1. Arif Ahmed, On Miracles
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 มี.ค. 2017
- In this first episode, I talk to Dr Arif Ahmed, who is a Reader in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. We talk about atheism, David Hume, and Arif's recent paper 'Hume and the Independent Witnesses' (2015). Here is Arif's academic page where you can see his research outputs and links to various public engagements he has participated in:
www.phil.cam.ac.uk/people/teac...
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I'm so excited for this series. I've been Jonesin' for some Alex Malpass content for months. Ended up watching both Matt Slick conversations all the way through twice. Was about to do a third viewing when this came out. Keep up the great work, Alex!
Thank you for starting this. We need more structured podcast/hangouts dedicated to philosophy of religion.
Glad you like it. The videos will all be on philosophy, but not always philosophy of religion.
Sounds great!
I'm pretty sure this channel is going to become one of my favourites. Keep up the good work Alex, I'm looking forward to the next one.
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That was great.
Looking forward to more episodes. 😎👌
Arif is one of my favourite debaters! This is brilliant. Thanks!
Very interesting. It's a shame iERA "lost" the audio to Arif's debate with Hamza Tzortzis and so were unable to release it.
TheRationalizer yup lol. That happened a lot more before TH-cam
They've always been very sketchy in their practices, they recently "accidentally" blured out cosmic skeptic in a debate exactly at the moments where he mentioned the wife beating verse.
@@empereurjustinien2082 iERA had a recording of an improvised public debate between myself and Subboor Ahmed at a university.
They obtained the recording from a Muslim member of the audience and (I am told) asked him not to give it to anyone else (he then deleted it).
iERA would not release the recording.
@@empereurjustinien2082 they also accidentally added few clips of Hijab reciting from Quran.
@@razi_kr And That doesn't show anything
Very interesting, thanks Alex and greeting from London, UK!
Arif Ahmed rocks.
Thank you Alex It was really great to hear your talk with Arif. (looking forward to a chat with Matt Bellend now..hehe). I will be watching your channel with great interest and enjoyment
PS I would like to hear some follow up hangouts if possible. Thanks
Glad you enjoyed it. There may be hangouts posted on Alex's personal channel, but the Thoughtology channel will be a place reserved for this sort of interview for now.
Sub'fn'scribed, and really looking forward to the content! :)
I actually read his article earlier this year. ha
Are there other philosophers that wrote against the validity of the argument from miracles? Can't find any.
Hume -part 3
Empiricists recognized that Hume's ham-handed attempt at producing skeptics of miracles and other unaccounted phenomena, were not just circular but destroyed the very thing that made the scientific method so strong! Namely, the best explanation for the data must change over time to account for new data.
Because he preceded Bayes by a few years, Hume can be forgiven his ignorance of same. Here is a restatement in Bayesian interferential form:
Pr(M/E&B) = (Pr(M/B) ⊆ Pr(E/M&B))/Pr(E/B)
Arif Ahmed, the thinking woman's hunk.
Will you be making this available via podcast ( iTunes etc.)? Thank you for this!
Yes, absolutely. We just need to figure out how to do that first!
Thoughtology
Uploading to Soundcloud is pretty straight forward.
Thoughtology: Soundcloud would probably be easier & more useful. :P
Hume part 5
So what is the probability that sailors told the truth about seeing black swans in Australia/ the probability of other explications of their reports of seeing black swans (e.g. Mass hallucinations, or a black swan conspiracy)
Within a few years George Campbell, A dissertation on miracles, p. 31-32, London: T. Tegg, 1824
"He [Hume] rests his case against belief in miracles upon the claim that laws of nature are supported by exceptionless testimony, but testimony can only be accounted exceptionless if we discount the occurrence of miracles."
love the content! can you explain moral cognitivism?
Moral cognitivism is the view that moral judgments are beliefs, and hence can be assessed as true or false. Moral noncognitivism is the view that moral judgments are more like expressing emotions or desires, and hence can't be assessed as true or false.
Thanks, I guess I am actually asking for someone to defend the position of moral non-cogntivism. The idea currently seems indefensible to me but I could be wrong.
Is there any way to read Arif's paper if you're not an Oxford Academic?
I don't think the journal it is published in offers open access, so you might have to email Arif and ask him if he can send you a copy himself.
Ok thanks. I might try that.
Yeah I noticed it was already online elsewhere after Arif sent me a copy. Thanks anyways.
Thanks Alex, loved it. Question, will you also ever talk to Philosophers who you disagree with on some issues?
Hi. Yeah, this isn't a debate series as such, but we anticipate that some of the issues which we have planned will at least go into areas where Alex doesn't know what to think, and quite likely will go into areas where he disagrees with the guest. There are some quite radical ideas which will be covered in the coming episodes, trust us! If you have suggestions for future guests, please let us know on our Facebook page:
facebook.com/thoughtologytube
Great conversation. I’m a big fan of you both. I was hoping, though, that you could explain to me why this “degree of belief/confidence” concept does not violate the law of noncontradiction. Because it seems to me that to say you have a .65 belief in P and a .35 belief in Not P is the same as claiming P and Not P (to varying degrees) which would be logically invalid.
Thanks Crazy Cat. Your question is about what the relationship is between degrees of belief and the phrase 'A believes that p'.
Say A's degree of belief that p is 0.35. Does this mean that 'A believes that p' is true? That doesn't seem right to me. I would say that 'A believes that p' cannot be true if A's degree of belief is less than 0.5. It seems necessary for it being true that you believe that p for you to be more confident that p is true than false.
However, I don't think this is sufficient. I think there are cases where I am more confident that p is true rather than false, where I also don't think 'I believe that p' is true. Here is an example:
Imagine I pick a card from a deck of cards, which is the ace of spades, and then I discard it. I pick another one at random, but don't look at it. My degree of belief that this card is red is slightly higher than that it is not red (i.e. that it is black), because there is one more red card than black in the deck. So my degree of belief that the card is red is about 0.52. I don't think that in this case the sentence 'I believe that the card is red' is true though. I'm agnostic about the colour of the card, even though I think it is more likely to be red than black. 0.52 doesn't seem enough to warrant the unqualified claim of belief to me.
I suspect that the unqualified claim of belief is vague in such a way that there is no precise degree of belief that is necessary and sufficient in all cases though.
Hope that helps.
That does clear things up a bit, thank you. On a side note, I’ve been wracking my brain to think of an instance where a degree of belief in P would be less than .5 with A claiming that he did believe P, and the best I can come up with is somebody who is just believing something on stubbornness alone, like a gambler betting his savings on a roulette wheel and believing that he will win despite the chances being .026. But then I step back and start to think that probability of success and degrees of confidence are two separate things.
Well, if you thought that the probabilities of you winning on the roulette wheel were 0.26, then you would be irrational to have a credence anything other than 0.26. Look up David Lewis and the 'Principal Principle'. In most situations though, we cannot make such accurate assessments of the objective probabilities. So we have credences without knowing the objective chances.
I don't think there are any situations in which it is rational to say 'I believe that p' when your credence (or degree of belief) that p is less than 0.5. You could do it, but you would be doing something irrational. That's my view (which may change as I learn more).
Thanks. I will look into David Lewis. I also saw you had a blog on degrees of belief which I intend to read. Based on what I’ve learned so far, I tend to agree with the premise that the .5 degree of belief is a meaningful threshold between belief in P and Not P. However, I struggle with the concept that believing something with low-level confidence is necessarily irrational, though I have no argument to support the contrary. I suppose I need to do more homework to settle it one way or the other. Also, on a minor point, I believe using the word “belief” in terms of degrees rather than a binary proposition could lead to equivocations by others. I could see, for example, a Christian with surface level knowledge of the concept telling me that because I have a degree in belief that God doesn’t exist that I also then bare a burden of proof. It reminds me of the “just a theory” argument I here sometimes referring to scientific theories. But perhaps, in that case, I could come back and say that they too have a degree of belief that God doesn't exist, even if it is .00001. It's funny to consider, but might ultimately muddy the waters between our two positions.
Hume part 6
Every major step forward in science was met with both legitimate skepticism and Humean skepticism. Max Planck's Quantum Mechanics, Einstein's special, and general theories of relativity, were rejected by most top scientist of their day due to Humean reasoning rather than a close examination of the data.
Someone tell me the irony in Hume's circular reasoning.
Please comment on similar problems with Hume's approach on our belief in space, time, external objects, personal identity over time, lack of free will, and his view that causation in not found in the external world.
I think it's wrong to say you have degrees of belief, but rather you either believe or don't and for a belief you then have degrees of confidence in it. You cannot be in a state of believing and not believing (where not believing is distinct from believing in the contrary).
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9:00-9:30 in the video we get a probabilistic version that is not representative of Hume's Enquiry. Hume's Hume discounts witnesses that report data that don't comport with the existing data. Ignoring his own "Problem of induction," he states all swans ever seen in the last several centuries are white. Any sailor, coming from say Australia, with a report of a Black swan stands in opposition to those data and must be giving an unreliable report. This deleted data that would have allow the naturalist to truly state, "Swans can be black or white in coloring," as opposed to Hume's method which forces naturalists to misrepresent the data.
Yeah, we are talking about the neo-Humean argument. I think we mention that several times. It doesn't matter for the argument we are talking about exactly what Hume said. The point is about the best way the argument can be reconstructed.
Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding X, i, 86
"Upon the whole, then, it appears that no testimony for any kind of miracle has ever amounted to a probability, much less to a proof; and that even if it did amount to a proof it would be opposed by another proof derived from the very nature of the fact it is trying to establish.
Hume concludes, "...so we may accept it as a maxim that no human testimony can have such force as to prove a miracle, and make it a legitimate foundation for any such system of religion."
We know miracles are impossible therefore anyone who is making a report of a miracle is unreliable.
Therefore all reports of miracles are unreliable.
Hume part 4
Pr(M/E&B) = (Pr(M/B) ⊆ Pr(E/M&B))/Pr(E/B)
Probability (Pr) that a miracle(M) occurred = Probability of a miracle given our background knowledge (B) divided by the probability of not a miracle given our background knowledge times the probability of the evidence (E) for the miracle given the miracle occurred and given our background knowledge divided by the probability of the evidence given that the miracle did not occur and given our background knowledge.
So the question Hume should have been asking (given Bayes), is, "What is the chances of witnesses, and experts (doctors), reporting miracles knowing that they would be openly mocked as liars, charlatans and fools." This applies even more significantly with testimonies of Jesus' resurrection. Since testimonies often resulted in death, not just being outcast.
Healings happen and miracles not so much depending on faith. I have had a few people healed instantly by praying for them. Not really enough. I am surprised why God did it but He did. These are part of the 9 Gifts of the Spirit outlined in 1 Cor 12. We should use them much more than we do.
3:44 why not call it strong atheism then? Why exactly can't atheism be this 50/50 position?, i.e. the simple lack of an unconditional statement of faith, the latter being, incidentally, the one thing that theism appears to require
this 50/50 position your talking about is called agnosticism.
For me all these mirracles and stuff is totaly irrelevant. Because I know that if I was omnipotent god I would not play this cat and mouse game. What is he shy to show him self. How peoole can't see such a simple thing baffels my mind.
Existing in no time, consisting of no matter and occupying no space it's simply impossible fora god to show himself. What would you even see/feel/detect if god revealed himself? That's the biggest problem for theists. Witness of the holy spirit my ass..
Well it all depends on why god created us there could be some reasons for creating us that would make god not show himself for example what a lot of theists say is that the life is a test to see who will believe in god if this is truly the case then i dont see why god would show himself to us i.e i could literally see him.