A few general points on the atheism/theism debate.

[gcomeau]

I used to have these debates a lot. A lot. In the last few years I haven't gotten into the as much as I used to, I got a little bored with having the same arguments rehashed over and over again, but recently I got so tired of some of the various idiocies being obsessed over in other parts of DU during the transition that my mind went wandering for something else to do and it settled here. After reading through the threads for a while I see many of the same things I've always seen in these debates and I figured I'd kill some time digging some tips and observations out of the old memory and see if they might help anyone out.

1. The Concept of "100% Absolute Proof" Almost NEVER Belongs Anywhere Near These Discussions.

As an acquaintance of mine, another person I used to engage in these debates with, used to say... "proof is for mathematics and alcohol". The rest of the planet deals with conclusions sufficiently supported by the available evidence, not "proof". If you run around here demanding the other side has to 100% absolutely prove their position you are wasting everyone's time, including yours. You might as well demand they fly from New York to Beijing using a muscle powered flying machine. It isn't happening. You can't 100% prove God exists, you can't 100% prove he doesn't, you can't 100% prove there's an afterlife, you can't 100% prove there isn't, you can't 100% prove your grandmother haunts your attic...

No argument there? Not done. You can't 100% prove the moon orbits the earth. You can't 100% prove I, the person typing this message you're reading, exist. You can't 100% prove you have 10 fingers (or 8 fingers and 2 thumbs if you insist on distinguishing). Want to try arguing it? Just try me. I'll shred anyone's attempt to prove any of the above with 100% certainty. And I won't break a sweat doing it, it's ridiculously easy.

Pretty much everything you "know" is subject to being demonstrated to be wrong if new evidence arrives. You might think you have 10 fingers. You might be 99.999...% confident you have 10 fingers. Of course, you might be experiencing a vivid hallucination with full tactile sensations and you're about to snap out of it and realize you actually have tentacles. 100% prove otherwise. Go ahead and try. You'll fail.

2. Lack of Certainty Doesn't Mean Anything Goes.

Can anyone prove with no degree of error involved that I don't have tentacles rather than hands with articulated fingers on the ends of my 2 arms? No. Does that mean they would be out of line tossing me in a psychiatric institution if I insisted I DID have tentacles? No! They would have every justification in the world. The fact that nobody can 100% prove I'm wrong doesn't mean they can't be overwhelmingly confident I'm wrong based on the evidence available, and act accordingly... accordingly being "this nutjob is out of his freaking mind, let's tuck him away in a nice padded room and call the psych staff."

In my experience people who demand others provide them with 100% proof of a position don't have any actual expectation of it being provided. They know perfectly well they are making an absurd request that will never be met, and they only make it to use the inevitable inability to provide a sufficient response as an excuse for holding positions they themselves cannot evidentially support AT ALL. They want to believe something they can't back up with evidence, they get backed into a corner, and they start trying to deceptively equate "can't support" with "can't prove" to try to wiggle out of it. Then they declare "AHA! You can't prove I'm wrong so my position isn't irrational!" If we really evaluated the rationality of worldviews according to this criteria psych wards would be populated only by people who insisted 6*8=56 while a person who insisted they were Genghis Khan transported through space and time to conquer New Jersey would be running around loose and treated as a rational person going about their business since we can't actually 100% prove they're not precisely that.

Bottom line: "You can't absolutely prove I'm wrong" DOES NOT MEAN "my position is justifiable/rational". It doesn't even come close. It's not only not in the ballpark... it's not even on the same continent. So if you're one of the people who makes this appeal, stop telling people that like it means anyhing, please. It's incredibly annoying.

3. The Vital Importance of Falsifiability

This is a central tenet in analysing any scientific hypothesis but it should really be used in all arenas, not just that of scientific investigation. If you want to propose an explanation for something... anything at all, you should know how to determine if you're wrong. You need to have some way of figuring out if you're off track, otherwise there are no limits to how completely screwed up your thinking can become. You have to be able to say "Look, if we see this then we can be pretty darn sure we messed something up and we need to take another run at explaining things because there's no way that should happen if we're right." A proposal which cannot be falsified is, ultimately, of absolutely no value. At all. None. An explanation that explains everything explains nothing.

This is one of the primary reasons I reject "supernatural" hypotheses. They're completely and totally pointless. Worthless. Allow me to illustrate. Let's take two potential competing explanations for orbital mechanics.

A. Plain old physics. Gravity, angular momentum, etc...

B. Orbital Elves.

Now, physics provides an explanation for why planetary bodies behave the way they do. It predicts orbital paths rather precisely based on the explanatory framework involved. If we watch the moon going around the earth day after day and it always behaves exactly the way the principles of physics tells us it should our explanation is holding up. If on the other hand tomorrow afternoon the moon took a 90 degree turn, wandered out to visit Venus for a while... then took a leisurely meandering tour of the moons around Jupitor... then drifted back over to the Earth and settled back into orbit, we'd have to take a really good long hard look at what the hell was going on and how we explained this. We'd be looking at long hours of re-examining everything we thought we knew about the basic physical laws governing the universe.

The Orbital Elves on the other hand explain ANYTHING. They're magical, undetectable, mysterious creatures whose motives we cannot fathom who fly through space pushing everything around where they want it to go. Moon keeps doing what it's doing? Well then obviously the Orbital Elves are doing that.... somehow... for some reason... behavior explained!

The Moon stops dead in space? The Orbital Elves are doing that... somehow... for some reason... see, proof they're there! Behavior explained!

The Moon starts bouncing back and forth between Mars and Mercury like a ping pong ball? The Orbital elves are doing that... somehow... for some reason... see, proof they're there! Behavior explained!

Our explanation is so awesome it can explain EVERYTHING! Therefore anything that happens can be claimed to be evidence in its favor and we can't ever possibly be shown to be wrong! If "X" happens that's evidence we're right. If the exact opposite of "X" happens, that's evidence we're right too! We can't lose!

Anyone under the impression that's actually a good thing? Anyone think that's useful? If so, try and explain what for. The "Orbital Elves" hypothesis tells us NOTHING. It imparts no knowledge. It doesn't tell us how or why anything is happening. It doesn't tell us how the system will behave going forward, it could do anything 2 seconds from now. It confers no understanding of the world around us that we didn't possess before it was proposed as a mechanism, we've just decided to call "I don't know" by a different name and then act like that's the same thing as explaining it. It's encouraging ignorance by pretending it's knowledge.


Well, I think I'll leave it off there for now.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. I'd like to hear more about Orbital Elves.

[Warpy]

2. It's blasphemy!

Everybody knows it's all the doing of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

[Sandrine for you]

3. Can we also say something about the burden of the proof:

It's the one who make a positive affirmation (there is a god) to give proof about it , and not the one who say no.

Hey: Don't you see the big pink elephant ? No ? Well give me proof it doesn't exist.

Or like Bush: give me proof there is no WMD in Iraq ?

In fact there cannot be any real proof about the absence of anything.

[melonkali]

4. History books are in-part based on "non-falsifiable" accounts.

Think of mainstream history books, which most of us accept as accurate, and on what their information is based. Sometimes only a few written, anecdotal, eyewitness accounts, but nothing "falsifiable".

So if you say than any explanation in any subject must be falsifiable, you're going to be ripping a lot of pages out of history texts!

Now take a religion like Christianity -- a great number of early extant documents have been found, including eyewitness accounts, scattered from Egypt to Greece. What do you do with them? A historian cannot take such a large number of extant ancient texts, which seem to be in agreement with each other, along with many later transmissions which appear to be faithful to the older texts, and simply dismiss them, can he?

[gcomeau]

5. There is a difference between evidence and hypothesis.

Testimony is evidence. Evidence is used to support or reject hypotheses. Hypotheses should be falsifiable. Evidence should be credible.

[melonkali]

6. What makes evidence credible or un-credible?

Again, I point out there are a large number of extant ancient Christian documents scattered from Egypt to Greece, and while there are some differences, they pretty well agree on the basics. So on what basis does one determine that they are not credible?

BTW: I'm not trying to engage you in a theism/atheism argument as much as I'm trying to determine the rules of evidence in such discussions.

[gcomeau]

9. Depends on the subject matter.

If you're trying to provide evidence someone ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich last week someone seeing them do it... or them just telling you they did... is probably sufficient to get the job done and establish that it happened with a reasonable degree of certainty considering the factors involved. People are known to eat PB&J sandwiches all the time so there's no reason to be terribly skeptical it happened. There is no apparent motive for any witnesses to provide misleading testimony on the matter. A week isn't that long, memories of the event are likely still intact enough that things aren't being recalled incorrectly. And to top it all off... who cares? It has no significance, why bother investing any great deal of time questioning the event? Just drop it in the little "it happened" file in your mind and move on.

On the other hand... let's say the person who was supposed to have eaten that peanut butter and jelly sandwich is known to be highly allergic to peanuts or something. One taste and they're looking at rashes, hives, difficulty breathing... almost certainly a hospital stay if they were trying to scarf down a whole sandwich packed with peanut butter... and they've known this all their life. In THAT case somebody just telling you this person ate one last week probably warrants considerable skepticism and a great deal of explanation before the claim is accepted. Why in the world were they eating something they knew was going to make them purely sick and miserable? How does the person telling you this know it was peanut butter? If they did eat it, why did you see them looking just fine at the gym the afternoon this was supposed to have happened? Etc...

Moving on... let's say now what supposedly happened was that someone ate a 2 foot by 2 foot quarter inch thick steel plate using nothing but their teeth as a cutting instrument to bite off chunks of it then chew them up and swallow them. There is absolutely no chance in hell someone just saying that happened is getting the job done. We known darn well the tensile strength of steel doesn't lend itself to being sliced through by people's teeth. There's no reason for someone to even try doing this. Two people could tell me the same thing and both "you're both lying for some reason" and "you were both had" immediately present themselves as a FAR more likely explanation than someone having teeth hard as diamonds and the bite power in their jaw to rend steel plate because people say things that aren't true constantly and they get tricked into thinking things happened that didn't all the time but to the best of my knowledge nobody in the history of the planet has displayed the claimed capabilities. Frankly, I could have a thousand eye witnesses and "you were all the victims of a hoax" still proceeds to come in WAY higher on the probability scale. Thousands of people think they've seen David Blain levitate. They haven't. No... it would take some definitive physical evidence to convince me of the veracity of that particular claim, because it is in direct conflict with every other piece of evidence about the capabilities of human beings I have accumulated throughout my entire life... so the evidence it happened needs to overcome that other very significant body of evidence before it will be considered credible.

There is no hard, objective, mathematical formula for evaluating this stuff if that's what you're looking for, but the principles are fairly simple. How they apply to biblical claims should also be fairly obvious. "Someone was walking around preaching" = "shrug, no real reason to doubt it". "someone rose from the dead after three days" = "you're going to need some really impressive evidence to back that one up".

[dmallind]

7. What do these extant eye witness accounts SAY?

What do they agree on?

The fact that the religion of Christianity arose at some time? Not too many people doubting that really. After all it's still around, so it must have started somewhere at some time, so all we need to do is find the earliest mention of it and hey presto!

That some guy called Jesus started it? Well now it's getting shaky. There are NO - absolutely none - contemporary references to an earthly Christ. But hey religions generally start from some new preacher or some new idea or other so it's very feasible that there is an individual origin.

That this individual did the apparently impossible because he had powers from or of a deity? Not a shred of anything even remotely credible, and you'd think meticulous record keepers like the Romans might have mentioned a guy who could raise the dead and a mass arising from graves after they crucified him. We have everything from academic histories to personal letters to price lists from tanners' shops from that era, but nary a word about a guy who could draw crowds of thousands, or who healed the lame and the blind in full view of the populace.

[cosmik debris]

8. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

You claimed:

...a great number of early extant documents have been found, including eyewitness accounts, scattered from Egypt to Greece. What do you do with them? A historian cannot take such a large number of extant ancient texts, which seem to be in agreement with each other, along with many later transmissions which appear to be faithful to the older texts...

I seriously doubt that claim.

What do you mean by "a large number"? Can you offer examples of these documents?

You're not just making this shit up are you?