Victor Reppert on the No Evidence Charge

My own response to the "no evidence" charge is, I think pretty well known, and it goes like this: 

We first have to define what evidence is. 

I understand evidence in Bayesian terms. For me, X is evidence for Y just in case X is more likely to exist given Y than given not-Y. By this definition, something can have evidence for it and be false. 

There is a whole boatload of stuff that look to me to be a LOT more likely to exist if God exists than if God does not exist. Some of it's in the Bible, most of it isn't. 

Here's a short list: 

1) The fact that we can reason about the world. The fact that it is even possible to go from evidence to a conclusion. If this isn't possible, then science isn't even possible. But that implies that our acts of reasoning are governed by the laws of logic, as opposed to the laws of physics. But naturalism says the laws of physics govern everything, and the laws of logic are superfluous as an explanation for any event in the universe. 
2) That there are stable laws of nature, so that the distant past resembles the recent past. It's easy to imagine an atheistic world with no stability at all, where the laws keep changing for no reason. Why is that not the actual world? 
3) The we have just the right cosmic constants for life to emerge. 
4) That DNA allows for gradual change, as opposed to being completely static or so radically changeable that it is completely unpredictable. 
5) That monotheism arose against all odds in a polytheistic world in a country that hardly qualifies as a world superpower, and that it persisted in spite of the efforts of the superpowers like Assyria, Babylon, the Seleucids, and the Romans, to get it to assimilate into a polytheistic culture. 
6) That the disciples of Jesus got in the faces of those responsible for Jesus's crucifixion and told them that the Jesus they crucified was Lord and God, and lived to tell the tale and found Christianity. (If they killed Jesus, they can kill you too). 
7) That archaeology has discovered that if Luke was writing a story about the founding of Christianity, it wrote it in such a way that the "research" for his "fictional" story was corroborated centuries later by archaeology, "research" that would have required him to know all sorts of detail from Jerusalem to Malta at just the right time in the first century. 
8) That Christianity became the dominant religion of an empire in spite of getting no help, and intermittent persecution, from the political leaders of that empire, for nearly three centuries.

I can understand concluding, at the end of the day, that this evidence is outweighed by the evidence for atheism. What is beyond my comprehension is the idea that this somehow isn't evidence AT ALL. Repeating "God of the Gaps" fifty times is not a response. 

Kant vs. Dawkins on evidence of absence

Kant maintained that what we know about the world around us can only be about the way the world appears to us, not the world as it is in itself. Therefore, we are left with just putting our appearances together, and given this we can't expect there to be evidence either way. So, Kant said, we have to decide whether to believe in God or not depending on whether we think it would make us a better person if we believed. And, he thinks that belief in God would be better for our character, and therefore we should believe. 

Contrast him with someone like Richard Dawkins, of God Delusion fame. Dawkins thinks that if there were a God, there would be evidence for his existence. But, there isn't any evidence that isn't better explained by evolution. He thinks we can know reality, and it makes more sense without belief in God. In fact, he actually thinks God couldn't possibly explain anything at all, and it would be the ultimate wrong answer whether or not there was a good evolutionary explanation for everything. For him, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. To believe in God is to embrace a belief that is almost certainly false, and therefore cannot be moral. 

A model for defining evidence

How about the following as a conception of evidence, based on Bayesianism? X is evidence for Y if X is more likely to exist given Y than given not-Y. 

Now if we accept this, it looks like there are lots of things that qualify on behalf of theism and on behalf of atheis. Beginning of the universe? Maybe it can be reconciled with atheism, but it's not what an atheist would expect. Ditto for the fine tuning of the universe? 

Evil and suffering? Sure it's possible given theism, but is it more likely given atheism? 

With this model, we might say of our opponents that there isn't enough evidence, or that the evidence is outweighed by the other side, but can we really make the "no evidence" charge? 

Is there something wrong with this definition of evidence? 

McGrew on ECREE

From his essay on evidence.

Extraordinary Claims and Extraordinary Evidence


Another common slogan, also popularized by Sagan, is that Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Much depends, of course, on what counts as extraordinary, both in a claim and in evidence. It cannot be simply that a claim is unprecedented. At a certain level of detail, almost any claim is unprecedented; but this does not necessarily mean that it requires evidence out of the ordinary to establish it. Consider this claim: “Aunt Matilda won a game of Scrabble Thursday night with a score of 438 while sipping a cup of mint tea.” Each successive modifying phrase renders the claim less likely to have occurred before; yet there is nothing particularly unbelievable about the claim, and the evidence of a single credible eyewitness might well persuade us that it is true.
The case is more difficult with respect to types of events that are deemed to be improbable or rare in principle, such as miracles. It is generally agreed in such discussions that such events cannot be common and that it requires more evidence to render them credible than is required in ordinary cases. (Sherlock 1769) David Hume famously advanced the maxim that No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish (Beauchamp 2000, p. 87), which may have been the original inspiration for the slogan about extraordinary evidence. The proper interpretation of Hume’s maxim has been a source of some debate among Hume scholars, but one plausible formulation in probabilistic terms is that
P(MT) > P(~MT) only if P(M) > P(T~M),
where M is the proposition that a miracle has occurred and T is the proposition describing testimonial evidence that it has occurred. This conditional statement is not a consequence of Bayes’s Theorem, but the terms of the latter inequality are good approximations for the terms of the exact inequality.
P(M) P(TM) > P(~M) P(T~M) when both P(~M) and P(TM) are close to 1. There is, then, a plausible Bayesian rationale for Hume’s maxim so long as we understand it to be an approximation.

It does not follow that the maxim will do the work that Hume (arguably) and many of his followers (unquestionably) have hoped it would. Hume appears to have thought that his maxim would place certain antecedently very improbable events beyond the reach of evidence. But as John Earman has argued (Earman 2000), an event that is antecedently extremely improbable, and in this sense extraordinary, may be rendered probable under the right evidential circumstances, since it is possible in principle that

P(TM)/P(T~M) > P(~M)/P(M),

a condition sufficient to satisfy the rigorous condition underlying Hume’s maxim and the slogan about extraordinary events. The maxim is therefore less useful as a dialectical weapon than is often supposed. It may help to focus disagreements over extraordinary events, but it cannot resolve them.

McGrew on Evidence

Here.

The "no evidence" charge

I have often been puzzled by the charge, made by many atheists, that there is NO evidence for God, or for the supernatural, or paranormal, or what have you. The reason is that as I understand evidence, X is evidence for Y is X is a fact of our experience that is more likely to be the case if Y is true than if Y is false. And it looks to me that there are all sorts of things in our experience that are more likely to be there with God than without God. The kind of testimony to the Resurrection that we have, it seems to me, is more likely to be there given the existence of God than without the existence of God. That doesn't mean that there is a God, to be sure, or that the Resurrection happened.

In an exchange on Debunking Christianity, someone said


To a rational, skeptical mind, claiming to have seen evidence of the paranormal is, in and of itself, evidence of 
delusional thinking.


When I said that I had seen evidence of the paranormal, I was referring to the violin teacher incident  that I discussed a few months back. Now I can easily see coming out of that discussion thinking that it wasn't a genuine episode of clairvoyance. What I can't see is thinking that it provides no evidence at all for clairvoyance. It seems to me that of course, it's something that is more likely to have occurred if there were such a thing as clairvoyance as opposed to if there were no such thing, even if it is really wasn't clairvoyance 
after all.

Maybe someone can explain how the term "evidence" is being used here.