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| Author | Topic: The Tension of Faith | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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LamarkNewAge Member Posts: 2316 Joined: Member Rating: 1.2 |
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PaulK Member Posts: 17825 Joined: Member Rating: 2.2 |
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Phat Member  Posts: 18298 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 1.1 |
deleted...wrong respondant
Edited by Phat, : No reason given.Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all. —RC Sproul "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." —Mark Twain " ~"If that's not sufficient for you go soak your head."~Faith Paul was probably SO soaked in prayer nobody else has ever equaled him.~Faith 
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Phat Member Posts: 18298 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 1.1 |
You often mention the pack mentality of EvC Forum and that you see it dominated by Leftist Ideology. At a posting rate of over 9 posts per day, you are on course to become the number one respondent here. One thing I will admit, somewhat sadly: You are the poster girl for Biblical Christianity. In case you have not done so, I encourage you to read the blog I posted over at The Marketing Of Christianity. The Christians Making Atheists
I believe that that blog is talking about you. (Not that I am innocent...I too make many mistakes in my replies to others.)
Faith writes: In my opinion, your weakness is that you never entertain opinions and beliefs contrary to your own. Your critics say that you are part of the cult of Biblical Christianity. If anyone wishes to see evidence of its impact, read the comments after that blog post--made by a variety of respondents. You and others here impute my views to me as some odd idiosyncratic invention of my own, but every day I hear sermons that share my point of view, I own hundreds of books that share it, my entire Christian life has revolved around the traditional understanding of the Bible, traditional theology. We truly live in a culture having a war on ideology. I used to think and believe that it was a sign of the last days, as you still probably do. Now, though still a believer in Jesus Christ, I fear that Biblical Christianity and traditional values are going to lead the world into a self-fulfilling prophecy of chaos...simply because we are taking a stand for authoritarian ideology marketed as The Truth. My intent is not to attack you personally, though if the shoe fits, wear it...don't run from it. I am challenging you to be less authoritarian.Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all. —RC Sproul "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." —Mark Twain " ~"If that's not sufficient for you go soak your head."~Faith Paul was probably SO soaked in prayer nobody else has ever equaled him.~Faith
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Percy Member  Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
Modulous writes: And with all that doubt you still want to call it evidence?
Yes. Evidence is not 'that which removes all doubt universally and without any question'. Except we weren't talking about doubt of what the evidence shows, but doubt about the reliability of the evidence itself. To repeat an example we've been using, if you know someone's lying is it really evidence? You say yes, I say no. Or were you thinking of the legal realm, where tradition calls all testimony evidence. The definition in my dictionary has a different definition of evidence for the legal realm:
quote: In this discussion I am not usually speaking in a legal context, and when I am hopefully I'm clear about it.
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 Well kind of, except it isn't, in effect, evidence of nothing. It is evidence of something, it's just not sufficient to support that something enough to elicit my belief. What if it failed the test of quality/credibility so badly as to be revealed a complete fabrication, Piltdown Man, say. Is it still evidence of the antiquity of man in Great Britain, just with zero quality and credibility? Or is it a forgery and not evidence at all, at least anthropologically?
'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. But my position is not 'everything is evidence' unless you want to get to that trivial level. My point is that written testimony is historical evidence. That's been your point? I didn't realize that. You've only used the phrase "written testimony" once in a message posted to me, and it wasn't to say your point is that "written testimony is historical evidence." I've been talking about the written word and how just the act of writing something down doesn't turn it into evidence. Unless the written word and written testimony are the same thing in your eyes, maybe we've been talking at cross purposes. So, then, what makes something written testimony? Obviously you consider John written testimony. How about the apocrypha, are they written testimony? How about the pseudepigrapha, are they written testimony? How about the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Iliad and the Odyssey, are they written testimony? Is an inventory written testimony? Is a reminder I scribble to myself written testimony? And if there is a point where you draw the line between "is written testimony" and "is not written testimony", then why do you draw it at that particular point? I think you and Tangle went to the trouble of defining testimony. To focus on just one instance of the written word, what makes John testimony? Why isn't it just an account whose qualifications as evidence must be assessed? I also presume you consider all these works evidence, so if there was a point where you drew a line between "is written testimony" and "is not written testimony", what is the point of that distinction if it's all evidence anyway? And finally, does written testimony always have to be historical evidence, or could it be something else, because if it could never be anything else then "written testimony" is just a synonym for "historical evidence."
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. I've been talking about the reliability of evidence ad nauseam haven't I? Not at that particular point in the discussion, no. I traced back several messages to make sure, but I'll do it again now... Nope, I didn't notice anywhere that that subdiscussion touched on the reliability of evidence, not that I'm perfect in ferreting these things out. It started in Message 718 with me asking if John is evidence that Jesus asked the servants to fill the jars with water, with my opinion being that it was unverifiable, and the discussion moved on from there through the messages to where we are now, but if you ever made the reliability of evidence part of that subdiscussion I somehow missed it. Sorry. Anyway, I think my point about the historians still stands. Obviously there is a wide variety of opinion among historians about what in John qualifies as evidence, and that Wikipedia article on the historical reliability of the Gospels did talk about historical reliability quite a bit:
quote: Do you really think that historians who question an account's historical authenticity consider it evidence of anything that really happened?
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. Testimony. I'm talking about testimony. People writing a history of events as an eyewitness, or reporting the words of people that claimed to be eyewitnesses etc. Okay, then obviously we've been talking at cross purposes. I'm questioning whether any example of the written word is evidence, while you're claiming that testimony, something presumably more formal, is people writing histories or reporting what eyewitnesses said. To apply these views to John, in my view John is just written words that contains no evidence of the truth of anything it says, and in your view John is history and reports that are evidence of the things it says, just as Faith claims.
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. The gospels are clearly biographies. There's no trivial element there. They are about the notable times of a guy called Jesus. The Gospels are biographies? Wasn't it just a second ago that they were histories? Isn't my characterization of them as the origin stories for early Christian religious communities far more accurate? For all we know the model for the Jesus described by Paul was actually the Teacher of Righteousness from the Dead Sea Scrolls, not some 1st century figure who purportedly accomplished astounding deeds and miracles and yet escaped the notice of history. It's also important to note that a key characteristic of myth is that details increase with time, and this is what happens in the time from Paul to the Gospels. Here's an interesting characterization from Frontline: What are the Gospels?: "Neither biographies nor objective historical accounts, the gospels resembled religious advertisements." It has quotes from a number of historians, here are the characterizations I liked best:
quote: 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. Welcome to history. It's written, so they say, by the victors. Well said. You often hear it speculated how successfully the early Christian church whitewashed their own history.
One's conclusions should be based on the totality of evidence available. The evidence for, and the evidence against, a proposition. But not the false or fake evidence. I know you disagree with that, but for example, once you know the gun or drugs were planted, they cease to be evidence. Continuing to call them evidence is misleading at best and simply untrue at worst. The only way the word "evidence" is an accurate description in this case is if it is always without fail preceded by the adjective "false" or "fake" or "fabricated".
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. Yes. Well, as I said, that's very interesting. Is that because you see written testimony for any of these conspiracy theories? Or is written testimony only for historical evidence? If that's the case, where do you see this evidence coming from? Let's take it to the next step. I write, "The Beatrix Potter stories are true." Is that evidence? No need to answer because that's so similar to where I asked you to consider the statement, "I just got back from Mars." You said the assemblage of evidence would show it wasn't true but that it was still evidence. As much as you aren't a fan of my saying that you believe "everything is evidence", I'm unable to find anything you don't consider evidence. I can't seem to coax you into any indication that it isn't true that for you "everything is evidence." Which is fine. If that's your position then that's your position. Just say it loud and proud so that isn't so confusing what position I'm actually arguing against. When you say that you're actually arguing that written testimony is historical evidence it feels like you're trying to place some qualifications on what can be considered evidence, but as soon as I start exploring where the boundary for you lies between evidence and non-evidence, there isn't one. Everything is evidence.
In my mind these conspiracy theories have no evidence, only unsubstantiated allegations. I'd go over some of the evidence if you'd like, seems a little off topic to me, though. Some of it is covered in other threads. Actually I think it would very helpful to this discussion to see some examples of what you consider genuine evidence of things untrue. It would be even better if you could also provide examples of things you consider not evidence at all. Go ahead.
I'm surprised to hear you say this. This isn't that different from the dictionary definition that you objected to earlier. My objections to dictionary definitions is only in their vague generalness. But you just basically said the same thing as the dictionary definition, only in your own words. You just argued that evidence "increases the probability of a hypothesis being true", so of course I was surprised that you said this, because that means that when it no longer increases the probability of a hypothesis being true then it isn't evidence anymore. But that contradicts what you've said at other times, for example just a bit further on in your message where you say about Gring's self-serving lies: "It's always evidence." Is this really that different from "Everything is evidence"?
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." Not because 'everything is evidence' but because I have a written witness testimony. But the worst evidence possible is eyewitness testimony, and it wasn't testimony anyway, it was just something I wrote. You think you're a good judge? I bet I could slip false facts about myself past you left and right. Written stuff is the worst kind of evidence. Resumes are a whole genre of false facts.
I've heard of Churchill and Montgomery, too. Cool. Do you regard them as significantly unreliable witnesses? Britain was pretty good at the art of deception during WWII, skilled at fabricating evidence, or hiding what they knew even when doing so cost the lives of many men. You can keep using the Nazi examples if you like, it just raises general concerns about staying on topic - introducing Nazis into a thread has a tendency to throw it off-topic or even spiral out of control.
But today, do you still consider Gring's self-serving lies evidence of anything? And if not, as the veracity of Gring's statements was assessed, how does evidence become no longer evidence, and what is it that it becomes? It's always evidence. Is there nothing that isn't evidence?
Historians will presumably be looking at that evidence for decades, possibly centuries to come - trying to understand what that evidence means. Determining based on Gring's testimony, and others, what they believe the historical truth of the matter to be. Sure. I'm most fascinated by Hitler's rise to power, but I guess Gring's Nuremberg testimony is interesting, too. But are lies evidence? For instance, if Churchill were to have stated, "We always used evidence gained from our code breaking of the Enigma machine to save lives, even when it risked letting the Nazis know we'd broken their code," is that historical evidence of how Britain actually handled the information? I think historians would dismiss it, not factor it in as part of the evidence equation. But I wonder how much longer the Nazis and WWII will garner significant historical attention. To kids today, tomorrow's historians, WWII is ancient history. I remember how long ago WWI seemed to me when I was a kid, and WWII is a lot longer ago now than WWI was then.
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. And as I said - we can't consider miracles common to the synoptics corroborative because of evidence of a shared source. It's not like John (whoever he really was) was likely to be ignorant of them so the synoptics and John can't be considered independent. So why do you believe you have evidence rather than a story with shared sources? I'm just looking for why the criteria isn't, "Everything is evidence."
So we agree that miracles are made up? I certainly believe so, yes.
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? My beliefs aren't what define what evidence is. I might think a person found guilty of a crime is not guilty - but that isn't necessarily because I think there is no evidence for this, only that the evidence is not sufficient to conclude guilt - or that the evidence supporting innocence is stronger. So in the above quote I've asked the question a different way this time, still seeking your criteria for what determines what is evidence, and the criteria still seems to be, "Everything is evidence."
Someone writing about miracles isn't evidence of miracles, no matter how many other people write about the same miracles. A witness testimony to an event is evidence, even if I think the event is unlikely to have actually happened. You just finished saying a few lines back that you believed miracles are made up. Now they're merely unlikely? "I just turned water into wine." Is that statement unlikely or made up? "I just saw a unicorn." Is that statement unlikely or made up? "I just saw the Beatrix Potter characters Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and Peter, and they're real!" Is that statement unlikely or made up? I think your view of evidence has difficulty distinguishing between fiction and reality.
That sounds fine, but how is a Gospel account of a miracle, something that is impossible and made up, evidence? Because my opinion about the (im)possibility or made-upness of a thing is not relevant to whether something is evidence. But this makes no sense. When you say that your opinion isn't relevant to whether something is evidence you don't mean that you're a special case and that the rest of our opinions are perfectly relevant. You mean that in general people's opinions aren't relevant. That's ludicrous. It absolutely is people who make the decisions about whether something is evidence, yet you remain reluctant to provide any criteria for determining what is evidence and what is not. The only conclusion you leave me with is, "Everything is evidence."
Sorry to put you through all this.
 What's that for? You said, in a pleasant way, that I'd taken us down a rathole, and I was apologizing. A couple paragraphs later I explained how hard I'm working to understand you, trying to convince you that I'm sincere and not just yanking you around, since you seem to feel I'm taking us down paths for no obvious reason.
So everything is evidence always. If something is evidence for a position, it doesn't stop being evidence for a position because contrary evidence exists. There's nothing to argue with in your statement. When evidence is incomplete then multiple possible pictures can emerge. Historians do this all the time. But are lies evidence? Is discredited evidence still evidence? I'm talking about evidence of events of the real world. Your answer has been yes, since you said that it is even evidence when I say, "I just got back from Mars." This is your "everything is evidence" position. But I guess our main difference is about "written testimony." To you written testimony is historical evidence. Why historical? Why not scientific or geographical or something else? What qualities must the written word have to be deemed written testimony? What validation process does the written word have to go though to determine if it has the necessary qualities to be deemed written testimony? Has John gone through that process? Was there a general consensus on the outcome? To me words are words, and there are no special words that put some writing in a category above others as "written testimony." An online lookup of "written testimony" returns references to legal definitions, and most of the time I'm not writing about the legal realm. Besides all the problems with witness testimony, I think your use of the term "written testimony" in reference to writings like John is inappropriate.
I referenced the Stanford Philosophy encyclopedia with Tangle earlier using an uncontroversial topic. Let me summarize here: "My name is Mod', says Mod. This is evidence that I am Mod. "That guy who calls himself Mod is a pathological liar. His real name is Tony", says Mod's wife. This is evidence that I am not Mod. "My wife and I have recently had an acrimonious break up and she is determined to discredit my reputation" This is evidence that calls into question the pathological liar claim. The existence of defeating evidence doesn't render the defeated evidence as 'not evidence'. If my wife produced documents to support her case, and I produced documents to prove that my wife is in a position to forge documents, and my wife produced evidence to show this is untrue....it's all evidence. It will need to be weighed, analysed until an opinion about the truth of the matter is arrived at. That opinion may change if further analysis is made later, or if additional evidence comes to light.... but the evidence doesn't cease being evidence. Well now you've suddenly dropped into the legal realm where the word evidence has a long tradition. The poor legal system can deal with the back and forth statements of you and your wife that cannot all be true and call it all evidence, but that's not what we're talking about. The question isn't whether your testimony and sworn statements are evidence in a legal context. The question is what is evidence in a general context. Is John evidence of impossible effects? Is the joking comment, "Nice day for a walk," on a rainy day evidence that it's a nice day for a walk? Is mere spoken or written declarations evidence of anything. And of course my position is that they aren't. People saying things is the worst sort of evidence and shouldn't be called evidence at all. True evidence is the result of events in the real world. Everything else is mere human commentary.
That's what I mean by
quote: But you don't have evidence. You have words.
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. It was evidence, it required corroboration. But you like the word evidence for everything. You don't actually know whether it provides proof or disproof of anything without corroboration, but it's evidence anyway.
It's still evidence? Evidence of what? A good question. But the point is that if it was evidence of X, there is no proving it is not evidence of X, there's just reducing the probabilities by introducing further evidence How do you prove it is evidence of X? And why does at one point believing it was evidence of X render it impossible to ever prove it was not evidence of X, such as when the initial assessment was mistaken. For instance, when the evidence room makes a mistake such that the trial lawyer plops evidence box B down on the table at trial A and announces, "In this box is the evidence that the defendant is guilty." Not everything is evidence. A lot of what is said or written is just words that is either evidence of nothing or of very little. I'm still curious how you address this: 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?
This exchange was about the religious perspective, as you said in Message 718 You went back 7 messages to prove what we're currently talking about? You replied to my introduction of the religious perspective of faith by describing something very similar to Faith's evangelical view of faith. It's contradictory to say in one message that, "That's what we were discussing - the evangelical approach," and then in the next message say, "This exchange was about the religious perspective, as you said in Message 718." By the way there's a [msg] dBCode, so you could have written the much easier [msg=718] instead of the more difficult [mid=823830].
I'm surprised to hear you say this. I thought this was something we agreed about, the horrible unreliability of eyewitness testimony. Something can be evidence, even if it is unreliable. Reliability and evidence are not the same thing. That has been my point all this time - I hope you saying it is surprising was a rhetorical piece of hyperbole. Something so unreliable has no right being called evidence. It just seems that you have no standards for what you call evidence. For you, if it exists, it's evidence. As I've conceded in the past, this is true in a trivial and non-useful way, but it isn't the way the word evidence is used. I'm using the word evidence the same way it is generally used, that stuff that doesn't provide support or proof or disproof of something isn't evidence. My difference with common usage doesn't lie with the word evidence itself but with what we recognize as unreliable. For example, most of the world still places a high value on eyewitness testimony, as the sad tale of your friend demonstrates:
I had a friend go to prison for two years based only on a single eye witness, no corroboration of any kind (and even multiple pieces of evidence to show the eye witness was unreliable). I have no idea how it even got to court. I sat through through the trial - I'm painfully aware I assure you. You've made me curious. What did they think he'd done?
What people think proves something, or is grounds for belief will vary. People obviously think eyewitness testimony is grounds for belief. A growing body of research indicates this faith is misplaced.
And what about the case where there are grounds for belief AND grounds for disbelief. Do the grounds for belief stop being grounds for belief or do they remain grounds for belief but not sufficient grounds given the existence of the grounds for disbelief? Weighing insufficient or conflicting evidence is fraught with difficulty. In the legal realm where only one outcome is possible (at a time - there can always be appeals), mistakes are inevitable and undoubtedly far more common than the statistics show. In the historical realm, as I've said before, historians are accustomed to dealing with a multiplicity of possibilities of various probability.
In history, there are often seemingly contradictory pieces of information. Both sources are evidence for their position, and it may be that we can't say anything about the truth of the matter as a result. But they are both evidence for either position. They are not sufficient for consensus belief (some historians might say source A is more reliable because the author is respected and educated, others might say source B is more reliable because they were more closely tied to the events (a direct witness say)) - are the sources not evidence? Surely they will be presented 'as evidence' for position A or position B accordingly in a historical debate. I think the natural response then is that they are both evidence. Certainly. --Percy
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
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Percy Member Posts: 22480 From: New Hampshire Joined: Member Rating: 4.8 |
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1465 days)  Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
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Faith Suspended Member (Idle past 1465 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
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Modulous Member  Posts: 7801 From: Manchester, UK Joined: |
To repeat an example we've been using, if you know someone's lying is it really evidence? What does it mean to know someone is lying?How do I know? Might I be wrong? What If you know that same someone is telling the truth? Is it evidence for you, but not evidence for me? Or is their testimony simply evidence that I don't believe and you do? What if evidence convinces me they are telling the truth? Does it become evidence suddenly where it was not before? What if evidence then comes up that halves the chance they are telling the truth?
That's been your point? I didn't realize that. You've only used the phrase "written testimony" once in a message posted to me, and it wasn't to say your point is that "written testimony is historical evidence." I've been talking about eye witnesses and their evidential value in history for pretty much the entirety of this thread. My first message to you was one argument used to justify John as an eyewitness. Then:
quote: It's about the witness thing again
quote: and then
quote: and
quote: then
quote: quote: quote: quote: quote: going on....
quote: quote: Pretty sure I've consistently been talking about testimony (particularly, but not exclusively eye witness) and it's status as evidence when considering events of the past. Ctrl-F on 'witness testimony' is insufficient, just reading one of my posts however, should be sufficient. I hope these excerpts are enough evidence for you.
So, then, what makes something written testimony If it's written.And it makes claims about how things are/were. And finally, does written testimony always have to be historical evidence, or could it be something else, because if it could never be anything else then "written testimony" is just a synonym for "historical evidence." Other things can be historical evidence other than testimony.
. I'm questioning whether any example of the written word is evidence, while you're claiming that testimony, something presumably more formal, is people writing histories or reporting what eyewitnesses said. I hope, at this time, we can lay to bed this particular problem now.
The Gospels are biographies? Wasn't it just a second ago that they were histories? Isn't my characterization of them as the origin stories for early Christian religious communities far more accurate? I don't see why something cannot be biographical in nature, about the past AND an origin story for early religious communities.
I know you disagree with that, but for example, once you know the gun or drugs were planted, they cease to be evidence. You keep saying it, but I don't see the argument to support it. Primarily it hinges on what 'to know' means. You can't know 100% the drugs were planted. Ever. Knowledge is tentative. Let's run through a scenario. Police officer produces drugs and says 'these were in the possession of the suspect'. 90% confidence. (say 10% chance officer is lying or mistaken) Suspect claims they were planted. Confidence 89% the suspect possessed the drugs - it's a common claim by criminals to try to muddy the water, but sometimes its true. A video shows the officer holding drugs, putting his hand into the suspects pocket and pulling out the drugs and arresting the suspect. 10% confidence. Very suspicious behaviour indeed. Officer claims the drugs fell out of the suspects pocket during the arrest, he picked them up, and was finishing the search with the drugs still in his hand. 20% confidence. That could happen. Further video footage shows the officer taking drugs out of his car prior to the arrest. 5% confidence The officer says the video was taken the day before when he wanted to show a CI the kind of drugs he was looking for. 8% confidence.... And so on. All of that is evidence, it all impacts the probabilities regarding whether the suspect held drugs. Regardless of the defeating evidence, the probability the suspect did have drugs on them is higher than a person who was thoroughly searched and no drugs were found. Thus the drugs and the testimony still increase the probability of the suspect actually possessing drugs. You don't throw that evidence out as no longer evidence.
Let's take it to the next step. I write, "The Beatrix Potter stories are true." Is that evidence? ... When you say that you're actually arguing that written testimony is historical evidence it feels like you're trying to place some qualifications on what can be considered evidence, but as soon as I start exploring where the boundary for you lies between evidence and non-evidence, there isn't one. Everything is evidence. But you aren't exploring the boundaries of what evidence is, you are exploring the boundaries of written testimony. Written testimony is evidence. If all I had were three pieces of evidence: 1. The stories of Beatrix Potter2. Percy is trustworthy 3. Percy says the stories are true. And no other evidence. Never seen a rabbit. Never seen any stories about rabbits or hedgehogs. Never even experienced the colour 'blue', only that this was Peter's waistcoat color, which is apparently clothing, which apparently people and a certain rabbit wears. I have only experienced your trustworthiness (however that was established without evidence....) and the Potter stories and you telling me they are true. I think (2) and (3) do increase the probability of (1) being true. It only sounds silly because we simply have an enormous weight of evidence that suggests it is very silly. Even if I knew you lied 50% of the time - it would still increase the probability of (1), just by halfish of what it was. But my owning a cat is not evidence of you owning a dog.My owning perfume does not support the veracity of Beatrix Potter tales. There are lots of things that aren't evidence of other things. So no, not 'everything is evidence' - except in the trivial case - and by only exploring testimony to truth of a thing you cannot possibly logically conclude that is my position. You can only conclude that 'all testimony to the truth of a proposition is evidence for the truth of that proposition'.
But you just basically said the same thing as the dictionary definition, only in your own words. You just argued that evidence "increases the probability of a hypothesis being true", so of course I was surprised that you said this, because that means that when it no longer increases the probability of a hypothesis being true then it isn't evidence anymore. But I have yet to see any mechanism where something that increases the probability of something being true suddenly doesn't increase the probability of something being true. So it's always evidence, even if we adjust those probabilities down - by say, finding something that increases the probability of the opposing proposition.
But that contradicts what you've said at other times, for example just a bit further on in your message where you say about Gring's self-serving lies: "It's always evidence." Is this really that different from "Everything is evidence"? Because witness testimony is not everything.
But the worst evidence possible is eyewitness testimony, and it wasn't testimony anyway, it was just something I wrote. It was testimony in the sense that it was something you claimed about something. You attested to the fact.
You think you're a good judge? I bet I could slip false facts about myself past you left and right. I'd be shocked if you couldn't. Let's say you list 100 facts about yourself. At least one of which is a lie and at least one of which is true. What is the probability than any given statement is true? Between 1 and 99% Thus if you say 'I've met Mick Jagger' - without any additional evidence to go on, I'd rate that as, at worst, 1% true. Which is considerably higher than I would place a random person's probability of having met Mick Jagger with no evidence to suggest that fact at all in play. Thus, even though you are very probably lying, your statement given I can't be 100% sure you are lying, increases the probability that you have in fact met Mick Jagger. Whether or not I choose to believe it is true, is a different matter, of course. It still supports the claim.It's still grounds I might refer to if I did decide to believe it. It is still that which increases the probability of the claim being true. Therefore it is evidence that you met Mick Jagger. See?
Britain was pretty good at the art of deception during WWII, skilled at fabricating evidence, or hiding what they knew even when doing so cost the lives of many men. You can keep using the Nazi examples if you like, it just raises general concerns about staying on topic - introducing Nazis into a thread has a tendency to throw it off-topic or even spiral out of control. As you seem determined to prove. The point is behind us now. Feel free to pick some other historical and unreliable witness who had access to the truth but whose veracity we can never be sure during some made claim as an example.
So why do you believe you have evidence rather than a story with shared sources? I'm just looking for why the criteria isn't, "Everything is evidence." Witness testimony, claimed witness testimony, increases the probability of something being true above the baseline where no such testimony exists. Did you know Queen Victoria met the Yeti while in India? There's no evidence she met a Yeti, nor that she went to India. So absent any evidence, should that thought pop into our head from nowhere, the baseline probability is basically close to 0. But a document from someone who knew Queen Victoria and said she did make a secret trip to India and did meet a Yeti and the writer, a close advisor to Queen Victoria even caught a glimpse of the beast... that increases the probability that she did beyond whatever near 0 probability it was before, to something pretty close to zero arguably but still higher than previously.
So in the above quote I've asked the question a different way this time, still seeking your criteria for what determines what is evidence, and the criteria still seems to be, "Everything is evidence." Evidence, yet again, is anything that increases the probability of a thing being true. I'm surprised you forgot since you exclaimed surprise when I have said it previously, and exposited on that surprise later on. My owning a cat does not increase the probability that you own a dog - (to be pedantic - given the existence of pet ownership not being something in question.). My owning a phone does not increase the probability that Julius Caesar pronounced 'v' more like 'w'. You having dogfood in your house increases the probability you own a dog.Puns, imitations of natural sounds, greek translations...all provide evidence that Caesar pronounced 'v' more like 'w'. You just finished saying a few lines back that you believed miracles are made up. Now they're merely unlikely? I think it is more likely they were made up than they actually happened. I believe they are made up because I think they are too unlikely. I cannot claim absolute knowledge about something like miracles, only make estimations of probability based on the evidence I do have and use those estimates in whether I assent to believe.
I think your view of evidence has difficulty distinguishing between fiction and reality. I use evidence to determine whether I think something is fiction or whether I think it is reality. Just like you. My epistemic humility however, prevents me from simply saying something isn't evidence for a proposition just because I disbelieve the proposition based on how I interpret the evidence.
But I guess our main difference is about "written testimony." To you written testimony is historical evidence. Why historical? Why not scientific or geographical or something else? It can be those things, but scientific evidence has certain particularities surrounding testimony and whether it can be considered scientific evidence so for simplicity I simply choose not to argue that it is scientific evidence. Since our overall topic here is Faith, evidence and the Bible - the most significant disagreement of which being 'what happened in the past', I've focussed on history as that seems the most relevant. I've distinguished it from scientific only to point out that written testimony is unlike blood stains or finger prints or photographs or .... but its still evidential.
But this makes no sense. When you say that your opinion isn't relevant to whether something is evidence you don't mean that you're a special case and that the rest of our opinions are perfectly relevant. You mean that in general people's opinions aren't relevant. My opinion about the proposition doesn't change whether something is evidence for that proposition. If my wife picked up a bloody knife she finds and I see this, and we're both puzzled by it. Then we find a dead body - stabbed, nearby. Then the police come in. The fact that my wife is holding a bloody knife is evidence she is the killer, even though I'm confident she isn't. If I didn't see her pick up the knife and only get told this later, the case is even more illustrative. The fact that she was near a stabbed person holding a knife certainly, even in my opinion, increases the probability that she is a murderer. It is certainly evidence to that end. But I may still not believe she is the murderer for a host of other reasons. But I'm not going to say 'Her holding a bloody knife is not evidence'. I might say 'Holding a bloody knife doesn't mean she did it'. I might be wrong about miracles. If nobody had ever claimed to have seen a miracle, maybe I'd rate their probability as 1% (using these numbers to just to avoid clumsy long decimals).If a thousand people claim to have seen one, maybe I'd rate them as being 1.1% The probability is higher with the witnesses, but I still don't believe. Same with black swans, gravitational waves....whatever. At some point, the evidence becomes sufficient to believe - but merely claiming to be a witness is weak enough that many witnesses don't tend to add up to much unless there is something real at stake - such as the careers of scientists or something, and some way for independent people with similar stakes to check the work.
It absolutely is people who make the decisions about whether something is evidence, yet you remain reluctant to provide any criteria for determining what is evidence and what is not. The only conclusion you leave me with is, "Everything is evidence." Let me know how many repeats of 'that which increases the probability of a proposition' it will take before you accept I am not reluctant to provide criteria. Other than some sense that you agree with this, you've not put forward much of your own criteria. It must 'support' a claim is the most explicit you've been, but you haven't described what supporting a claim actually means. If evidence is entirely subjective of course, then Christians who tell you their faith is based on evidence - and cite the Bible as evidence, are in fact citing evidence. Your response shouldn't be 'that isn't evidence'. It should be 'I don't see that as evidence'. Since it must be evidence if people have decided it is, at least for them.
What's that for? You said, in a pleasant way, that I'd taken us down a rathole, and I was apologizing. A couple paragraphs later I explained how hard I'm working to understand you, trying to convince you that I'm sincere and not just yanking you around, since you seem to feel I'm taking us down paths for no obvious reason. I gave you a tongue sticky out smilie to indicate this is still friendly, I'm not upset and we're all good.
To me words are words, and there are no special words that put some writing in a category above others as "written testimony." An online lookup of "written testimony" returns references to legal definitions, and most of the time I'm not writing about the legal realm. Besides all the problems with witness testimony, I think your use of the term "written testimony" in reference to writings like John is inappropriate. Well the argument is based on 'if John is witness testimony, as Christians believe based on the aforementioned argumentation and evidence....' But let's throw that out. Let's show why it still evidence without that starting point. Again, the numbers here are for show only, they aren't meant to be realistic, or agreeable or anything: Chance that John is a witness: 1%Chance that John is telling the truth as he remembers it: 1% Chance that John is not significantly/seriously mistaken or misremembering: 1% Chance that John is not a reasonable source of historical truth: 0.99 * 0.99 * 0.99 = 0.97 or 97% John cannot be relied upon for one reason or another. Therefore a 3% chance that John is a witness, is telling the truth as he remembers it and is not mistaken or misremembering to any significant degree. What is the baseline probability of the claim 'A person called Jesus miraculously turned water into wine'? 1/1000 % let's say. 3% > 1/1000 % Therefore the existence of John is an increase in the probability of Jesus turning water into wine. The maths is rough, but surely it is not mathematically possible for John to have either no impact or negative impact on the probability of the miracle. Negligible? Sure. But not 0. Since evidence is that which increases the probability of a thing, John is evidence of the wine miracle.
Well now you've suddenly dropped into the legal realm where the word evidence has a long tradition. Not legal, philosophy. I stated my source, here is a link:
Evidence (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
quote: I thought my version was a little more likely to be read.
Is John evidence of impossible effects? What's the probability they are impossible? Not 0, I'd wager.
"Nice day for a walk," on a rainy day evidence that it's a nice day for a walk? As I raised earlier when talking about analysing evidence:
quote: But you don't have evidence. You have words. If they increase the probabilities from the baseline, they're evidence. Let's take another uncontroversial example. A coin flip. You flip a coin. A person then says 'It is heads' Them saying it is heads doesn't impact the probability it is heads so it isn't evidence that it is heads. However if they say 'I saw it just before you covered it with your hand, it is heads'. The situation is less straightforward. If we know nothing else we might do as we did with John. 1% lying about seeing the coin. 1% mistaken about the coin. 1% saw the coin but is lying about it. Thus1% of the time their words are irrelevant. 1% of the time, they're wrong about it being heads 1% of the time, they're lying about it being heads. 97% of the time its heads1% of the time its 50/50 2% of the time its tails Now their witness testimony has drastically increased the probability of being heads. If you were to agree with the chances of lies and mistakes - then you can't help but agree the statement constitutes evidence They're still 'only words' - the words of 'I saw and it's heads'.
But you like the word evidence for everything. You don't actually know whether it provides proof or disproof of anything without corroboration A person saying 'the basement is wet' is not realistically ever going to be disproof of the the hypothesis 'the basement is wet'. Again, when the child said 'the basement is wet', what did you do?Was the same thing you did all the time without the child's statement? If not, why? As the numbers I provided show - even if the child is usually incorrect - the probability still went up which is why you thought to check just to be sure. You wouldn't have checked at that exact moment as there wasn't any particular reason to suspect the basement was wet, but the child's testimony is a reason. It's not proof. Evidence isn't necessarily proof.
How do you prove it is evidence of X? Prove? To 100%? Never.
And why does at one point believing it was evidence of X render it impossible to ever prove it was not evidence of X, such as when the initial assessment was mistaken. I explicitly stated this was possible, so I don't understand why you asked:
quote: Not everything is evidence. With a little luck, I hope you'll know that I agree by now.
I'm still curious how you address this: 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? Evidence of what?
You went back 7 messages to prove what we're currently talking about? I went back 7 message to prove that 4 messages ago and beyond we were talking about a religious perspective, yes. Problem?
You replied to my introduction of the religious perspective of faith by describing something very similar to Faith's evangelical view of faith. Are you differentiating 'religious perspective' and 'evangelical'? Because we have already agreed plenty of Christians who are not Faith cite evidence with regards to their faith, right? Are they all evangelical?
By the way there's a Message 1 dBCode, so you could have written the much easier Message 718 instead of the more difficult Message 718. I find the message ID easier. I'm just copy/pasting and there's less chance of mistaking a six digit ID in dark grey than of getting the message number and message total confused. But thanks anyway, always good to know 
Something so unreliable has no right being called evidence. It just seems that you have no standards for what you call evidence. If it increases the probability of a proposition being true, its evidence. Even if that increase is very small. A case can be built by a taking a number of pieces of evidence to show that the probability of all the pieces of evidence existing and the proposition being false, is small. Observe: There is a 20% chance the partial print is mine.There is 30% chance the DNA fragment is mine. There is a 20% chance that CCTV image is me. Hypothesis: This evidence is all there because it was me at the scene. Probability it was someone else 0.8 * 0.7 * 0.8 = 45% Therefore, on the balance of probabilities, it was me. Barely, but technically sufficient in a civil case or even a social dispute. Add another piece of evidence 10% probability the witness correctly identify me Now its 40% And so on. Any given piece is not enough but together it leads to a 60% likelihood in this case. Now true, some evidence may be so unreliable that it only changes the probability in the most negligible of fashions. And I understand colloquially disregarding it entirely. But technically, it's still evidence, it still plays a role in the tapestry of understanding. Especially when we consider that we only decide that probability is particularly low by studying additional evidence.
I'm using the word evidence the same way it is generally used, that stuff that doesn't provide support or proof or disproof of something isn't evidence. I'm not going down the 'proof' road as oftentimes a single piece of evidence is insufficient to prove anything. However, if by 'provides support' you mean 'increases the probability of' then John does do that.
You've made me curious. What did they think he'd done? I've found assuaging curiosity in this situation seldom ends well, so excuse me actually and explicitly demurring.
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." What people think proves something, or is grounds for belief will vary. People obviously think eyewitness testimony is grounds for belief.
Thus my point that what people think will vary.
Weighing insufficient or conflicting evidence is fraught with difficulty. Yes indeed. But I notice you seem to naturally refer to both as 'evidence'.
In the historical realm, as I've said before, historians are accustomed to dealing with a multiplicity of possibilities of various probability. And I think I've shown some (very rough) examples of this in my previous post and this one.
Certainly. Great. John is a source. Other religious texts are sources. Sources are evidence. We combine all the evidence from the natural world, from religious studies and we conclude that John is likely to not be a true account of real events much like other religious texts. It's still evidence. And epistemic humility should suggest that maybe evidence as yet unknown may cause us to think John is likely to be true. It was always evidence, we just miscalculated its reliability at one point.
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Tangle Member  Posts: 9504 From: UK Joined: Member Rating: 4.7
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Phat Member Posts: 18298 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 1.1 |
Faith writes: I disagree. We are not the ones converting anybody, Faith. Have your 9 posts a day produced a single convert? Have your blogs? The whole issue is communication. Compromise is an art. Anyone who truly knows me knows my beliefs, despite my neurosis in occasional posts. Sometimes I feel that you try too hard to use a hammer and end up beating your head against a wall. You are afraid to question your beliefs. You claim that you know that they are right, but the audience is interested in how you know. They have already pegged you as an example of all that is wrong with organized religion. Phat, a Christian must be an authoritarian, because God is an authoritarian. YOUR "weakness" is that you are a compromiser with God's truth, you "go along to get along," you don't seem to have any scruples about accepting blasphemous notions such as that God could be a "She" or that Christianity is "marketing" its teachings. Whatever "Christian converts" you might succeed in winning with your strategy would not be Christians. Besides, I am not here to convert people. If you are, I submit that you need to work on your technique. They will believe you if you are honest...not simply because you are without compromise and a staunch literalist. It is our character that we market in any online forum. The audience is too smart to fall for the dramatic orations of a preacher. They have seen the television preachers and they have in many cases been to a church. They may question our motives, however. BTW did you even read the article that I asked you to read? If not, I wonder how people think of your authoritarian closed-mindedness? Perhaps you are right, however. If I come across as wishy-washy, at least I am being honest and not hiding my insecurities. Because we all have them. Even believers. Edited by Phat, : added ranting  Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all. —RC Sproul "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." —Mark Twain " ~"If that's not sufficient for you go soak your head."~Faith Paul was probably SO soaked in prayer nobody else has ever equaled him.~Faith
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Phat Member Posts: 18298 From: Denver,Colorado USA Joined: Member Rating: 1.1 |
Faith writes: Phat, a Christian must be an authoritarian, because God is an authoritarian. Authoritarianadjective 1. favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom. "the transition from an authoritarian to a democratic regime" synonyms: autocratic, dictatorial, despotic, tyrannical, draconian, oppressive, repressive, illiberal, undemocratic; More noun 1. an authoritarian person. synonyms: autocrat, despot, dictator, tyrant; More So lets review. Is God an authoritarian? Do you have a different definition of the word? Edited by Phat, : No reason given.Chance as a real force is a myth. It has no basis in reality and no place in scientific inquiry. For science and philosophy to continue to advance in knowledge, chance must be demythologized once and for all. —RC Sproul "A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." —Mark Twain " ~"If that's not sufficient for you go soak your head."~Faith Paul was probably SO soaked in prayer nobody else has ever equaled him.~Faith
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