The Tension of Faith

Throughout my life I've been lucky enough to know people who were "creative with the truth". I suppose that has trained me to conclude that, "Joe says X happened," rather than, "X happened."

Ok, so now we have written words combined with personal testimony make it evidence so we still agree it takes more than something being written down to make it evidence. Good.But surely you are beginning to see how bizarre and essentially useless this insistence that evidence can be anything at all is? You've reduced it to an undifferentiated pile of words.Do you really think that if Pullman tells us that all people have personal daemons and then writes it down it becomes evidence that people have personal daemons? I hate argument by dictionary but it does seem to be an indefensible position

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1.
that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof.
2.
something that makes plain or clear; an indication or sign:
His flushed look was visible evidence of his fever.
3.
Law. data presented to a court or jury in proof of the facts in issue and which may include the testimony of witnesses, records, documents, or objects.

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In short, to be worthy of the epithet 'evidence' the words need to be properly capable of supporting or denying a claim or allegation. Merely saying or writing something is not evidence of anything other than something has been said or written.Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

I don't know that I'd used the term incredulity. I think rigor is better. A broad declaration of, "Everything is evidence," has no rigor.Obviously my message isn't, "I don't believe miracles can happen." That's just an excerpt from the discussion about the specific example of the Gospel of John. My message is that the view that everything is evidence is flawed.Take the example where I asked you whether, "I just got back from Mars," is evidence. You said it *was* evidence, easily disproved, but still evidence. But whoops, I lied, it's actually the first sentence of my new novel. Is it still evidence? Of what? Whoops, I lied again, it's actually something a resident of the local assisted living facility mumbled to me as I was helping them up the stairs. Is it still evidence? Of what?So obviously some rigor needs to be introduced. What's the context and provenance of the information, and does it qualify it as evidence in that realm? Tangle and I haven't exchanged any messages about this, but I've read his messages, and perhaps if they weren't too long he's read mine, and I still think we're saying something fairly similar. I don't know if he agrees or not. Regarding John and the miracles specifically, I think I've already explained this. The suspension of natural laws renders it false immediately. That it's part of a supernatural religious origin story alone casts suspicion on its credibility. Deeming it evidence of the impossible is a serious mistake.In a broader sense what this means is that you have to understand the context and provenance of the information you're considering to be evidence, so that you can judge the credibility. Would you really interpret the Gospel of John as potential evidence in the context of physics? How about in the context of history? How about in the context of a religious origin story? How about in the context of the beliefs of an early Christian community? How about as fiction? How about as an aggregation of earlier accounts, both oral and written?For each of these contexts you need to be able judge its appropriateness to be considered as evidence. Unless I've misjudged your religious proclivities, for someone of your level of knowledge I provided precisely the information you need to know it's false. Many people think the sun goes around the earth and can't name the three branches of the US government (Americans, I mean). What many people think isn't an argument. But when you say "as do most other people" you don't really believe that something as important as the nature of evidence should be a matter of opinion. I think we throw around the word evidence far too indiscriminately. Everything isn't evidence in every context. Many things are simply nonsense as evidence in most contexts. It seems obvious to me, but not you, that John is nonsense as evidence of physics, but it is certainly obvious to both of us that a picture of my house is not evidence that matter is made up of quarks. Context matters. From the Wikipedia article on the historical reliability of the Gospels:

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The historical reliability of the Gospels refers to the reliability and historic character of the four New Testament gospels as historical documents. Some believe that all four canonical gospels meet the five criteria for historical reliability; some say that little in the gospels is considered to be historically reliable...the only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate. Elements whose historical authenticity is disputed include the two accounts of the Nativity of Jesus, the miraculous events including the resurrection, and certain details about the crucifixion.

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Seems to be a bit of disagreement among historians, including of the miraculous events. Interestingly, the word "evidence" appears a mere 7 times and only in innocuous ways in the main body of the article. Nowhere does it refer to Gospel text as evidence of what it says.Here's something for Faith:

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In the majority viewpoint, it is unlikely that John the Apostle wrote the Gospel of John. Rather than a plain account of Jesus' ministry, the gospel is a deeply mediated representation of Jesus' character and teachings, making direct apostolic authorship unlikely. Opinion, however, is widely divided on this issue and there is no widespread consensus. Many scholars believe that the "beloved disciple" is a person who heard and followed Jesus, and the gospel of John is based heavily on the witness of this "beloved disciple."

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No, it's not really history. It's quite clearly religion with all the accompanying claptrap of most religions. It's certainly legitimate to study a religion's history based upon available legitimate evidence, but religion isn't history. A written witness statement is unsupported claims. If support for the claims is identified then the claims can become evidence. This is vaguely worded. I don't know what the second use of "either" applies to. You mean the mundane versus the miraculous? The diary versus the Gospel? Anyway, regarding the mundane, obviously it's information about things that may or may not have happened. Maybe they're accurate, maybe they're made up, maybe they're misremembered, maybe they happened but on a different day or with different people.Testimony is one of the worst forms of information if you're seeking accuracy. When you get together with your family this Thanksgiving (oh, wait a minute, you're in the UK - well, the next time you get together with your family) try the exercise of recalling the details of past get togethers. There won't be much agreement about anything, including things like what you ate, when you ate, who was there, who arrived when, who stayed over at your place, who went to motels, what you did, what you talked about, etc. (referring to photos is cheating). Testimony as evidence - pah! Yes, we're in agreement. And now we're not in agreement. Every cockamamie claim about the past is not evidence. Conspiracy theories are a good example of claims about the past that are not evidence of anything, although they're interesting examples of people's ability to bend evidence to their wills. Did I tell you about the study of voters that presented the crowd photos from the Obama and Trump inaugurations and found that 1 in 6 Trump voters identified the Trump photo as having more people? Too bad it wasn't a double blind study so we could see how many Trump voters picked the Obama photo when told it was actually the Trump photo. No, I don't think evidence means "'supports something to a degree that causes me to either believe it - or at least come close to that'. I think evidence is, as I said before, something shown to have relevant context and provenance. If everything is evidence, which is the direction you're going, evidence ceases to have useful meaning. It's just a synonym for everything. Well, first off there's one very important thing to get straight - if I were to kill any cat it wouldn't be somebody else's cat, it would be my own. If you met my cat you'd understand. But seriously, there's no evidence here. There's not even evidence of a dead cat. There's just people saying stuff. Some of it is possible, some of it absurd, but none of it is evidence. Testimony with evidence would be more like, "I witnessed Percy killing my cat using the knife on the table there labeled Exhibit A. The blade end has my cat's blood on it, as shown by the lab analysis also on the table labeled Exhibit B, and the handle end has Percy's fingerprints on it, which I understand will be covered in detail by the fingerprint analysis expert who is scheduled to testify later."That's evidence. Why the Nazis again?Anyway, does it make sense to you that that portion of Goering's testimony that was self-serving lies was evidence of anything? Again, does it make sense to you that the portions of testimony that are of questionable reliability be considered evidence of anything? You didn't evade it? You certainly didn't answer it. But anyway, you gave as your reason for not answering, "the disagreements between John and the Synoptics." This implies you felt the agreement between the Synoptics was sufficient, but when I proposed you choose a miracle common to the Synoptics to remove the objection about John, that apparently wasn't good enough either, since you replied, "But this is a pointless rabbit hole to go down surely?"I don't agree it's a pointless rabbit hole. The question wasn't intended to be about a specific miracle, but was for the purpose of giving you an opportunity to describe how you'd address corroborations about miracles between different books of the Bible. You demurred again. One demurring, okay. Two demurrings? Why?So just to be clear, the question concerns how you'd address a miracle corroborated across all three Synoptic Gospels. If in the end you decide it wasn't a miracle, what does that say about the accounts' status as evidence. You've judged them false - how could they be evidence of anything? I didn't say you did say there was "no reason". There are no quotation marks around were I said "no reason", and it's not in a quote box. What I was doing was posing to you the inevitable conundrum that arises when you say, "Just because something is evidence, it doesn't mean one has to accept it as true." I'm not following this. Is there a "not" missing in there somewhere, because as written it reads like you're saying, to trim it down a bit and mildly paraphrase, "Whether I accept that the evidence sufficiently supports the claims to elicit my belief in them doesn't mean the evidence isn't evidence." That last part appears to be calling the evidence into question, so I must be parsing this sentence wrong, because why would judging the evidence sufficient call it into question. Can you clarify? Well, like I've been saying, it's a nomenclature thing. I disagree with how indiscriminately we use the word evidence. The witnesses statement is testimony, not evidence, even though we often refer to it as "giving evidence". Some of what he says in his testimony may turn out to be relevant evidence, some not. Oh, I agree, the way you're using the word evidence is the normal usage, at least in the sense of how it's used in normal conversation. And while dictionaries should follow usage and not vice versa, at least at present the dictionary definition is a bit different than what seems to be normal usage.Anyway, I'm not arguing about what's normal usage and what's not. I'm arguing that the "normal usage" has diminished the value of the word evidence, turning it into a term that can apply to literally anything. The dictionary doesn't define it this way. You're just dressing up the same argument in different clothing. The jury should decide what testimony and evidence (meaning things like fingerprints, blood stains, etc.) combine to build the evidence deciding the case. They shouldn't be deciding, "This evidence is true, this evidence is false." That's silly - false evidence isn't proof of anything. Rather, they should be deciding, "This testimony is true, this testimony is false," and the true testimony is evidence that added to the physical evidence helps decide the case - or not, since maybe there's not enough evidence. Good example for me, since as a homeowner I have over the years had to occasionally face the question, "Where did this water come from," or "Why is the basement floor wet," and so forth. The wet path in your example is evidence, physical evidence. We have complete agreement about that. Now the problem becomes tracking down the reason.But someone, a person with all the normal issues of the human perceptual/cognitive system, saying, "The basement floor is wet," is not evidence that the basement floor is wet. I've actually had it happen that one of my children reported a wet basement floor that turned out to be a funny shadow from stuff we'd recently moved around. But that's actually a very good answer because it illustrates all the rigamarole you burden yourself with because for you everything written is evidence until proven otherwise, instead of taking the opposite course that nothing written is evidence until it has passed some minimum level of vetting. Well, probably it's just you and me, in which case yes, of course it's obvious, but there *are* other people in this thread, and I am discussing this exact same thing with PaulK, and Faith would definitely disagree, so maybe sometimes I cover possibilities with you unnecessarily. I don't think historians would decide on a binary acceptance/rejection of any unsubstantiated testimony. They would do what you've described a couple times (but that I'll describe in my own words), place all the testimony within a framework of various probabilities that call forth diverse scenarios, none of which are precisely true or false, any of which are possible. Yes, this is what I understood Faith to be saying. It's an evangelical approach, not a historical one. But if it's as I said, that they believe in their hearts that they have evidence, then to them it isn't myopic or credulous or insufficient evidence or idiosyncratic or delusional or psychotic. In fact, what they're doing is the behavior of normal human beings. I agree that it "can be approached, analyzed and used to try and arrive at the truth," but I disagree that the proper term for the mishmash of a thousand conflicting testimonies is evidence. That's interesting. You've obviously spent more time with the document than I have. I only read it through from beginning to end once, but its characterization of faith seemed to me a detailed marvel of consistency rather than multi-faceted. Yes it does, and didn't you quote that part before? Whether you did or not I have examined it several times:

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Faith is a belief that what is said in the Bible is true based on the eyewitness accounts and the peace that comes when we turn our lives over to God.

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It says that faith is a belief that the eyewitness accounts are true, not that they are evidence upon which to build faith. The word evidence doesn't appear anywhere on the webpage. I don't understand. Are you interpreting warrant as some kind of synonym for evidence? I'm not sure why you'd say that, I certainly don't agree with it, and it doesn't seem to follow any logic that you've presented anywhere. Evangelicals like Faith think faith involves evidence. Other branches of Christianity do not, believing something along the lines of that document. Well, if that's the way it looks to you and I haven't changed your mind in this post then I don't suppose there's anything more I could say that might convince you otherwise.--Percy

What is going on here is the destruction of civil discourse. Any time you're ready to return to it and eschew the barrage of accusations of mistakes and evasions and so forth just let me know. At the time I had no idea what you meant by "chronologies." I briefly considered the possibility that you meant when supernova and comets had appeared in the skies, but I didn't dwell on it. Obviously my mention of Tycho Brahe indicated that I had no idea that by "chronologies" you meant of ancient civilizations.Good grief, you screwed up a quote again. I'll do the same thing I did before, fix it here where I quote it, but leave it alone in your original post: What you should wish for is the ability to compose a comprehensible quote. This is woefully incomplete and confused at best and nonsense at worst. Again, congratulations on the message link, but it doesn't matter what you posted there. The problem for you is that what natural events stood in for the miracles, or the nature of the explanations for what people mistook for those miracles, is unknowable. I'm aware that you have the conceit to repeatedly claim you know them.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo.

That is just not true. Where are you getting that? The Bible was possessed by very very few of the common folk, most of those who did possess it+ in hiding from the Roman Church, such as the Waldensians who lived in the valleys of the Alps, and they were nevertheless subject to murdering rampages there too because they DID possess the Bible and were considered heretics for it. It was those who HAD the Bible, and preached from it to others, who were persecuted for "most of European history," not the other way around. Few people were educated at all, and even those who were had been stuffed full of Roman paganisms, NOT the Bible. None of them were interested in enforcing the Bible, quite the other way around, particularly the priests and the Pope. The priests could read the Bible though not all did, more interested inrelics and indulgences and masses for the dead and all that superstitious nonsense, though some of them preached from it, in Latin. But there weren't many educated people and most of them were priests, and in any case until the Reformation there was NO interest in the Bible that would have been forced on people, quite the opposite as I said: they were persecuted for following the Bible, or for not living according to the Roman supersititions -- that could get you persecuted. But that did not happen. The Bible was NOT revered until the Reformation. After that if you can produce some historical information I could maybe see your point to some small extent, but not before it, not in any Roman Catholic context, which was of course the dominant influence in Europe until then. It's possible after the Reformation because the Bible had become the authority over Church tradition, but also the Bible was a powerful liberating force in people's minds, the minds of the intelligent people I'm talking about. The intelligent people were strongly FOR he Bible, so that your idea of there being some kind of class of intelligent skeptics just doesn't wash during that period. Not earlier and not in the early years of the Reformation either. Now by the time we get to the Enlightenment and all that yes you've got your anti-religion skeptics, most of them against the Roman Church, however, not the Bible, and I still don't see any enforcement of the Bible against anyone. You are making all this up Mod. OK so it appears you aren't talking about "most of European history" at all, you are talking about very modern times. However, I'm not sure about your focus on the Bible even then, a focus on Christian principles in general, Protestant principles, OK, but the Bible? Not particularly. Unfortunately the strong Reformation Protestant underpinnings of much of Europe and also of America, were undermined by the Enlightenment trends even when the Protestants were strongest, and by the 20th century were falling behind. America did enforce blasphemy laws early on, perhaps you could focus on that to some effect. In any case you need some, yes, evidence, for your claims, this isn't holding together as you've presented it. There is no law against proselytizing except one made up in the feverish heads of anti-Christians, and I have no idea what you mean by "failing to perform duties" so I'd probably disagree with you about that too. Perhaps you'd like to take another run at this topic with more specificity?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

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What is going on here is the destruction of civil discourse. Any time you're ready to return to it and eschew the barrage of accusations of mistakes and evasions and so forth just let me know

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You departed from civil discourse quite a way back.

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At the time I had no idea what you meant by "chronologies." I briefly considered the possibility that you meant when supernova and comets had appeared in the skies, but I didn't dwell on it. Obviously my mention of Tycho Brahe indicated that I had no idea that by "chronologies" you meant of ancient civilizations.

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And yet that does not change the fact that you chose to call me a wingnut based on a serious misrepresentation of the discussion. Hardly an example of civil discourse

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What you should wish for is the ability to compose a comprehensible quote. This is woefully incomplete and confused at best and nonsense at worst.

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It is complete enough to show that you accused me of inventing the context right before I provided relevant context with proof. And you say that I am destroying civil discourse and making false accusations ?

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Again, congratulations on the message link, but it doesn't matter what you posted there. The problem for you is that what natural events stood in for the miracles, or the nature of the explanations for what people mistook for those miracles, is unknowable. I'm aware that you have the conceit to repeatedly claim you know them.

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On the contrary. Since the explanations I have been talking about all along are mine of course I know what they are. And since the point is to explain the account in 1 Corinthians 15:5-8 I don’t need to know what actually happened (and I remind you that those verses do not explicitly make any claims of miracles).Really you ought to ask yourself why you are making so many irrational objections to my argument.

Yes, I read yours, for the first thousand words at least :-) Yup, we're saying the same thing, but you have more patience......

Jes followin' your lead, darlin'. You don't listen real well, do ya. I told you to let me know when you're ready to return to civil discourse. Is this a signal you're ready? Wow, "relevant context with proof." Congratulations! Any other delusions you want to tell us about? Confused as ever, I see. Your irrational argument, you mean?--Percy

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Jes followin' your lead, darlin'.

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Oh no, the credit is all yours. The refusal to understand my argument, the ridiculous assertions, the failures to follow the thread of conversation, the complaints when your errors were pointed out, the false accusations. Really how could there be any constructive discussion under those conditions ?As for the rest of your post the answers already given refute your claims.

The claim was about about accepting the Bible's evidence as true. Whether the common folk possessed a Bible is immaterial to this. Regardless, one would not fair well in either the Catholic or heretic camps if one was to say you were skeptical of the Bible. The number isn't important. Your claim was about educated people. Exactly my point. It would be foolish to disagree with the power of the evidence of the Bible until basically the 20th Century, though it could be done - to some extent in the 18th and 19th Centuries. They said they were - but the aforementioned disincentives for proclaiming atheism suggests the data is tainted. In the sentence in discussion I said 'even now' - which is very modern. "regarded the Bible's evidence as sufficient to utterly commit their lives to Jesus Christ"I'm pointing out that it would be difficult for a US politician who proclaimed the Bible's evidence is insufficient to dedicate their lives to Christ to do well. Even if that were so, that doesn't matter. I'm talking about negative consequences to a person's career. Not criminal ones. If a person doesn't do their job, or some part of their job, because it conflicts with their stated religious beliefs then they'd be failing to perform duties. Maybe in that case, their career would be harmed.

Why thank you, but I simply couldn't accept your generous offer. My, my, but we do have an active imagination, don't we. Yes, we certainly do.--Percy

I tell you what Percy. The next time you object to one of my arguments and can’t be bothered to understand it, just say so and save all the unnecessary unpleasantness.Unless the unpleasantness is the point, and at this stage that wouldn’t surprise me.

Oh, did I object to one of your precious arguments? Aw, poor baby. Like I keep saying, anytime you're ready to return to civil discourse just let me know.--Percy

If you have nothing worth saying, better not to say it.

Darn good advice - will you be taking this advice yourself, by the way?Like I keep saying, any time you're ready to return to civil discourse, just let me know.--Percy