dangerous idea: God, the supernatural, and prior probabilities

Monday, April 16, 2007

God, the supernatural, and prior probabilities

I don't think the "supernatual" character of God is any essential part of Christian doctrine. So the fact that in some sense God could turn out to be a "natural" entity doesn't especially bother me. This is often put forward sa if it should be terribly embarrassing, but I've never been able to see why.

As for "laws of supernature," if we are talking about stict deterministic laws, we don't have those for nature either. If we are talking about probabilistic expectations, then it seems as if we can generate those based on what we take to be the character of the person we are talking about. It's not part of anything I believe that God is completely capricious in his actions.

I'm a subjectivist about antecedent probabilities, period. You don't have to "ground" them in anything. Attempts to provide an account of how you get "objective" priors have failed completely, so far as I have been able to tell. Frequency theory founders on the problem of the single case. Thge best we as humans can do epistemically is start from what we do believe and adjust our convictions based on the evidence. Bayesian confirmation theory helps us do that. What it does not do is tell us where to get the antecedent probabilities in the first place. There's an outstanding book by Howson and Urbach on this from about 1989.

I guess I would want to ask how much of a story you think you can tell, or want to, about the founding of Christianity. I think you're going to end up left with some pretty mysterious facts at the end of the day, whether you go hallucination, or legend, or theft, or swoon, or wrong tomb, or what have you. If "plausible" you mean more plausible than any alternative, including a supernatural alternative, given your own presuppositions as a naturalist" then that's not what I mean by plausible. I'm not claiming a refutation of naturalism based on the events surrounding the life of Christ. If naturalism constrains what you think is possible, then you can say with Sherlock Holmes, "Eliminate the impossible, and whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth." But I am betting, based on my knowledge of the founding of Christianity, that your story will end up being improbable in various ways.

Labels: Bayesianism, miracles, Resurrection

6 Comments:

At April 16, 2007 11:15 AM , Hallq said...

I'm curious as to your definition of natural/supernatural here. That's a distinction I've actually never cared for, and I'm regularly puzzled by other people's use of it.

I know Richard Carrier's account is something like, "the basic building blocks of the universe are non-mental," which would mean that any God-like entity would have to turn out to be really composed of inumerable small parts. This certainly seems to cut against standard Christian theology. Are you saying this would be no problem? Or do you have something else in mind?
At April 16, 2007 11:29 AM , Stunney said...

The proposition, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof’ cannot itself be proved, let alone proved by naturalistic scientific methods.

No-one has proved that experiential awareness of the divine presence is extraordinary. As a matter of sociological fact, most people around the world, all through recorded history, have not thought that the existence of a divine reality, or the occurrence of experiences of this reality was extraordinary. And in most cultures and religious traditions, people claiming such experiences are not regarded as mentally ill unless there are other, independent grounds for so regarding them. In most cultures throughout recorded history, it is the denial of divine reality that strikes most people as extraordinary and possibly a sign of mental abnormality.

Experience of the divine might, of course, be regarded as extraordinary against the background of an a priori disposition to cling to a materialist worldview. But it hasn't been scientifically demonstrated that materialism is true, nor can it be demonstrated (cf. the blind man, or a race of blind creatures, insisting that there is no such thing as sight).

If you assume materialism, or if you assume that there is no divine reality, then of course it will appear extraordinary to you for someone else to claim to have seen Jesus Christ risen. But most people haven't been committed to a worldview that would rule out such a thing. Anthropologically, religious belief is the norm, not the exception, and the claim that the world has a divine origin has not generally been regarded as extraordinary at all. And one reason that is so is because lots of people report religious experiences.

I actually knew a man in London years ago who once saw Jesus Christ risen and was given in that vision a profound awareness of how profoundly Jesus knew him and loved him.

The materialist view is that all such experiences must be illusory. But the idea that they are all illusions is not based on anything other than prior assumptions of scientism and materialism, neither of which is demonstrated or demonstrable by science.

Now one might object that such claims are extraordinary, because materialism is true, or prima facie true. But that's a blatantly obvious example of the fallacy of begging the question. In fact, most people have thought and continue to think theism is far less extraordinary as an ultimate explanation of mathematics, logic, rationality, thought, knowledge, meaning, morality, aesthetic value, consciousness in general, the laws of nature, and even material objects themselves than that everything has arisen by meaningless impersonal chance movements of purposeless material forces. So what counts as extraordinary in this context is far from settled, contrary to the assumption.

Moreover, the proportion of the population that is certifiably mentally ill is far lower than the proportion reporting religious experience, such as sensing or being aware of the divine presence. So an automatic assumption of mental illness for those reporting religious experiences is on shaky empirical ground anyway.

So atheist dismissals of the resurrection reports of early Christians because resurrection can't happen is an example of a prejudice doing all the work. It commits the atheist to the view that even if he had a vision of the risen Christ like the one of the man I knew in London, it would have to be an illusion of some kind. And the same would have to be true for any experience one cares to specify that would call into question scientific materialism. Thus it's obvious the atheist's demand for evidence is spurious and in fact disingenuous. As I say, it's the atheism that's doing all the work, not the evidence.

Catholics and Orthodox believe also in the resurrection of Mary the mother of Jesus. An interesting case of visions seen by many thousands of people---including a majority who were neither Catholic nor Orthodox over a period of several years was that of Zeitoun, a suburb of Cairo, between 1968 and 1971, and reported by the New York Times. Photos and TV film of the apparitions were taken. More here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitoun_apparitions
At April 16, 2007 11:45 AM , Stunney said...

hallq wrote:

I know Richard Carrier's account is something like, "the basic building blocks of the universe are non-mental," which would mean that any God-like entity would have to turn out to be really composed of inumerable small parts.

What if God is infinite? It might then be the case that the reason we don't see God is not that God isn't made of Carrier's non-mental building blocks, but simply that God is too big.

Science posits fields of various kinds. Re-reading Brian Greene's fine book, Fabric of the Cosmos, last night, he talks about the 'inflaton field' (that's 'inflaton' with no 'i'), a fluctuation of which led to the Big Bang, etc. Others talk about the zero-point field. Others talk about infinite branes (hypothesized in for example, the well-known Randall-Sundrun models).

Many versions of these natural fields and branes are a) infinite in some sense; and b) invisible. We might only know of them by inferences we make to account for the observable world.

That sounds pretty God-like to me.

Maybe a naturalist can posit God as an infinite natural entity along something like those lines.
At April 16, 2007 2:31 PM , Victor Reppert said...

Hallq: Obviously if you've got a definition of the natural that excludes the theistic God in some non-aribtrary way, that's a whole different matter. I was replying to someone who said that if we could form any kind of law-like understanding of God and what God does, that would make God a natural entity and not a supernatural one. The hazard involved in over-defining the natural is that you may find science sticking a knife in your back. For example, prior to this century you probably had a lot of people who thought it is the business of science to find determining causes for all events, and who would have opposed as pseudoscientific any idea that indeterminism is true or that the universe had a beginning.

Words like "supernatural" which have strong emotive connotations with some people, have to be clarified before they are at all useful. Lewis has a definition of the supernatural as what "won't fit in" with the closed system of mindless physical causes. There's nothing inherently religious about the idea as he introduces it.
At April 17, 2007 4:26 AM , Anonymous said...

Victor, I presume this post is directed at the comments I made in "More dialogue with anonymous", so I will treat it as a response to my remarks there.

You say that "the fact that in some sense God could turn out to be a "natural" entity doesn't especially bother me". Well, I can't say it bothers me either. However, you did begin this thread with a statement about naturalism, and in particular about naturalistic accounts of the resurrection. And according to wikipedia, "The concept of "nature" embraced by contemporary metaphysical naturalists excludes by definition gods, spirits, and any other supernatural beings, objects, or forces." You are of course free to object to this definition and substitute something else more to your liking. But it would be helpful if you could signal any non-standard definitions you have in mind from the very beginning.

Also, I stated very clearly (or so I thought) that the conclusion that, if laws of supernature were ever discovered, "supernature would just become another part of nature" was predicated on the key assumption of methodological naturalism, namely that "that observable events in nature are explained only by natural causes" (wikipedia again). If you choose to reject methodological naturalism then the conclusion 'law-governed supernature = nature' does indeed not follow, and I explicitly left this option open to you. To allege that I "said that if we could form any kind of law-like understanding of God and what God does, that would make God a natural entity and not a supernatural one" is therefore a misrepresentation of my argument.

Concerning your remark "if we are talking about st[r]ict deterministic laws, we don't have those for nature either", I am a bit of a loss to understand why you think "deterministic" laws ever entered the discussion. The simple fact is that physical laws have been proposed (in Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics and relativity) that (i) give extremely precise predictions, (ii) are experimentally well-attested, and (iii) are accepted by everyone (or almost everyone). There are no "psychological laws" or "laws or supernature" that go anywhere near to satisfying these three criteria. Whether or not the laws of physics _as we understand them_ are deterministic, and whether or not they are exactly the same today as they were 100 years ago, does not alter the fact that they are rules of inference with extremely high epistemic reliability.

Anon1
At April 17, 2007 4:32 AM , Anonymous said...

VR wrote: "I'm a subjectivist about antecedent probabilities, period. You don't have to "ground" them in anything."

Well, I guess that's where our discussion of epistemic justification ends then. There is little point in me asking "Why do you believe/expect that?" if your answer is going to be a consistent "I just do!" However, I can only conclude that when you write "I think the historical evidence is more like what we should expect if a supernaturalist story is true than it is like what we should expect if a supernaturalist story is not true" you must be using the royal "we". And as a consistent subjectivist, you will agree that when I assert the negation of your statement (that the historical evidence is more like what we should expect if a supernaturalist story is _not_ true) then both our statements are correct.

VR: "But I am betting, based on my knowledge of the founding of Christianity, that your story will end up being improbable in various ways."

1. I have no story. I have no specialist expertise in the history, sociology or religious politics of first-century Palestine, and I leave all questions of historical interpretation to those people who do.

2. I am surprised that you, as a consistent Bayesian, would bet on anything being "improbable". Probabilities are subjective after all, and it would be difficult for you to convince the "loser" that he had lost. But perhaps you meant "improbable to me", in which case it is unlikely that anyone would be foolish enough to take your bet in the first place.

Anon1