Reading the comments so far, I can’t help thinking that it doesn’t exactly bode well for the strength of the Christian position on the resurrection when apologists dedicate as much time as they do to lowering the epistemic bar. Though, I’ll be the first to admit when atheists are raising the epistemic bar irrationally high. For example, one of the episodes in my series about mistakes atheists make in epistemology was about how some skeptics seem to think testimony and intuition are epistemically worthless, which is a totally indefensible, ridiculous position. I also drew attention to one atheist who, on Justin Brierley’s show, explained how no evidence in principle could convince him God existed. You might turn my rhetorical point against me and say, “It doesn’t exactly bode well for the strength of the atheist position when counter apologists dedicate as much time as they do to raising the epistemic bar to such an irrational degree.” But that is not what we’re doing with “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. I’m not exactly going out on a limb when I say that Christian apologists probably resist the idea that they need to provide extraordinary evidence for the resurrection because they don’t have any on hand. Ironically, the apologists who resist ECREE are guilty of what they accuse lacktheists of doing: desperately trying to avoid the burden of proof.
I think that's right. I agree with what you said. But what constitutes extraordinary evidence? There is a difference between something being extraordinary in and of itself, which might be evidence of some extraordinary cause, although we don't know exactly what that is. It's harder to argue something is evidence 'for' a specific conclusion even if it's extraordinary. The origin of the universe is evidence of something extraordinary. What the evidence points to as its cause is the next question. But by its nature it automatically brings extraordinary causes to the table as probable, and excludes ordinary causes. Now is the event of the growth of early Christianity an extraordinary event? Is it similar to other religions? If it's extraordinary, then it suggests an extraordinary cause, or at least increases probability of something extraordinary.
@@collin501if you consider the rapid growth of a religion to be evidence of the truth of said religion, you should go ahead and convert to Islam immediately.
I don't have a problem with saying more evidence is needed to overcome a low prior. It's only when one says no kind of testimonial evidence can ever overcome a low prior because it's always more likely someone's lying or mistaken that I have a problem.
Hey Erik, I've been curious to compare what we might accept is true based on testimony in something a little less personal than the truth of Christianity, to see if maybe we just have different instincts on how reliable testimony is in general. Let's say your parents, wife, and a couple of your best friends came to you and told you that they had seen a device that clearly generated more energy than was put into it, say 100,000,000 times more to make it extremely obvious, had tested it out themselves to verify exactly how it was working, and even that they worked in science and engineering fields and have a pretty advanced knowledge of physics to be able to theoretically understand such a machine. In that case would you think it is more likely they are somehow mistaken, or that someone has somehow done something we didn't think was physically possible? For me, I think I would be very excited and would want to believe them. But if I'm honest with myself I just really don't think I would truly believe such a thing had happened just based on people, even multiple people that I have the most trust in, telling me that it had. Some of the possibilities I would envision as alternatives to them being correct would admittedly be pretty farfetched. A secret society finding a way to secretly beam energy into the device, or them having been placed in an advanced immersive holographic experience without knowing it, or one of them having a hallucination and telling the others which in some way made them all so excited about it that they built false memories of having had the same experience. And I honestly think there are millions of other possibilities I'm not considering many I'd never even be able to conceive of. But I would say at least in my mind even the extremely improbable explanations I gave seem significantly more likely than them being correct about this machine that breaks the fundamental laws of physics actually existing. Not trying to trap you or saying that this is equivalent to Christianity, I'm pretty sure you would say there are other types of evidence beyond just testimony for Christianity anyway. And I think the fact that you think other non-testimonial evidence raises Christianity's priors high enough for testimonial evidence to be sufficient is part of the difference between what we believe. Just wanted to see if maybe the difference in our conclusions might also be based on a different intuitive feel about what types of things we would believe based on testimony, or if it's really mostly based on what we think the priors are apart from the question of testimonial reliability. Thanks in advance if you have the time to reply.
What is the problem? Surely it is actually true that people do often lie. Surely it is true that many supernatural events are extremely rare if they ever happen at all. I'd imagine billions of lies are told every day all over the world, while roughly zero resurrections occur each day, so it seems natural to think that lies are more plausible than resurrections if we are looking for an explanation of some testimony. Where does the problem with this arise?
@@faithbecauseofreason8381 : Is there an interpretation of probability which would give stories about miracles a high probability of being true? How would this probability be measured? Suppose H were the claim "Bob can walk through walls." Would we have P(H) > 0.5?
I don’t have a problem with the idea conceptually that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that if a claim is extraordinary then the bar is raised obviously because extraordinary claims by definition or notordinary so they would obviously require more greater evidence than regular claims. But I think the problem is how we define extraordinary. Many atheists seem to have a different definition of what constitutes as an extraordinary claim, to the point where it seems pretty subjective to the particular person, very similar to how pro-choice people define personhood. Also it seems that many atheists themselves don’t even know what constitutes as an extraordinary claim, because they seem to dismiss all evidence that has ever been provided as not being sufficient without explaining how the bar could be met I think that’s an issue.
That's a bit short. It's merely a claim. It needs, or at least *I* need more evidence. You stating something may be evidence, but it's not enough evidence, especially for the theists among us: they need extraordinary evidence.
extraordinary evidence on the existence of an interventionist creator of the universe. I'd be happy to be presented with, remotely possible, for a start
This leads in many different ways, for there are many interventionist creators of the universe - in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, etc. To prove the Christian God, you have to prove the resurrection on the merits of its own relevant evidence. Otherwise, why not believe in Judaism, or Islam, or any of the other religions? Jews believe in the biblical God, yet they deny the resurrection. If you add religious variety to Hume's arguments against miracles, it turns out that it is impossible to prove any single religion true, and that it is more rational to simply disbelieve them all. Which is what I did.
Not only the probability of the event but the significance is also a factor. If the status of my immortal soul were dependent on my believing either that you did or did not eat potato chips for lunch raises the epistemological burden of an otherwise trivial event.
Meh. I'd save "claims" for gnostic assertions. Thus: "Extraordinary _beliefs_ require extraordinary evidence. Extraordinary _claims_ require objective _proof._" And remember: all Xians, by dint of their "personal" god, are gnostics.
You can say the phrase means that, but I think the phrase obviously leads to more confusion among both atheists and theists (apparently). One reason is probably because extraordinary prima facie just means unusual, so Craig and some atheists interpret it in that way. I suspect this is the original meaning too given Hume’s argument against miracles. Anyway, if a phrase just leads to confusion, I don’t see a reason to continue using it.
@@Tdisputations Well, maybe the religious should stop claiming that it's so important that you believe in god. If the subject is supposed to be a thing that impacts everyone, everyone should be able to critique it, no matter how much they understand it.
OK, but how much evidence do we need to prove that squirrels are responsible for the weirdness in the double split experiment? After all, magic squirrels exist, I feel it in my heart.
I agree wholeheartedly. I would add though that extraordinary claims _aren't_ miracle claims, who are even more burdened in this regard. As Humes puts it when talking about the hypothetical testimony of someone claiming to have seen a dead man restored to life: "If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion." So, miracle claims require miraculous evidence?
Only in a colloquial sense. Nobody's reputation is so high that their telling a falsehood constitutes a miracle. Hume was being a bit sardonic, I think.
@@donnievance1942 Nah, I suspect Hume was thinking of mundane situations. Say, a random person with no credential whatsoever tells you that they saw their neighbour at the bakery. The presence of someone at a bakery is a mundane everyday event. Someone lying to you about seeing their neighbour at the bakery, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, is a rare enough occurrence that you'd assume this possibility to be less probable than the possibility that they indeed saw their neighbour at the bakery. The rarer or more extraordinary the claimed event is, the higher the proportional standard of evidence you should go with. Hence why having the very same person telling you that they saw their _married_ neighbour _with_ the baker, fornicating _on_ a table full of flour during open hours, in a bakery fill of customers, would warrant a little more evidence than just 'trust me bro I've seen it', based on the uncommonality of such specific and potentially reputation-damaging event. However, if this person had a solid reputation of being promiscuous, and a bit of a semi-exhibitionist hothead, you would be far more inclined to believe this alleged witness at face value, without particular evidence at hand.
OK, I need help with this syllogism. I've tried to punch holes in it, but I can defend each premise. But if anybody can find problems with it or can give me a better way of wording it, I would appreciate it. Especially the conclusion. Premise 1) God, by definition, can not be contingent upon anything outside of him. Premise 2) it is impossible to say "God exists" without making God contingent upon something outside of him . Premise 3) If something is contingent upon anything outside itself, it can not be God by definition. Conclusion) The sentence "God exists" is incoherent by definition.
I think it’s something like “for claims that are sufficiently unusual you can’t just add up any kind/quantity of evidence and expect to eventually reach sufficient justification, you need special unusual evidence.”
Just rewatched the tjump debate. I'm hoping this kid has learned to communicate since then. Painful!! Check your ego and just acknowledge when you are out of your depth.
I think one of the issues I see when this is discussed is that there is not really a good way to distinguish between improbable vs probable claims, and the slogan is used more for rhetorical effect than anything else by either side. For instance, take P(R|CG) being the probability that the resurrection (R) occurs given that the Christian God (CG) exists. Conditioned on CG, R is not so extraordinary. Conditioned on Not CG, however, and the event seems exceedingly unlikely. The extraordinary-ness depends on the context and one’s background assumptions. Of course, if someone claimed someone was risen from the dead we should expect more evidence from them then if they said someone “stayed dead,” but this is due to our inductive reasons for believing people “stay dead,” (and induction itself can be difficult to defend) Unfortunately in many cases it becomes a word game over the use of the word “extraordinary” and unproductive
Refrain the slongar into into " Low possibility events require high amounts of evidence" and we are ok Because the term extraordinary is very subjective and can mean impossible. People use it in both sides to sleep in invisible ignorance a flat earther said something like this to me.
Extraordinary means something slightly different for many depending on context; ranging between mere abnormalcy all the way to proposed supernatural occurences. So yes, but no. But yes. It's why this phrase doesn't carry much water when used as an argument. It's just a low-effort gotcha that circumvents actual discussion and intellectual development on ideas.
Not really. I think that a resurrection is practically impossible, so the evidence must be so overwhelming, or the testimony must be of such nature that it would be more extraordinary if the testimony was false than if the miracle occurred. This is part of Hume's arguments that too many people forget to mention. He did not outright completely reject testimonial evidence, but raised for it an appropriate epistemic bar.
I'm still not really comfortable with this slogan, because I think an even more trivial and less controversial way to put it would be: *All claims need sufficient evidence*. To pick up your example with the two runners: Yes, in this specific scenario the second runner will need more speed if he wants to catch up, but in any possible scenario, both runners crossing the finishing line at the same time requires their average speed to be the same, no matter how it's individually split up in every case. The problem with ECREE is that, even in sciences, and we don't have to get into the field of religion here, it is often used as a means to move the goalpoasts and dismiss legit evidence, because "well, the evidence would be enough for an ordinary claim, but it's not for an extraordinary claim like this." (Rupert Sheldrake quotes examples like this about his studies with telepathy). And thus, you can virtually render claims unprovable just because you don't like them. That's not a very scientific approach. Not the claim decides whether something is serious science or pseudoscience, the methodology does. If the evidence is sufficient, it's sufficient, no matter how likely or unlikely the initial claim was, because the evidence automatically has to become stronger to be sufficient the more unlikely the claim is. But if someone puts himself on the standpoint that "no evidence will ever be sufficient because of the unlikeliness of the claim", they are misusing ECREE in a way that ACNSE cannot be misused. As to the resurrection problem specifically: I think the problem here doesn't even lie in the quality of the evidence, but in the disagreement about the claim. Everyone just goes on to discuss whether the resurrection of Jesus was possible or not, but I've never encountered anyone who would have taken the time to properly define what they mean by "resurrection" first.
So when Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God... It is true in it's Nietzchian way, and I would say he proves it. But by which metric and or method? Just to try and throw a spanner in your wheels
Yeah, sufficient evidence should suffice for any claim. "extraordinary" is just adjective that is impossible to quantify therfore useless for deductive reasoning. Y'all splitting hairs over a poetic slogan. "A small step for men, a giant leap..." Yes but how giant??? This is ridiculous
I'm lying immobile on the couch in my living room, convalescing from a broken leg . My brother, a reliable and trustworthy person who's not one for practical jokes or sarcasm, tells me that there's an elephant calf in my bedroom upstairs and presents a clear picture of said elephant next to my bed and an audio recording of an elephantine trumpet sound . Literally an extra-ordinary claim, and one I deem to have a low prior probability given my background beliefs about large land animals where I live, and their ability to infiltrate my bedroom without detection. Notwithstanding my low prior, I believe my brother because of relatively ordinary evidence, in kind and degree: testimony, visual, audio. Nothing extra-ordinary required for prima facie assent to the extra-ordinary claim.
This is why I believe Emerson has said it might be worthwhile rephrasing the slogan, because people can misinterpret what is being said. The repetition is for effect of pithiness and memory, but the second extraordinary does not mean "evidence we never thought could exist" or "evidence whose very nature is different than anything we've ever seen", it means "extremely good evidence better than what we have for ordinary claims". Evidence that goes beyond just ordinary evidence in how convincing it is, not in how strange or surprising it is that the evidence exists. In addition, it seems like you might just have a lower bar than a lot of people for believing things. The picture of an elephant in your room is extraordinarily (haha) easy to PhotoShop these days, and an audio recording of an elephant trumpeting as far as I can see does essentially nothing to raise the probability that there actually is an elephant in your room. I honestly think that no matter how serious or straight-laced I considered the person presenting me such things, I wouldn't believe there was actually an elephant calf up the stairs in my bedroom just from them telling me there was and showing me those things. I consider it significantly more likely I've misjudged the person or they've had an uncharacteristic break in their normally unjoking attitude than that an elephant calf somehow was obtained and put into my bedroom. And that's even given the fact that I have prior knowledge that elephant calves exist and would be theoretically possible to be in a bedroom. If the person then continued on to say that this elephant calf happened to be the only one in the world that was naturally purple with pink polka dots, and then further said that I wouldn't be able to see it directly because unfortunately he had to return it and had only been able to get it for a short time, I don't think there is literally anything he could say that would make me believe that was actually true. Even if I somehow did become convinced he was telling the truth after he continued insisting and swearing he wasn't lying for the next several hours, I certainly wouldn't go around making moral judgements about other people for not accepting his fervent testimony. But I find it much more likely I would get progressively more and more worried about why he was making such a big deal about me believing his unrealistic claim while he refused to give me any further evidence to think it was actually true.
There are still degrees. Would you be as willing to believe your brothers claim if the visitor would be a fully grown elephant? A unicorn? An aircraft carrier?
What if you do not hear the elephant at all? No sounds whatsoever, which should be expected from such a large animal. How do you think the animal even got into your room upstairs without anyone noticing or hearing, especially if the staircase is too narrow? It is still more likely that the photo and the recordings are fabricated, and people's behavior can often change suddenly. Unless you have more evidence from your own experience other than your borther's testimony, you still would not be justified in believing him.
@@Nexus-jg7ev I'd say you were rather gullible if you believed there was an elephant calf in your bedroom rather than suspecting that the photo was digitally shopped.
If all one means by the slogan is that improbable events have a higher evidential burden than everyday events, then it's not controversial. Contra what you stated in the video, I don't know any Christian apologist who would deny this weaker version, if you asked them precisely what they are rejecting. The problem is that most folks who use this slogan DON'T use it carefully; they just use it as a way to be dismissive of whatever arguments/evidence are placed in front of them. edit: Or they use it in a Humean way, i.e., that miraculous claims need equally miraculous evidence. Which is also a dismissive way of not taking the extant evidence seriously since it would never even allow evidence the possibility of justifying a miracle claim.
If miracles were real then it could be that we would find some miracles with truly extraordinary evidence, evidence of a sort that it would be a greater miracle for the evidence to exist without the miracle having actually happened. A miracle could happen in the plain sight of hundreds of people and be recorded in multiple videos and so on. We only rest assured that such evidence will never appear because we are confident that miracles are not actually real. They are stories told in religions, but few honestly expect miracles to occur in their real lives. Even people who believe in the supernatural and the theoretical possibility of miracles usually recognize that miracles are vanishingly rare.
Two prevailing theories of the existence of the universe : 1. Matter spontaneously burst into existence 2. All powerful deity created it with a purpose Both are extraordinary and neither can be proven One provides hope You chose
Why should we choose if we don't know which one is true? Wouldn't it be better to just accept that we do not know? What would the purpose be in pretending that one of these is true just because we happened to choose it?
First, "provides hope" is not really an argument at all. Second, I don't chose. Facing the right arguments, I have no choice but to believe. Third, "...with a purpose" is an entirely new claim. Fourth, theory #1 is only extraordinary if you compare it with stuff within our universe. It might be trivial, we just don't know yet. Fifth, theory #2 carries _a lot_ of unspoken claims.
You do realize there are WAY more options than you are presenting, right? Just off the top of my head: 1. We are in a simulation created for some unknown purpose. The laws of physics are different in the simulators' universe such that the explanation of their existence is trivial and obvious. 2. All powerful deity created the universe with no purpose. 3. There are a huge number of deities that in some way worked together to create the universe. 4. Solipsism is true and nobody exists outside of my (or maybe your) thoughts. 5. An all powerful evil entity created the world and enjoys seeing us continuously reborn into suffering and there is no hope. TLDR, your presented options are an extremely obvious false dichotomy, and without looking at the evidence for the essentially infinite actual options and figuring out which one makes sense I don't really find it possible or helpful to randomly pick one and say "yeah, I believe that one is true".
1. Those are not the only two options on the table 2. The fact that neither of the options you mentioned are provable doesn’t mean that they are equally plausible/probable. 3. The fact that “one provides hope” isn’t in and of itself a good reason to believe it to be true. Rationally, you should believe whatever is most likely to be true, not whatever brings most hope.
The odds of you winning the lotto are highly improbable. But if you did win the lotto . The evidence would be quite ordinaey . Show me your matching numbers . The only response to.this is " People win the lotto all the time " Well no they dont . People fail at winning the lotto more so than they succeed The evidence for winning the lotto and against you winning the lotto is exactly the same . Show the numbers Yet failing to win has a high probability and winning has a low probability . Yet the evidence is the same
So a Christian can use the same standards of evidence we use to establish a natural event happened in history for a supernatural event that happened in history
That's really not the only response. I think whether you realize it or not, your actual level of belief in that claim would probably be quite a bit lower (and I would argue should be) compared to other mundane claims. The fact that we have levels of how much we accept a claim/how probable we think it is, and how much we are therefore willing to stake on said claim, is something a lot of people don't realize until they think more about it. To help realize that it generally helps to raise the stakes of what you are going to do based on that belief. Let's say the person said they won the lotto of a million dollars, showed you the matching numbers to a lotto that you saw on TV someone (but you didn't see who) won a million dollars on, and then said they would sell you the ticket. (And that you know with 100% certainty that if it is actually the winning lotto ticket and you buy it you will be able to cash it without a problem, not sure how that actually works in the real world). How much would you give them for what you say you believe based on their testimony and the matching numbers is the winning ticket? 5 dollars? 1000 dollars? 50,000 dollars? I'm willing to bet that you would be unwilling to spend any substantial amount of money on that ticket until you had significantly more proof that it was indeed a winning ticket. You would want to maybe know where they bought it and go ask the person there if they bought a real lottery ticket. But that person could be in on a scam too. You could check other lottery tickets there and make sure that this lottery ticket looked like them. But they could have forged a lottery ticket that looked realistic. I would say you would not only be justified but would be wise to not spend basically anything buying that lottery ticket until you check with the people that are actually able to cash the ticket and make sure the ones that can actually give you the money say it has the worth that this person is claiming it does. But even then, if the person making the claim refuses to do that and continues to make excuses as to why you have to buy the lottery ticket before you have incontrovertible evidence from another trusted source about whether or not it is the winning ticket, you are entirely justified and I would again say even wise to become more and more suspicious about whether this person is telling you the truth. In fact, if after arguing for 15 minutes or so they agreed let you call into the lottery office to check the ticket, give you a number to call that you checked and was associated with a reputable looking website that really looks to you like it is the official website for the PowerBall, and someone picked up the phone and told you that the ticket was indeed worth a million dollars, I would argue that you would STILL be extremely justified to be suspicious and should probably refuse to buy the ticket but tell them you would trade them the money after they cash in their ticket. We only pragmatically accept claims like a random specific person we meet having won the lottery because there is no personal stake tied to believing the claim, and not believing things people tell us without at least some reason does have negative social implications. Which I would say is a perfectly good pragmatic justification to believe someone. But as soon as someone starts relying on that social trust to try and get you to both profess full acceptance of their claim and make some personal investment on the basis of it, that pragmatic justification to accept their claim is out the window. You are entirely justified in saying you would need to see more evidence before you are willing to take on any risk or make any changes to your life on the basis of that person's claim, even with otherwise relatively strong evidence they present in favor of it.
@@CammySchultz Let's change the context . Let's say I suspect you of winning the lottery and I am your brother and you just don't want to share . I would ask you to demonstrate that you indeed did not win the lottery . The evidence again would be the ticket
@@CammySchultz So weither you believe the claim " I won the lottery " or " I didn't win the lottery " The same standard of evidence can be used to support each claim And this evidence alone can override any prior beliefs I hold too. Yet there is nothing extraordinary about the ticket . The claim " I won the lottery " is extraordinary " but the evidence isn't
It really does seem like you were just redefining what is probable as a way to circumvent the distinction between extraordinary versus ordinary. Every claim relying on the same level of evidence with a base of zero evidence would incorporate probability as part of the evidence burden.
Reading the comments so far, I can’t help thinking that it doesn’t exactly bode well for the strength of the Christian position on the resurrection when apologists dedicate as much time as they do to lowering the epistemic bar. Though, I’ll be the first to admit when atheists are raising the epistemic bar irrationally high. For example, one of the episodes in my series about mistakes atheists make in epistemology was about how some skeptics seem to think testimony and intuition are epistemically worthless, which is a totally indefensible, ridiculous position. I also drew attention to one atheist who, on Justin Brierley’s show, explained how no evidence in principle could convince him God existed. You might turn my rhetorical point against me and say, “It doesn’t exactly bode well for the strength of the atheist position when counter apologists dedicate as much time as they do to raising the epistemic bar to such an irrational degree.” But that is not what we’re doing with “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. I’m not exactly going out on a limb when I say that Christian apologists probably resist the idea that they need to provide extraordinary evidence for the resurrection because they don’t have any on hand. Ironically, the apologists who resist ECREE are guilty of what they accuse lacktheists of doing: desperately trying to avoid the burden of proof.
I think that's right. I agree with what you said. But what constitutes extraordinary evidence? There is a difference between something being extraordinary in and of itself, which might be evidence of some extraordinary cause, although we don't know exactly what that is. It's harder to argue something is evidence 'for' a specific conclusion even if it's extraordinary.
The origin of the universe is evidence of something extraordinary. What the evidence points to as its cause is the next question. But by its nature it automatically brings extraordinary causes to the table as probable, and excludes ordinary causes.
Now is the event of the growth of early Christianity an extraordinary event? Is it similar to other religions? If it's extraordinary, then it suggests an extraordinary cause, or at least increases probability of something extraordinary.
@@collin501if you consider the rapid growth of a religion to be evidence of the truth of said religion, you should go ahead and convert to Islam immediately.
I don't have a problem with saying more evidence is needed to overcome a low prior. It's only when one says no kind of testimonial evidence can ever overcome a low prior because it's always more likely someone's lying or mistaken that I have a problem.
Precisely. The slogan becomes a problem when "extraordinary" refers to a bar which is too high to attain even in principle.
Hey Erik, I've been curious to compare what we might accept is true based on testimony in something a little less personal than the truth of Christianity, to see if maybe we just have different instincts on how reliable testimony is in general. Let's say your parents, wife, and a couple of your best friends came to you and told you that they had seen a device that clearly generated more energy than was put into it, say 100,000,000 times more to make it extremely obvious, had tested it out themselves to verify exactly how it was working, and even that they worked in science and engineering fields and have a pretty advanced knowledge of physics to be able to theoretically understand such a machine. In that case would you think it is more likely they are somehow mistaken, or that someone has somehow done something we didn't think was physically possible?
For me, I think I would be very excited and would want to believe them. But if I'm honest with myself I just really don't think I would truly believe such a thing had happened just based on people, even multiple people that I have the most trust in, telling me that it had. Some of the possibilities I would envision as alternatives to them being correct would admittedly be pretty farfetched. A secret society finding a way to secretly beam energy into the device, or them having been placed in an advanced immersive holographic experience without knowing it, or one of them having a hallucination and telling the others which in some way made them all so excited about it that they built false memories of having had the same experience. And I honestly think there are millions of other possibilities I'm not considering many I'd never even be able to conceive of. But I would say at least in my mind even the extremely improbable explanations I gave seem significantly more likely than them being correct about this machine that breaks the fundamental laws of physics actually existing.
Not trying to trap you or saying that this is equivalent to Christianity, I'm pretty sure you would say there are other types of evidence beyond just testimony for Christianity anyway. And I think the fact that you think other non-testimonial evidence raises Christianity's priors high enough for testimonial evidence to be sufficient is part of the difference between what we believe. Just wanted to see if maybe the difference in our conclusions might also be based on a different intuitive feel about what types of things we would believe based on testimony, or if it's really mostly based on what we think the priors are apart from the question of testimonial reliability. Thanks in advance if you have the time to reply.
What is the problem? Surely it is actually true that people do often lie. Surely it is true that many supernatural events are extremely rare if they ever happen at all. I'd imagine billions of lies are told every day all over the world, while roughly zero resurrections occur each day, so it seems natural to think that lies are more plausible than resurrections if we are looking for an explanation of some testimony. Where does the problem with this arise?
@Ansatz66 well the problem here is your dependence upon a frequentist interpretation of probability
@@faithbecauseofreason8381 : Is there an interpretation of probability which would give stories about miracles a high probability of being true? How would this probability be measured? Suppose H were the claim "Bob can walk through walls." Would we have P(H) > 0.5?
I don’t have a problem with the idea conceptually that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that if a claim is extraordinary then the bar is raised obviously because extraordinary claims by definition or notordinary so they would obviously require more greater evidence than regular claims. But I think the problem is how we define extraordinary. Many atheists seem to have a different definition of what constitutes as an extraordinary claim, to the point where it seems pretty subjective to the particular person, very similar to how pro-choice people define personhood. Also it seems that many atheists themselves don’t even know what constitutes as an extraordinary claim, because they seem to dismiss all evidence that has ever been provided as not being sufficient without explaining how the bar could be met I think that’s an issue.
you rely on fallacy
That's a bit short. It's merely a claim. It needs, or at least *I* need more evidence. You stating something may be evidence, but it's not enough evidence, especially for the theists among us: they need extraordinary evidence.
extraordinary evidence on the existence of an interventionist creator of the universe.
I'd be happy to be presented with, remotely possible, for a start
This leads in many different ways, for there are many interventionist creators of the universe - in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, Zoroastrianism, etc. To prove the Christian God, you have to prove the resurrection on the merits of its own relevant evidence. Otherwise, why not believe in Judaism, or Islam, or any of the other religions? Jews believe in the biblical God, yet they deny the resurrection. If you add religious variety to Hume's arguments against miracles, it turns out that it is impossible to prove any single religion true, and that it is more rational to simply disbelieve them all. Which is what I did.
"Extraordinary" is a subjective, relative and (usually emotional) term that doesn't really mean anything.
Not only the probability of the event but the significance is also a factor. If the status of my immortal soul were dependent on my believing either that you did or did not eat potato chips for lunch raises the epistemological burden of an otherwise trivial event.
Any evidence of the extraordinary is trivially extraordinary evidence so this just reduces to "claims require evidence".
Meh. I'd save "claims" for gnostic assertions. Thus: "Extraordinary _beliefs_ require extraordinary evidence. Extraordinary _claims_ require objective _proof._" And remember: all Xians, by dint of their "personal" god, are gnostics.
You can say the phrase means that, but I think the phrase obviously leads to more confusion among both atheists and theists (apparently).
One reason is probably because extraordinary prima facie just means unusual, so Craig and some atheists interpret it in that way. I suspect this is the original meaning too given Hume’s argument against miracles.
Anyway, if a phrase just leads to confusion, I don’t see a reason to continue using it.
The term 'god' causes confusion, too.
@@derkylosIt’s less the word God and more the fact that people with a 5th grade level understanding of God are trying to do theology.
@@Tdisputations Well, maybe the religious should stop claiming that it's so important that you believe in god. If the subject is supposed to be a thing that impacts everyone, everyone should be able to critique it, no matter how much they understand it.
OK, but how much evidence do we need to prove that squirrels are responsible for the weirdness in the double split experiment? After all, magic squirrels exist, I feel it in my heart.
None, that is just self-evident.
Rick & Morty had a brief documentary on this in the episode "Morty's Mind Blowers."
I agree wholeheartedly. I would add though that extraordinary claims _aren't_ miracle claims, who are even more burdened in this regard. As Humes puts it when talking about the hypothetical testimony of someone claiming to have seen a dead man restored to life:
"If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion."
So, miracle claims require miraculous evidence?
Only in a colloquial sense. Nobody's reputation is so high that their telling a falsehood constitutes a miracle. Hume was being a bit sardonic, I think.
@@donnievance1942 Nah, I suspect Hume was thinking of mundane situations. Say, a random person with no credential whatsoever tells you that they saw their neighbour at the bakery. The presence of someone at a bakery is a mundane everyday event.
Someone lying to you about seeing their neighbour at the bakery, for absolutely no reason whatsoever, is a rare enough occurrence that you'd assume this possibility to be less probable than the possibility that they indeed saw their neighbour at the bakery.
The rarer or more extraordinary the claimed event is, the higher the proportional standard of evidence you should go with. Hence why having the very same person telling you that they saw their _married_ neighbour _with_ the baker, fornicating _on_ a table full of flour during open hours, in a bakery fill of customers, would warrant a little more evidence than just 'trust me bro I've seen it', based on the uncommonality of such specific and potentially reputation-damaging event.
However, if this person had a solid reputation of being promiscuous, and a bit of a semi-exhibitionist hothead, you would be far more inclined to believe this alleged witness at face value, without particular evidence at hand.
OK, I need help with this syllogism. I've tried to punch holes in it, but I can defend each premise. But if anybody can find problems with it or can give me a better way of wording it, I would appreciate it. Especially the conclusion.
Premise 1) God, by definition, can not be contingent upon anything outside of him.
Premise 2) it is impossible to say "God exists" without making God contingent upon something outside of him
.
Premise 3) If something is contingent upon anything outside itself, it can not be God by definition.
Conclusion) The sentence "God exists" is incoherent by definition.
Why do I suspect Bill Craig doesn’t actually have any empirical evidence to back up his (plainly empirical) claim about the folk meaning of ECREE?
What exactly is the uncharitable interpretation? I couldn't follow that part.
I think it’s something like “for claims that are sufficiently unusual you can’t just add up any kind/quantity of evidence and expect to eventually reach sufficient justification, you need special unusual evidence.”
Greetings. ‘Extraordinary’ bodes as context if not worldview dependent.
Just rewatched the tjump debate. I'm hoping this kid has learned to communicate since then. Painful!!
Check your ego and just acknowledge when you are out of your depth.
I think one of the issues I see when this is discussed is that there is not really a good way to distinguish between improbable vs probable claims, and the slogan is used more for rhetorical effect than anything else by either side. For instance, take P(R|CG) being the probability that the resurrection (R) occurs given that the Christian God (CG) exists. Conditioned on CG, R is not so extraordinary. Conditioned on Not CG, however, and the event seems exceedingly unlikely. The extraordinary-ness depends on the context and one’s background assumptions. Of course, if someone claimed someone was risen from the dead we should expect more evidence from them then if they said someone “stayed dead,” but this is due to our inductive reasons for believing people “stay dead,” (and induction itself can be difficult to defend)
Unfortunately in many cases it becomes a word game over the use of the word “extraordinary” and unproductive
Refrain the slongar into into " Low possibility events require high amounts of evidence" and we are ok Because the term extraordinary is very subjective and can mean impossible. People use it in both sides to sleep in invisible ignorance a flat earther said something like this to me.
Is a 1 in a million chance extraordinary? 🙀
Extraordinary means something slightly different for many depending on context; ranging between mere abnormalcy all the way to proposed supernatural occurences.
So yes, but no. But yes.
It's why this phrase doesn't carry much water when used as an argument. It's just a low-effort gotcha that circumvents actual discussion and intellectual development on ideas.
Not really. I think that a resurrection is practically impossible, so the evidence must be so overwhelming, or the testimony must be of such nature that it would be more extraordinary if the testimony was false than if the miracle occurred. This is part of Hume's arguments that too many people forget to mention. He did not outright completely reject testimonial evidence, but raised for it an appropriate epistemic bar.
Fair, but never defend his dragon argument 🐉
I'm still not really comfortable with this slogan, because I think an even more trivial and less controversial way to put it would be: *All claims need sufficient evidence*. To pick up your example with the two runners: Yes, in this specific scenario the second runner will need more speed if he wants to catch up, but in any possible scenario, both runners crossing the finishing line at the same time requires their average speed to be the same, no matter how it's individually split up in every case.
The problem with ECREE is that, even in sciences, and we don't have to get into the field of religion here, it is often used as a means to move the goalpoasts and dismiss legit evidence, because "well, the evidence would be enough for an ordinary claim, but it's not for an extraordinary claim like this." (Rupert Sheldrake quotes examples like this about his studies with telepathy). And thus, you can virtually render claims unprovable just because you don't like them. That's not a very scientific approach. Not the claim decides whether something is serious science or pseudoscience, the methodology does.
If the evidence is sufficient, it's sufficient, no matter how likely or unlikely the initial claim was, because the evidence automatically has to become stronger to be sufficient the more unlikely the claim is. But if someone puts himself on the standpoint that "no evidence will ever be sufficient because of the unlikeliness of the claim", they are misusing ECREE in a way that ACNSE cannot be misused.
As to the resurrection problem specifically: I think the problem here doesn't even lie in the quality of the evidence, but in the disagreement about the claim. Everyone just goes on to discuss whether the resurrection of Jesus was possible or not, but I've never encountered anyone who would have taken the time to properly define what they mean by "resurrection" first.
So when Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God...
It is true in it's Nietzchian way, and I would say he proves it. But by which metric and or method?
Just to try and throw a spanner in your wheels
Yeah, sufficient evidence should suffice for any claim. "extraordinary" is just adjective that is impossible to quantify therfore useless for deductive reasoning. Y'all splitting hairs over a poetic slogan. "A small step for men, a giant leap..." Yes but how giant??? This is ridiculous
You sound like if Cameron Bertuzzi actually thought intelligently about what he said, instead of just pretended.
I'm lying immobile on the couch in my living room, convalescing from a broken leg . My brother, a reliable and trustworthy person who's not one for practical jokes or sarcasm, tells me that there's an elephant calf in my bedroom upstairs and presents a clear picture of said elephant next to my bed and an audio recording of an elephantine trumpet sound . Literally an extra-ordinary claim, and one I deem to have a low prior probability given my background beliefs about large land animals where I live, and their ability to infiltrate my bedroom without detection. Notwithstanding my low prior, I believe my brother because of relatively ordinary evidence, in kind and degree: testimony, visual, audio. Nothing extra-ordinary required for prima facie assent to the extra-ordinary claim.
This is why I believe Emerson has said it might be worthwhile rephrasing the slogan, because people can misinterpret what is being said. The repetition is for effect of pithiness and memory, but the second extraordinary does not mean "evidence we never thought could exist" or "evidence whose very nature is different than anything we've ever seen", it means "extremely good evidence better than what we have for ordinary claims". Evidence that goes beyond just ordinary evidence in how convincing it is, not in how strange or surprising it is that the evidence exists.
In addition, it seems like you might just have a lower bar than a lot of people for believing things. The picture of an elephant in your room is extraordinarily (haha) easy to PhotoShop these days, and an audio recording of an elephant trumpeting as far as I can see does essentially nothing to raise the probability that there actually is an elephant in your room. I honestly think that no matter how serious or straight-laced I considered the person presenting me such things, I wouldn't believe there was actually an elephant calf up the stairs in my bedroom just from them telling me there was and showing me those things. I consider it significantly more likely I've misjudged the person or they've had an uncharacteristic break in their normally unjoking attitude than that an elephant calf somehow was obtained and put into my bedroom.
And that's even given the fact that I have prior knowledge that elephant calves exist and would be theoretically possible to be in a bedroom. If the person then continued on to say that this elephant calf happened to be the only one in the world that was naturally purple with pink polka dots, and then further said that I wouldn't be able to see it directly because unfortunately he had to return it and had only been able to get it for a short time, I don't think there is literally anything he could say that would make me believe that was actually true. Even if I somehow did become convinced he was telling the truth after he continued insisting and swearing he wasn't lying for the next several hours, I certainly wouldn't go around making moral judgements about other people for not accepting his fervent testimony. But I find it much more likely I would get progressively more and more worried about why he was making such a big deal about me believing his unrealistic claim while he refused to give me any further evidence to think it was actually true.
There are still degrees. Would you be as willing to believe your brothers claim if the visitor would be a fully grown elephant? A unicorn? An aircraft carrier?
What if you do not hear the elephant at all? No sounds whatsoever, which should be expected from such a large animal. How do you think the animal even got into your room upstairs without anyone noticing or hearing, especially if the staircase is too narrow? It is still more likely that the photo and the recordings are fabricated, and people's behavior can often change suddenly. Unless you have more evidence from your own experience other than your borther's testimony, you still would not be justified in believing him.
@@Nexus-jg7ev I'd say you were rather gullible if you believed there was an elephant calf in your bedroom rather than suspecting that the photo was digitally shopped.
If all one means by the slogan is that improbable events have a higher evidential burden than everyday events, then it's not controversial. Contra what you stated in the video, I don't know any Christian apologist who would deny this weaker version, if you asked them precisely what they are rejecting. The problem is that most folks who use this slogan DON'T use it carefully; they just use it as a way to be dismissive of whatever arguments/evidence are placed in front of them.
edit: Or they use it in a Humean way, i.e., that miraculous claims need equally miraculous evidence. Which is also a dismissive way of not taking the extant evidence seriously since it would never even allow evidence the possibility of justifying a miracle claim.
If miracles were real then it could be that we would find some miracles with truly extraordinary evidence, evidence of a sort that it would be a greater miracle for the evidence to exist without the miracle having actually happened. A miracle could happen in the plain sight of hundreds of people and be recorded in multiple videos and so on. We only rest assured that such evidence will never appear because we are confident that miracles are not actually real. They are stories told in religions, but few honestly expect miracles to occur in their real lives. Even people who believe in the supernatural and the theoretical possibility of miracles usually recognize that miracles are vanishingly rare.
Two prevailing theories of the existence of the universe :
1. Matter spontaneously burst into existence
2. All powerful deity created it with a purpose
Both are extraordinary and neither can be proven
One provides hope
You chose
the first proposition is not actually what is believed by physicists.
Why should we choose if we don't know which one is true? Wouldn't it be better to just accept that we do not know? What would the purpose be in pretending that one of these is true just because we happened to choose it?
First, "provides hope" is not really an argument at all.
Second, I don't chose. Facing the right arguments, I have no choice but to believe.
Third, "...with a purpose" is an entirely new claim.
Fourth, theory #1 is only extraordinary if you compare it with stuff within our universe. It might be trivial, we just don't know yet.
Fifth, theory #2 carries _a lot_ of unspoken claims.
You do realize there are WAY more options than you are presenting, right? Just off the top of my head:
1. We are in a simulation created for some unknown purpose. The laws of physics are different in the simulators' universe such that the explanation of their existence is trivial and obvious.
2. All powerful deity created the universe with no purpose.
3. There are a huge number of deities that in some way worked together to create the universe.
4. Solipsism is true and nobody exists outside of my (or maybe your) thoughts.
5. An all powerful evil entity created the world and enjoys seeing us continuously reborn into suffering and there is no hope.
TLDR, your presented options are an extremely obvious false dichotomy, and without looking at the evidence for the essentially infinite actual options and figuring out which one makes sense I don't really find it possible or helpful to randomly pick one and say "yeah, I believe that one is true".
1. Those are not the only two options on the table
2. The fact that neither of the options you mentioned are provable doesn’t mean that they are equally plausible/probable.
3. The fact that “one provides hope” isn’t in and of itself a good reason to believe it to be true. Rationally, you should believe whatever is most likely to be true, not whatever brings most hope.
The odds of you winning the lotto are highly improbable. But if you did win the lotto .
The evidence would be quite ordinaey .
Show me your matching numbers .
The only response to.this is
" People win the lotto all the time "
Well no they dont . People fail at winning the lotto more so than they succeed
The evidence for winning the lotto and against you winning the lotto is exactly the same . Show the numbers
Yet failing to win has a high probability and winning has a low probability .
Yet the evidence is the same
So a Christian can use the same standards of evidence we use to establish a natural event happened in history for a supernatural event that happened in history
That's really not the only response. I think whether you realize it or not, your actual level of belief in that claim would probably be quite a bit lower (and I would argue should be) compared to other mundane claims. The fact that we have levels of how much we accept a claim/how probable we think it is, and how much we are therefore willing to stake on said claim, is something a lot of people don't realize until they think more about it.
To help realize that it generally helps to raise the stakes of what you are going to do based on that belief. Let's say the person said they won the lotto of a million dollars, showed you the matching numbers to a lotto that you saw on TV someone (but you didn't see who) won a million dollars on, and then said they would sell you the ticket. (And that you know with 100% certainty that if it is actually the winning lotto ticket and you buy it you will be able to cash it without a problem, not sure how that actually works in the real world). How much would you give them for what you say you believe based on their testimony and the matching numbers is the winning ticket? 5 dollars? 1000 dollars? 50,000 dollars?
I'm willing to bet that you would be unwilling to spend any substantial amount of money on that ticket until you had significantly more proof that it was indeed a winning ticket. You would want to maybe know where they bought it and go ask the person there if they bought a real lottery ticket. But that person could be in on a scam too. You could check other lottery tickets there and make sure that this lottery ticket looked like them. But they could have forged a lottery ticket that looked realistic. I would say you would not only be justified but would be wise to not spend basically anything buying that lottery ticket until you check with the people that are actually able to cash the ticket and make sure the ones that can actually give you the money say it has the worth that this person is claiming it does.
But even then, if the person making the claim refuses to do that and continues to make excuses as to why you have to buy the lottery ticket before you have incontrovertible evidence from another trusted source about whether or not it is the winning ticket, you are entirely justified and I would again say even wise to become more and more suspicious about whether this person is telling you the truth. In fact, if after arguing for 15 minutes or so they agreed let you call into the lottery office to check the ticket, give you a number to call that you checked and was associated with a reputable looking website that really looks to you like it is the official website for the PowerBall, and someone picked up the phone and told you that the ticket was indeed worth a million dollars, I would argue that you would STILL be extremely justified to be suspicious and should probably refuse to buy the ticket but tell them you would trade them the money after they cash in their ticket.
We only pragmatically accept claims like a random specific person we meet having won the lottery because there is no personal stake tied to believing the claim, and not believing things people tell us without at least some reason does have negative social implications. Which I would say is a perfectly good pragmatic justification to believe someone. But as soon as someone starts relying on that social trust to try and get you to both profess full acceptance of their claim and make some personal investment on the basis of it, that pragmatic justification to accept their claim is out the window. You are entirely justified in saying you would need to see more evidence before you are willing to take on any risk or make any changes to your life on the basis of that person's claim, even with otherwise relatively strong evidence they present in favor of it.
@@CammySchultz
Let's change the context .
Let's say I suspect you of winning the lottery and I am your brother and you just don't want to share .
I would ask you to demonstrate that you indeed did not win the lottery .
The evidence again would be the ticket
@@CammySchultz
So weither you believe the claim
" I won the lottery " or " I didn't win the lottery "
The same standard of evidence can be used to support each claim
And this evidence alone can override any prior beliefs I hold too. Yet there is nothing extraordinary about the ticket .
The claim " I won the lottery " is extraordinary " but the evidence isn't
@@ramadadiver8112 How would a single ticket demonstrate that you didn't win the lottery?
It really does seem like you were just redefining what is probable as a way to circumvent the distinction between extraordinary versus ordinary. Every claim relying on the same level of evidence with a base of zero evidence would incorporate probability as part of the evidence burden.