The Antecedent Probability Principle, the Proportional Principle & Carl Sagan

One might argue that your mother usually looks out for you; her advice has been good in the past; and there is no reason to doubt her; and that these are all forms of evidence to be considered in whether to trust your mother.But you are right in implying that such evidence may not be sufficient, as many children touch the iron anyway. I think a good definition of rational is anything that most fully and efficiently meets the goals set.Jon

Let's accept such to be the case. What then of that same mom's admonitions to trust in God?But I don't accept your characterization. In actuality, you trust your mom and accept that the iron is hot and that you should not touch the iron without considering evidence regarding the iron itself. That doesn't follow. Children who touch the iron anyway may not behaving rationally.

By the time I was old enough to understand the concepts you mention - hot, iron, don't etc, I had had overwhelming evidence that my mother was trustworty. i don't think so, but it does seem to be a bit binary for some people. If you call someone irrational its an insult, but it rather depends on the context; no-one wants to be Spock either.

There is no need to expound on this point to the length you have. You becoming old enough has nothing to do with NoNukes point. His point was as children with no knowledge of something we accept that there could be knowledge out there that goes beyond our childlike thinking even tho we don't know what it is. That's the analogy. You growing up does not give you a better understanding of the unknown. We will always have childllike thinking when it comes to the unknown. Edited by Chuck77, : No reason given.Edited by Chuck77, : No reason given.Edited by Chuck77, : No reason given.

As I mentioned regarding the definition of 'rational', whether the child's actions are rational or not depends on his goals.If his goal is to not get burned, then it is most rational to trust his mother since not touching the iron is clearly a working strategy for avoiding a nasty burn. If, on the other hand, his goal is to find the truth out for himself, touching the iron might be the most rational thing to do.We cannot determine levels of rationality without first deciding the metric against which we are measuring the behaviors.But I think in the case of the question of miracles raised in the OP, the goal is 'accepting as truth that which is most likely to be true'. In this way, concluding that something is a 'miracle' will always be the least rational conclusion because a miracle is always the least likely of any explanation to actually be true.Jon

Well I would submit that the rational way to find out for yourself that an iron is hot does not involve touching it, but perhaps I did not create an example with sufficiently bad consequences.So let's instead make mom's warning be about something like not sticking hair pins in the electrical outlet.In any event, the idea here is that trusting mom can be very rational, despite the fact that the decision to act is not based on any evidence about the matter at hand. Similarly, it might be rational to believe a trustworthy mom even when she talks about thing that the child is unable to test for himself.I earlier gave the example of Einstein devoting a decade of his productive years to developing the theory of general relativity. Can we say that Einstein's pursuit was not rational?Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

Circular logic. 2 includes your conclusion.

That's a really odd question. Surely it doesn't matter whether it was or whether it wasn't but in either case we can't know? It presumably seemed like a worthwhile and rational activity to him and presumably he had enough evidence to convince himself that it was worth continuing.Happily, not everything we do in life needs to be strictly rational, if only to keep the economy moving - why else would I be reaching for my golf clubs now?

Agreed - 2 is an unproven premise.I'll still take it as true until proven wrong and I claim that it is rational to do so.

I used 27 words to expound my point at 'length' which is roughly 60 less than you've used to tell me I shouldn't have done it. I win in the war against verbage.But of course, you've missed the point.NoNuke was trying to say that it's irrational to follow your mother's advice because it's unevidenced by you personally. I was saying that it is highly evidenced because my previous experience has told me that I can trust my mother in matters that I don't understand yet. Therefore it is totally rational for me to do what my mum says.

You are ducking the question. Of course it matters, at least for the purposes of this discussion. Your claim is that it is only evidence based conclusions that we can rationally to hold to be true. I'm trying to explore that proposition.Einstein did indeed have legitimate reasons to continue, but those reasons were not evidence based. My point is that legitimate reasons for doing X, analogous to the reasons Einstein pursued general relativity means that doing X is rational. If we can agree on that, then it is worth discussing what Einstein's rationale was.Alternatively, we can conclude that Einstein was not rational, in which case we should conclude that irrationality is not a good reason to not believe in something.Related question: Are string theorists rational?I'll present a different but closely related argument. It is in fact rational to make decisions and to take action with incomplete information, because we seldom have complete information.Taking action in the face of incomplete evidence is particularly rational when the outcome for inaction is potentially dire, or the possible rewards for action are sufficiently great.

I'm not ducking the question, I'm say that the question is irrelevant.I don't care whether Einstein was behaving rationally when he spent ten years working on relativity or not - I do care whether the result of his work is rational because I need to trust it for my sat nav.You may have gathered that I don't think it matters whether people behave rationally or irrationally until it actually DOES matter. One place where it matters is when we're trying to understand facts about the world.

I've no idea. But the search for whether they exist is rational. I agree entirely and I'd say that that is one of sub-clauses of the antecedent probability principle - We're forced to accept conclusions or actions based on best prior knowledge and reject actions that have the least convincing evidence.

I didn't mean the length of words, I meant to say taking the point to far. And yeah, I probably got it all wrong what NoNukes meant. I guess i missed it.Then i'll say it myself. As a child we think like children. It doesn't mean that that's where the knowledge ends. And if the SN is real (Which I believe it is) then to me it's the same thing. Our finite minds now, cannot grasp the SN world. It doesn't mean it doesnt exist and it doesn't mean that miracles don't happen. Maybe not all miracles can be recognized by people as such. It doesn't mean there are no miracles happening just because we don't understand them.Edited by Chuck77, : No reason given.Edited by Chuck77, : No reason given.

Actually, I think Chuck77 understanding of my point is more accurate than yours, although he takes things a bit further than I agree with. That always childlike stuff is 77's own work. That's decidedly not what I said. The child's decision to follow mom's advice was completely rational despite the fact that the child had no evidence of his own about the iron.It is only as an alternative that I discussed how we could view things if we did not agree that the child was rational. But given your own belief that the child's actions were rational, we need not pursue the alternative.I am having to do these kinds of corrections in every nearly response. I am confident that I was explicit about my position in my previous post, but I will endeavor to write more clearly. Exactly so. And people accept Biblical miracles for similar reasons. They have decided to trust the accounts of people who have written and testified about allegedly witnessed events. Further, with few exceptions, those who disagree don't claim that the events, had they actually occurred, would not be miraculous; instead those skeptics doubt that the miracles happened at all.