Does science solve our cognitive ills?

Science is not a monolithic "method" that can be applied across the board to deal with questions all the way from whether there are four bonds on a carbon atom to the question of whether your wife is faithful, or when abortion is justified, or whether it is wrong to inflict pain on little children for your own amusement. There's no magic pill that will make us stop the tendency to believe what we prefer to be true, except being aware that wishful thinking is possible and considering that when you think. C. S. Lewis's analysis of the "wishful thinking" argument in "On Obstinacy in Belief" still stands as a brilliant reply to this whole line of thinking, a response that has gone unanswered in infidel literature, so far as I can tell.

Some subjects are experimentable, and some are not. Even when they are experimentable, scientists who hold the theory that "loses" the experiment don't just give up on their theories. The adjust their theories to deal with the negative experimental results, using auxiliary hypotheses. In fact, they can go on doing this forever if they feel the need to. They usually quit when they die off. It's a myth that Michelson-Morley caused a complete and immediate abandonment of ether theory. So there is no such thing as a "crucial experiment" in science. That's just basic philosophy of science going back to Pierre Duhem.

Why are irrationality charges and psychological explanations necessary?

This is a response I put up on Debunking Christianity: 

It could be, though, that two people who are pursuing the truth as best they can, being as reasonable as it is possible for a human being to be, come to different answers without there by any irrationality on anyone's part. It is only that different life-experiences, different intellectual contacts, etc. etc., lead to different results. One side has to be mistaken, but neither side has to be irrational. One of them is correct, the other is in error, but neither is irrational. That is the presumption that I like to use in discussion with opponents. Of course, there's all sorts of crap going on in our minds when we try to think, but all we can ask of one another is that we do our best. But then, the title of my site isn't Debunking Atheism.

Do people who believed in the oxygen theory have to explain away all the people who believed in phlogiston?

Explaining the other side psychologically doesn't do anything. Both sides can do it, all day long, to one another. If I think you didn't discover the truth, then I can explain why you didn't. If I didn't discover the truth, then you can explain me away, too.

What you try to do in response to believers is to get them to grant that you may have seen something that they have overlooked. Why can't you accept the possibility that some Christian has seen something that you have overlooked?

The Wild Card Argument

I'm redating this post, because I noticed that Vinny has a post on his blog which essentially uses the WCA against my position. 

Dr. Logic's argument is what I have called the Inadequacy Objection, or we might also call it the Wild Card Argument. The idea is that theistic explanations don't really explain because they don't give you a reason to supposed that event X was expected as opposed to event Y. God had the power equally well to bring about X or Y, therefore, to say that he caused X doesn't really tell us why X was caused and not Y. Playing the God card is what you can do anytime, anywhere, and so it really doesn't do any real work.

We might believe that X is more in character for God than Y, and therefore X was more to be expected than Y given the existence of God. But here, I think, a kind of empiricism about the sources of our probability judgments is employed. We actually haven't seen God perform this act or that, and therefore we have no basis for believing that God is more likely to do this as opposed to that.

I'm not a pure empiricist about the basis for our probability judgments, and in fact I think that frequentism in probability theory leads to contradictions. But the Wild Card Argument is far from silly. Defenders of theistic explanations had better learn how to counter it.

My Infidels paper on Hume on miracles covers this issue, and I like to it here.

Is the Resurrection the best-evidenced NT miracle? Maybe not!

Actually, I'm not sure that the Resurrection is the best-evidenced miracle in the New Testament. Of course, it's the most theologically significant. But Acts has a much shorter event-to-writing time gap than the Gospels on any account, and at least the latter part of it is heavily supported by archaeological evidence. I realize this is controversial, but I think that Luke was a companion of Paul, and witnessed many of the events in later Acts firsthand. Since miracle reports go all the way through the book of Acts, I think the case for some of those could be stronger than the case for the Resurrection.

ECREE and Antecedent Probabilities

There is a sense in which I agree with the ECREE thesis, it is just that I don't believe that there is any objective way of proving that one set of antecedent probabilities is rational and another is not. So what is "extraordinary" is just what your antecendent probabilities tell you is improbable.

I think that as you pull at the story of the founding of Christianity, as you play out the various scenarios all the way through, you end up thinking that none of the scenarios for what might have really happened fit the facts very well. They run into factual brick walls of one kind or another. The Christian story, IF you can get over the initial antecedent improbability of the miraculous, makes more sense of it that any other story does. I think there is no logical proof that a miracle cannot happen, since it is possible that God exists, and God is omnipotent. Further, I think that this miracle is one that God would have a fairly understandable reason to perform. So, given my prior probabilities, the evidence lifts the case for the resurrection  at least over 90%. But I can't prove the someone else that they shouldn't have priors so low for the Resurrection that it never gets above 10 for them. Both can be rational, and that's just life in the big city. (I also don't think salvation is a matter of passing a theology test). If you don't believe in the Resurrection, then I think there are a bunch of inconvenient facts out there that are hard to make sense of. But I think every philosophy has to deal with inconvenient facts.

Keith Parsons would probably call this Bayesian Balkanization.

Was the Resurrection an Extraordinary Claim?

Keith: Let me try a deliberately "naive" response to ECREE and the Resurrection, to see what you think. How extraordinary was the resurrection, really. OK, people don't walk out of their tombs in the ordinary course of events. But this guy wasn't an ordinary guy. He healed lepers and paralytics. In fact he healed ten lepers at once, so much for the idea that miracles can't be repeatable. He multiplied loaves and fishes. He walked on water. He withered the fig tree. He raised Lazarus. He turned water into wine. Nature did funny stuff when he was around that it doesn't do when he's not around, except maybe when his first-century followers were around, who did a lot of the same stuff he did, as recorded in the Book of Acts. From that evidence base, the darned resurrection looks almost what you should expect. You could almost write out the laws of supernature and make a prediction. If the disciples hadn't been looking for some sort of political deliverance, they could have been confidently waiting for it to happen.

Of course, I am responding to Parsons, and he doesn't believe that any of those other events happened either. But is ECREE a principle that is supposed to be used by everyone, not just naturalists? Doesn't it beg the question in favor of what naturalists believe in order to insist that theists have the same negative priors for something like the resurrection that naturalists use?

Is there a non-belief-system relative standard for extraordinariness? I don't think so.

Ben Witherington critiques Bart Ehrman

HT: John DePoe. Readers of this blog will find a couple of familiar people in the "comments" sections.

A Question from a Student

Here's a thought: Who is the more virtuous person?

1. The person who follows a religious creed to avoid eternal damnation, but does not strive to live virtuously, instead taking advantage of the "forgiveness of sins" clauses that are in major religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism).
2. The atheist or agnostic who works to live a virtuous life merely for the sake of being virtuous, with no thought to any reward or any sort of afterlife.

If there was a god, and these two people were standing before you, which one would you let into the proverbial pearly gates? 

One theory is that since God standard is perfection, and no one reaches that standard, only those who, through faith, appropriate God's substitutionary sacrifice in Christ are saved, and everyone else is lost.

But there are other theories of heaven and hell. One is that heaven is actually a big bore to anyone except those with a good character. A religious faith that is just a fire insurance policy which allows you to stop worrying about going to hell while remaining indifferent to the development of one's character is a pretty worthless kind of faith. If a loving God runs the universe, then the only way one is ever going to be happy forever in this kind of a universe is to become a completely loving person oneself. You can do some of that on your own power, but that only goes so far, so at some point you are going to have to reach out to that loving God and ask them to turn you into the loving person you are trying, but not quite succeeding, in being now.  

Concealing the fallacy: A quote from "Mr. Anscombe"

When we hear of some new attempt to explain reasoning or language or choice naturalistically, we ought to react as if we were told that someone had squared the circle or proved the square root of 2 to be rational: only the mildest curiosity is in order-how well has the fallacy been concealed?[1] P. T. Geach


[1] Peter Geach, The Virtues (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1977) 52.


I wonder if his wife agreed with that statement. 

Who Said This?

That the man Yeshua or Jesus did actually exist, is as certain as that the Buddha did actually exist: Tacitus mentions his execution in the Annals. But all the other tomfoolery about virgin birth, magic healing, apparitions and so forth is on exactly the same footing as any other mythology. (VI, p.234).

a) Bertrand Russell
b) John W. Loftus
c) Richard Dawkins
d) none of the above

Keith Parsons replies to McInerny

Here is Parsons' reply to McInerny, as promised.

Reply to David Parker on Bayesianism and Trajectory of Science Arguments

David Parker has noticed my commitment to a subjectivist Bayesian model of belief acceptance. I should add what Monty Python said about Camelot: "It's only a model!" However, I don't see a better one. I believe in openness to evidence, but I don't believe in neutral perspectives. I believe in rationality, but I don't believe in artificial standards of rationality. And I certainly don't believe that people should claim to have achieved objectivity when they really are far from that lofty goal.

Parker wonders if my commitment to a Bayesian model of evidence commits me to the idea that all evidence is physical evidence, and hence will have to support physicalism by definition. I don't see why. Why these constraints? With Richard Swinburne, I see no good reason to suppose that there can't be evidence for theistic hypotheses. If I physically observe someone alive on Thursday, dead on Friday, and alive again on Sunday, that is prima facie evidence for the claim that that person was resurrected supernaturally from the dead. It is what I should expect if there was a resurrection, and what is very puzzling on the assumption that there was no resurrection. Now, I might, on further investigation, decide that indeed there was no resurrection, but the idea that I must rule a supernatural resurrection out from the outset strikes me as absurd. Or, to use my favorite example from atheist philosopher Keith Parsons, if the galaxies in the Virgo Cluster were to spell out the words "Turn or Burn! This means you, Parsons," then I suspect we have evidence that strongly confirms the claim that a deity exists who is threatening my atheist philosopher friend with eternal perdition.

I am unpersuaded of "trajectory of science" arguments which suggest that as we investigate further we will find greater and greater support for reductionism. Two aspects of the materialistic vision of the world as it has been historically understood are the following:

1) The universe had no beginning, and has always existed.

2) The universe is deterministic, and as we do science we will come closer and closer to finding determining causes for everything.

Now, thanks to the development of the Big Bang theory in the first instance, and quantum mechanics in the second instance, confidence in both of these theses has eroded in comparison to what might have been thought in the early days of the 20th Century.

Now, of course, naturalists have revised their conception of what is naturalistically acceptable to accommodate a universe with a temporal beginning, and a universe with quantum level indeterminism. But the point is that science frustrated the expectations of what at the time were the expected results of the naturalistic thrust of science, as it was understood at that time. This gives me some serious doubts about the idea that we can predict that the future of science will confirm physicalism, as we now understand it.

With respect to the analysis of mind, I see a lot of bravado about reductive analyses but no real hard evidence that reductions are going to be successful. In fact, given the fact that "the material" or "the natural" has to be defined in terms of the absence of the mental, it looks to me as if reduction of the mental to the physical is logically impossible, and that the more we study things scientifically the more evident this will become.

Burden, Burden, who's got the burden

This is Raply McInerny's essay arguing that, contrary to popular opinion, the burden of proof is really on the atheist.

I know Keith Parsons responded to this, and I linked to him earlier. But I would like some responses to this essay, first. 

Here's a shroud science link

For those of you interested in the shroud debate. HT: Ray Schneider.

Have you taken the Outsider Test for Patriotism?

Apparently one of the big issues that will be important in the next campaign is American Exceptionalism. Does Obama really believe that America is the greatest nation on God's green earth. Meanwhile, over at Debunking America, the question has been raised as to whether people like Romney, Palin, and Huckabee have taken the Outsider Test for Patriotism.

BDK and Tim on Historical Evidence

This exchange gets very very good about the time Tim and BDK get into an exchange on what evidence would be sufficient to support belief in a resurrection.

It goes, though, to an important part of my enterprise in discussing historical evidence surrounding the foundation of Christianity. Any particular piece of evidence in the question of theism versus atheism, or of Christianity vs. non-Christianity is just that, one piece of the evidence. This includes, by the way, the problem of evil. I would be surprised, maybe even shocked, if historical evidence alone overturned BDK's overall commitment to a naturalistic philosophy. People change basic philosophies only when lots of things fall apart and typically, it's lots of kinds of things. The interesting claim here for me is that patient study of the whole issue will reveal is that there is something profoundly odd and surprising from a naturalistic standpoint in the whole history surrounding the founding of Christianity. You can admit that and say, "OK, but naturalism seems to me so well grounded otherwise, that I'm got to continue to believe that naturalism is true and that the whole story happened naturalistically, even if it's tough to imagine just how that could have been."

Lewis wrote about an atheist colleague being surprised at the strength of the historical case for Christianity.

“Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole outline of Christian history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive “apart from his Christianity.” Now, I veritably believe, I thought-I didn’t of course say; words that would have revealed the nonsense-that Christianity itself was very sensible “apart from its Christianity.” But I hardly remember, for I had not long finished The Everlasting Man when something far more alarming happened to me. Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it really happened once. “… Was there no escape?”
by C. S. Lewis Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1942), pp. 223-224



VR: That atheist remained an atheist. But he thought the strength of the case for Christianity was stronger than he thought it would be. If you establish that with the argument, who knows where it goes from there.

Reply to Mark Frank on abusing probability theory

Mark Frank: You are quite right about abusing Bayes' theorem. Bayes also says we have to take into account the a priori probability of a natural or supernatural explanation. You have only considered the likelihood side of the equation. This is the famous gremlins in the attic paradox. Given gremlins in the attic it is very likely that they caused a noise. But that doesn't mean that Gremlins in the attic are a likely explanation of a noise in the attic.

Quite correct. However, we don't have any good way of measuring what the "prior" side of Bayes' theorem ought to be, and I presume that it can differ amongst reasonable people. That was the whole point of the anti-frequentism argument that I gave a few posts ago. I don't think there's a good way to go back into one's belief system and discount everything that is the product of a non-truth-conducive belief-producing mechanism, a la the Outsider Test. This is partly because it is not transparent to any of us why we think as we do. 

Reply to Parsons on the Spelling Bees, Theories, and Explanations

Keith Parsons responds to the Spelling Bee incident: 


Am I skeptical of Victor's report? No. Why should I be? People frequently think that they have had clairvoyant episodes, premonitory dreams, ESP, etc., so there is no reason whatsoever that I should doubt such a report. It is not at all outside of the "ordinary course of nature." On the contrary, people have such experiences all the time. How did he (the violin teacher) know what had happened? Well, of course, he did not know. People get hunches, feelings, and intuitions all the time. Some, by chance, are going to be close to something that actually happens. Confirmation bias then steps in to make sure that we remember those that seemed to correspond to what happened and forget all of those that did not. 


I have trouble seeing why people are so sure that he didn't know, even if they are naturalists. Does he really know that this is naturalistically impossible? It might be less likely given naturalism than given supernaturalism, and thus the evidence might probabilistically support supernaturalism via Bayes' theorem. (OK, OK, people accuse me of abusing Bayesian probability theory on a daily basis, so I'm already bracing myself). But the most we can say, I think, if my teacher knew that my rival had gone down and been upset, this might be difficult to explain naturalistically based on what we know about nature at this point. Why do we have to assume it was a guess that turned into an appearance of knowledge because of confirmation bias. 


A few more details about the incident are relevant here. First, he said he had this "perception" just at the time when the rival went down. Second, my violin teacher never reported anything like this in the three years when he was my teacher. It's not as if he brought up a bunch of them, and this one just happened to fit.  He did mention other clairvoyant incidents, but didn't claim to have a whole lot of them. Third, although spellers, like all competitors, experience the agony of defeat, nobody ever was quite as demonstrative as this guy. So I'm just not sure you can chalk it all up to guesswork and confirmation bias. In fact, in the absence of some good reasons to believe that he couldn't have known something that was going on a couple of miles away in that school auditorium, I think the reasonable thing to say would be that he did know. 


Of course, Victor raises these queries because of their seeming relevance to miracle reports. Didn't Hume say that we should be skeptical of reports of events outside of the "ordinary course of nature?" Well, it depends on what we mean by the "ordinary course of nature." The largest largemouth bass ever caught was a lunker of 23 pounds landed by a Georgia angler circa 1924. Now this is pretty astonishing since a largemouth bass of ten pounds is a whopper. My Dad was a lifelong bass fisherman and he never caught one over eight pounds. Suppose, though that in tomorrow's paper I read that a largemouth bass weighing 24 pounds had been caught. Would I be skeptical? Maybe slightly, but I would probably tentatively accept the story. What if the report said that a largemouth bass of 50 pounds had been caught? I would most definitely be skeptical and would strongly suspect a hoax. What if the report said that an enormous, glowing bass had levitated out of the water and pronounced maledictions on all fisherman? Obviously, no newspaper--with the exception of the (now sadly defunct) Weekly World News would every publish such a story. 


But, of course, we have to consider the not only the probability of the event given naturalism, but we must also consider the laws of supernature. How probable is the event given supernatural involvement. Is it the sort of thing God is likely to do, or not, if we suspect God? Of course, Keith and I disagree as to whether it is possible to consider the laws of supernature, but people who have beliefs about supernature have probabilistic expectations concerning what to expect from supernature. If you say that's not enough for a law, well guess what. In quantum mechanics all you get are probabilities also. Are we worried that God isn't observable? Well, science commits to unobservables all the time. 


In considering miracles claims like the Resurrection, we can formulate a theory about what kinds of miracles God is likely to perform, and why he would perform them. Given this theory, we can ask whether the historical evidence is more likely to be the sort thing we should expect if the theistic theory is true, or whether it is more like the sort of thing we should expect if the theistic theory is false. There is a very large trail of historical evidence to look at. 


Of course, you can end up deciding that yes, the historical evidence confirms the theistic story, but the atheistic account is more probable based on the total evidence, or relative to your priors. 


Have the laws of nature been established by a firm and unalterable experience, as Hume suggests? I don't think so. My experience is far from establishing the laws of nature on a firm and unalterable basis. What about yours? 

An exposition of Anscombe's Causality and Determination

A famous Anscombe essay.

CARM on Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence