Modulous writes:
I don't know that I'd used the term incredulity. I think rigor is better.
'I don't believe miracles can happen' is incredulity - inability or unwillingness to believe.
I've characterized miracles in a variety of similar ways. Miracles are impossible. Miracles are a suspension of the laws of physics. An unwillingness to believe in the nonexistent is not incredulity. It's being realistic. And demanding evidence derived as directly as possible from reality is being rigorous.
For me incredulity doesn't really capture my feeling about miracles. Maybe incredulity has a different feel for you, I don't know, but I feel the same way about miracles as I do about pots of gold at the end of the rainbow and spinning straw into gold, and incredulity definitely feels like the wrong word. I feel that my reasons for rejecting miracles go beyond mere incredulity, which is why I suggested rigor instead.
But rigor also addresses your request that I "go further in your explanation." Rigor is what we need to bring to our determinations about what constitutes evidence and what does not. That's why I said, "'Everything is evidence,' has no rigor."
A broad declaration of, "Everything is evidence," has no rigor.
Written documents are evidence.
They can be.
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?
It's evidence. After all you could be lying about having lied or writing a novel. It's just that latter statement is yet another piece of evidence to doubt the reliability of the Mars statement.
And with all that doubt you still want to call it evidence?
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?
Of course we want rigor. I introduced those things back in
Message 655:
quote:
When was the source, written or unwritten, produced (date)?
Where was it produced (localization)?
By whom was it produced (authorship)?
From what pre-existing material was it produced (analysis)?
In what original form was it produced (integrity)?
What is the evidential value of its contents (credibility)?
Then concerning rigor we may only differ on when it gets applied. You want to consider everything evidence and then apply rigor to discover the quality/credibility of the evidence, and even if it fails those tests you still want to consider it evidence, even though it is, in effect, evidence of nothing. I want to consider everything information and then apply rigor to discover whether it has sufficient quality/credibility to qualify as evidence. If not then it isn't evidence, because it isn't support or proof of anything.
Regarding John and the miracles specifically, I think I've already explained this. The suspension of natural laws renders it false immediately.
So its just incredulity that natural laws can be suspended?
I suspect our views on science are fairly similar. Is incredulity how you'd characterize your view on the possibility of suspending natural laws? Maybe it is, I don't know. In any case, it certainly isn't the word I'd choose to describe my own views. My reaction to the headline, "Miracles proven," would not be incredulity or extreme skepticism. It would be outright rejection. I would consider it ridiculous.
Do you have evidence that natural laws cannot be suspended?
I suspect you do. And that was my point. You have evidence that you use to question the reliability of other evidence.
No, I'm not aware of any evidence that natural laws cannot be modified or suspended, except in the form of negative evidence in that it's never been observed. Generally I think that people use their knowledge to test information for it's value as evidence.
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.
Nor is what you think, for what its worth.
I never said that what I think is an argument. I was responding to your use of the argument that "many people think..." by pointing out that many people think things that are wrong or contradictory.
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.
What a word means, is how it is used. So how it is used is quite important.
I think most people use the word evidence pretty much the way it is defined in the dictionary. There's a trivial sense in which it is true that "everything is evidence," for example anything is evidence of it's existence, but that's is definitely not what people normally have in mind when they use the word evidence. It isn't common usage. When people say evidence they're thinking of something that is support or proof or disproof of something. They don't think that evidence is anything that anybody scribbles down.
Seems to be a bit of disagreement among historians, including of the miraculous events.
Well naturally. I was talking about reliability of the evidence, just like they do.
What you said that I was concluding a response to was, "Nevertheless I happen to think a testimony is evidence, as do most other people - professional historians included," so if you were actually "talking about reliability of the evidence" then that definitely didn't come across.
The point I was making with my Wikipedia excerpt is that the "professional historians included" you mentioned don't seem to have the consensus about "testimony as evidence" that you implied.
No, it's not really history. It's quite clearly religion with all the accompanying claptrap of most religions.
A document that makes claims about what happened in the past is making historical claims. So it falls under history. History and religion are not mutually exclusive categories. Documents about Buddha's life or Mohammad's life can be both religion and historical evidence regarding their biographical details.
Lots of written works mention people and events of history (
A Tale of Two Cities,
Julius Caesar), that doesn't turn them into history books.
Anyway, are we still talking about John or the Gospels? If so then you seem to saying that want to consider them history or geography or biography or whatever else they might contain trivial elements of. Faith would say they're science books, too. For me they are what they are, religious origin stories. I don't think you'll find a dictionary anywhere that calls them anything other than stories of Christ's life.
If you're talking about the entire Bible, especially the Old Testament, then there's a lot of history there with a fair amount of corroboration, and in some cases excellent corroboration. If you want to call some books of the Old Testament history then while I'd prefer calling them religious books that happen to include some history, it doesn't seem worth arguing over.
A written witness statement is unsupported claims. If support for the claims is identified then the claims can become evidence.
Witness statements are evidence. If they're unsupported then that's another way of saying they are uncorroborated. They don't become evidence upon corroboration. They become corroborated evidence.
Hmmm, we seem to have become reduced to trading opposing opinions.
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?
The diary vs Gospel.
Oh, okay. In that case the exchange I quoted in
Message 753 was:
Well, The Diary of Anne Frank and the Gospel of John are completely different beasts. The likelihood of finding accurate information in a diary is far, far greater than finding it in a religion's origin story full of the supernatural.
The reliability or accuracy of the mundane events in either is a different question as to whether either is data that can interpreted using historical methods to support, to varying degrees, various historical hypotheses.
I see what you're saying now. I guess I don't agree. It seems like "the reliability or accuracy of the mundane events" in the diary and Gospels would be a key issue in their interpretation "using historical methods". To me they don't seem like different questions but very interdependent issues.
Testimony is one of the worst forms of information if you're seeking accuracy.
Agreed. Unfortunately, sometimes its the only one available.
Yeah, but this is reminiscent of the old joke about looking for the earring under the streetlight because that's where the light is, not because that's where the earring was lost. In other words, bad or false testimony can be worse than none at all. Speaking of testimony, give this a look:
15 men exonerated in one day -- and 7 Chicago cops taken off the street. Would you really call the testimony of these bad cops evidence? Is it really information that supports or proves anything that really happened, which is what evidence is?
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.
I disagree. They're evidence. Just really bad quality with next to no reliability.
So would I be correct in saying that in your mind there's evidence, bad evidence but evidence nonetheless, that a secret group controls the world, that Obama is a Muslim who is not a citizen of the US, that the Bush administration blew up the World Trade Center, that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't work alone, that aliens are being held in Area 51, and so forth? If so, that's very interesting.
In my mind these conspiracy theories have no evidence, only unsubstantiated allegations. People's ability to make stuff up doesn't suddenly create evidence out of thin air.
If everything is evidence, which is the direction you're going, evidence ceases to have useful meaning. It's just a synonym for everything.
Evidence is that which increases the probability of a hypothesis being true.
I'm surprised to hear you say this. This isn't that different from the dictionary definition that you objected to earlier.
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.
Heh, but also - this statement is evidence you have a cat.
Hey, we agree! But you think it's evidence because "everything is evidence," while I think it's evidence because it's "that which tends to prove or disprove something."
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.
Two people arguing about who killed a cat is reasonable evidence of a dead cat.
Saying it isn't evidence is unsupportable.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolfe?
Why the Nazis again?
Recent event of significant importance that occurred approximately as long ago as the Gospels were from there events. And an example I could be confident wouldn't be obscure to you.
I've heard of Churchill and Montgomery, too.
Anyway, does it make sense to you that that portion of Goering's testimony that was self-serving lies was evidence of anything?
We can't know what was self-serving lies without comparing his statements to other evidence. Again, weighing two or more pieces of evidence to decide the probable truth based on them.
But today, do you still consider Goering's self-serving lies evidence of anything?
And if not, as the veracity of Goering's statements was assessed, how does evidence become no longer evidence, and what is it that it becomes?
You didn't evade it? You certainly didn't answer it.
The answer was 'To some extent' along with additional information.
That's my third time answering it.
Sorry, didn't mean to make you answer the same question over and over, but honestly, I couldn't recognize an answer. If someone were to ask me, "How did Modulous address the issue of a miracle corroborated across three Synoptics," I wouldn't have had a clue how to answer. I see you say some more about it now, so let me take a look.
It is not sufficient. I even went on to say 'and the evidence of a shared source of the synoptics means using them to corroborate one another is questionable.'
That was from when I first broached the topic, asking you to consider the miracle in Matthew, Mark and John about Jesus walking on water. You demurred because John was so at odds with the other Gospels, so I asked you consider a miracle common to the Synoptics.
You ignoring my answer isn't me demurring.
I'm not trying to annoy you. I'm just saying that, honestly, I still don't know your answer. If your intent was to fully answer the question then I'm thankful, but through some cross-up or just call me dumb if you like, no answer was apparent at my end. Oh, wait, your next paragraph provides an answer:
The answer is that there is some corroboration - but the texts aren't independent which undermines the corroboration. The texts don't agree in a variety of ways. Sometimes when the texts agree, they use identical or near identical words. And also - miracles are more likely to be made up to serve a religious purpose than they are to actually have happened.
So we agree that miracles are made up? If I'm interpreting you correctly and you do believe miracles are made up, how could there ever be any evidence of miracles, no matter how many independent or interdependent corroborations there are?
I hope you know how this is going to help the discussion because I haven't a clue.
It's about what I said just above. Someone writing about miracles isn't evidence of miracles, no matter how many other people write about the same miracles.
I'm not sure how many times you are going to ask me to repeat this:
I wasn't asking you to repeat anything. I said "Just to be clear..." to make it clear that I was restating the question in another way in order to, well, be more clear. Anyway, this appears to be more information, so let me take a look:
Evidence does not mean something is true.
It doesn't mean it is not false.
Evidence is something that increases the probability of something.
Other evidence can decrease the probability of something.
In order for me to believe something, the balance of the evidences has to reach a certain threshold.
Things don't stop being evidence just because they suggest something contrary to my views.
That sounds fine, but how is a Gospel account of a miracle, something that is impossible and made up, evidence? Because everything is evidence? Well, we've been over this ground before, I'll stop there.
I warrent you are satisfied with with this hole, I wouldn't want anybunny to suggest I took us down it, I hop you know the way back out.
Sorry to put you through all this.
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.
I was quoting you, so I used quotation marks. Is that OK?
Oh. I thought you were emphasizing that you hadn't said "no reason".
I'm truly making my best effort to understand you. When I get it wrong it isn't for lack of effort. I'm trying very hard. Let me emphasize this point by quoting this part from me
Percy writes:
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?
Does that read to you like someone who's just giving a casual read to your posts and not making any effort to get things right?
In any case, you replied to that with:
The evidence may not sufficiently, in my view, support the claim to elicit my belief.
But that being the case, it doesn't stop being evidence.
So everything is evidence always.
Well, like I've been saying, it's a nomenclature thing. I disagree with how indiscriminately we use the word evidence.
So what, in your view, would make something evidence?
Anything that's been vetted as evidence, which involves context, and which means it provides support or invalidation or proof or disproof in that context. For example, John is not evidence of Boyle's Law. It isn't evidence of the Battle of Hastings. It isn't evidence of the origin of corn. It isn't evidence of the impossible. John is evidence of the beliefs of an early Christian community. It is evidence of the antiquity of several towns in the Middle East. It is evidence for the existence of several people of that period.
If you want to say that everything is evidence of something then I guess I could go along with that, but in many cases it's trivial evidence like a pebble is evidence that the pebble exists, and it doesn't seem to me like a very useful definition of evidence.
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.
I don't think it can apply to literally anything, though. You certainly haven't supported that position. I mean anything that can be observed can be evidence for something.
How do you reconcile "I don't think it [evidence] can apply to literally anything" with "anything that can be observed can be evidence for something"? They seem to be saying opposite things. About everything being evidence you say, "You certainly haven't supported that position," and yet there you are saying "anything that can be observed can be evidence for something." And I've agreed that this is true, but only in a trivial sense.
The interesting question isn't 'is this evidence'. But what propositions are supported by this evidence, and how much support does it give.
Right, mostly. But I would vet the item first before calling it evidence. For example, you can't take the evidence box for one trial, take it into a different trial, and call it evidence for that trial. It's out of context. For that trial it is not evidence.
By taking the stance you have, you have created your own tangle of meaning, but its not too difficult - we typical and technical users all seem to get on just fine with the definition as is.
But there's no tangle of meaning. As I said in my previous message (and that you address shortly), "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."
That a child was wrong, didn't make it not evidence. It moved you to check it out, so you clearly thought the probability of a wet basement was higher than its baseline probability as a result of the child's report. It turns out that additional evidence overturned that hypothesis.
But the child's report wasn't evidence. It was a claim requiring vetting. Discovering actual water on the floor of the basement is evidence of a wet basement. A child's report is not evidence. Now my wife coming up the stairs and saying, "Water's come in again," during the period when we were having a problem would be evidence because the vettings already been done, since she was familiar with the problem, knew where the water was coming in and where to look for it, and as an adult was less likely to be fooled by shadows and such.
Seriously, are you really going to treat the every utterance of a child as evidence? But they've got eyes and ears, and so you investigate their reports. "Grammy's coming, Grammy's coming," is evidence to me that Grammy is actually approaching the front door when it happens on a day when Grammy is actually coming for a visit, but on other days I would assume they've made a mistake and that while someone is approaching the front door, it isn't Grammy, more likely an older neighbor or evangelist.
But that's actually a very good answer because it illustrates all the rigamarole you burden yourself with
Historical analysis may be a rigmarole, but its a rigorous pursuit I don't know why you find it problematic.
because for you everything written is evidence until proven otherwise
I'll keep repeating it - it's still evidence. There is no proving it otherwise.
It's still evidence? Evidence of what? You're at an archaeological dig and there's a trowel of dust and debris in your sieve. Is it all evidence? Or is the dust and debris just dust and debris, while the little cylinder seal you eventually uncover is evidence?
because for you everything written is evidence until proven otherwise
I'll keep repeating it - it's still evidence. There is no proving it otherwise.
I notice we're doing that a lot, repeating our basic premise over and over.
instead of taking the opposite course that nothing written is evidence until it has passed some minimum level of vetting.
I'm perfectly happy to say 'nothing written is to be believed until it has passed some minimum level of vetting'.
Right, but this phrasing just papers over our difference. What you really mean is, "No written evidence is to be believed until it has passed some minimum level of vetting, and whether it passes that vetting or not it is still evidence."
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.
Well yes, but that doesn't run counter to what I said, which was about believing. You either believe something or not. You might believe it with a great deal of tentativity, but belief is basically binary.
Oh, sorry, I must have misunderstood you somewhere along the way. I had no idea you thought "belief is basically binary." I don't know why you think that way, but we were talking about historians, and historians definitely have to make acceptance/rejection of the various candidate hypotheses probabilistic. Some things have a probability approaching 1 with no other possibilities (the Battle of Hastings happened), while others have many possibilities of various probabilities (what really happened to the illegitimate nephews of Richard III).
Yes, this is what I understood Faith to be saying. It's an evangelical approach, not a historical one.
That's what we were discussing - the evangelical approach.
Well, let's not confuse things. The evangelical approach may be where we started, but it's not where most of the discussion has been spent.
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.
Well yes, obviously. The same is true of deluded psychotics.
This is open to multiple interpretations. I won't venture a guess.
It says that faith is a belief that the eyewitness accounts are true, not that they are evidence upon which to build faith.
That's pedantry. Eye witness accounts are evidence. They have faith that the evidence is true.
I'm surprised to hear you say this. I thought this was something we agreed about, the horrible unreliability of eyewitness testimony. And there are many instances of eyewitness testimony in trial records where the eyewitness has later admitted that they spoke more about what they were coached to say rather than what actually happened.
The Reliability of Eyewitness Testimony is very interesting, here's one excerpt:
quote:
In 1986, Chicago began using the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or AFIS. Soon after this technology became available, Newsome began campaigning to have the unidentified fingerprints run through the AFIS databases. This was done in 1989 and the fingerprints matched a man who was already in prison serving a life sentence for murder. However, this information was not revealed until 1994, when a court order forced the police to run the prints through the database again. Because these prints matched someone else, James Newsome was released from custody in 1995, having served over 15 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. He was officially pardoned by the governor a few months later. In 1997, he received $140,350 for wrongful imprisonment from a compensation claim with the state of Illinois. In 2001, he sued two homicide detectives who had framed him by coaching the eyewitnesses. He was awarded $1 million for each year he had been wrongfully imprisoned. This is the largest award which has ever been granted based on wrongful conviction (Vollen, 2005).
The relevant portion is the coaching of the eyewitnesses.
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.
You could just define evidence, maybe that would help. Better than listing things that you think are or are not evidence and hoping I'll get to it that way.
I gave you the dictionary definition of evidence: "that which tends to prove or disprove something; ground for belief; proof." I think that's the definition people generally have in mind when they use the word evidence. They definitely don't think "everything is evidence."
--Percy
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