in the claims people make. There is an internet full of people making claims that Yahweh talks, interacts with them and micromanages their lives. Yet, apologists are still trying to prove it. No epistemology needed. We are talking about an imaginary character. It's time to cut the crap, folks. Your religion is fantasy make-believe with imaginary characters.
Saying "theism is incoherent" is not very compelling when you can change the definition of "God." One stated definition can be incoherent but then just modify it slightly. You can do this with anything. Only specific propositions can be incoherent
This is the primary issue. A precise, unambiguous, and coherent discription of god needs to be established prior to any determination on whether there is evidence for such. If this definition is inprecise and ambiguous then almost anything will be able to be interpreted as evidence for it. If the definition of god is incoherent then there is no need to look for evidence. I submit, all definitions of god so far put forth are either inprecise/ambigious or incoherent.
@@semidemiurgeI think it's better to work the other way. Use the evidence to find the truth rather than create a definition and look for confirming evidence.
I was a Christian for 60 years. Your video is quite compelling. I, too, now that I am an atheist, dislike much of what you discussed. I remain convinced, however, that both atheism and theism are unfalsifiable. Yes, it's a scientific term. But I am a mthodological naturalist. I reject the concept of the supernatural. I can't help it if most theists reject my own view. We agree to disagree on that part. No harm, no foul. Thanks for an excellent presentation of your own views. You were indeed charitable! 😊
The gospels are very problematic: 1) They aren't eye-witness accounts. Even if we grant the names on the books are the people who wrote them, they were eye witnesses to a lot of the events. I consider an eye-witness to be someone who saw the events with their own eyes. The writers of the gospels don't meet this criteria for many parts of the gospels. 2) The gospels were written 30-60 years after the events. It seems more likely that these were stories passed around and then attributed to people whos names are on the books. 3) The gospels are in the Bible and are along side stories of a talking snake, talking donkey, water to wine, water to blood, rivers parting, people turning to salt, fire from Heaven and many more fantastical things. It seems more likely to me that these stories are just made up. 4) When people ask, "Where did Jesus' body go?" I usually reply.... how do we even know he was buried in Joseph's tomb? Interestingly the gospels even say they'll invent a story that the body was stolen. But.... why couldn't the body have been stolen? Is it because Rome would've hunted down those who stole the body? Ok... how and why? How do you find thieves and why do you REALLY want the body back? Rome probably didn't care.
@@scambammer6102 I like the writing on the moon. It conveys power and a specific message. Though several of the prophet stories in the Bible have similar miracles (not the Bible stories themselves mind you, but if prophets could actually perform those miracles). I don't rate either as being good evidence but they are so much better than what apologists can provide. It's as if apologists know what evidence actually means when they aren't trying to justify their religion.
This is one of the reasons I don't think it is helpful to compare the rationality of atheist vs theist. You can be using rational processes and arrive at either conclusion. You can be be using irrational processes and arrive at either conclusion.
But what's the probability that they are? What I see is that the rational processes that are used for most mundane claims are not applicable to theism. If theism needs some new kinds of evidence and investigation then it needs to show the efficacy of this new methodology.
@@goldenalt3166 I myself think atheism is more probable. But that largely isn't my own doing, I am a product of my environment after all. I'm saying it can be rational to trust your friends and family if they all grow up telling you God exists.
@@IdiotDoomSpiral69 For example if all of your friends and family teach you from birth that God definitely exists. Parents teach their children lots of things which end up being true, that's why accepting the God claim off their word when you are young is a rational process, because their word seems to the child to be true more often than not.
@@JasonWood100 Perhaps if you grew up in an environment where "god" was a coherent unified concept. However, most people are exposed to "god" from several sources and they don't all agree.
One mistake I see on both sides is that intelligent design needs a creator. It doesn't! Consider the set of all possible multiverses. This can be seen as a platonic form, and then pick one multiverse with intelligent design (without a creator) of which our universe is a member.
@@scambammer6102 The origin of life is still very difficult to explain from a non-intelligent design perspective. There is a lack of a general definition of complexity in science, which I believe is because complexity has to do with strong emergence which can't be explained with fixed physical laws alone.
It seems that a large issue with epistemological criteria overtly held by an atheist/agnostic in a generally religious community is that the amount of evidence itself isn't independent of her criteria, but rather interacts in a game-theoretic way. If she tells people with strong social incentives to keep her in the fold, "Your testimony (of direct experience of Yahweh) is significant evidence, but I just find it to be outweighed by other kinds of evidence", then she is very likely -- shortly after the following service -- to receive more of such testimony. Faced with such a dynamic, it may be wise to keep the means of our own persuasion close to the vest.
Ah, that phrasing would indeed be unwise. However I don’t think I testimony is basically ever strong evidence for the miraculous, and often has no evidential weight at all since it is no less likely to be observed on a view that most or all such experiences are exclusively mental or social phenomena.
1. Your definition of evidence isn’t scientific evidence. There is literally no scientific evidence for gods. You are correct to say that your definition of evidence allows for any crazy idea - that’s why it’s a bad definition of evidence.
@@irish_deconstruction scientific evidence is based on observation that is testable and repeatable. So yes I can give you scientific evidence that I exist - I am human, a human that is said to “exist” is one that is living. You could observe me, test my heart beat, see brain activity, etc. as opposed to something like a dragon that we cannot observe or test. The type of “evidence” in this video is, “my house burned down. This is evidence for dragons”.
@@ThoughtCogCan I perform experiments using the Scientific Method to prove that you exist as a conscious mind and you aren't just a philosophical zombie?
That's how I'm understanding it too. Or I think we may be on the same page. Something counts as evidence if it raises a possibility God exists, then I'm inclined to say there is no evidence for God, because I don't think it's possible for God to exist. ie: possibility raising = evidence, and no possibility of God (impossible state of affair) then we wouldn't expect to find any evidence for God.
@@gospelfreak5828 Hello. Appreciate your question. Well, I think it's impossible because I think Naturalism is true (I'm a naturalist) ie: if naturalism is true then it's impossible for God to exist. I think naturalism is true. so therefore I think it's impossible for God to exist. And that's it. Hope that helps. Thanks.
@@roger5442surely you can't just start with naturalism though, you'd have to step back consider the evidence that naturalism is true verse theism? If your argument is that God is impossible because naturalism true it seems circular. I assumed from Danny's comment he'd be talking about things like contradictions between omniscience and omnibenevolence and things like that.
1) We should not say that there is no evidence that unicorns and fairies exist. That is only said by people who are not "well read". To say there is no evidence against the existence of fairies and unicorns is as ridiculous as claiming that there is no evidence for the existence of fairies and unicorns. 2) We should not say that theism is unfalsifiable. That does not apply to theists who believe in an immaterial, timeless and omnipresent being who happens to love them. Theists are not concerned about that. They have other things in mind. Besides, theism is not unfalsifiable. 3) We should not say that testimony is not evidence. Because you are justified in trusting testimony by default as long as you have no specific grounds for doubts. Like when your parents first told you about Santa. 4) We should not say that intuitions don't matter. They matter a lot. Everybody uses them. Even when a scientific study or just a TV show clearly and openly shows us how bad our intuition is when doing statistics (the Monty Hall problem, etc.) in the end the scientists are just relying on their own intuition that the mathematics they have done is correct. 5) We should not say I don't believe God doesn't exist. Look, if some nut tells you one day that the total number of grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet is odd, you should not tell him that you do not believe him, do not hide behind semantic tricks and subterfuge. Please, grow up and tell him clearly that what he has said is false and face like an adult your belief that the number is even. This is what I call "atheists who are one Catholic girlfriend away from desperately wanting to be saved by Our Lord Jesus Christ". Somehow something tells me that if she were Muslim that just wouldn't do the trick. It must be my intuition...
I know that his reflections lacked serious philosophical training and that his depth of thought does not reach the standards that many people expect in this type of conversations, but I will leave a couple of excerpts from Carl Sagan. And a joke, which always comes in handy. "In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast ... 'To physics and metaphysics.' Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy-truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else. The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory." - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World. "A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage" Suppose I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity! "Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle--but no dragon. "Where's the dragon?" you ask. "Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon." You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints. "Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air." Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire. "Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless." You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible. "Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick." And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work. Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so. - Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World. Dean, to the physics department... "Why do I always have to give you guys so much money for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff. Why couldn't you be like the math department - all they need is money for pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper."
@@thomasthellamas9886 No brother, I am possessed by an evil spirit. Pray for my brother. Pray very hard. But remember, you are not talking to yourself, you are communicating with the creator of the universe.
@@thomasthellamas9886 I told you, it is the evil spirit that possesses me, you yourself have noticed by reading me that nobody reads me and yet I write. Pray very hard brother. Very very hard. And don't look at the proof that Erik Manning lies to his followers.
I'd say your first point on evidence is somewhat confused insofar what evidence means in philosophy radically changes based on framework of any given school of thought on the matter, and the probabilistic framework is just one of many. It's level of acceptance or use doesn't necessarily justify its adoption or relate to a statement - especially by anyone not philosophically trained and not a proponent of probabilistic evidential models. Personally, I take evidence to mean phenomenon that has been demonstrated to be causally related to a proposition or other phenomenon I.E Milk on the floor is evidence of milk having left some container and fallen to the floor, but it isn't evidence of someone having spilt milk or a cow having loitered in the area. It has nothing to do with probability, and indeed I think a probabilistic view of evidence could be argued as weak and confused. A footprint is only evidence of me having commited a murder in a house if it can be demonstrated sufficiently that the footprint is mine and that my footprint being in the house inexplicably means that I would have to been in the house for it to be left there at the time of the murder - not put there in an attempt to frame me or from an earlier visit in no way related to the murder. I would very much say there is no evidence for god in this respect because non of the "evidence" that has been posited for god so far as I know meets non-probabilistic standards of evidence. And, the probabilistic standards of evidence are compromised. Even granting probabilistic evidence here though, I'm not sure that such evidence should be considered evidence still if its validity, as is, has been undermined by other arguments or evidence - as I believe is the case for purported religious "evidence". For example, my footprint might appear evidence of me having entered a house, but is it still evidence of such if we could prove it was placed there by another individual wearing my shoes? I'd argue no, and I'd argue this holds true for religious evidence as well. I am not aware of any religious evidence that has not been undermined in this way, thus I'd assert there's no evidence for god. Moreover, and as an example, the existence of Jesus is not "evidence of god" because there's no inherent causal relationship between his existence and God's. It's red herring. The ressurection of Jesus is not evidence of god, because there's no evidence to suggest Jesus was actually ressurected. Jesus's empty tomb is not "evidence of Jesus having been resurrected" because a tomb being empty is in no way causally connected to ressurections and there's no evidence to suggest the tomb couldn't have been empty for any other number of reasons, or the story just being a fabrication in the first place etc. I don't know that there is any fact about the world that enhances the probability of theism being true. Simply put, probabilism is not interesting at all in respect to this and I reject that perspective on judging what constitutes evidence as far as god's existence is concerned. It's especially not interesting if the objection here is merely that many atheists unknowingly use "evidence" in a way that isn't consistent with a subset of philosophers who work on epistemology. After all, it's more useful to meet arguments where they're at according to the intended meaning of the speaker, rather than their failure to comport their words to that of specialists. In colloquial speech, I'd venture a guess that most people do use evidence synonymously with proof and would not accept that grainy photos constitute evidence of Loch Ness or Big Foot. Similary, when the average atheist say there's no evidence for god, what they're saying is that shallow and easily explained phenomenon that could be construed as "evidence" for god, do not constitute real evidence. Thus, I wouldn't say there's anything miraculous about there being no evidence for god. In fact, if god does not exist, I wouldn't expect there to be any evidence for him, and the lack thereof comports to that expectation.
The kind of phenomenological correlation you mention itself can be modeled probabilistically. Probability is fundamentally just a modeling of uncertainty, so in any arena where uncertainty exists, such as evidence increasing/decreasing the likelihood a proposition is true, we're dealing with probability. If you take your milk example there's two ways to approach that probabilistically. First, let's say you found the milk first; from there you might form a list of hypothesis to explain why the milk is there and then model those hypotheses probabilistically based on how common/likely they are. Second, let's say someone told you they spilled the milk, and then you went to find the milk. Well, then the milk you find is evidence for the claim that someone spilled milk, because if the claim were true you would've expected to find such milk. Your footprint example conflates evidence with proof; they are not the same. Proof, in the colloquial sense, means evidence that makes a given proposition/hypothesis overwhelmingly likely to be true, but evidence is merely anything that makes the hypothesis/proposition more likely than it was before you observed the evidence. So, yes, your foot print in the house of a murder victim would increase the probability you were the murderer, but it would not prove you were. It could be very weak or strong evidence depending on how expected it would be for your footprints to be in the house even if you didn't commit the murder. If you were a close family friend or significant other one would expect your footprints in the house regardless of whether or not you committed the murder. I actually agree with you that there's no evidence for God, but I think you can get there while maintaining the probabilistic view of evidence. The problem with evidences for God is that they make no novel predictions, they merely observe data and then post-hoc construct their hypothesis and then post-hoc alter that hypothesis when/if new data comes in. That's not how evidence works, probabilistic or not.
Everytime you say, "It would be a miracle if we lived in a reality where there was no evidence for theism", I think, "And that miracle would be evidence."
ok? People of all kinds please state if your theists, atheists, agnostics or any combination of those and then if willing participate in the test. As well, looking for 5 good moral theist questions for atheists/agnostics. #1 You see a child drowning in a shallow pool and notice a person just watching that is able to save the child with no risk to themselves but is not, is that persons non action moral? #2 If you go to save the child, the man tells you to stop as he was told it was for the greater good, but he does not know what that is, do you continue to save the child? #3 Is it and act of justice to punish innocent people for the crimes of others? #4 If you were able to stop it and knew a person was about to grape a child would you stop it? #5 Would you consider an all knowing parent who put their kids in a room with a poison fruit and told the kids not to eat it but then also put a supernatural con artist in the room with the children knowing the con artist will get the kids to eat the fruit and the parent does nothing to stop it a good parent?
The first question seems to be predicated on a Principle of Bystander Intervention (PBI) that, if I were to formulate, would say "if one has the means and opportunity as a bystander to intervene in a situation to secure someone else, and that intervention would cause no harm or risk to themselves, then that bystander OUGHT to intervene or act in such a way to bring about the security of someone else." So, in order to even think about answering these questions, I'd have to think about some moral framework in which the PBI is true and applicable to myself. (If you don't like the PBI, then clearly some other principle that contains some moral obligation must be the case in order for the first question to have any bearing.) What reason is there to accept the PBI??
@@gordontubbs >>The first question seems to be predicated on a Principle of Bystander Intervention (PBI) that, if I were to formulate, would say "if one has the means and opportunity as a bystander to intervene in a situation to secure someone else, and that intervention would cause no harm or risk to themselves, then that bystander OUGHT to intervene or act in such a way to bring about the security of someone else." So, in order to even think about answering these questions, I'd have to think about some moral framework in which the PBI is true and applicable to myself. (If you don't like the PBI, then clearly some other principle that contains some moral obligation must be the case in order for the first question to have any bearing.) What reason is there to accept the PBI??"' ???? Who said you had to accept something you dont already to answer the questions? Whatever moral ways you use for your morals, use those and just answer the questions honestly. Less then 18% of christians answer these simple moral questions, I often get BS like this are responses.
@@gordontubbs >>Sorry to disappoint. There's no such thing as a "simple moral question" in these discussions. Get used to the BS."" Then why do most atheists and agnostics agree they are simple? These are not like trolley questions where its save 5 random people or someone you love asking you to make hard moral choices. These are pretty simple. Do you save a drowning child, stop a rape, find a person watching a child drown and saying its for the greater good but they dont know what that is dont seem to be hard choices to make.
1 - yes, their non-action is immoral. 2 - yes, I'm saving the child. 3 - no, punishing people who didn't commit an action committed by someone else is immoral. 4 - yes, I'd stop it. 5 - no, that's a bad parent.
I do not really understand the evidence for or against theism part. The very notion of evidence is based on probability in this case, yet it seems that when examining the argument the probability is simply assumed. For instance, in the murder weapon example, we have observed both outcomes and thus can determine the probability with some success. In all arguments for and against theism, we have nothing but our intuition to guide the probability estimates. Am I getting this wrong?
Are many people this binary in their thinking? Most conversations I've had or heard on such topics are more nuanced than the depictions suggested but largely not played in this video. There are areas where our intuitions are fairly reliable, and they can vary depending on our physical and mental states. It's mentioned in many videos on science that our intuitions work well for things common to our world. Things that move relatively slowly (v
30:14 The problem for “testimonial evidence” comes when an observation is conflated with a claim. For example, “I saw a ghost” is characterized as testimonial evidence for the existence of ghosts, but it’s better characterized as a claim for the existence of ghosts based on an interpretation of an observation. A person’s testimony that they saw a light is evidence that there was a light (apply the principle of charity). But someone’s claim that the light they saw was a ghost is not evidence that the light they saw was a ghost - that’s a claim about how to interpret the light.
On testimony: Many of the examples you gave do not only include testimony. E. g. that the earth is 4.5 billion years old is not only supported by testimony but by the fact that all scientists in the field agree on it. If the negative of H (or something vastly different) was the case, you would expect at least a decent chunk of scientists to dissent. Else you would have to believe a global conspiracy which is very unlikely.
Yeah, but even these things trace back to some kind of testimony too, no? Why do you believe the fact all scientists agree on something is evidence for a proposition? Because someone told you.
@@irish_deconstruction People put trust in science/scientists because they know it's based on observation and hypothesis testing, not just testimony. The virtue of science is that anyone is capable of learning it and, in many cases, conducting the experiments on their own to observe the same thing. Because this "claim testing" system in place, it's very difficult for scientists to lie and get away with it, and when they've tried it's always been other scientists that have called them out on it. It's that empirical testing methodology that makes the testimony of scientists reliable, and it's the lack of that methodology that makes most other testimony far less reliable.
I understand the sentiment, but in order to make your points you really overstated most of those cases. For example the testimony part and the claim that without it most convictions are wrongful. That is just nonsense. As in the case of intuition, most people aren't arguing to completely toss them out, just to weight them reasonably, and use them only where it's appropriate. So when someone tells me he saw a deer near highway I take it, nothing important hinges on that claim and it is a mundane one. On the other hand in an cosmological argument for the existence of a divine creator testimony or intuition are beyond useless, they actively skew the debate. Your presentation lacks these nuances, I would argue, to the point of strawmannig most reasonable atheists. And the point about kolmogorov axioms that dude makes in your clip is just wrong. Axioms have nothing to do with intuition.
I don't think constructing an unfalsifiable hypothesis means no evidence can be raised for it. Take the instance of "I exist", or "Thoughts requires thinking" or "Knowledge requires consciousness". You cannot falsify any of them because the falsification requires the affirmation. To falsify "I exist" I need to exist; to falsify "thinking requires consciousness" I need to think about the falsehood; to know that "Knowledge requires consciousness" as false I require to be conscious. Yet we would obviously not say there's no evidence to believe in any of those claims. Those claims are all unfalsifiable and yet incontrovertly true. They are so true that they can't be false. Of those, the strongest is "I exist" or "there is reality". Obviously I exist and I can affirm and there's evidence to believe I exist, and yet no counter-evidence could be raised up against those fact because all such evidence already presupposes the affirmation. The theist claims that God is at a similar level of necessity. I think a similar thing can be done for all necessary truths. One cannot falsify a necessary truth(its falsehood is impossible) and that doesn't mean there's no truth or evidence for their truthfulness.
I don’t agree with you on the first point. Bayesian epistemology is an analysis of priors, not a tool that can justify those priors. If evidence is anything that can reliably differentiate between real and imaginary things, then there is no evidence for theism. Every single argument and attribution that I’ve heard is based on unreliable tools, fallacies, etc. We may disagree on what evidence is. Your definition seems to be “is plausibly consistent with” whereas mine is as stated above.
Never heard the 'lack of belief' stance until I began listening to atheistic youtube content a couple years ago. I've been an atheist 40. It always seems to be side-stepping and assuming my belief. I'm an agnostic atheist. I can't for certain know or prove a god exists. I know I don't believe it does. But some people will tell me that I just lack a belief and that's that. Nope. I told you I don't believe. Take me at my word that I know my mind better than you. My non-belief that a god doesn't exists...exists. Therefore, I do not lack a belief that a god exist.
*Would you claim that the following commentary (in whatever degree) is inadequate or false? If so on either, please present the relevant reference material which you think would sustain that point if presentation would likely be cumbersome/messy. I am also open to having a discussion.* Currently, I think there is simply a failure to understand alternative models and/or sociological conditions upon which the claims being made - rest. --- *There is no evidence for God* I will grant that the framework you are using has merit, but I do not think such dismisses or even discounts the following account of how the claim of there is no evidence for God arises and is sustained within various cognitive tapestries. *IF God cannot be shown to be existent, then there is no basis for consideration of any claim about God.* It is on this basis that the demand for evidence of God and the subsequent dismissal of claims predicated on the existence of God, but not actually showing God as existent - arise long before the claim of there is no evidence for God arises. This leads to the question as to whether there can be evidence for existence given the God concept being claimed. A review of various God claims results in the answer being NO due to the claim being false given the facts understood of reality. A broader view of the idea unencumbered with particulars of a particular theological group such as the philosophical God concept (omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) results in various points of incoherence which again results in the idea of being considered false and thus again there can be no evidence for such. There are many paths to the same conclusion of there being no evidence for God with the conclusion itself being sustained so long as nothing is provided which substantiates existence. The final piece of the puzzle concerns the nature of evidence. There are two distinctly different applications of the term evidence. One is about showing some X as being existent via some demonstrable cause/effect linkage that sustains an X in the context of reality and the associated capacities of X. The other is after X has been established as existent, then anything that matches the capacities of X can be considered a possible link to X. It is only that this point that the probabilistic review of evidence as you present come into consideration, since there is in a fact something which has been sustained by which to allow a possible linkage. --- *Testimony is not evidence* The issue as to what denotes evidence also results in the idea of testimony not being evidence. The broader point being that testimony is understood to be a reference to substantiated aspects of reality such that the reference IS what is the evidence, but not the testimony just as the claims of science are referencing the data which sustains the claims being made, but the claim itself is not the data. This is comparable to the map (claim) is not the territory (data). It should be noted that the account of coherence in support of the general utility of testimony in your presentation also has implications with regard to the claim of there being no evidence for God, since given a particular tapestry of linkages, there is no basis to grant the idea a basis for plausibility. --- *Intuitions don't matter* I suspect the statement "intuitions don't matter" arose as a response to people attempting to put forth their seemings/intuitions as something that another should accept, since none of us are under any obligation to accept the seemings/intuitions of another as being correct. The intuitions/seemings of another is just a claim being made which would need substantiation if such were to be rationally accepted (or at the very least compatible with one's own seemings/intuitions). I do accept that we are personally bound by our intuition/seeming. I remember as a kid having the experience of "Why are the adults lying about there being a God?" The level of WTF that I experienced when I listened to the claims created a massive amount of distrust. I am not on board with the disjointed nature of intuitions/seemings from grounding being suggested, since I find such to be conclusions that have come to our mind wherein we do not know how to express/present the details that ground that conclusion and/or understand the internal linkages that give rise to such a conclusion. I would not denote the understanding that every additional criteria reduces the size of a potential set as merely an intuition, but I will grant that for those that don't understand it, they may have a hard time providing substantiation. The use of the term intuition and seemings thus strike me as fluff to set aside what may in fact be a failure of understanding. _I suspect the reason for the error concerning additional criteria being given a higher probability isn't as much about probability, but the feeling of certainty, since it is generally the case that the more information we have, the more certainty can be attained. Now considering the idea of probability is associated with the idea of certainty in I suspect most cognitive tapestries, this would seem to explain this common error of review, since, they are in fact reporting on what results in a greater feeling of certainty._
With regards to your statements about lack theism and igtheism, I completely agree and was even thinking the exact same thing in that part of the video. In fact I myself strongly related to lack theism, but could not figure out how to justify that lack of belief and found it somewhat confusing. It wasn't until I had done a lot more research and understood epistomology, philosophical theology, and igtheism much better that I realized my intuitions and thought processes very much lean towards igtheism.
@@thotslayer9914 Kind of a broad question. As a broad answer I would say that I believe reality exists and my senses interact with that reality in a way that gives me some reasonably corresponding representation of that reality mainly because that seems to be the only useful position to take in order to do anything else. On that basis, it seems relatively clear to me that the material exists, and less clear that something beyond the material exists. That's mainly because I think it seems plausible that all processes, cognitive functions, propositions, etc. are emergent phenomenon from interaction of the material world, but also find it plausible some set of those could in some way entail something that is separate in some way from the material. I don't really see a good way to demonstrate that one or the other is the case though, so epistemically I feel pretty agnostic on the metaphysical and ontological nature of reality. As long as other people aren't using their different ontological or metaphysical intuitions to try to insist others must be wrong about their epistemic conclusions though, I don't really have any problem with other people reaching different conclusions either pragmatically or rationally, since it seems to me multiple views are viable based on our current knowledge.
It is troublesome to define evidence in terms of probability. By that definition, we would need some theory of probability that gives numbers to P(H | E) and P(H) before we could determine whether E is evidence. It is simple enough to determine the probability of each side of a coin flip or the probability of drawing a particular card from a shuffled deck, but how can we possibly measure the probability of theism? If we are just plucking numbers out of thin air, then the values of P(H | E) and P(H) are whatever our whims dictate, which says more about us than it says about E. I think a definition that better captures what people usually mean by evidence is that "evidence" means a trace that would be left behind by some thing, person, or event. When a thing happens like a bank robbery, it creates witnesses, fingerprints, video recordings, and maybe even dead bodies and missing money. Whether the event really happened or not, when we imagine this bank robbery happening, we imagine it creating these lingering consequences upon the world, so these lingering consequences are the "evidence." We need no theory of probability to recognize "evidence" by that definition. When people say that there is no evidence of God, what they probably mean is that when they imagine God's presence in the world, they imagine God leaving a variety of traces upon the world, and they do not see those traces in reality. There are no witnesses, no miracles, no booming voice from the sky. What exactly we would imagine God would do in this world varies from person to person, but when a person says there is no evidence that probably indicates that whatever they imagine is not what they find.
That’s all well and good until you try to apply it to everything relevant to the debate on God. For instance, is there evidence that numbers exist? They leave no trace. Neither do morals. Neither does consciousness. Neither does contingency. There aren’t any hard objects to see as traces of these things. Instead, we just say X,Y,Z, and make imperfect judgments on the likelihood of them based on our observations of other things
@@whatsinaname691 : It's not clear what it means for numbers to exist. Do you mean is there evidence that groups of three objects exist? That does leave plentiful traces. The nature of morals is highly controversial. Some moral naturalists would say that morals do leave evidence in the form of natural traces. It seems that every time we have any sort of interaction with another person we are witnessing traces left by that person's consciousness. The ideas that a person expresses are a consequence of that person's consciousness that lingers, thereby making it evidence. What do you mean by "contingency" exactly? "There aren’t any hard objects to see as traces of these things. Instead, we just say X,Y,Z, and make imperfect judgments on the likelihood of them based on our observations of other things." If there are no hard objects to observe, then what are these "things" we are observing to make these judgements?
It seems to me like your definition is really just a re-wording of the probabilistic definition of evidence. Suppose we have a claim that there was a bank robbery, but we do not have any witnesses, fingerprints, video recordings, dead bodies or missing money; would having all these things make the bank robbery hypothesis more probable, which means that P(H/E) is more likely than P(H)?
You say that some theists make an argument that leads to the god hypothesis being unfalsifiable. In what way do you think that God is falsifiable? I don't know any way you could falsify the hypothesis that there is a god.
I have a dog named Suziebaby girl. Many people would read that, weigh their experiences and come away with "Idk" This is something you do not grant the lacktheist.
I'd believe you if you were my friend and told me you had a dog. I know dogs exist and I trust my friends when they make novel claims. When my friend tells me they have a friend who is a God, why should I believe this?
@@malirk you missed my point. I was talking about our ability to be in the "idk" or lacktheist category. Like if I said I live in an apartment but have a yacht, you could dismiss it out right, but you would also be justified in reserving judgement. Or if I said I could eat 40 hotdogs in one sitting.
On your first topic, if the base belief of theism is a belief in the supernatural what evidence do you think exists that would increase the probability that ther is anything supernatural? It would not be epistemically incorrect to say there is no evidence for a god if that god is supernatural unless you can indeed present anything that would increase the probability of the supernatural.
Well, to be fair, atheism only relates to strong or weak disbelief of god(s) claims. Says nothing else about someone. You don't have to be a skeptic to be atheist - even a broken clock is right twice a day. If you don't believe any gods, but instead fill that gap with pixies, you're an atheist - but definitely not a good skeptic.
Maybe SHOW us the person saying “no, I meant it in the dumb way.” This strikes me very much as many videos from apologists about ‘here’s what atheists do!’ which aren’t reacting to anything specific they and the viewer could both look at and evaluate together. Show us what (and whom) you’re talking about. Please and thank you.
Defining terms would've been helpful e.g. what is "theism"? I regard it as believing in at least one existing divine entity but perhaps it's used in this video as a god or gods constantly being essential to existence (or similar).
Defining “testimony” would be most helpful. Is “I saw a ghost” testimonial evidence for ghosts? Or is it just testimonial evidence that there was a light, with a claim tacked-on that the light was a ghost?
@@MarkLeBay It's a good question. Court's require "foundation" for testimonial evidence to be admissible. That means that the testimony has to be sufficiently detailed and specific, and the circumstances adequately explained, to permit an inference that the witness has personal knowledge of the alleged event. "I saw a ghost" would pretty much never be admitted as testimony in court. The witness would have to state specifically what s/he saw, and also the basis for believing it is a ghost. Since there are no generally accepted criteria for identifying a ghost, the statement "I saw a ghost" would not be admitted, even if it was sufficiently specific. The same would apply to "I saw god". But that's just the law. Various branches of science have different concepts of evidence, and philosophers argue about it constantly.
@@scambammer6102 I think this is particularly relevant when listening to Huemer’s description of testimony. Huemer is talking about testimony very broadly without distinguishing between types of testimony. Trusting a consensus of experts when they testify that _there is evidence_ to support the claim that a table is made of atoms is meaningfully different than saying testimony that “a table is made of atoms” is evidence that “a table is made of atoms”. We assume that when an expert testifies that “a table is made of atoms”, they are really testifying that “there is evidence to support the claim that a table is made of atoms”.
Thesis: God exists Evidence: Most humans think god exists Would classify as evidence for god according to you? If there is a competing naturalistic theory of why most humans believe in god, would that not make this no longer evidence for god? Is there "evidence" for god that is more likely than a naturalistic explanation?
The problem is that this is a conflation of terms. Most humans think their god exists but deny that other gods exist. Thus, most humans deny any particular god.
No, that isn't how that works. The fact that most humans think God exists is evidence for the existence of God because it is something we would expect on theism and not on atheism. Just because atheism can offer an explanation as to why this is the case doesn't change the fact that it is still something we would expect on theism and not on atheism.
@irish_deconstruction and yes the fact people don't believe in particular gods is evidence for those gods non-existence just like the other way around. You can't just assert it doesn't work the other way around when it does.
@@williamthompson1455Never said atheism (or naturalism) cannot give an explanation for this. It is, however, something that is surprising on atheism. If atheism were true, we would expect it to be the case that most people would be atheists, not theists. I am fine with agreeing that atheism can give an explanation for this, it is however still something that renders the theism hypothesis more probable.
"E evidence for H iff P(H|E)>P(H)" According to this definition, If I toss a dice and it lands on 4, that's evidence that the dice is a magic relic of gilgamesh enchanted to always land on 4. This definition needs some work.
@@WhatsTheTakeaway Sincere question: why? I mean, i'm not saying his hypothesis is just as plausible. But why do we think your answer is better? I suspect it's a matter of making fewer asumptions. What are your thoughts?
@@piano9433 the hypothesis "die is loaded" is better because loaded dice exist, unlike gilgamesh, magic and enchantments. This gives that hypothesis a much higher prior probability. However, according to the definitions used in this video, the die landing on 4 isn't greater evidence for "the die is loaded towards 4" than for "the dice is a magic relic of gilgamesh enchanted to always land on 4". Because what determines the strength of evidence E for hypothesis H is the bayes factor K = P(E given H) / P(E given not-H). In english, that means you look at how expected it is to get a 4 if the die is loaded (maybe 40%) vs if it's not loaded (about 16.7%), you do the ratio, you get K = 2.4. But for the gilgamesh hypothesis, it's 100% to get a 4 if the hypothesis is true, vs 16.7 if it's false, so K = 6. We get a bigger K because the gilgamesh hypothesis makes a stronger prediction (that the die ALWAYS lands on 4). And so it gets rewarded more when the die does land on 4.
The concept of theism is so poorly defined that it’s don’t think it’s appropriate to even consider whether a fact makes it more or less likely. The concept needs to be defied first and it simply can’t. There has yet to be a cohesive definition of a god that holds up under scrutiny so we can’t ever get to the point where we weight whether it is more or less likely under any given circumstances.
There is a part missing from what is considered evidence: It has to raise the probability of H to the exclusion of P. If something can fit either hypothesis, it is not evidence for or against either
He mentioned that. He worded it as evidence for must increase the probability, while evidence against would lower it, in regard to something being falsifiable. If the evidence is neutral, then that's not evidence, it would be some sort of irrelevant or unrelated fact. For example, during a trial the fact that the defendant has many friends that consider him a nice guy is almost always irrelevant to the facts of the crime.
It was 14 minutes, and I mentioned an entire playlist where I defend theism as well as a video from Majesty of Reason. Unfortunately most atheists, like you, are so confused about epistemology that it is necessary to go over the basics carefully.
This video is about evidence in Bayesian terms, it's not about absolute proof. One piece of evidence for the existence of God? The Bible. Maybe it raises the probability of Christianity being true only by 0.0001% but that still counts as being evidence.
@@MsJavaWolf The bible isn't a piece of evidence. It is a book containing thousands of different claims, all by anonymous authors (except Paul). We don't know if they were even attempting to be factual. Most of those claims are vague and inconsistent, and none of them have sufficient foundation to be evidence of anything except the book they are in. The literary genre to which the bible belongs - sacred texts - does not prioritize factual accuracy. To the contrary, sacred texts usually eschew facts and reason, in order to promote transcendental concepts. You can't take the bible as a whole and say that it is evidence of anything. You have to identify specific claims and then analyze the claim, its context, and what it is allegedly trying to prove.
There is no evidence for _theism_ , is this a joke.? The only evidence we need for "theism", are people who: "believe in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief in one god as creator of the universe". And we have that in the billions and billions. How about you use the actual phrase: "there is no evidence for the existence of God". That's completely different.
34:00 This quote makes a lot of parallels to what people think about Christianity, but I don't think it fits at all with what is actually in the Bible about Christianity.
I think a BIG subject related to this entire discussion about epistemic mistakes is whether or not an atheist subscribes to doxastic voluntarism or involuntarism. In simple terms, you're a doxastic involuntarist if you believe you have no choice in what you believe. Of course, there are a couple ways to cache out these doxastic attitudes: (1) in terms of belief-formation or (2) in terms of belief-justification. For purposes of this comment, I'll cache out doxastic involuntarism in terms of belief-justification. One of the issues I take with DI is that it more or less 'outsources' belief-justification to your external reality to the extent that your external reality provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for what you wind up thinking is a justified belief. After all, if your choices have no impact on how you justify your beliefs, then you've given up any and all agency in the justification process. Given that, I can completely understand why *lacktheism* is a predominant view. I don't agree with it, but I understand it because I see lacktheists as doxastic involuntarists who are holding onto this idea that their external reality has not provided the necessary and sufficient conditions to justify theism. They are like an unmoored ship in the wind, waiting for the wind to blow them towards theism because they subscribe to this view that theism is a proposition that they cannot voluntarily elect to believe. Just my opinion.
As someone who lacks a belief in god, due to lack of "good" or "verifiable" evidence, I do think I have a choice in what I believe, but I just choose to make the rational choice and not believing something that has not been anywhere near proven or even appear likely.
The term is "cash out" not "cache out." The reference is to liquidating assets. One trades in assets and takes cash out of the transaction. One "cashes out."
Lacktheism indicates openness to hearing someone's personal argument for their concept of a god while having no interest in arguing for the idea that there is no 'god' anywhere.
I noticed you kept going back and forth between evidence and arguments for theism. Do you think arguments count as evidence? And I feel like this entire video is just "look I'm not like those other bad atheists"
i'd say it's reasonable to claim there is no evidence at all for theism, because theism *is* unfalsifiable. the "probability" of any set of facts is exactly 1 on the hypothesis of a god that wants that exact set of facts to be the case, and if a god exists the set of true facts is exactly what god wants it to be (that's what omnipotence means).
Just starting the video and within the first few minutes I was wondering if he was ever going to define what he thought theism was, because one evidence I could think of for theism was that people believe they have heard from a God... But that is only evidence of a God that wants to interact with people, and is evidence against a God that doesn't want to interact with people. I'm guessing based on your comment he never gets into how one would establish consistent criteria and predictions for theism, but I will continue watching and see.
I think you took that fella's inability to answer on the spot as him being inflexible. However, it seems to me he is doing the very thing you are talking about when invoking madness or other things. He sees more evidence for something like that being the case than evidence for God being the answer.
The funny thing is I actually have heard Aron Ra say on a few occasions that rocks and sticks are atheists😂 And I think a way to show lacktheists why the definition really doesn’t work. It’s just to simply define theism as the lack of belief in the claim that there are no gods. I could just say I don’t believe there is a God I simply lack the belief in the idea that there isn’t a God. It’s pretty ridiculous. I don’t wanna psychoanalyze people but from my own experience I feel like it comes down to not wanting to shoulder any burden of proof. For some reason I don’t get it. Pretty much everything I believe I want to be able to give a defense as to why I believe it and I want to reasons as to why I believe it. For some reason I have a lot of atheists they seem perfectly fine just believing some thing without being able to provide a sufficient justification as to why they believe it, nor do they want to at all. For a lot of theists the same is true they probably don’t really have any reason other than they were raised in a culture or raising a household or community that is theistic. But most theists I have seen at least recognize that they have a burden of proof and at least try to give some reason as to why they believe in God even if those reasons are ridiculous and absurd
4:20 the inverse is true also, the fact there are believers open to a non-existent or different God being more pluralistic may counterbalance that. Who knows maybe God used to exist but before time and space and everything is it's decaying body, or that it's all an egg God is raising to have another God to live with outside of time and space or possibly in some kind of infinite fractaline multiversal body. We genuinely have no clue but due to goedel we know there's a god like hole in math
I agree with this video, I was just confused when you said things like “if atheism was false” or “you could be agnostic rather than atheist” as if atheism makes a claim. Isn’t atheism just the non belief in God?
Most analytic philosophers use the term atheist in a different way, there it really is the claim that God does not exist. That doesn't mean their definition is objectively better, as long as we know how we define the terms, we can have a productive discussion either way.
"claims aren't evidence" in a steel-manned Dillahuntian manner probably means "testimony by itself is never sufficient evidence for a miracle (and you don't even have first hand testimony of the resurrection)"
We di=o actually. regardless or not if the Gospels are written by the people they are ascribed to, it is common knowledge they contain eye-witness testimony.
I'd say that the epistemic definition for evidence is necessarily unwarranted. It fails to even meet the bar of convincing - it's more an attempt to claim the boundaries of a set by pseudo-rigorous means (as bayesians, which are widespread despite being unjustifiably circular to the point of tautological) where the set is redefined to be wholly meaningless. It's like saying 'positive numbers' but then saying that some positive numbers are less than zero, because they ADD, but they add UNDERSTATED.
@@scambammer6102 Oh, that's adorable. You cannot have relevance without validity. Have you heard of the raven-paradox? It's where you have EVIDENCE for X by showing the existence of something not related to X. Did you mean VALID as in sound-vs-valid? So evidence actually doesn't rely on relevance. But if it DID rely on relevance, then that would necessarily require validity. If I said, for example that Joey had an infection, then would that be evidence for the existence of god? It could be relevant, by virtue that you could assert that god causes infections.. but it is valid? Not logically. Because the link wasn't even there.
So is there anything that would be considered philosophically unfalsifiable at all? As far as I can tell, there wouldn't be anything that would qualify as being fundamentally unfalsifiable, philosophically speaking. Also, what makes Huemer say that Popper would hate Huemer's explanation in _Understanding Knowledge_ (pp.144-145)?
Skeptical scenarios (e.g., last thursdayism, the brain in a vat, etc.) would be unfalsifiable. But on the probabilistic view, unfalsifiability is a matter of degree -- some things are more falsifiable than others. So it doesn't have to be *totally* unfalsifiable (like last thursdayism) to count as unfalsifiable. Since there is strong evidence against theism, I don't see how theism qualifies as unfalsifiable (even though some theists naively seem to want that, not realizing that it would rid theism of any predictive power and force them to throw out every theistic argument). Popper would hate Huemer's explanation because it is probabilistic, and Popper didn't like induction or probabilistic reasoning. He thought that deduction was the only legitimate kind of reasoning: fakenous.substack.com/p/you-dont-agree-with-karl-popper
@@EmersonGreen AFAICT, the foundational tenets of most religions are no more falsifiable than a brain in a vat or last thursdayism. There's no test you can to do to show a man name Jesus didn't rise from the dead 2k years ago or that beyond our universe there isn't an omnipotent agent that created everything. For any data one can pull from empirical reality theists can find ways to rationalize it either by some mysterious "God's plan" or by simply ad-hoc'ing the God hypothesis. This is why the problem of evil doesn't convince many theists because for human suffering they fall back on "God gave humans free will and doesn't intervene" and for all other suffering they either deny it (claiming, eg, animals aren't conscious/don't suffer), or deny that it's gratuitous ("all part of God's plan.") At the latter point the hypothesis DOES become unfalsifiable because there's no way to prove a difference between "apparent gratuitous suffering" and "suffering due to some mysterious/unknown plan of God" and you simply must retreat to arguments from prior probabilities, which is philosophical rather than empirically falsifiable.
@@EmersonGreen Thank you for the response! Apologies for the delay in my reply. I believe I have sufficiently understood the point being made about theism wrt falsifiability and I think I wholeheartedly agree with you as of now. Could you please provide me with some examples of things that are not totally unfalsifiable but would still qualify as sufficiently unfalsifiable under the probabilistic view? 😅
If there were ever an Emerson Green drinking game, quoting Michael Huemer would definitely be a drink
You would die
@@EmersonGreen I agree that the standard for identifying evidence is relevance. But I don't see any facts that are relevant to the existence of god, where every fact equally indicates naturalism, cognitive bias, or social utility. The fact that most people believe in god equally indicates cognitive biases relating to agency, fear, and uncertainty. The authors of sacred texts have many motives for promoting religion other than factual accuracy. Also, one needs to define what "god" means before deciding whether any fact is supportive of that hypothesis, which is problematic, since there are many definitions of "god", and most of them cannot be demonstrated.
Theism is falsifiable because it is false. That doesn't imply there is any evidence supporting it. Some things are just false.
Testimony can be evidence, but not when the testimony is too vague to support the (also vague) thesis and is equally explained by cognitive bias.
Your point on belief and "lack-theism" is good, but you should mention that indecision about the existence of god is common, reasonable and traditionally called "agnosticism". There are more agnostics than there are atheists (which is why atheists are so eager to claim them).
The lack of any concrete examples of "evidence" supporting theism in the program is notable. Perhaps some theists can provide it /s.
@@EmersonGreen Would you mind if I clip the "lacktheism" segment of your video out and upload it on my channel with some framing about why it's relevant to people who aren't interested in philosophy at all?
@@MathewSteeleAtheology yeah no problem
@@EmersonGreen Thank you kindly. Ten years ago, a retired philosophy professor explained why lack of belief doesn't make sense and I realized why I was wrong. Now it's something of a pet peeve for me, especially when it's defended so dogmatically. You do a great job of explaining it.
I worry about people who say nothing counts against their view. This was excellent. 👏 👏 👏
You worry way more about not being shown wrong, that's why you constantly block and delete critical comments on your channel.
@@yurigagarin7182 I have proof.
@@vejekeprove it than.
Oh the bitter sweet irony.
@@yurigagarin7182 He is about to admit it a couple of comments down (after I had provided the proof). Damage control they call it.
*Can you imagine being asked "What would persuade you of the existence of square circles?*
This is what many atheists experience when asked "What would persuade you of the existence of God?".
I have had this experience before I understood the incoherence and/or ambiguity of the term, since in general conversation the term is not a singular claim, but a category of claims and thus one is not actually engaging some particular, but is instead making a variety of assumptions when speaking to any particular individual UNLESS one takes the time to establish what is being denoted as God.
---
I would not denote the atheist as being unreasonable, but he didn't present what I suspect most would need to give charitable consideration. I am assuming he holds the idea that the concept of God is incoherent and thus there can be no evidence. I am assuming most wouldn't argue for there being some possible evidence for square circles.
One of the issues that I think he is referencing is the idea of the Bible (or any such error laden and/or muddled presentation) being the presentation (or even reasonable associated) of a supposed omniscient omnipotent entity. The very idea can strike some as an absurdity given sufficient knowledge of the falsehoods in the Bible.
So, just as the problem of evil is an issue for theism so is the problem of incompetence which might be considered a subcategory of divine hiddenness.
Being persuaded of square circles is WAY WAY EASIER than being persuaded of God. Both the properties "square" and "circle" are *observable.* So all I need is to somehow observe that a given geometric shape is both a square and a circle, and then I'll be convinced! I can't imagine _how_ that would happen, but at least I know which signals I'd have to be receiving to conclude that.
On the other hand, "omnipotent disembodied mind that created the Universe" is very much *unobservable,* in its every aspect. I don't know how to observe a mind without a body. I don't know how to observe _that_ it doesn't have any body anywhere. I don't know how to observe something being created out of nothing, and even if I did, I wouldn't be able to correlate it with the disembodied mind's intentions (because I can't observe its intentions), etc.
Thank you for this analogy and exposition.
@@user-qm4ev6jb7d Right. Instead of a "square circle" it's more of "unsprongticable prongticum". I made that up, it sounds silly and that's the point. And this type of language is often used in theism "the mystery that contains all truths" and things like that.
@@juanausensi499 I think it was Rudolf Carnap who first publicly called it out, claiming that things like "What is the foundational principle of all existence?" are simply meaningless pseudo-questions.
Now, I don't fully agree with Carnap here, I would rather say such questions are "meaningless until proven otherwise", instead of immediately dismissing them as "meaningless by construction".
Ngl, if God stepped out from the heavens today, and was walking around bathed in holy light with cherubim choirs in tow, I would be quite open to accepting that God is real
And, in the event that the entity which stepped out were not God, I would still be ready to drop the topic nonetheless.
Either way, if some celestial entity arrives on Earth, the "does God exist" conversion is absolutely over for me.
Good stuff. I especially like the point that if all evidence must be scientific evidence, then virtually all convictions were wrongful. That’s a nice way to put that point
A whole lot of them are. I certainly wouldn't stake my life on a single eye-witness. Especially if there's no physical evidence at all.
That's poppycock.
How would you prove a god or gods exist?
@@bipslone8880 First, you need to define God. If he's a being similar to us, just invite him over.
@@goldenalt3166 Which God? How can I define something that can't be proven to exist?
It's called "withholding judgment due to lack of information for either proposition." it accurately described my position for years after I lost my faith. I have moved on from this position, but it is a real position that I honestly held for years, hoping for theists to demonstrate their claims.
I also think that's a perfectly reasonable position to maintain. I myself maintain a relatively unorthodox position: beyond God being real or not, i think the existence of God is not relevant.
Its worthwhile to take atheists to task when they make bad arguments but a lot of this gives too much credit to theism. The main problem is theism is often hoplessly vague, poorly defined, and endlessly malleable - it isnt strictly a philosophical claim, its a huge collection that is just packaged under a single term.
Also falsifiability isnt exclusive to science. In a sense it is a way to measure information content. An unfalsifiable statement is effectively vaccuous - it cant provide information (it can still serve some other purpose).
More broadly, if all this intellectual labor was an honest and rigorous search for truth show me the theist that carefully evaluated each individual question and only held onto a set of beliefs that were epistemologically justified... The overwhelming majority of theists are working backwards, searching for justification of already held belief. How else does the supposed importance of an itinerant preacher in ancient Palestine factor into discussions of first causes and "fine-tuned" universes?
theism is simply the belief in a god or gods.... it's not complicated. Atheists don't believe.
Yup. When a statement is “hopelessly vague, poorly defined and endlessly malleable” how can one even start to evaluate if something is evidence for it?
@@pansepot1490 you can male certain assumptions about what is meant by "god" and then perform such evaluations
@@scambammer6102The issue is many theists don't define their claims. They define God in ways that allow them to rely on mystery. If you point out the Christian God commanded genocide, they will say it's not bad if God does it. Theists refuse to define their God in any meaningful way.
@@WaterCat5 I know, but there are pretty well defined definitions of god in theology and philosophy that can be debunked. But there is no way to debunk a claim that the claimant refuses to define.
This was really well done and much needed! It's part of the reason why as a atheist I often wince at some of the stuff I see on line. I've also been guilty of a couple of those and it was epistemology that `corrected me.` Keep in mind though, we're talking about a very broad topic in "theism" There are few people that simply believe there is a god, without a whole bunch of other stuff. Depending on what that stuff is, makes a difference.
it is much needed. what passes for atheism on youtube needs skeptical analysis.
Genuine question: using these definitions, are rainbows evidence of leprechauns? If rainbows didn't exist, it seems like leprechauns are less probable. I can't put my head in this mindset. It seems theists are simply defining God as a universe-maker, consciousness-maker, DNA-maker, morality-maker, etc. and therefore universes, consciousness, etc. all count as evidence for him. And conversely, if the universe, etc. didn't exist that would make God less probable?
There are MANY explanations for the things we see in the world. Some kind of deity/god, maybe a computer program, aliens etc. It's pretty much impossible at this point to know the true answer. There is no evidence for a god and yet also boundless evidence for god. Same applies for just about everything. The issue is that most religions make claims that conflict with science and how we understand the world as well as sometimes supporting things today we see as highly immoral such as slavery.
And for that last point if the universe did at one point never exist at all then neither did the cause and effect rule so theoretically anything is possible to occur without a cause. It doesn't make god any less or any more probable than what many theists claim. It just also means the universe could have came into being causeless without any kind of deity.
Exactly this 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
I agree. I majored in philosophy. I saw the word epistemology, and clicked.
As you say, rainbows are not evidence of leprechauns. I'd like to see your question answered.
When it comes to theological philosophy, the arguments are usually in regard to X versus Y or X versus all non-X. For example, the universe is expanding, and appears to have had a beginning, which is obviously greater evidence for a divine creator than a universe that is static, and appears to have always existed. Other similar attributes are order and chaos, or simplicity and complexity. A universe that is nothing but a single neutrino is much more likely to generate spontaneously; especially, given our understanding of virtual particles than a universe of over a dozen types of quantum particles that assemble into numerous forms of complexity.
Is the lack of rainbows evidence against leprechauns? If not then rainbows are not evidence for leprechauns.
Ok, but you are just complaining that colloquial speech is different than academic speech. As a practical matter, any "evidence" that is not "good" enough to change a mind, might as well not be called "evidence" at all, especially by the person whose mind we are talking about. Similarly, the "lacktheist" hangup is motivated by practical interactions when a theist asks an atheist to "prove that god doesn't exist," as opposed to just "give reasons why they are an atheist." Theists like to pretend that "believing in god" is somehow "the same" as "not believing in god." But the whole point is that to believe in god is have a standard of evidence that is so low as to be laughable.
he is describing the proper framework for analysis. you are free to use it or not.
@@scambammer6102 that's exactly my point - "proper" is relative to a situation, isn't it? And not all situations demand this level of pedantry, do they?
I mean, sure. I definitely understand your point. I would argue though that the “lacktheist” has affirmed a position on the matter in either context, so it really doesn’t come down to knowing what’s standard in academia. You know that you don’t “lack a belief” in God like an infant or some inanimate object does. You have a stance. Stand by it. Why exactly should this not be recognized as the case in colloquial speech? Ofc in a practical setting, your beliefs don’t demand justification, but then just say “i don’t need to justify anything to you.” That’s perfectly fine to say to a mean aunt at a family reunion or whatever, but saying you lack a mental state on a topic that you clearly do not isn’t true in either a graduate level course, or the comfort of your living room.
@@on.periattt Every atheist I have ever met can most definitely explain "why they are an atheist," as in explaining what is their reasoning and the evidence they used to come to their conclusion. This isn't an issue. The issue is when a theist hears this and replies with something pedantic like, "Oh, you mean you are an 'agnostic!'" as if that is some profound insight and then wants to go into how we are both "open the possibility...blah, blah." I think the big picture is simply that atheists are tired of the whole ridiculous conversation, in both colloquial and academic settings. At this point, its like theists are speaking their own language which they just mindlessly repeat ad nauseam.
48:54 - I think it's fair to say two things simultaneously:
1. I believe that the evidence for God is insufficient to warrant belief.
2. I believe that the evidence *against* God is sufficient to warrant *disbelief*.
Number one is the bare minimum requirement to not be a theist, and it doesn't require any positive evidence against God, it only requires a lack of evidence *for* God, hence "lacktheism". This is the bare minimum which, IMO, many forms of theism haven't overcome.
That being said, I agree that most atheists are not *just* lacktheists, I think they do have some evidence in mind against God which informs their beliefs, but I think it's perfectly reasonable for such people to sit back and say, "Look, I don't see sufficient evidence for theism, so I'm not even going to bother proposing evidence *against* it: it would be a waste of time and effort at this point. I am going to act like a lacktheist until given reason to do otherwise."
In which case it might make more sense to use agnostic or as you say explicitly use the term lacktheist rather than atheist.
" I agree that most atheists are not just lacktheists" he didn't say that, and it isn't true.
"The number of atheists and agnostics found in common surveys tends to be quite low since, for instance, according to the 2019 Pew Research Center survey they were 3.1% and 4% respectively" (goddam I am good)
Okay, everything you said there would be correct except with the word "lacktheist" being replaced with the word "agnostic".
@@irish_deconstruction modern pop atheists have muddied the word "agnostic" to the extent it's clearer to just use "lack-theist" even though it sounds awful.
@@scambammer6102 I'm not sure that's actually true in broader society. In certain places online such as the r/atheism subreddit, probably. But not necessarily if you're just talking to a random neighbor or something.
I'd actually be interested to see a survey on this topic.
15:15 - I don't think theists are claiming to do science, I think they're doing what you go on to describe, which is why, depending on the brand of theism being proposed, I do accuse them of making their beliefs unfalsifiable, and thereby unsupportable. Frankly, I don't hear many if any atheists using this idea in the way you initially described it.
I forget. What are the parameters of falsifiability?
@@thomasthellamas9886 The ability to make future testable predictions.
@@goldenalt3166 That sounds more like the definition of evidence
@@thomasthellamas9886 Not really. Evidence is facts consistent with a view. Falsifiability needs potential facts which are inconsistent. For example, if I say my next coin flip will be heads or tails that's consistent with a fair coin but not a testable prediction.
Fact: There is a fuzzy video of something flying in the sky that I can't explain. Therefore dragon.
This is a strawman. You slipping in that "therefore dragon" is just dishonest. If there was a fuzzy video of something flying in the sky, this is something we would expect if dragons did exist. This is very different from saying that the fuzzy video decisively proves the existence of dragons. However, the video is more likely to be evidence for something less improbable, such as an airplane or a helicopter or some other probable flying object.
@@irish_deconstruction Clownsky-- he was making a joke.
I cringe harder than ever before from thinking about how I would have denied a lot of this at one point lol.
What would you deny as an example?
I probably would have denied all of it 6 or 7 years ago!
@@goldenalt3166 The fact that there is some evidence for theism lol
@@irish_deconstruction theism is just a belief in a god or gods, evidence is not required, theism exists. What you need is evidence for a god or Gods.... got any?
@@bipslone8880 dude you know what they fucking mean
When you are talking about evidence, I think it is important to note most people are not high minded epistemologists whether theist or atheist, in the common man's understanding of evidence, there is no evidence or verifiable evidence at the least for theism.
Things like fine-tuning, and the universe supposedly having a beginning, etc are what I would and the common man would consider arguments for theism, but not "evidence" in the common man's parlance.
This is a topic not only debated by epistemologists.
I agree with you, it's all in the context of conversation or debate. When your debating evidence for gods existence I think most people know what "evidence" means in that context. You can claim anything as evidence I suppose but it doesn't make it true.
Theists can say this same thing to atheists. Emerson (I don't watch him a lot) made this point that both "meta-worldviews" can rationalize the same things in different ways.
I agree that a lot of people, theists and atheists alike, are idiots. i think it's worthwhile to advocate being less idiotic, in spite of everything.
It's not that hard to understand what "evidence" is. Take any proposed fact. Assume it is true. Does it make the claim more or less likely? If so, it is evidence.
There is the small irony in Emerson complaining about people redefining what "to believe" means (i.e. differently than in academic epistomology), then redefining "evidence" from what 90% of people would regard the word as meaning.
I don't think his complaint is necessarily wrong, but if there were one group of people who I would accuse of needlessly redefining words to suit their argument, it would be philosophers (see modal ontology).
There's a fundamental difference in testimonies about the existence of god and of table being made of atoms: If you wanted to do so, there's a clear path which you could follow and observe the latter yourself, hence your knowledge of it will stop being purely testimonial. However, you can never go back in time to meet Jesus, hence all the knowledge you have about him will always necessarily be testimonial. This option of going beyond the testimonial is what separates the two groups of knowledge
On one level, all evidence is testimonial. Your memory is another form of testimony (and unfortunately not particularly reliable). I'd say that the number of independent and methodologically rigorous testimonies is the key difference. But the amount of contradictory testimonies is also significant.
You’re presupposing that if God exists it must be Jesus. Probably because you live in a Western secular culture. If Jesus is not God it doesn’t logically follow that God doesn’t exist. It only proves the Christian God doesn’t exist. For someone to move from being an atheist to a Christian one must first resolve whether God exists and if he’s immaterial and exists outside of nature as he’s is the grounding of all reality. Once that objection has been answered then they can study Jesus to get that question answered. In other words it’s downstream of whether or not God exits.
Why do you believe observing the table being made of atoms is evidence that the table is made of atoms?
@@irish_deconstructionI guess because apart from intuition, observation is the fundamental way in how I perceive the world. If I don't believe in it, there's nothing else to believe
Suppose a criminal investigator said there is no evidence connecting a suspect to a crime scene. According to this epistemological version of the concept that would almost surely be false. At least something in a complex crime scene would fit this definition.
For example, the crime occurred in a house. It’s more likely this person did it given that houses exist. So there is some amount of evidence he did it.
But that’s clearly not what we mean. That’s ridiculous. Yet that’s kind of the low standard that we’re appealing to here.
I’m not sure exactly which definition we should be using. I’m not sure exactly which definition of evidence would make the atheist claim “there is no evidence for Gods existence” to be roughly correct.
Maybe there is none. But I think focusing on the particular notion you’re bringing up kind of misses the point.
I probably wouldn’t say “there is no evidence”. But I don’t think it’s too far off in some colloquial sense. Suppose we just said, the reasons to believe in God are very very bad. Colloquially that would mean almost the same thing. The difference is that it doesn’t use the exact term “evidence” and it doesn’t use the categorical “there is *no* …”. Yet that could just be ascribed to phrasing and reasonable hyperbole.
I just don’t think it’s correct to overanalyze such a statement. Don’t get me wrong, the Bayesian account of evidence is probably the best one we’ve got. But that doesn’t mean it’s the one we intend with such a simple statement.
I'll add this. I think when people use language in practice, very often they simply say words while meaning something that would require inserting extra qualifiers if we wanted to be pedantic. So "there is no evidence" can reasonably be intending "there is no good evidence" or "there is no sufficient evidence" or "there is almost no evidence" or something like that. I'm not saying people actually have a more complete sentence in their mind and just leave stuff out, but rather that they probably just render words from some black-box mental process and they've come to associate various ideas and examples and situations with those words. Even more they've probably heard someone say the words and now thy repeat them.
So in a philosophical analysis the question really becomes if the person uttering the words can think reflectively about the concepts involved. How would they answer certain followup questions. If they say they're using the Bayesian definition of evidence you suggest and they also say "there is no evidence for God", then you'd be reasonable in pushing back on that and giving trivial counter examples and challenging them on it. But maybe they'd describe evidence in some less sophisticated way. Then you might be reasonable in trying to teach them about subjective Bayesian probabilities as a model for reasoning and convincing them that this is what they should be using. That's probably a noble goal. Good luck!
If they don't have a well thought out definition of evidence, maybe you'll just have to empirically test how they use the term by asking them many many questions.
@@HyperFocusMarshmallow One problem is that many atheists have a stronger definition of "god" than apologists that argue this. The bigger problem is that this epistemology also must admit that there's evidence against god.
@@goldenalt3166 Yup, this scheme must admit there is evidence for just about anything. Maybe except things that strictly live at probability 0 or 1.
@@HyperFocusMarshmallow They can't even know something has 0 probability because God can do anything.
no, because the existence of a house equally supports both guilt and innocence. It is irrelevant, and therefore is not evidence.
Evidence requires experience. If want to know whether a fact is evidence for my hypothesis, I must evaluate its probability. But where do I get my probability distribution? From statistical data, i.e. experience. Always. No exceptions. This is a problem for theism: Nobody has experience with a god creating stuff, so we don't know if stuff existing is evidence for such god. Of course I could *imagine* what a god could do, but that's just me defining "god" to have every property I like (e.g. human-like intelligence) and discard every property I don't like (e.g. the fact that humans require brains).
nope, evidence has nothing to do with probability. It has to do with relevance. Assume the proposed fact is true. If it tends to prove or disprove the thesis, it is evidence.
@@scambammer6102 How do we know if a fact is relevant to a hypothesis?
Very intuitive, I'm an atheist and I applaud you for making these profound points. I've encountered several hardcore atheist who's solely restricted to their worldview and is not interested to lend their ears to the other side.
or maybe we lent our ears to the "other side" and found there was nothing there
@@scambammer6102Well I don't think they were talking about you.
You're confusing evidence with hypothesis. There are no testable, falsifiable hypotheses afaik that would confirm or deny theism. There are poorly constructed hypotheses, but these aren't evidence. An hypothesis itself cannot raise the probability for theism; only evidence that can support a testable hypothesis. Once the hypothesis test is satisfied, this is evidence.
This is simply false I suggest going back and paying closer attention to the video.
6:03 discussion of probability of a hypothesis. THAT's NOT WHAT A HYPOTHESIS IS. It's a plan for testing. There's no probability until you test it. That's the whole point.@@pleaseenteraname1103
This video seems to hint at a lack of respect for skepticism. The idea that a person might lack belief is treated as ridiculous, while a skeptic would say that a lack of belief is wise. Beliefs are not necessary or even helpful. We can act in the world while withholding judgement on what is true. No matter how much evidence we think we have for God not existing, there could still be some sort of God hidden out there somewhere, and no productive purpose would be served by jumping to the conclusion that God does not exist, so what use is there in ridiculing people for withholding judgement?
Except you all want to destroy all religions : you're not benign!
If we say beliefs and truth judgments are unnecessary, we very quickly arrive at the "There are no absolute statements" problem. Do we believe that beliefs are unnecessary? Do we judge true the claim that we don't need truth judgements? We may try to say "We don't need X type of beliefs," but then we need to justify both why we don't need ~X, and why we do need X. We may also justifiably say "I have not seen sufficient evidence to make a determination for or against Y," but that is necessarily on a case by case basis.
@@billcynic1815I don't believe we "need to justify" in general. It is sufficient that beliefs are good enough to make good enough predictions. It doesn't matter what's under the water when you're trying to sail a boat.
@@goldenalt3166 You don't think that you should have some kind of rational justification for the things you accept as true?
"there could still be some sort of God hidden out there somewhere" no there couldn't. "god" is just a word used by humans. But you are right that he didn't sufficiently respect agnosticism.
Great video. Cameron promoted it and im hoping to see a theist do something similar. It could be a helpful resource for each side, progressing the coversation more towards truth and not tribalism.
I'm hoping there can be a conversation between apologists and non-believers. My biggest problem with modern apologetics is that they argue for a prime mover / first cause and never want to talk about the specific God they believe in.
JMike, do you know of any apologists on TH-cam giving strong apologetics for their specific religion? Maybe it's Islam running "The Quran is perfect" or people running the minimum facts? It seems apologists who are willing to fight for their God are fewer and fewer these days.
We get more and more Darth Dawkins....
@@malirk The first step is to argue for the existence of God. Specifics come later. I am always baffled when I hear people complain about Cosmological Argument by saying that it doesn't prove Christian God to exist, when the purpose of the argument is to make people agree with something which would lead to arguing for some specific religion.
@@Wlof25 I think a cause via the kalam is a justified belief. Do you think the cause is a specific God? If so, which one and why?
@@malirkyou should check out apologetics squared and inspiring philosophy on this
I still don't see anything that raises the probability of theism from zero.
Anything that counts as evidence for theism is indistinguishable from evidence for something else, like a hallucination, which is far more likely.
Infinite Multiverse can though
Found my way here via Richard Carrier's blog post. Excellent, but a bit over my head. I'll have to listen again, after reading Carrier's thoughts.
Your channel is almost as good as Joe Schmid for majesty of reason. It’s funny how you and Joe both put in the hard work and research and when you provide this Contant. however people like Matt Dillahunty and Aron Ra and not to say they don’t put hard work into their contact but when it comes to their research it’s laughable and embarrassing to say the least. Yep they have hundreds and thousands of subscribers and they make thousands upon thousands of dollars. And you don’t even have 5000 subscribers yet you were obviously more philosophically competent than they are and also much younger. Well you know what they say life just ain’t fair.
Interesting video, but I disagree on a lot:
No evidence for theism: I stand by the statement that there is no evidence for theism. The major problem with theism is that it makes no predictions; it merely observes our world/universe and then tries to construct a hypothesis that fits the data it sees. Theism never says "if theism is true, we'd expect Y and not Z," where Y is some novel prediction. You may say that not all evidence must come in the form of novel empirical predictions, but the only other kind of evidence is correlational, meaning we have past examples of X and Y being correlated so that discovery Y makes X more probable. This fits the murderer/knife example. But we have no examples of gods existing or doing anything, so we have no such correlational examples. What we have with theism is akin to flipping a coin 10x, getting a random sequence, and then hypothesizing that there's a maker of programmed coins that programmed that coin to flip that sequence and then claiming that the fact the sequence happened is evidence for the programmer hypothesis.
The only way one can say that there's evidence for theism is by cherry-picking data and ignoring any disconfirming evidence, and believers do this almost instinctively. An example might be when theists pray for someone who's sick and they get better. You might argue that's evidence since you'd expect intercessory prayer to happen under theism; but then you have to ask whether it happens more often with or without prayer (or with/without prayer in different religions), and multiple studies on intercessory prayer have shown little to zero to inverse affects. When theists are confronted with counter-examples, they'll then rush to make excuses such as "God works in mysterious ways" or "it's part of God's plan," basically retreating from the from prediction to begin with. You can't just pay attention to the "hits" and ignore the "misses," because that's how "psychics" fool people.
Theism is falsifiable: I think the subject of falsifiability follows from the above. Because theism doesn't make any strong/novel predictions, it is basically impossible to falsify it. There's no way to, eg, confirm that 2k years ago a person wasn't resurrected, which is the central claim of Christianity; there's similarly no way to prove that there isn't some omnipotent creator beyond our universe that created it/us with a purpose. There's no tests to prove any of religion's central tenets false, and this (to theists) is a feature, not a bug; though to any rational person it should be a bug and not a feature.
Testimony isn't evidence: I would agree that testimony is evidence, but "evidence for what" is the question. Testimony is evidence that the testifier had an experience; it is not evidence for the cause of that experience. I've found that people liberally mix up these two things, conflating the experience with the hypothesis that could explain the experience. In the case of The Bible we don't even have testimonial evidence; we have anonymous claims of testimonial evidence, the evidential equivalent of hear-say, decades after the supposed facts would've occurred. Given what we know about legendary development we can pretty easily conclude that such "testimony" indeed isn't evidence since we'd expect it just as much if it were false and, even according to theists, all other such claims from other religions throughout history would be false.
Intuition: Intuitions are cognitive short-cuts formed by evolution to conserve our computational brain power for other more intensive tasks. They're geared towards survival and reproduction, not truth. Now, truth can be useful in terms of survival and reproduction, but not necessarily so, so intuitions lead to as many "useful fictions" as they do to correct beliefs. The important thing with intuitions is to ask and answer why any particular intuition would've been useful for survival reproduction. Sometimes, those answers will pertain to truth, but just as often they will not. So, eg, the intuition/instinct to be wary of heights is "truthful" in the respect that we fear a very real existential threat. The intuition for seeing agency behind events is merely a useful bias because even when it's wrong it doesn't cost us anything, but if it's right then it would probably help save us from predators, or even help us to understand the motivations of other tribal members.
I also strongly disagree with Mike in his explanation behind why it's OK to trust intuitions because, hey, even the Kolmogorov axioms reduce to axioms that we intuitively trust. Well, no, mathematical axioms can be used to model how empirical reality operates, and when they model it well we tend to trust those axioms because of that. They also easily map on to tons of real-world examples. If you were to come home to a ransacked house and forced to explain why "human burglars" was a more probable explanation than "alien burglars" then it's obviously because the latter require many more assumptions that all have some probability of being wrong. Things like Kolmogorov complexity and probability theory model/explain this mathematically: every assumption you add is another probabilistic point that can be wrong, so when you continually add such point the overall probability of your hypothesis must go down, not up.
I mean, to suggest that we can't know human intuitions are bad at probability based on humans failing probability tests (like the conjunction fallacy or the Monty Hall Problem) because probability theory is just based on intuitions seems absurd to me and would lead to complete epistemic chaos and completely glosses over how we distinguish "good" intuitions from "bad" intuitions. I assume there's more to the interview, but that was a pretty awful take just based on that clip.
Lacktheism: I don't feel strongly about this. I tend to refer to Dawkins's Spectrum of Theistic Probability and say I'm a 6 on that scale. This does away with the ambiguities of trying to define a complex spectrum of confidence with just three vague terms. I will, however, say that I think "lacktheism" came from the perception of so many theists thinking all atheism was the equivalent of "strong atheism" or a "7" on Dawkins's scale. Often such misunderstandings lead to equally inaccurate backlashes.
I love seeing these types of videos. More atheists/agnostics need to speak against this New Atheist tendency that treats philosophy as a closed vacuum, especially because it paints us as being pontificating asshats. Thank you for doing this, Emerson.
Not just atheists. This was an excellent video but every bit as pertinent to theists who I see make all the same mistakes. We could all benefit from taking a step back from our beliefs and biases and taking a more considered approach based on sound epistemology.
And believers need to finally give compelling evidence for the specific God they believe in.
@@malirk Okay, let's try to keep things in the realm of possibility 🤣
@@malirk or any evidence
@@scambammer6102mistake 1
"If E is evidence for H, then it follows that not-E is evidence for not-H."
Except the evidentiary strength of not-E for not-H might be nearly 0, even when the evidenciary strength of E for H is high. Not-E might only increase the probability of not-H from 10% to 10.0000001%, which is worthless. This means you can never use this principle you stated.
Here's one counter example: "If newyork didn't exist, that would be evidence against spiderman being real, therefore the fact that newyork exists is evidence for spiderman". The existence of newyork might raise the probability of spiderman from 1 in a gajillion to 1.5 in a gajillion, but that's not good enough to actually count as evidence.
nope that would be evidence for spiderman. But no such evidence exists for god.
Awesome work, man. Only one area where I would push back: At 16:05 the video seems to conflate "falsifiability" with "verifiability."
Here's the difference as I see it.
Take:
1. P(H)
2. P(H|E)
3. P(H|~E)
In relevant cases:
2 >= 1 >= 3
These three probabilities may lie at varying distances from each other.
H is "verifiable" to the degree that 2 > 1
H is "falsifiable" to the degree that 1 > 3
Thus,
A. To the degree that 1 is far from both 2 and 3, H is both verifiable and falsifiable.
B. To the degree that 1 is far from 2, but close to 3, H is verifiable, but not falsifiable
C. To the degree that 1 is close to 2, but far from 3, H is not verifiable, but is falsifiable.
D. To the degree that 1 is close to both 2 and 3, H is neither verifiable nor falsifiable.
Hi.
Longtime listener to your podcast, “Counter Apologetics”; I just stumbled across your channel here.
So, I want to wrap my head around this idea that theism is NOT unfalsifiable. I'm not sure if I'm even understanding the whole concept well enough - it was something I had trouble with from the first time I ever heard the word, “unfalsifiable”.
But you have this quote, “suppose you have two theories... with one being much more falsifiable than the other... Suppose also that... neither one of them makes any false predictions...”
It feels to me that “falsifiable” is used here as a thing; that there is something one can do to demonstrate the falsehood of the hypothesis.
But is that really true? What is one of the things necessary to elevate an hypothesis to a theory? You have to be able to test it, right? Make predictions. Now, I notice the quote says “neither one of them makes any false predictions”, but not whether either one makes any true predictions.
Well, if neither one of them makes any false predictions, and that's the extent of your testing the hypotheses, exactly what would make one of them “much more falsifiable”?
The only way to infer that one of the hypotheses is “wrong” is to test it and see if it's “right”, i.e.; makes true predictions. And if all you know is that neither one of them makes a false prediction, what other falsifiability is there beside more testing, which is available to both?
Moreover, is there any way to test the hypothesis that God exists? I'm not aware of one that would stand up under clinical trials. And isn't testing it the only way to falsify something? And wouldn't that mean that theism is unfalsifiable?
Am I getting something wrong here?
Is the fact that wood exists evidence that Jesus was crucified, and therefore that the resurrection happened? Not being snarky, I really think that may be the case.
no, because the existence of wood neither supports nor opposes Jesus' crucifixion. It is irrelevant to the claim and thus is not evidence.
@@scambammer6102 if there was no evidence that wood existed, then it would be less likely that crucifixion happened as reported. Therefore, evidence of wood existing makes the hypothesis more likely to be true than if there was no evidence of wood existing.
H is more likely on e than not e
Where is the fault in this?
Imo it does. If there were no wood, being crucified on a wooden cross would have a probability of 0 and I think most people would say that the actual probability is at least slightly greater than 0.
@@MsJavaWolf If there were no wood, the probability of someone making up a false story of a crucifixion on a wooden cross would be 0, since the concept of wood would not even exist. Because there is wood, the probability of someone making up a false story of a crucifixion on wood goes up. Since the probability of a false story and a true story of a wooden cross crucifixion are both increased by the existence of wood, the existence of wood has no evidentiary value for establishing a crucifixion. The material specified by the storyteller has no relevance. There is, for all meaningful purposes, a 100% probability that the storyteller would specify some actually existent material, whether the crucifixion story was true or false.
Great video; I recently tried to address a similar question to your first one on my channel. You probably did a better job haha. Theists can make these mistakes too.
"Epistemology is hard." Excellent.
It is my view that there are two types of knowledge. In the first case knowledge comes from careful observation and reason. The second source of knowledge is "making shit up." The latter type is very popular because it is easy, answers every conceivable question, and produces irrefutable truth. The first type is hard, has no answers at all to many questions, and oftentimes has to be modified or even rejected as new observations come into play. I try my best to adhere to the first type but must admit guilt in engaging the second type.
One great mistake made by those who value the first type of knowledge is not realizing the futility of arguing with someone who is using type 2 knowledge. When someone tells you that "there is nothing you say or show me that could make me change my belief," that is a big hint that you are not going to have a lot of success by appealing to evidence and reason.
Thank you an excellent video. I am tempted to write much more but will resist.
I want to thank you (and majesty of reason) for being there to challenge my beliefs (and lack there of).
Challenge your lack of belief is a non-demonstrable entity? You should have a lack of belief.
@@bipslone8880 I agree that this should be the null hypothesis, but I want to believe in true things, so I appreciate Emerson helping me develop my epistemology and helping me gain a better understanding of how I get an understanding.
@@EarnestApostate Emerson doesn't understand the words that he uses. I don't think he even understands what an Atheist is
@@bipslone8880 Ok, this reeks of no true Scotsman. I subscribe because he has such different beliefs from me, I subbed after watching his capital punishment video and how he got to the same place as me but by a completely different route. I also find it interesting to see things from a panpsychist point of view, even though I am a physicalist that views atheist panpsychism as less likely that theistic idealism (though I think both are more likely than dualism). I don't want to just get the perspectives of people who agree with me, am an atheist because I want to seek truth and I believe the best path is to challenge every belief that I hold. Only the strong ideas should survive.
@@bipslone8880 What is an atheist?
Your first example was 4 situations, all involving probabilities. I am not putting 100% faith in a probable situation. As an atheist. The evidence I need doesn't exist, plus according to the stories in the Bible, I don't want that arrogant, violent, overly sensitive god to exist. We aren't making mistakes, but we are just stating we don't believe.
Idk, theres evidence CONSISTENT WITH theism, then there's evidence INDICATIVE of theism. I don't see any that's indicative.
Why are you discussing probability of theism (belief in the existence of a god or gods). People believe in god or gods....that's a fact. What is the probability of a god or gods and how would you calculated something that is non-demonstrable?
Methods to demonstrate the existence of Mr. Yahweh are baked right in the claims people make.
There is an internet full of people making claims that Yahweh talks, interacts with them and micromanages their lives. Yet, apologists are still trying to prove it.
No epistemology needed. We are talking about an imaginary character.
It's time to cut the crap, folks. Your religion is fantasy make-believe with imaginary characters.
What a beautiful example of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing...."
Atheism is the simple observation that zero evidence for any gods has yet to be presented.
How can you have evidence for incoherent theses?
Saying "theism is incoherent" is not very compelling when you can change the definition of "God." One stated definition can be incoherent but then just modify it slightly. You can do this with anything. Only specific propositions can be incoherent
This is the primary issue. A precise, unambiguous, and coherent discription of god needs to be established prior to any determination on whether there is evidence for such. If this definition is inprecise and ambiguous then almost anything will be able to be interpreted as evidence for it. If the definition of god is incoherent then there is no need to look for evidence. I submit, all definitions of god so far put forth are either inprecise/ambigious or incoherent.
@@user-lv9gm3fe6j"Incoherent" literally means it's unclear. So yes, making it more specific should make it more clear.
@@semidemiurgeI think it's better to work the other way. Use the evidence to find the truth rather than create a definition and look for confirming evidence.
@@user-lv9gm3fe6j lol wut? you just supported his argument that theism is incoherent lol
I was a Christian for 60 years. Your video is quite compelling. I, too, now that I am an atheist, dislike much of what you discussed. I remain convinced, however, that both atheism and theism are unfalsifiable. Yes, it's a scientific term. But I am a mthodological naturalist. I reject the concept of the supernatural. I can't help it if most theists reject my own view. We agree to disagree on that part. No harm, no foul. Thanks for an excellent presentation of your own views. You were indeed charitable! 😊
The gospels are very problematic:
1) They aren't eye-witness accounts. Even if we grant the names on the books are the people who wrote them, they were eye witnesses to a lot of the events. I consider an eye-witness to be someone who saw the events with their own eyes. The writers of the gospels don't meet this criteria for many parts of the gospels.
2) The gospels were written 30-60 years after the events. It seems more likely that these were stories passed around and then attributed to people whos names are on the books.
3) The gospels are in the Bible and are along side stories of a talking snake, talking donkey, water to wine, water to blood, rivers parting, people turning to salt, fire from Heaven and many more fantastical things. It seems more likely to me that these stories are just made up.
4) When people ask, "Where did Jesus' body go?" I usually reply.... how do we even know he was buried in Joseph's tomb? Interestingly the gospels even say they'll invent a story that the body was stolen. But.... why couldn't the body have been stolen? Is it because Rome would've hunted down those who stole the body? Ok... how and why? How do you find thieves and why do you REALLY want the body back? Rome probably didn't care.
What is the best example of this hypothetical "evidence for god"?
Hypothetical evidence or actual evidence?
@@goldenalt3166 either
funny he didn't give any
@@scambammer6102 I like the writing on the moon. It conveys power and a specific message. Though several of the prophet stories in the Bible have similar miracles (not the Bible stories themselves mind you, but if prophets could actually perform those miracles).
I don't rate either as being good evidence but they are so much better than what apologists can provide. It's as if apologists know what evidence actually means when they aren't trying to justify their religion.
@@goldenalt3166 I don't know about any writing on the moon
This is one of the reasons I don't think it is helpful to compare the rationality of atheist vs theist. You can be using rational processes and arrive at either conclusion. You can be be using irrational processes and arrive at either conclusion.
But what's the probability that they are? What I see is that the rational processes that are used for most mundane claims are not applicable to theism. If theism needs some new kinds of evidence and investigation then it needs to show the efficacy of this new methodology.
What rational process can you use to arrive at theism?
@@goldenalt3166 I myself think atheism is more probable. But that largely isn't my own doing, I am a product of my environment after all.
I'm saying it can be rational to trust your friends and family if they all grow up telling you God exists.
@@IdiotDoomSpiral69 For example if all of your friends and family teach you from birth that God definitely exists.
Parents teach their children lots of things which end up being true, that's why accepting the God claim off their word when you are young is a rational process, because their word seems to the child to be true more often than not.
@@JasonWood100 Perhaps if you grew up in an environment where "god" was a coherent unified concept. However, most people are exposed to "god" from several sources and they don't all agree.
One mistake I see on both sides is that intelligent design needs a creator. It doesn't! Consider the set of all possible multiverses. This can be seen as a platonic form, and then pick one multiverse with intelligent design (without a creator) of which our universe is a member.
none of the facts cited in support of intelligent design actually support intelligence or design. they are not evidence of anything.
@@scambammer6102 The origin of life is still very difficult to explain from a non-intelligent design perspective. There is a lack of a general definition of complexity in science, which I believe is because complexity has to do with strong emergence which can't be explained with fixed physical laws alone.
It seems that a large issue with epistemological criteria overtly held by an atheist/agnostic in a generally religious community is that the amount of evidence itself isn't independent of her criteria, but rather interacts in a game-theoretic way. If she tells people with strong social incentives to keep her in the fold, "Your testimony (of direct experience of Yahweh) is significant evidence, but I just find it to be outweighed by other kinds of evidence", then she is very likely -- shortly after the following service -- to receive more of such testimony. Faced with such a dynamic, it may be wise to keep the means of our own persuasion close to the vest.
Ah, that phrasing would indeed be unwise. However I don’t think I testimony is basically ever strong evidence for the miraculous, and often has no evidential weight at all since it is no less likely to be observed on a view that most or all such experiences are exclusively mental or social phenomena.
1. Your definition of evidence isn’t scientific evidence. There is literally no scientific evidence for gods. You are correct to say that your definition of evidence allows for any crazy idea - that’s why it’s a bad definition of evidence.
No, it is the only coherent understanding of evidence. Can you give me scientific evidence that you exist?
@@irish_deconstruction scientific evidence is based on observation that is testable and repeatable. So yes I can give you scientific evidence that I exist - I am human, a human that is said to “exist” is one that is living. You could observe me, test my heart beat, see brain activity, etc. as opposed to something like a dragon that we cannot observe or test. The type of “evidence” in this video is, “my house burned down. This is evidence for dragons”.
@@ThoughtCog No, I am making the point that you cannot give me scientific evidence for your existence, you can only give me sensory evidence.
@@ThoughtCogCan I perform experiments using the Scientific Method to prove that you exist as a conscious mind and you aren't just a philosophical zombie?
@@irish_deconstruction yes, easily. nice random capitalization.
There can’t be evidence for impossible things/states of affairs. The presumption is that theism is coherent here.
That's how I'm understanding it too. Or I think we may be on the same page.
Something counts as evidence if it raises a possibility God exists, then I'm inclined to say there is no evidence for God, because I don't think it's possible for God to exist.
ie: possibility raising = evidence, and no possibility of God (impossible state of affair) then we wouldn't expect to find any evidence for God.
What evidence is there that God is impossible?
@@roger5442Why do you think it’s impossible for God to exist?
@@gospelfreak5828 Hello. Appreciate your question.
Well, I think it's impossible because I think Naturalism is true (I'm a naturalist)
ie:
if naturalism is true then it's impossible for God to exist.
I think naturalism is true.
so therefore I think it's impossible for God to exist.
And that's it.
Hope that helps. Thanks.
@@roger5442surely you can't just start with naturalism though, you'd have to step back consider the evidence that naturalism is true verse theism? If your argument is that God is impossible because naturalism true it seems circular.
I assumed from Danny's comment he'd be talking about things like contradictions between omniscience and omnibenevolence and things like that.
1) We should not say that there is no evidence that unicorns and fairies exist. That is only said by people who are not "well read". To say there is no evidence against the existence of fairies and unicorns is as ridiculous as claiming that there is no evidence for the existence of fairies and unicorns.
2) We should not say that theism is unfalsifiable. That does not apply to theists who believe in an immaterial, timeless and omnipresent being who happens to love them. Theists are not concerned about that. They have other things in mind. Besides, theism is not unfalsifiable.
3) We should not say that testimony is not evidence. Because you are justified in trusting testimony by default as long as you have no specific grounds for doubts. Like when your parents first told you about Santa.
4) We should not say that intuitions don't matter. They matter a lot. Everybody uses them. Even when a scientific study or just a TV show clearly and openly shows us how bad our intuition is when doing statistics (the Monty Hall problem, etc.) in the end the scientists are just relying on their own intuition that the mathematics they have done is correct.
5) We should not say I don't believe God doesn't exist. Look, if some nut tells you one day that the total number of grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet is odd, you should not tell him that you do not believe him, do not hide behind semantic tricks and subterfuge. Please, grow up and tell him clearly that what he has said is false and face like an adult your belief that the number is even.
This is what I call "atheists who are one Catholic girlfriend away from desperately wanting to be saved by Our Lord Jesus Christ". Somehow something tells me that if she were Muslim that just wouldn't do the trick. It must be my intuition...
I know that his reflections lacked serious philosophical training and that his depth of thought does not reach the standards that many people expect in this type of conversations, but I will leave a couple of excerpts from Carl Sagan. And a joke, which always comes in handy.
"In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast ... 'To physics and metaphysics.' Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy-truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else. The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory."
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World.
"A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage"
Suppose I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you'd want to check it out, see for yourself. There have been innumerable stories of dragons over the centuries, but no real evidence. What an opportunity!
"Show me," you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle--but no dragon.
"Where's the dragon?" you ask.
"Oh, she's right here," I reply, waving vaguely. "I neglected to mention that she's an invisible dragon."
You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon's footprints.
"Good idea," I say, "but this dragon floats in the air."
Then you'll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.
"Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless."
You'll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.
"Good idea, but she's an incorporeal dragon and the paint won't stick."
And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won't work.
Now, what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I'm asking you to do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.
- Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World.
Dean, to the physics department... "Why do I always have to give you guys so much money for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff. Why couldn't you be like the math department - all they need is money for pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper."
@@vejeke are you ok?
@@thomasthellamas9886 No brother, I am possessed by an evil spirit. Pray for my brother. Pray very hard.
But remember, you are not talking to yourself, you are communicating with the creator of the universe.
@@vejeke I want to say you are trolling, but the amount of effort you put into responding to no one indicates something else
@@thomasthellamas9886 I told you, it is the evil spirit that possesses me, you yourself have noticed by reading me that nobody reads me and yet I write.
Pray very hard brother. Very very hard. And don't look at the proof that Erik Manning lies to his followers.
I got here from a fkn Richard Carrier article lmfao!!! 🤣
"No, I mean it in the dumb way" lmao
I'd say your first point on evidence is somewhat confused insofar what evidence means in philosophy radically changes based on framework of any given school of thought on the matter, and the probabilistic framework is just one of many. It's level of acceptance or use doesn't necessarily justify its adoption or relate to a statement - especially by anyone not philosophically trained and not a proponent of probabilistic evidential models.
Personally, I take evidence to mean phenomenon that has been demonstrated to be causally related to a proposition or other phenomenon I.E Milk on the floor is evidence of milk having left some container and fallen to the floor, but it isn't evidence of someone having spilt milk or a cow having loitered in the area.
It has nothing to do with probability, and indeed I think a probabilistic view of evidence could be argued as weak and confused.
A footprint is only evidence of me having commited a murder in a house if it can be demonstrated sufficiently that the footprint is mine and that my footprint being in the house inexplicably means that I would have to been in the house for it to be left there at the time of the murder - not put there in an attempt to frame me or from an earlier visit in no way related to the murder.
I would very much say there is no evidence for god in this respect because non of the "evidence" that has been posited for god so far as I know meets non-probabilistic standards of evidence. And, the probabilistic standards of evidence are compromised.
Even granting probabilistic evidence here though, I'm not sure that such evidence should be considered evidence still if its validity, as is, has been undermined by other arguments or evidence - as I believe is the case for purported religious "evidence".
For example, my footprint might appear evidence of me having entered a house, but is it still evidence of such if we could prove it was placed there by another individual wearing my shoes? I'd argue no, and I'd argue this holds true for religious evidence as well. I am not aware of any religious evidence that has not been undermined in this way, thus I'd assert there's no evidence for god.
Moreover, and as an example, the existence of Jesus is not "evidence of god" because there's no inherent causal relationship between his existence and God's. It's red herring. The ressurection of Jesus is not evidence of god, because there's no evidence to suggest Jesus was actually ressurected. Jesus's empty tomb is not "evidence of Jesus having been resurrected" because a tomb being empty is in no way causally connected to ressurections and there's no evidence to suggest the tomb couldn't have been empty for any other number of reasons, or the story just being a fabrication in the first place etc. I don't know that there is any fact about the world that enhances the probability of theism being true.
Simply put, probabilism is not interesting at all in respect to this and I reject that perspective on judging what constitutes evidence as far as god's existence is concerned. It's especially not interesting if the objection here is merely that many atheists unknowingly use "evidence" in a way that isn't consistent with a subset of philosophers who work on epistemology. After all, it's more useful to meet arguments where they're at according to the intended meaning of the speaker, rather than their failure to comport their words to that of specialists.
In colloquial speech, I'd venture a guess that most people do use evidence synonymously with proof and would not accept that grainy photos constitute evidence of Loch Ness or Big Foot. Similary, when the average atheist say there's no evidence for god, what they're saying is that shallow and easily explained phenomenon that could be construed as "evidence" for god, do not constitute real evidence.
Thus, I wouldn't say there's anything miraculous about there being no evidence for god. In fact, if god does not exist, I wouldn't expect there to be any evidence for him, and the lack thereof comports to that expectation.
The kind of phenomenological correlation you mention itself can be modeled probabilistically. Probability is fundamentally just a modeling of uncertainty, so in any arena where uncertainty exists, such as evidence increasing/decreasing the likelihood a proposition is true, we're dealing with probability. If you take your milk example there's two ways to approach that probabilistically. First, let's say you found the milk first; from there you might form a list of hypothesis to explain why the milk is there and then model those hypotheses probabilistically based on how common/likely they are. Second, let's say someone told you they spilled the milk, and then you went to find the milk. Well, then the milk you find is evidence for the claim that someone spilled milk, because if the claim were true you would've expected to find such milk.
Your footprint example conflates evidence with proof; they are not the same. Proof, in the colloquial sense, means evidence that makes a given proposition/hypothesis overwhelmingly likely to be true, but evidence is merely anything that makes the hypothesis/proposition more likely than it was before you observed the evidence. So, yes, your foot print in the house of a murder victim would increase the probability you were the murderer, but it would not prove you were. It could be very weak or strong evidence depending on how expected it would be for your footprints to be in the house even if you didn't commit the murder. If you were a close family friend or significant other one would expect your footprints in the house regardless of whether or not you committed the murder.
I actually agree with you that there's no evidence for God, but I think you can get there while maintaining the probabilistic view of evidence. The problem with evidences for God is that they make no novel predictions, they merely observe data and then post-hoc construct their hypothesis and then post-hoc alter that hypothesis when/if new data comes in. That's not how evidence works, probabilistic or not.
Everytime you say, "It would be a miracle if we lived in a reality where there was no evidence for theism", I think, "And that miracle would be evidence."
ok? People of all kinds please state if your theists, atheists, agnostics or any combination of those and then if willing participate in the test. As well, looking for 5 good moral theist questions for atheists/agnostics.
#1 You see a child drowning in a shallow pool and notice a person just watching that is able to save the child with no risk to themselves but is not, is that persons non action moral?
#2 If you go to save the child, the man tells you to stop as he was told it was for the greater good, but he does not know what that is, do you continue to save the child?
#3 Is it and act of justice to punish innocent people for the crimes of others?
#4 If you were able to stop it and knew a person was about to grape a child would you stop it?
#5 Would you consider an all knowing parent who put their kids in a room with a poison fruit and told the kids not to eat it but then also put a supernatural con artist in the room with the children knowing the con artist will get the kids to eat the fruit and the parent does nothing to stop it a good parent?
The first question seems to be predicated on a Principle of Bystander Intervention (PBI) that, if I were to formulate, would say "if one has the means and opportunity as a bystander to intervene in a situation to secure someone else, and that intervention would cause no harm or risk to themselves, then that bystander OUGHT to intervene or act in such a way to bring about the security of someone else." So, in order to even think about answering these questions, I'd have to think about some moral framework in which the PBI is true and applicable to myself. (If you don't like the PBI, then clearly some other principle that contains some moral obligation must be the case in order for the first question to have any bearing.) What reason is there to accept the PBI??
@@gordontubbs >>The first question seems to be predicated on a Principle of Bystander Intervention (PBI) that, if I were to formulate, would say "if one has the means and opportunity as a bystander to intervene in a situation to secure someone else, and that intervention would cause no harm or risk to themselves, then that bystander OUGHT to intervene or act in such a way to bring about the security of someone else." So, in order to even think about answering these questions, I'd have to think about some moral framework in which the PBI is true and applicable to myself. (If you don't like the PBI, then clearly some other principle that contains some moral obligation must be the case in order for the first question to have any bearing.) What reason is there to accept the PBI??"'
???? Who said you had to accept something you dont already to answer the questions? Whatever moral ways you use for your morals, use those and just answer the questions honestly. Less then 18% of christians answer these simple moral questions, I often get BS like this are responses.
@@macmac1022 Sorry to disappoint. There's no such thing as a "simple moral question" in these discussions. Get used to the BS.
@@gordontubbs >>Sorry to disappoint. There's no such thing as a "simple moral question" in these discussions. Get used to the BS.""
Then why do most atheists and agnostics agree they are simple?
These are not like trolley questions where its save 5 random people or someone you love asking you to make hard moral choices. These are pretty simple. Do you save a drowning child, stop a rape, find a person watching a child drown and saying its for the greater good but they dont know what that is dont seem to be hard choices to make.
1 - yes, their non-action is immoral.
2 - yes, I'm saving the child.
3 - no, punishing people who didn't commit an action committed by someone else is immoral.
4 - yes, I'd stop it.
5 - no, that's a bad parent.
I do not really understand the evidence for or against theism part. The very notion of evidence is based on probability in this case, yet it seems that when examining the argument the probability is simply assumed.
For instance, in the murder weapon example, we have observed both outcomes and thus can determine the probability with some success. In all arguments for and against theism, we have nothing but our intuition to guide the probability estimates.
Am I getting this wrong?
Are many people this binary in their thinking? Most conversations I've had or heard on such topics are more nuanced than the depictions suggested but largely not played in this video. There are areas where our intuitions are fairly reliable, and they can vary depending on our physical and mental states. It's mentioned in many videos on science that our intuitions work well for things common to our world. Things that move relatively slowly (v
30:14 The problem for “testimonial evidence” comes when an observation is conflated with a claim.
For example, “I saw a ghost” is characterized as testimonial evidence for the existence of ghosts, but it’s better characterized as a claim for the existence of ghosts based on an interpretation of an observation.
A person’s testimony that they saw a light is evidence that there was a light (apply the principle of charity). But someone’s claim that the light they saw was a ghost is not evidence that the light they saw was a ghost - that’s a claim about how to interpret the light.
On testimony: Many of the examples you gave do not only include testimony. E. g. that the earth is 4.5 billion years old is not only supported by testimony but by the fact that all scientists in the field agree on it. If the negative of H (or something vastly different) was the case, you would expect at least a decent chunk of scientists to dissent. Else you would have to believe a global conspiracy which is very unlikely.
That's the good thing about science, there's hypothesis, testing, and then peer-review, it's not just "people telling you things".
Yeah, but even these things trace back to some kind of testimony too, no? Why do you believe the fact all scientists agree on something is evidence for a proposition? Because someone told you.
@@irish_deconstruction No, because I can rationally conclude that is the best evidence we can have at the moment (until AGI or the like shows up).
@@irish_deconstruction People put trust in science/scientists because they know it's based on observation and hypothesis testing, not just testimony. The virtue of science is that anyone is capable of learning it and, in many cases, conducting the experiments on their own to observe the same thing. Because this "claim testing" system in place, it's very difficult for scientists to lie and get away with it, and when they've tried it's always been other scientists that have called them out on it. It's that empirical testing methodology that makes the testimony of scientists reliable, and it's the lack of that methodology that makes most other testimony far less reliable.
I understand the sentiment, but in order to make your points you really overstated most of those cases. For example the testimony part and the claim that without it most convictions are wrongful. That is just nonsense. As in the case of intuition, most people aren't arguing to completely toss them out, just to weight them reasonably, and use them only where it's appropriate. So when someone tells me he saw a deer near highway I take it, nothing important hinges on that claim and it is a mundane one. On the other hand in an cosmological argument for the existence of a divine creator testimony or intuition are beyond useless, they actively skew the debate. Your presentation lacks these nuances, I would argue, to the point of strawmannig most reasonable atheists.
And the point about kolmogorov axioms that dude makes in your clip is just wrong. Axioms have nothing to do with intuition.
I don't think constructing an unfalsifiable hypothesis means no evidence can be raised for it. Take the instance of "I exist", or "Thoughts requires thinking" or "Knowledge requires consciousness". You cannot falsify any of them because the falsification requires the affirmation. To falsify "I exist" I need to exist; to falsify "thinking requires consciousness" I need to think about the falsehood; to know that "Knowledge requires consciousness" as false I require to be conscious. Yet we would obviously not say there's no evidence to believe in any of those claims. Those claims are all unfalsifiable and yet incontrovertly true. They are so true that they can't be false.
Of those, the strongest is "I exist" or "there is reality". Obviously I exist and I can affirm and there's evidence to believe I exist, and yet no counter-evidence could be raised up against those fact because all such evidence already presupposes the affirmation. The theist claims that God is at a similar level of necessity.
I think a similar thing can be done for all necessary truths. One cannot falsify a necessary truth(its falsehood is impossible) and that doesn't mean there's no truth or evidence for their truthfulness.
I don’t agree with you on the first point. Bayesian epistemology is an analysis of priors, not a tool that can justify those priors. If evidence is anything that can reliably differentiate between real and imaginary things, then there is no evidence for theism. Every single argument and attribution that I’ve heard is based on unreliable tools, fallacies, etc.
We may disagree on what evidence is. Your definition seems to be “is plausibly consistent with” whereas mine is as stated above.
Never heard the 'lack of belief' stance until I began listening to atheistic youtube content a couple years ago. I've been an atheist 40. It always seems to be side-stepping and assuming my belief. I'm an agnostic atheist. I can't for certain know or prove a god exists. I know I don't believe it does. But some people will tell me that I just lack a belief and that's that. Nope. I told you I don't believe. Take me at my word that I know my mind better than you.
My non-belief that a god doesn't exists...exists. Therefore, I do not lack a belief that a god exist.
*Would you claim that the following commentary (in whatever degree) is inadequate or false? If so on either, please present the relevant reference material which you think would sustain that point if presentation would likely be cumbersome/messy. I am also open to having a discussion.*
Currently, I think there is simply a failure to understand alternative models and/or sociological conditions upon which the claims being made - rest.
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*There is no evidence for God*
I will grant that the framework you are using has merit, but I do not think such dismisses or even discounts the following account of how the claim of there is no evidence for God arises and is sustained within various cognitive tapestries.
*IF God cannot be shown to be existent, then there is no basis for consideration of any claim about God.*
It is on this basis that the demand for evidence of God and the subsequent dismissal of claims predicated on the existence of God, but not actually showing God as existent - arise long before the claim of there is no evidence for God arises.
This leads to the question as to whether there can be evidence for existence given the God concept being claimed. A review of various God claims results in the answer being NO due to the claim being false given the facts understood of reality. A broader view of the idea unencumbered with particulars of a particular theological group such as the philosophical God concept (omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent) results in various points of incoherence which again results in the idea of being considered false and thus again there can be no evidence for such.
There are many paths to the same conclusion of there being no evidence for God with the conclusion itself being sustained so long as nothing is provided which substantiates existence.
The final piece of the puzzle concerns the nature of evidence. There are two distinctly different applications of the term evidence. One is about showing some X as being existent via some demonstrable cause/effect linkage that sustains an X in the context of reality and the associated capacities of X. The other is after X has been established as existent, then anything that matches the capacities of X can be considered a possible link to X. It is only that this point that the probabilistic review of evidence as you present come into consideration, since there is in a fact something which has been sustained by which to allow a possible linkage.
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*Testimony is not evidence*
The issue as to what denotes evidence also results in the idea of testimony not being evidence. The broader point being that testimony is understood to be a reference to substantiated aspects of reality such that the reference IS what is the evidence, but not the testimony just as the claims of science are referencing the data which sustains the claims being made, but the claim itself is not the data. This is comparable to the map (claim) is not the territory (data).
It should be noted that the account of coherence in support of the general utility of testimony in your presentation also has implications with regard to the claim of there being no evidence for God, since given a particular tapestry of linkages, there is no basis to grant the idea a basis for plausibility.
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*Intuitions don't matter*
I suspect the statement "intuitions don't matter" arose as a response to people attempting to put forth their seemings/intuitions as something that another should accept, since none of us are under any obligation to accept the seemings/intuitions of another as being correct. The intuitions/seemings of another is just a claim being made which would need substantiation if such were to be rationally accepted (or at the very least compatible with one's own seemings/intuitions).
I do accept that we are personally bound by our intuition/seeming. I remember as a kid having the experience of "Why are the adults lying about there being a God?" The level of WTF that I experienced when I listened to the claims created a massive amount of distrust.
I am not on board with the disjointed nature of intuitions/seemings from grounding being suggested, since I find such to be conclusions that have come to our mind wherein we do not know how to express/present the details that ground that conclusion and/or understand the internal linkages that give rise to such a conclusion.
I would not denote the understanding that every additional criteria reduces the size of a potential set as merely an intuition, but I will grant that for those that don't understand it, they may have a hard time providing substantiation. The use of the term intuition and seemings thus strike me as fluff to set aside what may in fact be a failure of understanding.
_I suspect the reason for the error concerning additional criteria being given a higher probability isn't as much about probability, but the feeling of certainty, since it is generally the case that the more information we have, the more certainty can be attained. Now considering the idea of probability is associated with the idea of certainty in I suspect most cognitive tapestries, this would seem to explain this common error of review, since, they are in fact reporting on what results in a greater feeling of certainty._
With regards to your statements about lack theism and igtheism, I completely agree and was even thinking the exact same thing in that part of the video. In fact I myself strongly related to lack theism, but could not figure out how to justify that lack of belief and found it somewhat confusing. It wasn't until I had done a lot more research and understood epistomology, philosophical theology, and igtheism much better that I realized my intuitions and thought processes very much lean towards igtheism.
@@thotslayer9914 Sorry, not sure I understand the relevance of your question. What about metaphysics and ontology?
@@thotslayer9914 Kind of a broad question. As a broad answer I would say that I believe reality exists and my senses interact with that reality in a way that gives me some reasonably corresponding representation of that reality mainly because that seems to be the only useful position to take in order to do anything else. On that basis, it seems relatively clear to me that the material exists, and less clear that something beyond the material exists.
That's mainly because I think it seems plausible that all processes, cognitive functions, propositions, etc. are emergent phenomenon from interaction of the material world, but also find it plausible some set of those could in some way entail something that is separate in some way from the material. I don't really see a good way to demonstrate that one or the other is the case though, so epistemically I feel pretty agnostic on the metaphysical and ontological nature of reality. As long as other people aren't using their different ontological or metaphysical intuitions to try to insist others must be wrong about their epistemic conclusions though, I don't really have any problem with other people reaching different conclusions either pragmatically or rationally, since it seems to me multiple views are viable based on our current knowledge.
The full collection, here at last! Thanks!
Good stuff
It is troublesome to define evidence in terms of probability. By that definition, we would need some theory of probability that gives numbers to P(H | E) and P(H) before we could determine whether E is evidence. It is simple enough to determine the probability of each side of a coin flip or the probability of drawing a particular card from a shuffled deck, but how can we possibly measure the probability of theism? If we are just plucking numbers out of thin air, then the values of P(H | E) and P(H) are whatever our whims dictate, which says more about us than it says about E.
I think a definition that better captures what people usually mean by evidence is that "evidence" means a trace that would be left behind by some thing, person, or event. When a thing happens like a bank robbery, it creates witnesses, fingerprints, video recordings, and maybe even dead bodies and missing money. Whether the event really happened or not, when we imagine this bank robbery happening, we imagine it creating these lingering consequences upon the world, so these lingering consequences are the "evidence." We need no theory of probability to recognize "evidence" by that definition.
When people say that there is no evidence of God, what they probably mean is that when they imagine God's presence in the world, they imagine God leaving a variety of traces upon the world, and they do not see those traces in reality. There are no witnesses, no miracles, no booming voice from the sky. What exactly we would imagine God would do in this world varies from person to person, but when a person says there is no evidence that probably indicates that whatever they imagine is not what they find.
That’s all well and good until you try to apply it to everything relevant to the debate on God. For instance, is there evidence that numbers exist? They leave no trace. Neither do morals. Neither does consciousness. Neither does contingency. There aren’t any hard objects to see as traces of these things. Instead, we just say X,Y,Z, and make imperfect judgments on the likelihood of them based on our observations of other things
@@whatsinaname691 : It's not clear what it means for numbers to exist. Do you mean is there evidence that groups of three objects exist? That does leave plentiful traces.
The nature of morals is highly controversial. Some moral naturalists would say that morals do leave evidence in the form of natural traces.
It seems that every time we have any sort of interaction with another person we are witnessing traces left by that person's consciousness. The ideas that a person expresses are a consequence of that person's consciousness that lingers, thereby making it evidence.
What do you mean by "contingency" exactly?
"There aren’t any hard objects to see as traces of these things. Instead, we just say X,Y,Z, and make imperfect judgments on the likelihood of them based on our observations of other things."
If there are no hard objects to observe, then what are these "things" we are observing to make these judgements?
It seems to me like your definition is really just a re-wording of the probabilistic definition of evidence. Suppose we have a claim that there was a bank robbery, but we do not have any witnesses, fingerprints, video recordings, dead bodies or missing money; would having all these things make the bank robbery hypothesis more probable, which means that P(H/E) is more likely than P(H)?
You say that some theists make an argument that leads to the god hypothesis being unfalsifiable. In what way do you think that God is falsifiable? I don't know any way you could falsify the hypothesis that there is a god.
I have a dog named Suziebaby girl.
Many people would read that, weigh their experiences and come away with "Idk"
This is something you do not grant the lacktheist.
I'd believe you if you were my friend and told me you had a dog. I know dogs exist and I trust my friends when they make novel claims.
When my friend tells me they have a friend who is a God, why should I believe this?
@@malirk you missed my point.
I was talking about our ability to be in the "idk" or lacktheist category.
Like if I said I live in an apartment but have a yacht, you could dismiss it out right, but you would also be justified in reserving judgement. Or if I said I could eat 40 hotdogs in one sitting.
Thank you for this video.
😂 existence of believers is in no way evidence that theism is true.
Great video! ❤ make more such videos
On your first topic, if the base belief of theism is a belief in the supernatural what evidence do you think exists that would increase the probability that ther is anything supernatural?
It would not be epistemically incorrect to say there is no evidence for a god if that god is supernatural unless you can indeed present anything that would increase the probability of the supernatural.
Well, to be fair, atheism only relates to strong or weak disbelief of god(s) claims. Says nothing else about someone.
You don't have to be a skeptic to be atheist - even a broken clock is right twice a day. If you don't believe any gods, but instead fill that gap with pixies, you're an atheist - but definitely not a good skeptic.
Maybe SHOW us the person saying “no, I meant it in the dumb way.” This strikes me very much as many videos from apologists about ‘here’s what atheists do!’ which aren’t reacting to anything specific they and the viewer could both look at and evaluate together. Show us what (and whom) you’re talking about. Please and thank you.
Defining terms would've been helpful e.g. what is "theism"? I regard it as believing in at least one existing divine entity but perhaps it's used in this video as a god or gods constantly being essential to existence (or similar).
there are forms of religion that have no gods
@@scambammer6102 "forms of religion that have no gods" - yes but that means they're not theistic religions, not "theism".
Defining “testimony” would be most helpful. Is “I saw a ghost” testimonial evidence for ghosts? Or is it just testimonial evidence that there was a light, with a claim tacked-on that the light was a ghost?
@@MarkLeBay
It's a good question. Court's require "foundation" for testimonial evidence to be admissible. That means that the testimony has to be sufficiently detailed and specific, and the circumstances adequately explained, to permit an inference that the witness has personal knowledge of the alleged event. "I saw a ghost" would pretty much never be admitted as testimony in court. The witness would have to state specifically what s/he saw, and also the basis for believing it is a ghost. Since there are no generally accepted criteria for identifying a ghost, the statement "I saw a ghost" would not be admitted, even if it was sufficiently specific. The same would apply to "I saw god". But that's just the law. Various branches of science have different concepts of evidence, and philosophers argue about it constantly.
@@scambammer6102 I think this is particularly relevant when listening to Huemer’s description of testimony. Huemer is talking about testimony very broadly without distinguishing between types of testimony. Trusting a consensus of experts when they testify that _there is evidence_ to support the claim that a table is made of atoms is meaningfully different than saying testimony that “a table is made of atoms” is evidence that “a table is made of atoms”.
We assume that when an expert testifies that “a table is made of atoms”, they are really testifying that “there is evidence to support the claim that a table is made of atoms”.
EPISTEMOLOGY IS HARD! I have made and will make mistakes therefore I should be charitable when others do the same!😇😎
Wrong, wrong, wrong, kind of right, wrong.
Impeccable work astounding video. Also..... who's the guitar god??? Insane shreding
Thesis: God exists
Evidence: Most humans think god exists
Would classify as evidence for god according to you? If there is a competing naturalistic theory of why most humans believe in god, would that not make this no longer evidence for god?
Is there "evidence" for god that is more likely than a naturalistic explanation?
The problem is that this is a conflation of terms. Most humans think their god exists but deny that other gods exist. Thus, most humans deny any particular god.
No, that isn't how that works. The fact that most humans think God exists is evidence for the existence of God because it is something we would expect on theism and not on atheism. Just because atheism can offer an explanation as to why this is the case doesn't change the fact that it is still something we would expect on theism and not on atheism.
@@irish_deconstructionatheism isn't an explanation. . . Either is theism. . .what are you trying to say?
@irish_deconstruction and yes the fact people don't believe in particular gods is evidence for those gods non-existence just like the other way around. You can't just assert it doesn't work the other way around when it does.
@@williamthompson1455Never said atheism (or naturalism) cannot give an explanation for this. It is, however, something that is surprising on atheism. If atheism were true, we would expect it to be the case that most people would be atheists, not theists. I am fine with agreeing that atheism can give an explanation for this, it is however still something that renders the theism hypothesis more probable.
"E evidence for H iff P(H|E)>P(H)"
According to this definition, If I toss a dice and it lands on 4, that's evidence that the dice is a magic relic of gilgamesh enchanted to always land on 4.
This definition needs some work.
It would be greater evidence for the hypothesis that the die is loaded.
@@WhatsTheTakeaway Sincere question: why? I mean, i'm not saying his hypothesis is just as plausible. But why do we think your answer is better? I suspect it's a matter of making fewer asumptions. What are your thoughts?
@@piano9433 the hypothesis "die is loaded" is better because loaded dice exist, unlike gilgamesh, magic and enchantments. This gives that hypothesis a much higher prior probability.
However, according to the definitions used in this video, the die landing on 4 isn't greater evidence for "the die is loaded towards 4" than for "the dice is a magic relic of gilgamesh enchanted to always land on 4". Because what determines the strength of evidence E for hypothesis H is the bayes factor K = P(E given H) / P(E given not-H). In english, that means you look at how expected it is to get a 4 if the die is loaded (maybe 40%) vs if it's not loaded (about 16.7%), you do the ratio, you get K = 2.4. But for the gilgamesh hypothesis, it's 100% to get a 4 if the hypothesis is true, vs 16.7 if it's false, so K = 6. We get a bigger K because the gilgamesh hypothesis makes a stronger prediction (that the die ALWAYS lands on 4). And so it gets rewarded more when the die does land on 4.
congratulations on missing the point of the video
@@scambammer6102 try making an argument
I don't think you can
The concept of theism is so poorly defined that it’s don’t think it’s appropriate to even consider whether a fact makes it more or less likely. The concept needs to be defied first and it simply can’t. There has yet to be a cohesive definition of a god that holds up under scrutiny so we can’t ever get to the point where we weight whether it is more or less likely under any given circumstances.
There is a part missing from what is considered evidence: It has to raise the probability of H to the exclusion of P.
If something can fit either hypothesis, it is not evidence for or against either
He mentioned that. He worded it as evidence for must increase the probability, while evidence against would lower it, in regard to something being falsifiable. If the evidence is neutral, then that's not evidence, it would be some sort of irrelevant or unrelated fact. For example, during a trial the fact that the defendant has many friends that consider him a nice guy is almost always irrelevant to the facts of the crime.
@@litigioussociety4249 that's not quite the same thing
I mean. You could have just said what is the evidence for gods rather than go on for an hour about what evidence is.
there isn't any. which is odd, because there is evidence for almost everything else.
It was 14 minutes, and I mentioned an entire playlist where I defend theism as well as a video from Majesty of Reason. Unfortunately most atheists, like you, are so confused about epistemology that it is necessary to go over the basics carefully.
@@EmersonGreen being confused about epistemology is considering the supernatural when there is no evidence for it.
This video is about evidence in Bayesian terms, it's not about absolute proof. One piece of evidence for the existence of God? The Bible. Maybe it raises the probability of Christianity being true only by 0.0001% but that still counts as being evidence.
@@MsJavaWolf The bible isn't a piece of evidence. It is a book containing thousands of different claims, all by anonymous authors (except Paul). We don't know if they were even attempting to be factual. Most of those claims are vague and inconsistent, and none of them have sufficient foundation to be evidence of anything except the book they are in. The literary genre to which the bible belongs - sacred texts - does not prioritize factual accuracy. To the contrary, sacred texts usually eschew facts and reason, in order to promote transcendental concepts. You can't take the bible as a whole and say that it is evidence of anything. You have to identify specific claims and then analyze the claim, its context, and what it is allegedly trying to prove.
There is no evidence for _theism_ , is this a joke.?
The only evidence we need for "theism", are people who:
"believe in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief
in one god as creator of the universe".
And we have that in the billions and billions.
How about you use the actual phrase: "there is no evidence
for the existence of God". That's completely different.
34:00 This quote makes a lot of parallels to what people think about Christianity, but I don't think it fits at all with what is actually in the Bible about Christianity.
I think a BIG subject related to this entire discussion about epistemic mistakes is whether or not an atheist subscribes to doxastic voluntarism or involuntarism. In simple terms, you're a doxastic involuntarist if you believe you have no choice in what you believe. Of course, there are a couple ways to cache out these doxastic attitudes: (1) in terms of belief-formation or (2) in terms of belief-justification. For purposes of this comment, I'll cache out doxastic involuntarism in terms of belief-justification.
One of the issues I take with DI is that it more or less 'outsources' belief-justification to your external reality to the extent that your external reality provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for what you wind up thinking is a justified belief. After all, if your choices have no impact on how you justify your beliefs, then you've given up any and all agency in the justification process.
Given that, I can completely understand why *lacktheism* is a predominant view. I don't agree with it, but I understand it because I see lacktheists as doxastic involuntarists who are holding onto this idea that their external reality has not provided the necessary and sufficient conditions to justify theism. They are like an unmoored ship in the wind, waiting for the wind to blow them towards theism because they subscribe to this view that theism is a proposition that they cannot voluntarily elect to believe.
Just my opinion.
As someone who lacks a belief in god, due to lack of "good" or "verifiable" evidence, I do think I have a choice in what I believe, but I just choose to make the rational choice and not believing something that has not been anywhere near proven or even appear likely.
we have different types of beliefs supported by differing levels of evidence
The term is "cash out" not "cache out." The reference is to liquidating assets. One trades in assets and takes cash out of the transaction. One "cashes out."
Lacktheism indicates openness to hearing someone's personal argument for their concept of a god while having no interest in arguing for the idea that there is no 'god' anywhere.
Very interesting video
I noticed you kept going back and forth between evidence and arguments for theism. Do you think arguments count as evidence?
And I feel like this entire video is just "look I'm not like those other bad atheists"
i'd say it's reasonable to claim there is no evidence at all for theism, because theism *is* unfalsifiable. the "probability" of any set of facts is exactly 1 on the hypothesis of a god that wants that exact set of facts to be the case, and if a god exists the set of true facts is exactly what god wants it to be (that's what omnipotence means).
Just starting the video and within the first few minutes I was wondering if he was ever going to define what he thought theism was, because one evidence I could think of for theism was that people believe they have heard from a God... But that is only evidence of a God that wants to interact with people, and is evidence against a God that doesn't want to interact with people. I'm guessing based on your comment he never gets into how one would establish consistent criteria and predictions for theism, but I will continue watching and see.
@matthewnitz8367 honestly i agree with everything he says after the evidence/unfaldlsifiability portions
I think you took that fella's inability to answer on the spot as him being inflexible.
However, it seems to me he is doing the very thing you are talking about when invoking madness or other things.
He sees more evidence for something like that being the case than evidence for God being the answer.
The funny thing is I actually have heard Aron Ra say on a few occasions that rocks and sticks are atheists😂
And I think a way to show lacktheists why the definition really doesn’t work. It’s just to simply define theism as the lack of belief in the claim that there are no gods. I could just say I don’t believe there is a God I simply lack the belief in the idea that there isn’t a God. It’s pretty ridiculous.
I don’t wanna psychoanalyze people but from my own experience I feel like it comes down to not wanting to shoulder any burden of proof. For some reason I don’t get it. Pretty much everything I believe I want to be able to give a defense as to why I believe it and I want to reasons as to why I believe it. For some reason I have a lot of atheists they seem perfectly fine just believing some thing without being able to provide a sufficient justification as to why they believe it, nor do they want to at all. For a lot of theists the same is true they probably don’t really have any reason other than they were raised in a culture or raising a household or community that is theistic. But most theists I have seen at least recognize that they have a burden of proof and at least try to give some reason as to why they believe in God even if those reasons are ridiculous and absurd
4:20 the inverse is true also, the fact there are believers open to a non-existent or different God being more pluralistic may counterbalance that. Who knows maybe God used to exist but before time and space and everything is it's decaying body, or that it's all an egg God is raising to have another God to live with outside of time and space or possibly in some kind of infinite fractaline multiversal body. We genuinely have no clue but due to goedel we know there's a god like hole in math
I agree with this video, I was just confused when you said things like “if atheism was false” or “you could be agnostic rather than atheist” as if atheism makes a claim. Isn’t atheism just the non belief in God?
Most analytic philosophers use the term atheist in a different way, there it really is the claim that God does not exist. That doesn't mean their definition is objectively better, as long as we know how we define the terms, we can have a productive discussion either way.
"claims aren't evidence" in a steel-manned Dillahuntian manner probably means "testimony by itself is never sufficient evidence for a miracle (and you don't even have first hand testimony of the resurrection)"
We di=o actually. regardless or not if the Gospels are written by the people they are ascribed to, it is common knowledge they contain eye-witness testimony.
Has anyone ever heard of a Christian apologist admitting that there's evidence for atheism?
I'm pretty sure I have. There's some that argue that there's evidence on "both sides" but Christianity has more.
Yes! I included a video of a Christian apologist doing just that.
Even if there wasn't, how does that mean atheists should also be intellectually dishonest?
@@EmersonGreen thanks
@@irish_deconstruction no of course not. But it would be very telling
Atheists may make mistakes , but teists' whole life is a big mistake😌
@@thotslayer9914 then what are you? 😂
@@thotslayer9914 then you are an atheist otherwise you would be a slave to god :)
I'd say that the epistemic definition for evidence is necessarily unwarranted. It fails to even meet the bar of convincing - it's more an attempt to claim the boundaries of a set by pseudo-rigorous means (as bayesians, which are widespread despite being unjustifiably circular to the point of tautological) where the set is redefined to be wholly meaningless.
It's like saying 'positive numbers' but then saying that some positive numbers are less than zero, because they ADD, but they add UNDERSTATED.
you don't understand what "evidence" means. It has to do with relevance not validity.
@@scambammer6102 Oh, that's adorable.
You cannot have relevance without validity.
Have you heard of the raven-paradox?
It's where you have EVIDENCE for X by showing the existence of something not related to X.
Did you mean VALID as in sound-vs-valid?
So evidence actually doesn't rely on relevance.
But if it DID rely on relevance, then that would necessarily require validity. If I said, for example that Joey had an infection, then would that be evidence for the existence of god? It could be relevant, by virtue that you could assert that god causes infections.. but it is valid? Not logically. Because the link wasn't even there.
Sufficient evidence is the key.
So is there anything that would be considered philosophically unfalsifiable at all? As far as I can tell, there wouldn't be anything that would qualify as being fundamentally unfalsifiable, philosophically speaking.
Also, what makes Huemer say that Popper would hate Huemer's explanation in _Understanding Knowledge_ (pp.144-145)?
Skeptical scenarios (e.g., last thursdayism, the brain in a vat, etc.) would be unfalsifiable. But on the probabilistic view, unfalsifiability is a matter of degree -- some things are more falsifiable than others. So it doesn't have to be *totally* unfalsifiable (like last thursdayism) to count as unfalsifiable. Since there is strong evidence against theism, I don't see how theism qualifies as unfalsifiable (even though some theists naively seem to want that, not realizing that it would rid theism of any predictive power and force them to throw out every theistic argument).
Popper would hate Huemer's explanation because it is probabilistic, and Popper didn't like induction or probabilistic reasoning. He thought that deduction was the only legitimate kind of reasoning: fakenous.substack.com/p/you-dont-agree-with-karl-popper
@@EmersonGreen AFAICT, the foundational tenets of most religions are no more falsifiable than a brain in a vat or last thursdayism. There's no test you can to do to show a man name Jesus didn't rise from the dead 2k years ago or that beyond our universe there isn't an omnipotent agent that created everything. For any data one can pull from empirical reality theists can find ways to rationalize it either by some mysterious "God's plan" or by simply ad-hoc'ing the God hypothesis. This is why the problem of evil doesn't convince many theists because for human suffering they fall back on "God gave humans free will and doesn't intervene" and for all other suffering they either deny it (claiming, eg, animals aren't conscious/don't suffer), or deny that it's gratuitous ("all part of God's plan.") At the latter point the hypothesis DOES become unfalsifiable because there's no way to prove a difference between "apparent gratuitous suffering" and "suffering due to some mysterious/unknown plan of God" and you simply must retreat to arguments from prior probabilities, which is philosophical rather than empirically falsifiable.
@@EmersonGreen Thank you for the response! Apologies for the delay in my reply.
I believe I have sufficiently understood the point being made about theism wrt falsifiability and I think I wholeheartedly agree with you as of now.
Could you please provide me with some examples of things that are not totally unfalsifiable but would still qualify as sufficiently unfalsifiable under the probabilistic view? 😅