Why Apologetics Arguments aren’t actually Terrible and Useless (SCCC pt 1)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ก.ค. 2022
- This is part 1 of my Square Cumulative Case for Christianity. In this video, I lay out my understanding of the nature of arguments, which turns out to be more optimistic about their usefulness than some competing views.
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1:58 -- Well, some caution is called for here; importantly, Oppy doesn't advocate ditching arguments or talk of arguments. Instead, Oppy thinks many arguments -- specifically, (all and only) reductios -- are immensely important. :)
I'm also inclined to think that there might be a way to merge the general spirit behind Oppy's view of arguments with a Bayesian approach thereto. Specifically, the spirit of Oppy's view is correct that if you simply don't accept the premises in a Bayesian argument -- e.g., you don't share relevant intuitions, or you have commitments from which it falls out that one or more of the premises of the Bayesian argument are false -- then the argument simply fails for you; it shouldn't do anything to move you.
In any case, for those interested in pursuing Oppy's view of the nature and purpose of arguments further, I can recommend his article "What derivations cannot do" and -- shameless self-plug! lol -- the video I did with him on the topic. Interestingly, he's also started a huge research project on it (the project involves writing a book), and I think the end date for the project is currently in 2025. Exciting stuff!
Also: Great explanations of Bayesian!
So I'm an atheist and a Bayesian and I liked this video. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series and potentially updating my priors, though I'm not sure we would agree on the values of likelihoods/marginal probabilities when the Bayesian reasoning for Christianity begins
Awesome that you're explicitly digging into epistemology! I often feel like some epistemology is assumed when people make arguments, but rarely explained. This will give a much clearer picture of your reasoning process. Gotta clean the window before lookin' through it!
Exactly :)
Can't wait for the next part!
Thanks for this video! I learned a lot. Only through this video did I realize that the method of solving common Math problems involving probability /are/ examples of applying Bayes' theorem! Haha. The scribble-stretching demo made it really easy to understand.
So far, I see how Intuitive Bayesianism reflects what people actually practice.
Great video, in my opinion.
The real problem with Bayes with these kinds of arguments (and maybe broadly) is that we have no rules compelling us (save for academic discussions population parameters and the like) on how new information must update our priors. Basically the is-ought gap rears its head again when discussing probabilities:
There are no "is facts" which directly entail how one "ought" to either update a prior given those "is facts" or even evaluate a conditional given the "is facts". It's just subjective all the way down. That's fine with me, I'm a Pragmatist, but that means that this isn't going to do a lot of work convincing other people. At best it just clarifies what you think.
Awesome video squared
Great video and great explanation of bayesianism epistemology! I'm sort of worried about one thing given "intuitive bayesianism". There are just certain things which I'm not sure we can even have intuitions about. Let's say you wanted to apply bayesian reasoning to see which theory of abstracta is more likely. How exactly could you have a prior intuition regarding platonism or divine conceptualism? I do think our seemings give justification for believing certain propositions, but I'm somewhat skeptical that we even have seemings in domains which are far outside our range of normal experiences.
I am inclined to think (though I'm not convinced) that we actually do have intuitions about every proposition we can conceptualize. However, if we don't have intuitions about some issue, then we can just set that particular issue to one side and focus on what we *do* have clear intuitions about.
Especially since it is a known fact that people are clearly indoctrinated into religions and find their religion intuitive. Islam, Mormonism, Christianity, Buddhism, even those raised non-religious find their religion so intuitive that it takes more evidence than we have to make something unlikely to someone.
I will say that Christianity does a pretty good job at converting people lol… although a lot of that historically comes from social pressure like Spanish missions, etc.
This is fantastic stuff
Oppys views about theories determining which arguments we find as sound simply extend to probabilistic arguments too. Which premises we accept is going to be determined by our prior theory which determines our view of likelihoods, priors and so on; moving from PL to probabilistic argument isnt going to save the day here. Just as Oppy says reductios in PL will be succesful insofar as they'll compel you to reasonable belief revision much the same is going to be said for probabilistic arguments where people will discover that they have inconsistent credences wrt propositions (rather than being committed to contradictory propositions) meaning they ought to revise. Im not sure Bayesianism is a magic bullet here - especially when most who use it in phil rel get their priors from their posteriors! I also worry about "intuition" being a blank cheque here for anything.
(Took me a second to realize PL was propositional logic lol)
Anyways, if I'm understanding you correctly, I don't agree with the statement that "Which premises we accept is going to be determined by our prior theory which determines our view of likelihoods, priors and so on." Your prior theory emphatically does _not_ get to determine something's prior probability. That is the job of intuitions. As a concrete example, say a theist realizes their favorite theory of God's existence or free will or something entails that some propositions are self-explained, and they find that super duper counterintuitive. They do *not* get to say, "Oh, this counterintuitive thing is entailed by my favorite theory, so I'll just give it a high prior." No, they need to respect that because this is so counterintuitive, their favorite theory's probability is going to take a hit.
Also, I totally get the worry about intuitions being a blank cheque, but hopefully I can assuage these worries by noting that I intend to distinguishing between theory-laden laden interpretations of the sentences we're intuiting about and what our intuitions are actually saying.
@@ApologeticsSquared Theres a good forthcoming paper on issues such as hindsight bias in Bayes and my view is that peoples commitments absolutely affect how they assess prior probabilities, but if you disagree we're probably not going to resolve that here. I highly recommend Joes video with Oppy on argument and Micah Edvensons video too where Oppy talks about some of these things. Theres also an interview with Friction and one on Alex Malpass' channel on arguments from evil where he talks more about the probability stuff.
Fair enough. One last point of clarification: I definitely do think things like confirmation bias and the like will lead people to assign higher priors than they should to propositions that are friendly to their theory, and so we need to fight our biases when trying to seek the truth. I'm not claiming that our prior theories never affect our prior probabilities, but that we should avoid this because that's putting the cart before the horse.
can you establish the prior probability with things like simplicity and fit with background knowledge?
This is an *excellent* introduction to Bayesianism. I expect to disagree with mos of the rest of the series (at least in terms of priors if nothing else), but this (and presumably the next) video seem really good.
Since you bring it up: ideally Iʼd go with a Solomonoff-like prior (a particular family of reifications of Occamʼs razor) though even in theory itʼs impossible to calculate that for computers and humans are even worse at the required math. That is, the prior probability of a proposition is (a function of) how *simple* that proposition is, for a certain math/CS/information theory definition of “simple”. One place this definitely departs from your intuition prior is that God is fairly intuitive (or at least the generalized idea of gods is), *not* simple by these definitions (even though He is by some other philosophical definitions).
wow , squared your video brings up a lot of critics here. gratz man...
Damn you threw me down a rabbit hole!
I never understood why people used baysian principles on such topics because, coming from a data analytics background it did not seem to fit. The reason is that in order to get any useful result from a baysian network you need some specific prior knowledge of your system.
Then you began to talk about POP and i thought "oh nice he is gonna adress the problem". Only to find out that this is something completly different that only seems to exist in philosophy and nowhere else. Now i am really interessted what else philosophers say about baysian networks...
Oh btw the problem i thought you were gonna address is that for bayes to work you need to have knowledge about which variables affect each other. Its not really important in which way they affect each other (like you hinted at) but it is extremly important that you know which variables are dependant on what. If you get this part wrong you can essentially thow your whole approach down the drain. This is really difficult in the natural sciences because of the whole correlation/causation problem and so on. I imagine in the social sciences/philosophy this is a nightmare.
1 simple example: Does the existence of natural evil depend on the existence of god, or are both independent of each other? Depending on your answer, your credence adjustment will vary drastically once you observe natural evil.
In part 3 we'll see what sort of "variables" are affected by theism. Have a nice day! :)
Atheist here: I generally agree with this though I will say that peoples intuitions are a lot worse than we think.
But yeah- we just… don’t have all the evidence for things like subjective bayesianism to work on a lot of things- there’s a whole lot of things we just don’t know about the world yet.
And so for things like naturalism, I’d say sure, but for stuff like agnosticism it’s quite difficult to say since we really don’t have access to all the information.
Essentially, I’m saying that since we have access to so little information, “intuitive baysianism” is not much better than subjective bayseanism since there’s so much information that’s lost to time !
(Especially when it comes to stuff like Christianity and etc which obviously vary wildly by which person you ask.)
I do agree on a lot of common sense bit but I am saying that we know from evidence that so many people have wildly different intuitions on God and Religion.
Many people say things like they would NEVER leave Christianity because of the testimony of the Holy Spirit, or other things which are fine, but raise their confidence level beyond anything you can show in your lifetime
But yeah I mean I do agree that arguments are a good way to find things haha.
If the priors are really skewed due to intuition (an atheist thinks it is really intuitive that God is just made up) and because there is an essentially limited number of arguments, then how we really cannot know when they will converge.
I mean, there really are not THAT many unique arguments for God. (If you exclude things like modern day miracles and answered prayer.)
Maybe it is better to consider all possible priors and see the final state of the evidence then compare the results in the end of how all the probabilities changed?
Is that a way that people have done this?
Hello D! First, I actually think there are quite a few arguments, but setting that aside, yes people very often do exactly the thing you mentioned. You can actually choose two hypotheses and show *how much* some body of evidence raises the probability of one rather than another.
The problem of priors is an issue however there are some nice results about universal priors with respect to very general model classes such as computable programs or first order logical statements, such that a rational agent acting under said priors will always converge to true beleifs and in many cases very quickly. Now it does pose a metaphysical issue if you don't believe the universe is computable, disputing that the universe is in the model class. There are still tons of open problems and practical approximation of universal or logical induction is a hard problem.
But even if there is no canonical universal prior over a model class all universal priors give rise to rational agents who's loss bounds on prediction are finite in the limit if the loss is finite if you are already omniscient aside from randomness and the average loss for n time steps is O(n^(-1/2)). Which basically means for any possible deterministic universe a predictor observing the universe will make finitely many prediction mistakes when updating optimally given it's distribution (I'm simplifying for brevity but "A Gentle Introduction to the
Universal Algorithmic Agent AIXI" is a good intro if you've got the maths)
Doesn’t Swinburne defend objective Bayesianism?
The "intuitions" are derived from your theory of the world, I don't think this is a good alternative to Oppy's. If you have a well justified consistent theory, the priors would be 1, 0 or just doing guesswork on "what if another theory has different virtues"
I don’t think that our intuitions are derived from our theories of the world. I have a strong intuition that if x=y and y=z then x=z. This intuition comes “before” any theory, rather than some theory bringing about this intuition. Also, when we look at the Problem of Dogmatism, we’ll see that there are actually *very* few times where we can have credences of 0 or 1.
@@ApologeticsSquared
I think that your example comes from knowing the language of maths, which would be included in probably any theory of the world. Once you know a language, you pretty much have an implicit theory of the world.
I think that the Problem of Dogmatism raises with a Bayesian approach to knowledge, but with the systematic/theoretical approach, it would happen what I said before: 1/0 or just doing guesswork on "what if another system/theory is right".
I am very critical of the Bayesian approach and I think that systematic philosphy, which Oppy calls "theories", can explain intuitions as statements from an implicit philosophical system ; and we can criticize the systems. Also: very good video!
Serious question: what books have you read on Bayesianism?
also your intuitive Bayesianism doesn't make sense from a Bayesian perspective. It's just subjective Bayesianism (unless you can offer some other axiomatic formulation).
also also, you're objection to objective Bayesianism (which technically isn't what you explained) refutes the fine tuning argument.
Hey Christians, it's okay to like Jesus and he's a pretty chill dude. You don't need Bayes Theorem or epistemology to justify it.
Also I liked the "scribble-stretching" animation - it reminds me of 3B1B's video on Bayesianism.
Okay. But I'm going to justify it anyways cuz I enjoy it. :)
How do you deal with the “garbage in, garbage out” problem of Bayesian analysis, especially when intuition is notoriously wrong?
I address this with my first reason I like Intuitive Bayesianism. Our intuitions at least get us in the ballpark of a right answer (e.g. even though a flat earth may be initially more intuitive than a round one, no one finds the idea the earth is round so counterintuitive that they assign it a prior of 1/googolplex). Once we're in the right ballpark, scribble-stretching on our evidence gets us closer and closer to the truth eventually.
@@ApologeticsSquared
But what if your initial premise is wrong, yet intuitively apparent (ie, the Earth is flat)? Cognitive bias will lead to incorrectly probabilities, which lead to incorrect conclusions at a high confidence (ie, all the evidence points to a flat Earth). That’s why there is a GIGO problem with Bayesianism, and why intuition is normally avoided.
As a counter point, the scientific method requires a process that falsifies your premise rather than supporting your conclusion, as a way to remove intuition and bias, leading to a more accurate conclusion.
@@jeffersonian000 // Cognitive bias will lead to incorrectly probabilities, which lead to incorrect conclusions at a high confidence //
If I understand what you're saying, you're objecting that if people update their credences in a biased way, instead of pure scribble-stretching, they'll come to the wrong conclusions. That may be true, but it doesn't count against my epistemology, because my epistemology is an account of what people are *supposed* to do, rather than what they actually do. Am I understanding you correctly?
// As a counter point, the scientific method requires a process that falsifies your premise rather than supporting your conclusion, as a way to remove intuition and bias, leading to a more accurate conclusion.
//
Well, that's why I like scribble-stretching! With scribble-stretching, each piece of information "falsifies" every theory, just to different degrees.
@@ApologeticsSquared
No, I mean that if your premise is inherently wrong yet intuitively apparent, you will assume the conclusion and bias your credence to support your conclusion, hence garbage in, garbage out. That’s the problem with Bayesianism. You say that Scratch-Stretch counters bias by adding new information that adjusts your credence, but without a methodology that removes bias, you have no filter on your credence that moves it towards reality and away from imagination.
For example, if your premise is that the Earth looks flat and the Sun appears to move over the Earth, your conclusion is justified that the Earth is flat and the universe is Geocentric (intuition). Each experiment you try demonstrates the flatness of the Earth, and every almanac for the last four hundred years demonstrates geocentrism, moving your credence towards a flat Earth. Even the Bible says the Earth is flat, so your credence moves even further towards a flat Earth. But what about gravity? Doesn’t fit your premise, so doesn’t move your credence. But what about the Moon? Can be explained away as a source of light, and is supported in the Bible, so moves your credence towards a flat Earth. What about Australia and Antarctica? The maps of Australia are inaccurate and Antarctica is an ice wall that surrounds the flat Earth, so your credence moves towards a flat Earth. What about satellites and the ISS? Those are lies told by NASA to support their bloated budget, so your credence moves towards a flat Earth.
See my point? Garbage in, garbage out.
I have listened to several apologists attempt to use Bayesianism to prove God, and failing due to their inability to differentiate between reality and imagination. They are unable to explain why any deity has a probability that’s not zero, given every possible universe would have both a possible god and no god, effectively doubling every possible universe ad infinitum. You would need a defeater for all but one proposition to bias it over any other, which means the probability that a deity exists approaches zero per Bayesianism if used without an inherent bias.
If garbage is put in garbage will come out. That is true of Bayesianism, that's also true of every computer program. Just as that does not mean software engineering is a pointless waste of time, same for Bayesianism. If you use it properly it's a powerful tool, and when someone misuses it, it's easy to point out exactly where they're going wrong.
Might I suggest a name/name change for the series? Jeffery Epstein and John McAfee didn't kill themselves Squared Christianity
The laws of probability you give are not the ones a Bayesian would use, as no concept of conditional probability appears in them. To a Bayesian, ALL probabilities are conditional; they are conditional on the information you have at hand (which may include intuition as a condensed summary of the information you have encountered over a lifetime). So a Bayesian never writes P(A) except as a shorthand for P(A | X), where X is the available information; and a Bayesian would replace your third rule with the sum and product rules: P(not A | X) = 1 - P(A | X), and P(A and B | X) = P(A | X) * P(B | A and X).
That's nice presentation. Except that no theistic theory offers any predictions. So you can't update your credences and Bayesian epistemology is useless in Apologetics.
In part 3, we'll see that theism actually predicts a LOT. So, stay tuned! :)
“One does not need to prove that one’s intuition is reliable” it’s been proven not to be. Using intuition is actively worse than either objective Bayesianism.
Exactly. Intuitions are proven to be wrong all the time (e g. the Monty Hall paradox).
Which is largely a result of human brains are not exactly made for number crunching.
@@gergelymagyarosi9285 I see your point that intuition is not always correct. However, the monty hall problem is not the best example as it is a problem easily solved with probability theory and bayesian updating.
@@jackobrien7073
Then what's the point? Intuition can often be false. So one mustn't rely on intuition alone.
So your objection of Oppy's request of focusing more on theories is a presentation of your own "intuitive" theory?!?
At least you have fulfilled in that regard Oppy's request.
But that's not even Oppy's actual concern of deductive arguments.
One person can logically and validly deduce proposition P from some premises and another person can also logically and validly deduce proposition ~P from some other premises. And simply pointing out that *_"This argument of mine is valid, so unless one of my premises is false, therefore my VALIDLY deduced conclusion is true."_* (like theists, as Maverick Christian, prefer to emphasize very much for some dubious reasons, I guess) gives no justification nor a warrant for the premises or for the conclusion for such a "VALID" argument to be true.
Validity shouldn't be given so much emphasis at this point, so the main focus for finding the truth should lie in the analysis of the premises and from where they originated.
*Because of "all relevant things considered"* a regarded proposition/conclusion should be true and not only and sololy because some argument for it being supposedly "VALID".
There is to much focus and emphasis in some debates on being supposedly "VALID" or having a "VALID" point, which leads to no where and certainly not closer to any relevant truths.
Besides that, my strong "intuition" is, that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", and my other strong intuition is, that "sometimes the lack of evidence for the existences of a thing is quite well explained by the non-existence of that particular thing".
Just sayin.
I have to confess, I don't understand your point. If we're debating the validity of certain premises in any style of argument - isn't that just the natural dialectic at this point? It's not hard to come up with a logically valid argument, it's the soundness of the premises that we typically debate when it comes to arguments and whether they fail or succeed. But everybody already knows that. Most people will try and defend the premises in their main argument with sub-arguments. Is your claim more about a potential "grounding" problem for arguments, as we might need some infinite chain of arguments to back our original argument up?
@@Jimmy-iy9pl Have you seen any exchange between Wade Thisthammer alias Maverick Christian and an interlocutor?
He asked once Joe Schmid alias Majesty of Reason, what he thinks about the past being infinite and particularly about his Maverick Christians argument against it?
His argument:
P1) If an infinite past is possible, then there an "Eternal Society" is possible.
P2) If an "Eternal Society" is possible, then scenario S1 (a scenario without any contradictions concerning that Eternal Society and an "Anual Coin Flipping Tradition") is possible.
P3) If scenario S1 is possible, then scenario S2 (a scenario with an allied contradiction concerning that Eternal Society and that Anual Coin Flipping Tradition) is possible.
P4) That scenario S2 is not possible (, since it entails a contradiction).
C) Therefore, an infinite past is not possible.
Joe responded, that he doesn't think, that such arguments, which argue for an infinite process supposedly entailing a contradiction, succeed, because of reasons:
Arguments like _"If an infinite past would be possible, then a contradiction would be possible."_ are not actually showing an infinite past entailing a contradiction, but rather the contradiction is already assumed to be the case in the form of _"there is a first a element, if and only if there is no first element"_ - *the Unsatisfiable Pair Diagnosis.* If we disregard such contradictions, then an infinite past could still be possible (and actually be the case).
And what's Maverick Christians response to all of this:
_"Lol this doesn't addresses any of my premises (from my deductively VALID argument. If the premises of a deductively VALID argument are true, then it's conclusion must also be true._
_That's the "magic of logic". So which of MY premises are false, if any of them are false?)"_
You see, Maverick Christian doesn't appear to understand in this regard, how his argument has been addressed and dealt with, since he doesn't know, that his slippery slope of an argument can be reduced to a simple syllogism:
*C1) If an infinite past is possible, then scenario S2 is possible. (from P1-P3 by successive hypothetical syllogisms)*
P4) Scenario S2 is not possible.
C2) Therefore, an infinite past is not possible.
Yes, MoR has accurately addressed MC's argument more or less indirectly and as such should now MC address that objection. But since MC doesn't understand that objection or rather doesn't want to understand, he simply and irrationally falls back to his _"deductively VALID argument"._
Wenn Maverick Christian tatsächlich etwas von LOGIK und RATIONALITÄT versteht, dann fresse ich einen Besen.
@@Jimmy-iy9pl *"One man's dogma/deductively VALID argument is another man's counter position, which is just another dogma/deductively VALID argument."*
Dogma D1:
*D1-P1* = D2-P1 = ~D3-C: If A, then B.
*D1-P2* = ~D2-C = D3-P2: A.
*D1-C* = ~D2-P2 = ~D3-P1: B.
Dogma D2:
D1-P1 = *D2-P1* = ~D3-C: If A, then B.
~D1-C = *D2-P2* = D3-P1: Not B.
~D1-P2 = *D2-C* = ~D3-P2: Not A.
Dogma D3:
~D1-C = D2-P2 = *D3-P1:* Not B.
D1-P2 = ~D2-C = *D3-P2:* A.
~D1-P1 = ~D2-P1 = *D3-C:* It's A AND not B, so it's not, that "If A, then B.".
This is not all but a substantial part of current philosophy in a nutshell.
So no wonder if people like Stephen Hawking would think, that current philosophy is dead - well not literally, but intellectually, which is worse, since if it were literally dead, then it wouldn't waste so much time and effort on these irrelevant dogmas and make such imprecise and inaccurate statements and claims such as "One man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens.", since *one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens, another man's disjunctive syllogism and another man's indirect proof,* and yet quite a substantial part of current philosophy is doing exactly that.
Getting "intuitions" is the same as setting priors. You're arguing for subjective Bayesianism. The whole point of the criticism of subjective Bayesianism is that not all subjective beliefs make sense, hence that there should be more that we don't know. Replacing it with "intuition" merely shifts the terminology. Now you need to answer what the reason is for the intuition for the Earth being flat giving us low/high values.
// You're arguing for subjective Bayesianism. //
No, because on subjective Bayesianism, it's permissible to give a high prior probability to something counterintuitive. I am explicitly barring that.
@@ApologeticsSquared Why are you barring that? On what grounds? Doesn't "intuition" boil down to "don't worry my priors aren't crazy"?
I am afraid all your hard work is only going to proove that apologetics is only convincing to those who already believe. Because of prior probabilities.
Objective Bayesianism should be done claim by claim, ie "there is a supernatural reality" (T/F). All supernaturalist positions (aka religions) share 0.5 against naturalism.
Within that space, you can divide it into which supernaturalism school is right.
This is easier to see if you recognise that different religions are AND propositions (subclaims):
Supernaturalism is true AND Jesus is supernatural.
If you don't do it claim by claim, you could artificially inflate any given position by adding new subclaims.
Supernaturalism is true AND n-billion people will go to heaven. Insert as many iterations of 'n', each slice goes down, not up.
I don't understand. Imagine Jim, born and raised a Christian, starts really thinking about whether or not his religion is true after learning Bayesianism. So, he starts with the claim "Christianity is true." He assigns a 0.5 credence to this claim's truth and a 0.5 credence to this claim's falsehood. Why is Jim's starting point worse than your offered starting point of "there is a supernatural reality"?
@@ApologeticsSquared I see the difference being "christianity" is not a single claim, it is a large set of sets of claims (ie, it includes different sets of doctrines (denominations) under its umbrella).
So, "christianity is true" at least means:
Supernaturalism && Monotheism && Jesus is supernatural
Each of those is an individual claim, not entailed by the previous one.
Even to say "Jesus is supernatural", it requires first the assumption of supernaturalism, which only occupies a 0.5 prior if you assess that claim on its own.
I should add, I dont necessarily think its a problem to assume a preceding claim as true, so long as you are aware that you aren't comparing further claims against the opposite of that precedent.
(Christianity is true can be compared against Judaism for example, because there is a single claim of contention, that is Jesus role in the story.)
@@YLLPal Christianity certainly *entails* monotheism and Jesus's divinity etc. etc., but naturalism also entails infinitely many things as well, like "everything in the Andromeda galaxy is physical" and "everything on Mars is physical" and "there are no ghosts" and "there are no leprechauns" etc. etc. So you can't just count the number of claims a certain proposition entails to decide a starting point. Maybe Christianity FEELS like a worse starting point to you, but to Jim it feels like the most natural starting point in the world! So, you're going to need some sort of external criteria to find our "starting point" of objective Bayesianism. Have a nice day! :)
@@ApologeticsSquared Thats true, "what is the universal null hypothesis?" is a question worth considering.
I think the difference in mine and Jim's starting point, is that he starts by assessing a specific, while I start by assessing a general claim.
Whichever way the general claim of supernaturalism lands determines whether or not the leprechaun question even arises.
Thanks for the thought provoking discussion btw 😀
What is wrong with apologetics? Any process that starts with a predetermined conclusion and then searches for reasons to believe that conclusion is rotten at the core. It's tainted epistemology and it is intellectually dishonest. We can see this when you say that your job as an apologist is to look for evidence that favors Christianity. This is known as "cherry picking the evidence". An honest man considers ALL the evidence, including the evidence that disfavors his preferred hypothesis.
I suggest that you read Richard Carrier's book, "Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus," along with the followup "On the Historicity of Jesus". He started out highly skeptical of the mythicist viewpoint -- that there never was a historic, flesh-and-blood Jesus -- but after examining the evidence and applying Bayesian reasoning, decided that there was only about a 1/3 probability of there ever having existed a historic Jesus.
Still don't know how to figure a supernatural probability.
Every example you used was naturalistic.
That's why you don't use the supernatural in bayesian equations.
I'd love for him to see how he calculates the probability tho, the desperation would be palpable.
Since, on Intuitive Bayesianism, the prior probability of a proposition is how strongly it seems to be true, you just need to ask how strongly it seems that a proposition about the supernatural is true to get its prior probability.
@@ApologeticsSquared "it seems to be true"
Oh man....
@@ApologeticsSquared Realistically, it can't just be based on intuition as if it were hanging in a vacuum, can it? There's plethora of information and cognition and reasoning you had to get through to even conceptualize the term in some way. You should be able to at least partly justify your initial intuition about that particular complex idea, by going through your memories, pointing to certain occurrences, maybe even some evidence, experiences, evaluating their different interpretations given different theories and so on. There had to be some historical build up there.
If I'd just claim that my intuition about say ancient aliens is such and such, without any further elaboration, it would just be question begging. And if I refused to explain why I believe it rose to that level of conviction, no one would take it seriously (well, ancient aliens! - pretty much no one would take that seriously anyway, but that's a different matter).
To clarify, I’m saying the *prior* probability - that is, the starting point for one’s credence in a proposition’s truth - is dictated by its intuitiveness. Quickly after this starting point, and I mean VERY quickly, a plethora of factors will change and update the credence to (potentially) a very different value.
This bayesian explanation and makng up "intuitive bayesianism" is entirely unnecessary.
When you have to dress up the evidence by this much it almost guarantees that it's poor and not conclusive of what you want to conclude.
If I were a betting man:
the argument is going to be "You can totally trust the anonymous eyewitness sources, because the bayesian probability means they were either liar, lunatic, or lord."
(which is an awful argument no Christian would accept for Islam or other religions or other supernatural claims).
Not meaning to strawman here but the only reason you'd bring up Bayesian theory for a supernatural claim like Christianity, is because the evidence is so poor that you think you can talk for so long that they won't notice.
You don't use Bayesian theory for supernatural claims and you have to be really desperate to make that argument.
Wrong
A strength of the Bayesian epistemology is that one can't be selective with evidence but has to take everything into account. Seems like a very calm and thought through way of reaching conclusions to me. The opposite end, just pointing at one or few things that confirm held beliefs without looking at the big picture would be desperate though. Idk I just completely fail to see your point tbh.
@@TheAndreas1008 Yes, normally, but when you involve the "supernatural", a completely unknown entity with unknown properties, and the question does this entity even *exist* as described? You don't get to that with bayesian epistemology, it doesn't work like that, and you can't calculate probability of complete unknown entities.
And if you believe you do, then welcome to Hinduism or Islam or Mormonism or any other of millions of other supernatural beliefs that have have better evidence.
But that's the thing, Squared is going to bring up bayesian epistomology then immediately drop it when challenged for another bad argument, and then another, and then another.
Because the evidence for Christianity is just bad and having to make these overly complex arguments to avoid that reality is just cognitive dissonance.
@@ShouVertica Speaking to just how bad the evidence for Christianity is-- Leaving aside the supernatural elements of the Gospel narrative, it has recently come to my attention that the individual prosaic items of the so called biography of Jesus are virtually all challenged by mainstream Biblical scholars. These scholars are people who are predominantly Christians, so we are steelmanning the issue.
These biographical items are contested on many grounds-- many of the anecdotes in the Gospels are evident rewrites of items from the life of Moses and other Biblical characters. Some of them were transparently written to fulfil imputed prophecies in the Old Testament. Often the wording of the items suspected of deriving from the OT are so similar that the derivation cannot reasonably be doubted. Some items fail to align with what we otherwise know about circumstances and customs in Judea at that time (remember that the Gospels were written decades after the putative life of Jesus, and likely written elsewhere in the Hellenic world, and they were all written in Greek.) Many items cannot be accepted because the Gospels contradict each other in respect to those details.
These details of Jesus' life fail scrutiny under a whole list of criteria, and it turns out that there are only two items of the life of Jesus for which there is a consensus among MAINSTREAM scholars: that Jesus was baptized (presumably by John the Baptist) and that he was crucified.
Those two items are not a collection that can be said to constitute a biography of anyone. Many people were baptized and many people were crucified in that era. There were likely a substantial number of persons who overlapped those categories. From this we can see that the historicist vs. mythicist debate is decided at a much earlier stage than it is usually carried out. To even ask the question of whether some character from ancient literature was a real person or not, there must be a plausible biography of which the question can be asked. But there is not. There's simply no there, there.
@@mistermkultra3114 Brilliant argument. I think I'll use it the next time I debate somebody.
Sheesh. Even arguments for geo-centrism aren't actually terrible if you don't know anything about orbital mechanics.
“Why should we turn to someone other than historians or scientists, the experts in their related fields of research, for answers related to history or science? Apologists are just there to take advantage of you, telling you what you want to hear when the evidence tells you otherwise. The sheer existence of apologists is reason alone to raise suspicion. Their dishonesty is blatant when you simply double check what they say. In the end, historians and scientists are not just one big conspiracy against Jesus, the Bible is simply wrong about most things.”
-Joseph R. Hanson
Well, the "sheer existence" of counter-apologists is also equally suspicious then...