Supernaturalist double standards

I was reading a post by Don Severs over on Enough’s Enough entitled (deliberately confusingly, methinks) “Is it wrong to be resistant to opposing Anti-supernaturalism? Or not?”. The post talks about “anti-supernatural bias”, as if atheists reject the claims of the Bible out of presupposition (which can happen) rather than the fact that they are just ridiculous and completely improbable. We can even use objective methodology to arrive at such conclusions (Bayes’s Theorem).

In this short post, all I want to do is quickly point out the double standards of theists in the context of their accusation. for example, if a theist lost their car keys, they might list these explanations:

1) I misplaced them, forgetting where I put them

2) My partner took them

3) My child has hidden them as a prank

4) My cat has knocked them onto the floor somewhere

etc.

What the theist does NOT do is make a list as follows:

1) I misplaced them, forgetting where I put them

2) My partner took them

3) My child has hidden them as a prank

4) My cat has knocked them onto the floor somewhere

5) A poltergeist took them

6) Satan ordered a demonic minion to steal into my house and take the keys, hiding them, most diabolically, under the flowerpot

and so on.

Why does the theist not do this? Because these are wildly improbable claims. So it comes down to strength of evidence using something like Bayes’s again. Can the exceptionally low prior probability of such a wild claim be countered by the fantastically superior and indubitable evidence, which is of the highest quality? the answer is always, it appears, no. And this is the same historiographical problem that the claims of the Bible face in trying to work in tandem with the evidential quality of the Bible.

Theists have double standards in that they recognise the incredibly low prior probabilities of such supernatural claims, and utilise this conclusion on a daily basis. but when it comes to the Bible, they throw that out of the window and use a completely different epistemological method.

Which is, in my book, known as double standards.

http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

We can even use objective methodology to arrive at such conclusions (Bayes’s Theorem).

How is Bayes’ Theorem objective when the numbers placed into the equation can be highly subjective?

Why does the theist not do this? Because these are wildly improbable claims.

The poltergeist explanation, for example, might be deemed improbable because no poltergeist activity has been observed in the house. If you were already convinced the house was haunted or if you, say, saw the car keys thrown out the window by an unseen force then the poltergeist explanation suddenly becomes more probable. The probabilities don’t occur in a vacuum.

Can the exceptionally low prior probability of such a wild claim be countered by the fantastically superior and indubitable evidence, which is of the highest quality? the answer is always, it appears, no.

Would you mind working through, as an example, the Rosenheim poltergeist case and show us how the evidence is insufficient to accept the poltergeist hypothesis? Is someone who uses different numbers in Bayes’ theorem really applying a double standard or do they just have a different view of the probabilities?

Theists have double standards in that they recognise the incredibly low prior probabilities of such supernatural claims, and utilise this conclusion on a daily basis. but when it comes to the Bible, they throw that out of the window and use a completely different epistemological method.

There’s two problems here. First, prior probabilities can be overcome by posterior probabilities. Second, theists often accept supernatural explanations for claims made outside of the Bible.
pboyfloyd

So, Jayman, ‘the theist doesn’t normally attribute events to supernatural causes’, is untrue because, “If you were already convinced the house was haunted or if you, say, saw the car keys thrown out the window by an unseen force then the poltergeist explanation suddenly becomes more probable.” ?

1) No doubt you learned to argue ‘taking a point out of context’ from your Biblical studies? Christians take O.T. verses out of context when they agree that those O.T. verses are refering to Jesus AND they ceaselessly point out that ANY verse quoted by an atheist is obviously out of context, sometimes ‘the context’ being the entire collection of books of the Bible!

2) You believe that there are such things as poltergeists?
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

So, Jayman, ‘the theist doesn’t normally attribute events to supernatural causes’, is untrue because, “If you were already convinced the house was haunted or if you, say, saw the car keys thrown out the window by an unseen force then the poltergeist explanation suddenly becomes more probable.” ?

Who are you quoting in the phrase “the theist doesn’t normally attribute events to supernatural causes”? I’m not disputing that. I take the issue to be whether theists apply a double standard towards the supernatural, not whether they attribute most events to natural or supernatural causes.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

Hi Jayman

Sure, we could get into a discussion about informative and uninformative priors. But in the case of supernaturalism, when looking at Christianity as a whole (rather than individual cases) and comparing other religions as a whole, then the prior for Christianity is very low, given the falsehood of every single other religion in humanity. Then when we see a poor level of evidence (archaeology etc) and we can see clear contextual evolution of theological ideas (the Maccabean Revolt seeing the stealing of the ideas of hell and eternal souls off the Greeks, so that by the time the NT comes along, it’s had a couple of hundred years or thereabouts to mutate into the Christian understanding, etc), then the whole equation presents problems for the supernatural thesis.

And then, when you use something like Jeff Lowder’s Evidential Argument from the History of Science, http://secularoutpost.infidels.org/2012/06/evidential-argument-from-history-of.html, you see that the probabilities are stacked against supernaturalism.

But this is not to deny it a priori, don;t forget. It just means the evidence has to be very , very good to reasonably believe it.

In the case of the Gospels, it ain’t. And the Rosenheim poltergeist, as wiki admits, is highly contentious:

The Rosenheim Poltergeist case has become an extremely contentious issue. While some claim that it proves the existence of paranormal phenomena, critics maintain it was set up and faked, or simply an attention-seeking prank developed by the emotionally disturbed Ms. Schneider. There is also no evidence on video that matches the more extreme (and, therefore, paranormal) events said to have occurred. However the police officers present and others unconnected with the company, such as Karger and Zicha, did give official statements claiming to have witnessed unexplained object movements, and Annemarie Schneider was never actually caught faking the phenomena.

I guess you believe what you want to, but bear in mind:

The allegedly “best documented” poltergeist case of Rosenheim had some special investigators in that none of them has a record of having found rational explanations for anything ever. However, they have records of having been fooled again and again.

Hans Bender, who investigated the case for the “Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene” in Freiburg, had investigated another Poltergeist case in Bremen before, in 1965. He attested the case to be genuine and concluded that a 14-year old employee named Heiner Schäfer subconsciously damaged his working place by psychokinesis. Twelf years later Schäfer confessed that it was all manipulated by him. Out of frustration about the working conditions he applied technically skilled manipulations, and he also used tricks to get significant results when he was examined by Bender. In 1982, again, Bender declared the spook case “Chopper” to be for real. That case as well was later proven to have been nothing but a fraud set up by a young female employee.One of the two physicists from the Max-Planck institute, Friedbert Karger, who attested the Rosenheim case to be unexplainable, also investigated Uri Geller in 1972 and concluded that “The powers of this man [Geller] are a phenomenon that theoretical physics cannot explain yet”. Nowadays, he appears every now and then on paranormal TV shows as an alibi-scientist to make claims like “I have performed telepathy experiments quite successfully. You can’t explain that with conventional physics”.
As for Andreas Resch, he happened to investigate the Rosenheim case being a cleric with zero qualification in natural science and zero experience in investigating. Lecturing in the Vatikan, he even made the Vatikan officials raise an eyebrow or two when it became public that he gave lectures on how to missionize aliens.

And

Here are two interesting links though with articles from the years 1968 and 1970, respectively.

http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-45465380.html
http://www.zeit.de/1970/15/geister-oder-nylon/seite-1

They describe the involvment of electricians, of the electric company, of Siemens, and the parapsychologists. Police is only mentioned in one line within a protocol made by office workers in that they allegedly witnessed a banging sound. The second article is also interesting in that it tells about three authors who visited the office and found traces of fraud, eg. a nylon thread attached to a lamp. The lawyer filed a lawsuit against them, but apparently without success since you can still buy the book (http://www.amazon.de/Falsche-Geister-echte-Schwindler-Allan/dp/B0000BNOGU).
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Jonathan:

One of my points is that merely appealing to Bayes’ theorem does not make things more objective. You seem to be saying that the prior probability of Christianity (and presumably all religions [including atheism?]) is 1 in R, where R is the number of religions in the world. One can object to this probability by noting that religions contain some overlap (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam believe Moses was a prophet so if Christianity is true that does not mean Islam is completely false on all matters). Someone else could assert that the prior probability of Christianity is 1 in 3 since about 1 in 3 humans is Christian.

For the Rosenheim poltergeist case you immediately jump to the posterior evidence without suggesting a prior probability. Is this because any number you would come up with would be entirely subjective?

My main point, which you didn’t really touch, is that you have not demonstrated a double standard. It’s not like Christians always appeal to a supernatural explanation for events described in the Bible or always rule out a supernatural explanation for events outside the Bible.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

It is that Christians are happy to rely on the most probable explanation of events in their everyday lives, but in the more fundamental questions of reality, they lump for the less probable theses.

Your analogy of atheism is incorrect. First, it is not a religion. Second it is not a religion which has been found to be false.

The claims of, say, the infancy narratives (since this is the start of Christianity, per se) are that the priors of a miraculously conceived person being born are exceptionally low, negligable non-zero. So the evidence must be awesome. We have totally problematic and poor evidence (see my book and debate with Randal Rauser). The claim of the nativity being true must have a higher probability than alternate hypotheses, whilst accounting for low priors, and poor evidence (contradictory, anachronistic, lack of provenance or hisotoriographical methods, lack of attestation, lack of 2 of the other Gospels corroborating etc).

So it seems fairly obvious that, using Bayes, one could quite easily conclude that it was more likely it did not happen (at least as reported).

And we could do these for all individual claims of the bible. The simple fact is, the evidence is poor. Which is why faith is so important. Faith is what gets you over the low priors. It is also what gets people who want to believe in poltergeists over the low priors.

But you don’t apply such heavy ‘faith’ weighting to any mundane events. Here is the double standard.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Jonathan:

It is that Christians are happy to rely on the most probable explanation of events in their everyday lives, but in the more fundamental questions of reality, they lump for the less probable theses.

Of course the Christian views things differently. He finds the supernatural explanation to be the most probable explanation for certain events. That’s not a double standard; it’s a difference of opinion.

Aside: I also find the theistic explanation the most probable explanation for everyday/mundane events. It’s just that these kinds of events are done through secondary causes.

Your analogy of atheism is incorrect. First, it is not a religion. Second it is not a religion which has been found to be false.

I don’t care to quibble over the definition of religion. But it seems that the prior probability of atheism has to be tied in with the prior probability of religion since the truth of atheism depends on all religions being false. Whether atheism has been found false is where we differ but it is also irrelevant for determining its prior probability. You would need to show the posterior probability of atheism offsets its low prior probability (if we are going to use the 1 in R method for determining its prior probability).

The claims of, say, the infancy narratives (since this is the start of Christianity, per se) are that the priors of a miraculously conceived person being born are exceptionally low, negligable non-zero.

But how do you calculate that number? Can you give a definite number for this prior probability? If not then we’re dealing with thoroughly subjective numbers.

And we could do these for all individual claims of the bible.

Christians have provided Bayesian arguments for the resurrection of Christ. You’ll probably disagree with the numbers they put into the equation but, again, that merely shows a difference of opinion, not a double standard on the Christian’s part.

Faith is what gets you over the low priors. It is also what gets people who want to believe in poltergeists over the low priors.

That’s no more convincing than claiming bias is what causes atheists to give excessively low priors and to underestimate the evidence. How do you tell the difference between faith and difference of opinion?

Also, while I realize you said “people who want to believe in poltergeists”, I think it’s safe to say the vast majority of people do not want their house to be haunted (if we go with the spirit interpretation of poltergeist phenomenon). It cannot be taken for granted that people want the supernatural to exist.
Andy_Schueler

Of course the Christian views things differently. He finds the supernatural explanation to be the most probable explanation for certain events. That’s not a double standard; it’s a difference of opinion.

I find it more helpful to distinguish between ordinary / likely and extraordinary / unlikely claims than between natural and supernatural ones. Even if you believe that supernatural events, like Gods resurrecting people from the dead, are possible – you would still have to admit that it is a very extraordinary claim (because people are not ordinarily resurrected from the dead – christians for example believe in only in a handful of resurrections – Jesus, Lazarus, some saints in Jerusalem etc., and reject all other alleged resurrections. Which means that resurrections are, in any case, exceedingly rare and do not ordinarily happen). To establish such extraordinary / unlikely claims, evidence that is at least as extraordinary / unlikely is required.
And christians have no extraordinary evidence in support of these claims. Eyewitnesses for example do not count as extraordinary evidence (just one piece of material evidence, like fingerprints or DNA samples, are sufficient to trump an arbitrary number of eyewitnesses in court). And christians do not even have eyewitnesses, only alleged eyewitnesses mentioned in second hand sources. The double standard is that christians believe these sources, but they do not believe that people are regularly abducted by aliens or that Bigfoot exists or that Sathya Sai Baba is a miracle worker, although these claims are definitely not more extraordinary than the resurrection of Jesus and the evidence to support them is actually superior (first hand instead of second hand accounts).
The usual christian reply to this is that investigations into claims like alien abductions and non-christian miracle workers like Sai Baba demonstrates that these claims are based on fraud and delusions. And such replies further reveal the double standard. It is rational to ask for a thorough investigation of such extraordinary claims before believing them, but this cannot be done for claims about ancient miracles where all alleged eyewitnesses are dead for many centuries and no material evidence is available whatsoever. So why do christians believe the extraordinary claims reported in the gospels but reject countless other claims that are just as extraordinary ? It is a double standard.

But how do you calculate that number? Can you give a definite number for this prior probability? If not then we’re dealing with thoroughly subjective numbers.

For events like a resurrection, the correct prior probability would be a / b with a = “number of true resurrection claims” and b = “number of true AND false resurrection claims”. For events that are exceedingly rare in any case and for which it is completely unknown whether they are even possible, the prior probabilities cannot be precisely calculated. One tentative way of approaching the problem would be to assume that ALL alleged resurrections (not only counting christianity) actually did happen and divide this number by the number of all humans that lived in the last two thousand years (a time frame for which recorded history is available from most regions of the earth). This is already very generous and a prior probability close to zero could be rationally defended, but I´ll not go into that. If we calculate the prior probability like I explained above, the number would be around ~1000 (all alleged resurrections) divided by 40 billion (number of humans that lived in the last two thousand years). Which would result in a prior probability of 1 / 40000000. Now, to get a reasonably high posterior probability, the conditional probability of the evidence in support of an alleged resurrection, given that the resurrection is indeed true has to be very likely (close to 1) and the probability of observing the evidence in any case (with the actual resurrection claim being true OR false) has to be very low, close to 1 / 40000000, to reach a reasonably high posterior probability. The only evidence that christians have however, are second hand accounts about alleged eyewitnesses that allegedly claimed to have witnessed miracles. And eyewitnesses reporting miraculous claims is nothing particularly unusual – we find them in the recorded history of all cultures and for contemporary miracle claims that can be scientifically tested, we can demonstrate that they are always based on deception and / or delusion (meaning that eyewitnesses reporting miraculous events is a completely ordinary event, even if the event demonstrably did not happen!). And this means that the denominator in Bayes´ theorem will not approach anything even remotely close to 1 / 40000000 and the resulting posterior probability will be very low.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Andy:

I find it more helpful to distinguish between ordinary / likely and extraordinary / unlikely claims than between natural and supernatural ones.

What happens when an extraordinary claim is the outcome of ordinary claims? Jesus being killed by crucifixion is an ordinary claim. Jesus being buried in a tomb is an ordinary claim. A tomb being empty is an ordinary claim. Jesus’ disciples seeing Jesus is an ordinary claim. But when those ordinary claims are combined in the gospel they point to an extraordinary claim. So, again, we see how subjectivity creeps into the allegedly objective Bayesian analysis. How do you divide the claims into classes to evaluate?

Even if you believe that supernatural events, like Gods resurrecting people from the dead, are possible – you would still have to admit that it is a very extraordinary claim (because people are not ordinarily resurrected from the dead – christians for example believe that only a handful of people were actually resurrected – Jesus, Lazarus, some saints in Jerusalem etc., and reject all other alleged resurrections. Which means that resurrections are, in any case, exceedingly rare and do not ordinarily happen).

Since you seem to include resuscitations in your list, you are quite simply wrong to assert that Christians reject all other alleged resurrections/resuscitations. I managed to put together a list of 616 alleged resuscitations and they are believed to have occurred by at least some Christians.

Eyewitnesses for example do not count as extraordinary evidence . . . .

That’s another can of worms. Since the authenticity of material evidence is filtered through eyewitness testimony we would have to conclude extraordinary evidence doesn’t exist.

The double standard is that christians believe these sources, but they do not believe that people are regularly abducted by aliens or that Bigfoot exists or that Sathya Sai Baba is a miracle worker, although these claims are definitely not more extraordinary than the resurrection of Jesus . . . .

First, Christians often believe the NT sources are better than you describe. You might think they’re wrong but it’s not necessarily a double standard. Second, relatively brief glimpses of a UFO or Bigfoot are different than witnessing your resurrected teacher over a period of 40 days. It isn’t merely a matter of adding the number of witnesses up. Third, there are Christians who accept UFOs (especially in the plain sense of the term), Bigfoot, and/or non-Christian miracles.

For events like a resurrection, the correct prior probability would be a / b with a = “number of true resurrection claims” and b = “number of true AND false resurrection claims”.

This highlights a problem with Bayesian analysis for historical claims. Unique events happen all the time in history but using this method would require us to give a prior probability of zero for such events. If we did this then no matter how good the evidence is we would not be justified in believing the event occurred. With such an absurd outcome why should we apply Bayes’ theorem to history at all?

. . .for contemporary miracle claims that can be scientifically tested, we can demonstrate that they are always based on deception and / or delusion (meaning that eyewitnesses reporting miraculous events is a completely ordinary event, even if the event demonstrably did not happen!).

You can demonstrate no such thing. For example, at Lourdes there have been about 5000 cure claims presented to the Medical Bureau; 67 have been deemed certain cures and 4000 have been deemed probable cures. In other words, 81.34% of claims have been deemed probable or better by the Medical Bureau. See here for more.

The second hand accounts about eyewitnesses are based on actual eyewitness accounts and not made up (which can easily be rejected by pointing out that in the earliest surviving copies of the earliest gospel (Mark), the ending where the resurrected Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene and to the disciples is missing). The hypothesis that the appearances of the resurrected Jesus are forgeries added by scribes (in case of Mark) and fabrications by later gospel authors is thus not at all unlikely.

Mark 1:1-16:8 still has Jesus prophesying that his disciples will see him after the resurrection so he clearly knew of the appearances even if he did not narrate them. Paul, who predates Mark, also notes such appearances. Your hypothesis has nothing going for it.

And with the exact same assumptions, I could demonstrate that alien abductions happen regularly, with a posterior probability being almost arbitrarily close to 1.

Perhaps a Bayesian approach isn’t warranted at all?
Andy_Schueler

What happens when an extraordinary claim is the outcome of ordinary claims? Jesus being killed by crucifixion is an ordinary claim. Jesus being buried in a tomb is an ordinary claim. A tomb being empty is an ordinary claim. Jesus’ disciples seeing Jesus is an ordinary claim. But when those ordinary claims are combined in the gospel they point to an extraordinary claim. So, again, we see how subjectivity creeps into the allegedly objective Bayesian analysis. How do you divide the claims into classes to evaluate?

You say “Jesus’ disciples seeing Jesus is an ordinary claim”. It is most certainly not an ordinary claim because Jesus was allegedly dead at that time. Compare these two claims:
a) I saw my grandmother last week.
or:
b) My grandmother died and was buried two weeks ago, but me and some of my friends saw her just yesterday and talked to her.
I don´t have to provide much evidence to prove that I saw my grandmother, because it is something completely ordinary and plausible. If I claim however that my grandmother was bodily resurrected from the dead and appeared to me and my friends – nobody would believe us unless we had some truly impressive evidence (at least as impressive as the resurrection claim itself) to support that claim, and rightfully so…

Since you seem to include resuscitations in your list

I didn´t include them. And I see no reason to include them because resuscitations demonstrably happened many times, which is also completely unsurprising given our understanding of human physiology. What has never been demonstrated, and what is impossible given our understanding of human physiology, is the resurrection of a corpse (like what happened to Lazarus allegedly).

That’s another can of worms. Since the authenticity of material evidence is filtered through eyewitness testimony we would have to conclude extraordinary evidence doesn’t exist.

Not at all. The outcome of DNA profiling for example results in an objective result – the tested sample came from the suspect with a probability that can be precisely determined and which requires no subjective interpretation whatsoever (assuming that the lab that was ordered tested the sample actually did their job of course – which is why many jurisdictions send the samples to several independent labs).
Evidence of this kind easily trumps (and indeed has trumped many times) an arbitrary number of eyewitnesses in court.

First, Christians often believe the NT sources are better than you describe. You might think they’re wrong but it’s not necessarily a double standard. Second, relatively brief glimpses of a UFO or Bigfoot are different than witnessing your resurrected teacher over a period of 40 days. It isn’t merely a matter of adding the number of witnesses up.

There are not only brief UFO sightings, there are very detailed accounts of people being abducted by aliens, medically examined and / or interrogated by them etc. pp. And these are primary sources, actual living eyewitnesses that can be interrogated by experts, examined for their mental health and so on. This is far superior than second hand accounts about alleged eyewitnesses that are dead for almost two thousand years. This is not a matter of opinion, the evidence supportion alien abductions is objectively better – there is a reason why second hand accounts are dismissed as hearsay in court, they are notoriously unreliable.

Third, there are Christians who accept UFOs (especially in the plain sense of the term), Bigfoot, and/or non-Christian miracles.

If you apply consistently low standards of evidence and believing every claim, no matter how extraordinary, as long as it is supported by eyewitness evidence, then I would call that extremely gullible, but certainly consistent (i.e., no double standard).

This highlights a problem with Bayesian analysis for historical claims. Unique events happen all the time in history but using this method would require us to give a prior probability of zero for such events. If we did this then no matter how good the evidence is we would not be justified in believing the event occurred. With such an absurd outcome why should we apply Bayes’ theorem to history at all?

There are heuristics to come up with semi-objective priors for events that might be impossible. Like the example heuristic I´ve given to come with a prior for the resurrection. What is done usually in such cases, is to be very generous (by for example assuming that all alleged resurrections indeed did happen and thus setting the prior probability at “number of people that were resurrected” / “number of all people that lived in the considered timeframe”). If we don´t get a reasonably high posterior probability with even a very generous prior, the claim can be conclusively rejected and requires no further investigation.

You can demonstrate no such thing. For example, at Lourdes there have been about 5000 cure claims presented to the Medical Bureau; 67 have been deemed certain cures and 4000 have been deemed probable cures. In other words, 81.34% of claims have been deemed probable or better by the Medical Bureau. See here for more.

The question is what do you consider to be a miracle ? If you consider it to be a very unlikely event, then yes, miracles happen all the time (no matter to which God you pray or if you pray at all). If it is something that is impossible given our understanding of the laws of nature however (an amputated arm regrowing for example), than not a single event on the list you link to counts as a miracle.
I would be impressed if you could point to one, just one, event that demonstrably happened and which would have been impossible without the laws of nature, as we currently understand them, being suspended.

Mark 1:1-16:8 still has Jesus prophesying that his disciples will see him after the resurrection so he clearly knew of the appearances even if he did not narrate them. Paul, who predates Mark, also notes such appearances. Your hypothesis has nothing going for it.

My point was that we don´t have the autographs and cannot reconstruct what the autographs said beyond reasonable doubt. We can demonstrate plenty of forgeries that have been added very late to the gospels and epistles, what has been altered in the 1st and 2nd centuries is impossible to know.

Perhaps a Bayesian approach isn’t warranted at all?

Why not ? Without applying double standards (if christian apologists would weigh the evidence for alien abductions in Bayes´ theorem in the same way that they do it for the resurrection of Jesus – than I would have nothing to criticize, it would be an extremely naive and gullible, but completely consistent approach).
pboyfloyd

“..whether theists apply a double standard towards the supernatural, not whether they attribute most events to natural or supernatural causes.”

That’s fine Jayman, but, “”If you were already convinced the house was haunted or if you, say, saw the car keys thrown out the window by an unseen force then the poltergeist explanation suddenly becomes more probable.”, doesn’t seem to be addressing that issue either, right?

I put this phrase, ‘the theist doesn’t normally attribute events to supernatural causes’, in single quotes for it to be clear that everything within was ‘the thing’ that you ALSO weren’t addressing with the crap about a poltergeist explanation, “suddenly becom[ing] more probable.”

That theists don’t normally attribute events to supernaturalism, while it isn’t the main issue, as you point out later, is what you seem to be ‘taking on’ when you point out the poltergeist thing.

Gee Jayman, why didn’t you just say that that first comment was a total diversion which had absolutely nothing to do with the issue? I’m guessing that you had decided that the first part of the issue WAS important to speak on, but apparently it was some kind of ‘bad form’ for me to address the points you were making about that part of the issue?
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

This highlights a problem with Bayesian analysis for historical claims. Unique events happen all the time in history but using this method would require us to give a prior probability of zero for such events. If we did this then no matter how good the evidence is we would not be justified in believing the event occurred. With such an absurd outcome why should we apply Bayes’ theorem to history at all?

Whoah. You are confusing unique events with physically impossible events.

Take the example of winning the lottery. Don’t worry, you are in good company. Craig made this same gaffe in a debate. You are calculating the probability of a particular person X winning the lottery. When the real issue is whether any person should win the lottery. Given the numbers of tickets bought, this is actually almost certain, and not unique or incredible. Because if you calculate the chances of anything individual happening, the chances are ridiculously low for everyday occurrences. If you are going to individualise probability calculations, it kind of defeats the object. Anyway, given perfect knowledge and determinism, and a narrow frequency definition of random, everything has a probability of one, anyway…

But in the case at hand, we are calculating the probability not of naturalistic resuscitation (since if Jesus did this, then it ain’t anything special). We are talking coming back from 3 days dead. So Andy is spot in in his calculations.

The evidence for Sathya Sai Baba, and the contemporary witnesses completely outdo the evidence for Jesus etc., too.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Andy:

You say “Jesus’ disciples seeing Jesus is an ordinary claim”. It is most certainly not an ordinary claim because Jesus was allegedly dead at that time.

I’m not sure we actually disagree. I said it is only when the ordinary claims are combined do we come to an extraordinary claim. You’re combining the appearances of Jesus with the death of Jesus.

I didn´t include them [resuscitations].

Lazarus is clearly a resuscitation because he died again. He was not raised to eternal life like Jesus.

What has never been demonstrated, and what is impossible given our understanding of human physiology, is the resurrection of a corpse (like what happened to Lazarus allegedly).

All physiology tells us is that a corpse does not revivify on its own accord. Physiology tells us absolutely nothing about whether God can revivify a corpse. Also, my list included modern-day resuscitations of some people who were dead for multiple days (#51 and #62 in the list had been dead for 4 days; #66 had been dead for 2 days and the body was decomposing). At least some Christians believe these modern-day resuscitations occurred so they aren’t applying some double standard between Biblical miracles and non-Biblical miracles.

The outcome of DNA profiling for example results in an objective result – the tested sample came from the suspect with a probability that can be precisely determined and which requires no subjective interpretation whatsoever

Whether it’s objective is not the issue. The issue is whether it involves eyewitness testimony or not. The DNA might be gathered from the crime scene. Someone will attest where they got the DNA from and that it has not been contaminated before its gets to the lab. The validity of lab procedures and experiments is determined by human beings. An expert witness may be called to court to give testimony as to what the DNA evidence means. The point is that even material evidence is supported by eyewitness testimony. If eyewitness testimony cannot be extraordinary evidence then I don’t see how extraordinary evidence exists.

This is not a matter of opinion, the evidence supporting alien abductions is objectively better

Care to point me to the best evidenced alien abduction case you know of?

If you apply consistently low standards of evidence and believe every claim, no matter how extraordinary, as long as it is supported by eyewitness evidence, then I would call that extremely gullible, but certainly consistent (i.e., no double standard).

That does seem to be a standard atheist accusation. On the one hand, we have atheists who say Christians apply a double standard. On the other hand, we have atheists who say Christians are gullible.

Like the example heuristic I´ve given to come with a prior for the resurrection. What is done usually in such cases, is to be very generous (by for example assuming that all alleged resurrections indeed did happen and thus setting the prior probability at “number of people that were resurrected” / “number of all people that lived in the considered timeframe”).

That’s highly subjective and you still face a reference class problem. In a similar discussion with atheist Jeffrey Jay Lowder he started out by assigning the prior probability of Jesus’ resurrection to be 1 (Jesus’ alleged resurrection) in 100 billion (the total number of people to have ever lived). I then talked him into saying the prior probability should be 1 (Jesus’ alleged resurrection) in 50 billion (the total number of males to have ever lived). For whatever reason, he thought the number of males was the proper reference class (as opposed to the number of mammals, the number of Jews, the number of prophets, or other possibilities). Your suggestion is slightly different (you take a timeframe).

And perhaps we should use miracles as part of the reference class instead of just resurrections. Craig Keener has noted that hundreds of millions of people claim to have witnessed or experienced a miracle. Let’s say 300,000,000 alleged miracles divided by 7,000,000,000 people means there is about a 0.04 prior probability of the resurrection.

Plus even natural claims seem wildly improbable using this heuristic. What is the prior probability that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon? 12 in 100 billion? How many eyewitnesses can attest that Neil actually walked on the moon?

If it is something that is impossible given our understanding of the laws of nature however (an amputated arm regrowing for example), than not a single event on the list you link to counts as a miracle.

So when the Medical Bureau says the case is medically inexplicable they are wrong? You know better than they do?

I would be impressed if you could point to one, just one, event that demonstrably happened and which would have been impossible without the laws of nature, as we currently understand them, being suspended.

Keener’s book includes a number of accounts of body parts growing back. For example, on p. 326 he writes: “One of Tonye’s own patients when he was a junior doctor at the hospital (something like residency here) had such a serious condition that the gynecologist, Dr. Membre, had to perform a bilateral tube ligation, removing the tubes. The woman prayed during Apostle Numbere’s monthly healing meetings there, and three months later Tonye was present when Dr. Membre found her pregnant. Having removed the tubes himself, he could only concede, “Your God is great.” After the child’s birth, a hysterosalpingogram, a sort of X-ray using dyes, confirmed that the woman indeed had two healthy tubes; Tonye witnessed this test himself, and the woman had other children afterward.”

My point was that we don´t have the autographs and cannot reconstruct what the autographs said beyond reasonable doubt.

Sure you can. Pick up the critical textual commentary by Metzger and you can note the manuscript evidence and the viewpoint of the UBS scholars. By my count, at least 98% of the Greek words in the NT are certain. Are you now telling me that, not only do you know better than trained doctors, you also know better than trained textual critics?

Why not ? Without applying double standards, there would be nothing to criticize (if christian apologists would weigh the evidence for alien abductions (for example) using Bayes´ theorem in the same way that they do it for the resurrection of Jesus – it would be an extremely naive and gullible, but completely consistent approach).

Because it’s subjective and leads to absurd results? I’m suggesting you do history without invoking Bayes’ theorem at all.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

pboyfloyd:

That’s fine Jayman, but, “”If you were already convinced the house was haunted or if you, say, saw the car keys thrown out the window by an unseen force then the poltergeist explanation suddenly becomes more probable.”, doesn’t seem to be addressing that issue either, right?

That would be part of the background knowledge that would factor into one’s Bayesian calculation. Likewise, whether you own a cat will factor into the probabilities of the cat hypothesis. The point is that background information can vary from case to case so you can’t assume any two cases are analogous.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

“Lazarus is clearly a resuscitation because he died again. He was not raised to eternal life like Jesus.”

I think you have just dug yourself into a problem since you define resurrection as now EVEN more improbable. So if you are calculating the priors of resurrection, well..
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

(#51 and #62 in the list had been dead for 4 days; #66 had been dead for 2 days and the body was decomposing). At least some Christians believe these modern-day resuscitations occurred so they aren’t applying some double standard between Biblical miracles and non-Biblical miracles.

This is your worst moment – this precisely does show just that, since these are uniquely Christian claims, and they would not afford such resuscitation claims of other ancient histories or other religions.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

Plus even natural claims seem wildly improbable using this heuristic. What is the prior probability that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon? 12 in 100 billion? How many eyewitnesses can attest that Neil actually walked on the moon?
But you forget, that given the standard of the evidence and the background knowledge, and bearing in mind that no laws of nature are broken, too, then the calculation favours the truth of the claim, especially given the poor evidence for alternate non-moon theories.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Jonathan:

You are confusing unique events with physically impossible events.

I’m following Andy’s lead. Andy wrote: “For events like a resurrection, the correct prior probability would be a / b with a = “number of true resurrection claims” and b = “number of true AND false resurrection claims”.” I’m just replacing “resurrection” with some other variable.

You are calculating the probability of a particular person X winning the lottery. When the real issue is whether any person should win the lottery.

They are both historical issues, are they not? Did anyone win the PowerBall drawing on such-and-such a date? Did Bob win the PowerBall drawing on such-and-such a date?

If you are going to individualise probability calculations, it kind of defeats the object.

Isn’t the object to know what actually happened in history? This involves individual people.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Jonathan:

I think you have just dug yourself into a problem since you define resurrection as now EVEN more improbable. So if you are calculating the priors of resurrection, well.

I’m not convinced a Bayesian approach is even possible for history. But, yes, I realize that would make the resurrection more improbable on some people’s accounts.

This is your worst moment – this precisely does show just that, since these are uniquely Christian claims, and they would not afford such resuscitation claims of other ancient histories or other religions.

Not all the witnesses to the items in my list were Christians. And you need to show Christians denying these other resuscitation accounts for your claim to stick.

But you forget, that given the standard of the evidence and the background knowledge, and bearing in mind that no laws of nature are broken, too, then the calculation favours the truth of the claim, especially given the poor evidence for alternate non-moon theories.

Note I was speaking of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon. I was not commenting on whether a human being has ever walked on the moon (e.g., maybe Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon but Neil didn’t). And alternate theories don’t need to be strong to assert that the available evidence is not strong enough to believe Neil walked on the moon.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

On Keener, Hallquist has some interesting things to say:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/hallq/2012/06/from-the-archives-review-of-craig-keeners-miracles/

One has to be suspect when Keener cites, as evidence for a regrown limb, a book by a televangelist. It must be true.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

I’m just replacing “resurrection” with some other variable.

You are talking about something else, then,
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

They are both historical issues, are they not? Did anyone win the PowerBall drawing on such-and-such a date? Did Bob win the PowerBall drawing on such-and-such a date?

Yeah, but to work out the prior probability of Jesus having resurrected before makes the calculation even more insanely improbable. So one must be general.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

Alternate theories together with priors need to have higher probability than the theory being tested. That is the whole point. Which is why, without realising it, we use Bayes’ in our every day life (Carrier clearly elucidates this in Proving History). There is no new theory here, it is just codification of what we do subconsciously, weighing up evidence against likelihood.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

Of course, what is really telling, Jayman, is that your posts are actually proving the point. It’s almost ironic.

Keener.

If I read such accounts in any book, secular or otherwise, I would firstly be checking the sources VERY carefully. After all, the probability of these events is minimal. I would be sifting through primary evidence, and most probably demanding MORE evidence.

You see, had these have happened either in secular accounts, unrelated to prayer, or in different religions, and you simply read it in one agenda-laden book (the title gives it away), then you would actually have low epistemic reason to believe them. You obviously believe them. Have you researched Membre? I’m just wondering why such a clearly AMAZING claim does not feature in any scientific journals that I can find.

In fact, using some fairly tight search terms, all I could find was Keener’s book and your post (verbatim what is below).

The fact that you appear to believe these claims on apparently very low evidential quality, and very very low priors, speaks volumes and rather proves our point.
Andy_Schueler

I’m not sure we actually disagree. I said it is only when the ordinary claims are combined do we come to an extraordinary claim. You’re combining the appearances of Jesus with the death of Jesus.

This seems to be a semantic disagreement but it is a quite important one. Context matters. “I just went outside for a walk” sounds like an ordinary claim – however, if the context would be that I just used my spaceship to fly to my house on Mars, where I went out for a walk, it would no longer be an ordinary claim now, would it ?

Lazarus is clearly a resuscitation because he died again. He was not raised to eternal life like Jesus.

Ok, if you want to define the words like this, be my guest. As long as you don´t count non-miraculous events like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiopulmonary_resuscitation
as a “resuscitation” then, I´m fine with that.

All physiology tells us is that a corpse does not revivify on its own accord.

Once the body is dead, entropy will win over biology and the decay is irreversible. Raising such a body would be possible If there are Gods who can suspend the laws of nature – without them it would be absolutely impossible.

. Also, my list included modern-day resuscitations of some people who were dead for multiple days (#51 and #62 in the list had been dead for 4 days; #66 had been dead for 2 days and the body was decomposing).

Indeed, I missed that. What is the evidence that this:
“A 2-year-old girl’s decomposing body (she had been dead for 2 days) was restored to life (p. 564)”
actually happened ?

Whether it’s objective is not the issue. The issue is whether it involves eyewitness testimony or not. The DNA might be gathered from the crime scene. Someone will attest where they got the DNA from and that it has not been contaminated before its gets to the lab. The validity of lab procedures and experiments is determined by human beings. An expert witness may be called to court to give testimony as to what the DNA evidence means. The point is that even material evidence is supported by eyewitness testimony. If eyewitness testimony cannot be extraordinary evidence then I don’t see how extraordinary evidence exists.

That sounds like a semantic trick – you simply count everything that involves human interaction as “eyewitness evidence” (and redefine “expert testimony” as “eyewitness testimony”) and thus define the very notion of material evidence out of existence. Using this definition for “eyewitness evidence”, we have “eyewitness evidence” (and only eyewitness evidence) for Big Bang Cosmology because humans study the evidence and communicate it to the public. This simply makes no sense.
The difference between forensic science and eyewitness testimony is the availability of scientific tools and the application of the scientific method. Both the tools and the methods that are applied by forensic scientists have been and are extensively tested for potential biases by experts all over the world. This is not perfect, but as objective and reliable as it gets (especially because multiple labs and multiple independent experts can be involved) – and material evidence does easily trump an arbitrary number of eyewitnesses for this very reason. When all eyewitnesses point to suspect A, but the DNA profile points to suspect B – what do you think will happen ?

Care to point me to the best evidenced alien abduction case you know of?

There are many examples, the most popular is this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_and_Barney_Hill_abduction
Carl Sagan was involved in studying UFO sightings and alleged alien abductions, he gives a nice recollection of this in the beginning of “The Demon-haunted World”.
Care to point me to the best evidenced miracle (in the sense of something that would be impossible without the laws of nature being suspended) that you know of ?

That’s highly subjective and you still face a reference class problem. In a similar discussion with atheist Jeffrey Jay Lowder he started out by assigning the prior probability of Jesus’ resurrection to be 1 (Jesus’ alleged resurrection) in 100 billion (the total number of people to have ever lived). I then talked him into saying the prior probability should be 1 (Jesus’ alleged resurrection) in 50 billion (the total number of males to have ever lived). For whatever reason, he thought the number of males was the proper reference class (as opposed to the number of mammals, the number of Jews, the number of prophets, or other possibilities). Your suggestion is slightly different (you take a timeframe).

I think taking a timeframe is reasonable because we could not possibly know of resurrections that happened in times before it was common to record history.
Using just the number of males however sounds strange to me.
As long as we are moving within two orders of magnitude or so, it doesn´t really matter.

And perhaps we should use miracles as part of the reference class instead of just resurrections. Craig Keener has noted that hundreds of millions of people claim to have witnessed or experienced a miracle. Let’s say 300,000,000 alleged miracles divided by 7,000,000,000 people means there is about a 0.04 prior probability of the resurrection.

Sorry but this is just ridiculous. I could just reverse this and say that there is a prior of 0.96 for non-miraculous events and use this as the prior for a (hypothetical) claim of yours that own a spaceship (a claim that is extraordinary as it gets, but definitely not a miracle). This would be not one iota more ridiculous than using a 0.04 for a specific miracle claim.

Plus even natural claims seem wildly improbable using this heuristic. What is the prior probability that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon?

We don´t have to use a heuristic here at all, because it was already known and empirically demonstrated at that time that it is possible to escape the earth´s gravitational filed and also that it is possible to land on the moon – both the soviets and the americans carried out unmanned moon landings before the Apollo 11 mission, missions that involved thousands of scientists and engineers in both countries, which designed the probes and evaluated the data that was collected on the moon.

So when the Medical Bureau says the case is medically inexplicable they are wrong? You know better than they do?

The key word here is “inexplicable” – “I don´t understand it so it must be magic”. Spontaneous remission of cancer for example was completely inexplicable decades ago, but it did not violate any laws of nature as we understand them. A human being regrowing an amputed arm however would not be something “inexplicable” – it is absolutely impossible without suspending the laws of nature as we currently understand them.

Keener’s book includes a number of accounts of body parts growing back. For example, on p. 326 he writes: “One of Tonye’s own patients when he was a junior doctor at the hospital (something like residency here) had such a serious condition that the gynecologist, Dr. Membre, had to perform a bilateral tube ligation, removing the tubes. The woman prayed during Apostle Numbere’s monthly healing meetings there,

Here I can only say that every single alleged miracle healer that has been investigated has been exposed as a fraud. Every single one of them. I would be willing to bet everything I own that if we would send a private investigator to “Apostle Numbere´s” meetings, he would be exposed as just as much of a fraud as Peter Popoff.

Sure you can. Pick up the critical textual commentary by Metzger and you can note the manuscript evidence and the viewpoint of the UBS scholars. By my count, at least 98% of the Greek words in the NT are certain. Are you now telling me that, not only do you know better than trained doctors, you also know better than trained textual critics?

Could you then please explain how they could possibly know that, since there are no surving autographs, no copies from the 1st century, only a handful of fragments (sometimes containing only a few sentences) from the second century, and no complete copies whatsoever until the 4th century ?

Because it’s subjective and leads to absurd results? I’m suggesting you do history without invoking Bayes’ theorem at all.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (which is essentially just a rephrasing of Bayes theorem).
Even if we cannot calculate precise priors (outside of religious claims, this is rarely much of a problem….) it would still be completely unreasonable to not require more evidence for extraordinary claims than for ordinary ones.
http://www.skepticink.com/tippling/2013/01/17/whether-supernatural-or-not-extraordinary-claims-do-require-extraordinary-evidence-a-naturalistic-parallel-to-the-gospels/
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Jonathan:

One has to be suspect when Keener cites, as evidence for a regrown limb, a book by a televangelist. It must be true.

The point of Keener’s book is not to prove each case he cites. The case I cited is not from Pat Robertson anyway.

You see, had these have happened either in secular accounts, unrelated to prayer, or in different religions, and you simply read it in one agenda-laden book (the title gives it away), then you would actually have low epistemic reason to believe them.

Not true. For example, there have been secular accounts (not related to prayer) of people unexpectedly being resuscitated after appearing to be dead. I don’t necessarily deny these accounts.

You obviously believe them.

That depends on what cases you have in mind. For example, in the list of resuscitations I don’t claim that each example is definitely a miracle.

I’m just wondering why such a clearly AMAZING claim does not feature in any scientific journals that I can find.

So if I find a miracle account published in a scientific journal you would believe it? Or would you still say the evidence ultimately comes down to the eyewitnesses anyway so whether it is published in a journal or not is irrelevant?
stuart32

Jayman, doesn’t the possibility of resuscitations worry you. If they are as common as you say then perhaps Jesus was resuscitated rather than resurrected. When Jesus appeared to the disciples the concern might have been not that they were seeing a ghost but that they were seeing a resuscitated man. In order to dispel this impression Jesus had to prove his ghostly credentials by dematerialising.
Andy_Schueler

The point of Keener’s book is not to prove each case he cites.

So what is the point of the book then ? If the purpose is to document that millions of people believe in “miracles” (using the definition of “miracle” = “something very improbable / unusual”) – a simple poll would suffice.

Not true. For example, there have been secular accounts (not related to prayer) of people unexpectedly being resuscitated after appearing to be dead. I don’t necessarily deny these accounts.

Ok, seriously – define “resuscitation”. People “coming back to life” after appearing to be death is not a miracle. What would be a miracle would be a corpse coming back to life (i.e. decay has already started – which is irreversible without the laws of nature being suspended).

So if I find a miracle account published in a scientific journal you would believe it? Or would you still say the evidence ultimately comes down to the eyewitnesses anyway so whether it is published in a journal or not is irrelevant?

I wouldn´t care about eyewitnesses one bit (and if you have nothing but eyewitnesses, no scientific journal would accept your story – unless you want to study it as a putative case of mass hysteria). Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable and something as extraordinary as a miracle – any miracle – cannot be established beyond reasonable doubt without physical evidence.

Also, you said earlier:

Keener’s book includes a number of accounts of body parts growing back. For example, on p. 326 he writes: “One of Tonye’s own patients when he was a junior doctor at the hospital (something like residency here) had such a serious condition that the gynecologist, Dr. Membre, had to perform a bilateral tube ligation, removing the tubes. The woman prayed during Apostle Numbere’s monthly healing meetings there,

This case allegedly happened in Nigeria, which is one of the most superstitious countries on this planet. Nigerian children are routinely accused of witchcraft and murdered for example – this has been studied and seems to be a clear case of ignorance, superstition and, most importantly, evil and greedy pentecostal pastors.
The difference between these cases and the case that Keener cites, is that the witchcraft accusations have been studied and we know that the pastors who make this accusations are evil frauds and the people who believe them are breathtakingly superstitious.
Before we investigated this case, we had nothing but thousands and thousands of eyewitnesses who swear that thos children were “witches” – would you have believed them ? If not, why not ? Do you think those witchcraft accusations are less plausible than the miracle healing that Keener cites ? If so, why ?
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

“I don’t necessarily deny these accounts.”

Therefore, you misunderstand the post. It is not about necessary denial a priori. It is about whether a posteriori overcomes lower priors.

And in the cases you mention, I doubt this is the case, otherwise science journals would be going mental.

And this is the point. Double standards.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

I would like Jayman to cite the evidence in support of the ligation case from Nigeria.

Because as far as I am concerned, his claims actually entirely prove that he has double standards.

You see, if Jayman believes such an account ON THE BASIS OF A SINGLE NON-EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY (Keener), without corroboration of further research into the sources, then, I am afraid, he is committing an epistemological crime on the basis of it being routed in Christianity. In other words, he shows his double standards, wears them on his sleeve here.

Thoughts, Jayman?
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Andy:

What is the evidence that this: “A 2-year-old girl’s decomposing body (she had been dead for 2 days) was restored to life (p. 564)” actually happened?

I’ll try to remember to look into when I get home.

That sounds like a semantic trick – you simply count everything that involves human interaction as “eyewitness evidence” (and redefine “expert testimony” as “eyewitness testimony”) and thus define the very notion of material evidence out of existence.

No, material evidence exists. It’s just that it is not completely separate from testimony. If you downplay testimony you in turn downplay material evidence.

When all eyewitnesses point to suspect A, but the DNA profile points to suspect B – what do you think will happen ?

This needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. For example, here’s a story on a troublesome crime lab: “‘[Most people] think it’s absolute and black and white and infallible,’ says Johnson. ‘But it is not. The testing has to be performed correctly in the first place and interpreted correctly in the second place.’”

A DNA profile (for example) however, requires no trust at all

Also from the linked story: “We’re not equipped with enough scientific knowledge to question a lab like that,” says Munier. “So we basically go on good faith. Unless there’s something that slaps us in the face, which is what this has all done to say, ‘Hey, look there is a problem here.’” Science itself depends on human observation and testimony too. I have to trust scientists in order to accept their findings (I certainly can’t reproduce every experiment myself).

There are many examples, the most popular is this one:

Based solely on the Wikipedia entry I don’t see how that is better evidence than for the resurrection of Christ:

* The resurrection was witnessed by 500 people while the Hill case was witnessed by 2 people
* The resurrection witnesses were not in an altered state of consciousness while the Hill’s were (including dreams and hypnosis)
* The resurrection appearances occurred over 40 days while the Hill’s case occurred over a matter of hours

Care to point me to the best evidenced miracle (in the sense of something that would be impossible without the laws of nature being suspended) that you know of ?

I’ve already mentioned cases that can’t be explained naturally. You can always reject them.

As long as we are moving within two orders of magnitude or so, it doesn´t really matter. The evidence in support of the resurrection is still so far away from the prior in even the most generous case that it doesn´t make a difference either way.

Going off of memory, I believe the McGrews’ argument (which you might label the “most generous case”) overcomes the odds.

Sorry but this is just ridiculous.

It was intentionally ridiculous to show how terribly subjective Bayesian analysis is (regarding history). Your reference class may not seem ridiculous on a subjective level but you haven’t explained why we should use your reference class and not another. Lowder’s reference class seems reasonable to him but “strange” to you.

That depends on how you count them – would you count the thousands of NASA scientists and engineers that designed the spacecraft which carried him to the moon, who saw his lift off and interacted with him during the entire mission or would you only count Buzz Aldrin ?

You tell me. Bayesian analysis is supposed to be objective. Yet here we are wondering whether we should count thousands of witnesses or one witness (the material evidence could have been placed there by someone other than Neil Armstrong so it proves nothing by itself).

Here I can only say that every single alleged miracle healer that has been investigated has been exposed as a fraud. Every single one of them. I would be willing to bet everything I own that if we would send a private investigator to “Apostle Numbere´s” meetings, he would be exposed as just as much of a fraud as Peter Popoff.

Keener’s book also contains accounts of investigative reporters who have started out skeptical and come around to accept the miraculous. And my claim is not that Numbere is a miracle healer (note that it was the woman who prayed). Tonye’s claim is that fallopian tubes miraculously regrew and that this was confirmed by the doctors. This case is exactly the kind you were asking for (something that suspends the laws of nature). Of course you are always free to reject it.

Could you then please explain how they could possibly know that, since there are no surving autographs, no copies from the 1st century, only a handful of fragments (sometimes containing only a few sentences) from the second century, and no complete copies whatsoever until the 4th century ?

Basically you can trace a line of tradition and extrapolate back to how that tradition began.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (which is essentially just a rephrasing of Bayes theorem).

Bayes’ theorem is merely a way to visualize that adage mathematically. No one is bound to use Bayes’ theorem when studying history.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

stuart32:

You’re basically describing the swoon theory. No, I don’t find that at all convincing.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Andy:

So what is the point of the book then ?

The first thesis is that eyewitnesses do offer miracle claims. The second thesis is that supernatural explanations of miracle accounts should be on the table in scholarly discussions.

Ok, seriously – define “resuscitation”. People “coming back to life” after appearing to be death is not a miracle. What would be a miracle would be a corpse coming back to life (i.e. decay has already started – which is irreversible without the laws of nature being suspended).

A (miraculous) resuscitation would involve a dead person coming back to life by supernatural means. Exactly when someone is dead is hard to determine. And even if someone is resuscitated you could argue over whether it was natural or supernatural.

I wouldn´t care about eyewitnesses one bit (and if you have nothing but eyewitnesses, no scientific journal would accept your story – unless you want to study it as a putative case of mass hysteria). Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable and something as extraordinary as a miracle – any miracle – cannot be established beyond reasonable doubt without physical evidence.

Wouldn’t the patient and hysterosalpingogram be the physical evidence? But as I said before, that physical evidence is not completely separate from testimony. You still have to rely on the testimony that the the patient had her fallopian tubes removed and then that fallopian tubes were later found in her body. You still have to rely on the testimony that the physical evidence (e.g., hysterosalpingogram) is authentic. The example I gave involves physical evidence of this kind so my question still stands unanswered.

This case allegedly happened in Nigeria, which is one of the most superstitious countries on this planet.

Of course my quotation also mentioned: “Having removed the tubes himself, he could only concede, “Your God is great.”” In other words, he wasn’t superstitious enough to believe this would happen. Perhaps you also believe the hysterosalpingogram is superstitious.

Before we investigated this case, we had nothing but thousands and thousands of eyewitnesses who swear that thos children were “witches” – would you have believed them ? If not, why not ? Do you think those witchcraft accusations are less plausible than the miracle healing that Keener cites ? If so, why ?

One can accept the reports of witch-like behavior without believing witchcraft is the best explanation of that behavior. There are natural explanations for the witch-like behavior. On the other hand, you have admitted that body parts regrowing violate the laws of nature. There are qualitative differences that I don’t think you can quantify and plug into Bayes’ theorem.
Andy_Schueler

No, material evidence exists. It’s just that it is not completely separate from testimony. If you downplay testimony you in turn downplay material evidence.

In principle, it is completely seperate from testimony because everyone with the required training and equipment should be able to reproduce scientific findings – if not, the respective findings are not reliable, period.

This needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis. For example, here’s a story on a troublesome crime lab: “‘[Most people] think it’s absolute and black and white and infallible,’ says Johnson. ‘But it is not. The testing has to be performed correctly in the first place and interpreted correctly in the second place.’”

In most countries, this is not a problem at all because samples are routinely sent to multiple labs and every lab is evaluated at unpredictable intervals. All labs that actually do their jobs will produce the exact same result.

Also from the linked story: “We’re not equipped with enough scientific knowledge to question a lab like that,” says Munier. “So we basically go on good faith. Unless there’s something that slaps us in the face, which is what this has all done to say, ‘Hey, look there is a problem here.’” Science itself depends on human observation and testimony too. I have to trust scientists in order to accept their findings (I certainly can’t reproduce every experiment myself).

This is simply wrong, you don´t have to “trust scientists” – you certainly cannot reproduce every experiment yourself, but everyone with the required training and equipment can do it. If it´s not reproducible, it´s not reliable. And even in countries like the USA (where it is not common to involve multiple labs for forensic analysis) you would still have every right to involve additional experts and labs if you think that the lab chosen by the prosecutor screwed up or was bribed.

Based solely on the Wikipedia entry I don’t see how that is better evidence than for the resurrection of Christ:
* The resurrection was witnessed by 500 people while the Hill case was witnessed by 2 people* The resurrection witnesses were not in an altered state of consciousness while the Hill’s were (including dreams and hypnosis)
* The resurrection appearances occurred over 40 days while the Hill’s case occurred over a matter of hours

The resurrection was not “witnessed by 500 people”, one person claimed that it was witnessed by 500 people. So it is 2 vs. 1 (also, there are hundreds of cases similar to this one)
And you cannot possibly know what state of mind the alleged witnesses to the resurrection were – in fact, you don´t know anything about them whatsoever. Even if you trust Paul that they even existed, you still don´t know who they were, you don´t know what they saw exactly (a talking light in the sky like Paul or a bodily christ complete with resurrection wounds like doubting Thomas or something completely different), you don´t know if the risen christ talked to them (and if so, what he allegedly said), you don´t know if all of those alleged eyewitnessed knew Jesus before and would have been able to identify him, you don´t know if they were independent witnesses or not, you don´t know anything about them – even if you trust Paul that they actually existed.
And that is the difference – we have actual, living, breathing eyewitnesses for alien abductions, eyewitnesses that could and were examined, interrogated etc. pp. For the resurrection, we have nothing but a handful of ancient documents saying that there were witnesses, we can´t examine or interrogate these witnesses, we can´t even check if those witnesses actually existed. And that is why the evidence for alien abductions is objectively better, it can be proven that eyewitnesses for alien abductions exist, it cannot be proven that eyewitnesses for the resurrection of Jesus exist.

I’ve already mentioned cases that can’t be explained naturally. You can always reject them.

So, a spontaneous remission of cancer (for example) was a miracle fifty years ago because “it can´t be explained naturally” but it is not a miracle now because it can be explained naturally ?
This makes no sense. “Inexplicability” is not a useful criterion to identify miracles because what is inexplicable today might be explicable tomorrow. What would be a useful criterion would be that the event in question violates the laws of nature. Spontaneous remission of cancer was only inexplicable (it is not inexplicable today), a human regrowing an amputed limb is absolutely impossible.

Going off of memory, I believe the McGrews’ argument (which you might label the “most generous case”) overcomes the odds.

Yes, but they cheated. See my earlier comment regarding “weighing the evidence”.
Their case fails for many reasons, most importantly – they assumed that at least ten of the mentioned eyewitnesses actually existed (although they have no evidence for that except for the gospels and Paul´s epistles – so their case can technically never be stronger than the degree to which it can be demonstrated that the gospels are indeed reliable) and they assumed statistical idependence of the eyewitness (which is a very strong claim – without that, their case falls apart completely, and they have no evidence to support that whatsoever, in fact – taken at face value, if the gospels and epistles are accurate, the eyewitnesses were NOT independent).
An argument can never be stronger than it´s weakest link, and the McGrews only beat a low prior by using two very strong assumptions that they cannot demonstrate to be true at all.

It was intentionally ridiculous to show how terribly subjective Bayesian analysis is (regarding history). Your reference class may not seem ridiculous on a subjective level but you haven’t explained why we should use your reference class and not another. Lowder’s reference class seems reasonable to him but “strange” to you.

Not at all. I would completely agree with Lowder – with the single exception that I don´t see a point in including people that lived before it was common to record history.

You tell me. Bayesian analysis is supposed to be objective. Yet here we are wondering whether we should count thousands of witnesses or one witness

All of them do count obviously, my question was rather if you would call the millions of people who saw the video footage “eyewitnesses” or not.

(the material evidence could have been placed there by someone other than Neil Armstrong so it proves nothing by itself).

That some humans visited the moon in 1969 can indeed be demonstrated with much more certainty than demonstrating that it was indeed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin – although both claims can be established beyond any reasonable doubt, one of them (the one that some humans were on the moon in 1969) is much closer to absolute certainty than the other.

Basically you can trace a line of tradition and extrapolate back to how that tradition began.

And how can you possibly know which interpolations, omissions and other kinds of forgery were applied to the scriptures in the first two centuries ?

Bayes’ theorem is merely a way to visualize that adage mathematically. No one is bound to use Bayes’ theorem when studying history.

Not explicitly – but extraordinary claims certainly do require extraordinary evidence, and only religious people disagree with that.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Jonathan:

It is not about necessary denial a priori. It is about whether a posteriori overcomes lower priors.

I realize that, I just don’t have a specific case on hand to point to. Of course, I’m also skeptical that you can quantify the probabilities of historical events at all.

You see, if Jayman believes such an account ON THE BASIS OF A SINGLE NON-EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY (Keener), without corroboration of further research into the sources, then, I am afraid, he is committing an epistemological crime on the basis of it being routed in Christianity. In other words, he shows his double standards, wears them on his sleeve here.

I’ll try to post more information on the case later. But recall that I initially pointed to the Rosenheim poltergeist which is not a claim rooted in Christianity. You might charge me with having too low of priors.
Andy_Schueler

The first thesis is that eyewitnesses do offer miracle claims. The second thesis is that supernatural explanations of miracle accounts should be on the table in scholarly discussions.

Again, which definition of “miracle” does he use ? And second, supernatural explanations would be on the table if just one – really just a single one – miracle could be demonstrated to be real.

A (miraculous) resuscitation would involve a dead person coming back to life by supernatural means. Exactly when someone is dead is hard to determine. And even if someone is resuscitated you could argue over whether it was natural or supernatural.

You seem to insist on a fallacy of equivocation here. It is very simple – if the body was not decaying, it is a completely natural and well understood process, if it already was decaying it is, for all that we know, completely impossible without divine intervention (or super-advanced aliens).

Wouldn’t the patient and hysterosalpingogram be the physical evidence?

Certainly! So where is this alleged evidence and why didn´t Keener investigate the case ?

But as I said before, that physical evidence is not completely separate from testimony. You still have to rely on the testimony that the the patient had her fallopian tubes removed and then that fallopian tubes were later found in her body. You still have to rely on the testimony that the physical evidence (e.g., hysterosalpingogram) is authentic. The example I gave involves physical evidence of this kind so my question still stands unanswered.

I don´t have to rely on testimony and I´m certainly not going to. If this alleged miracle happened, they can make the evidence available and invite experts and skeptics to study it (and Numbere can claim a million dollars from James Randi).

Tonye’s claim is that fallopian tubes miraculously regrew and that this was confirmed by the doctors.

Where are these doctors ? Do you have a telephone number or an email address ? Have your or Keener checked whether these doctors actually exist ? Have you checked if those alleged doctors are even registered anywhere ? Have you checked whether they are employed by Numbere´s organization ? Have you checked anything about their testimony ?
See, this is what I don´t get – just one of these alleged miracles would be sufficient to disprove materialism once and for all, so why do people like Keener collect thousands of cases that are based on nothing but hearsay instead of spending their ressources on selecting the most convincing dozen or so cases and hire PIs and experts to study the available evidence ?

One can accept the reports of witch-like behavior without believing witchcraft is the best explanation of that behavior. There are natural explanations for the witch-like behavior.

So you think it is more likely that thousands of nigerian children showed “witch-like behaviour” than the alternative explanation that pentecostal pastors in Nigeria are evil and greedy frauds with incredibly gullible and superstitious followers ? (hint: this is exactly what is found when those cases are investigated).
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

“Not explicitly – but extraordinary claims certainly do require extraordinary evidence, and only religious people disagree with that.”

It’s startling how true that is!
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

“Of course, I’m also skeptical that you can quantify the probabilities of historical events at all.”

But that’s precisely what historians do! That is their job! It’s just Bayes’s qualifies and codifies that process!
stuart32

Jayman, how do you distinguish between a resurrection and a resuscitation? You said before that the difference is that a resuscitated person will die again. Does that mean you have to wait for a resuscitated person to die before you know that it wasn’t a resurrection? In that case how did the disciples know immediately that Jesus had been resurrected? Wouldn’t they have needed to wait say a hundred years to see whether he was still alive before they knew he had been truly resurrected.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_NZMJ7JRYKH7WR6YTXJGG3PU65E John Grove

The resurrection, sorry to say, just didn’t happen. You want to hear my theory. Remember on the cross he was reported as saying, “It is finished”? That is in error. I think the truth of the matter was he said, “I am finished”, realizing his doom.
stuart32

John, you’re right. Jesus might actually have believed that God would save him and then realised that it was all a terrible mistake. I wonder if it would have been any consolation to him as he was dying on the cross to know that people would end up believing that he had been raised from the dead even though it wasn’t actually going to happen.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

The account of the two-year-old girl whose decomposing body was raised is found on p. 168 of:

Koch, Kurt E. God Among the Zulus. Translated by Justin Mitchell and Waldemar Engelbrecht. Natal, R.S.A.: Mission Kwa Sizabanu.

I found an online translation here and found the account on p. 69 (at least when I opened it in Open Office):

Reference may also be made to the island of Timor, where there has been a deep and far-reaching revival since 1965. In my book, The Wine of God, I have also reported on the issue of the raising of the dead, as well as in the book Uns, Herr, wirst du Frieden schaffen (To us, Lord, You will give peace). A two-year-old girl died in a hospital and was returned to her parents for burial. The parents searched and sent for a woman from the revival area, who came at last – but two days late. The little corpse was already beginning to show signs of decomposition in the tropical heat. Nevertheless, the Lord answered the prayer of the messenger and raised the child. This report is from a European missionary, who has never made this public before for fear of criticism.

Concerning the ligation case from Nigeria, Keener interviewed the witness, Dr. Tonye Briggs, on December 16, 2009. The woman in question was a patient of Briggs’. Briggs’ was present when the hysterosalpingogram was performed.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Jonathan:

But that’s precisely what historians do! That is their job! It’s just Bayes’s qualifies and codifies that process!

Really? From reading history books I don’t recall historians quantifying the evidence (let alone doing so on a regular basis). I found this mini-review of Richard Carrier’s Proving History where the author (an atheist) writes: “Then I remembered that no other book I’ve read on historical methodology or the Historical Jesus had correctly used probability theory to justify its judgments.” He also links to C. B. McCullagh’s book on historical methodology and notes it does not use a Bayesian approach.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

stuart32:

how do you distinguish between a resurrection and a resuscitation? You said before that the difference is that a resuscitated person will die again. Does that mean you have to wait for a resuscitated person to die before you know that it wasn’t a resurrection?

I suppose you might have to wait for him to die again. On the other hand, eternal life refers to a quality of life and not merely the duration of life. The resuscitated might fall ill, for example, while the resurrected person would not.

In that case how did the disciples know immediately that Jesus had been resurrected? Wouldn’t they have needed to wait say a hundred years to see whether he was still alive before they knew he had been truly resurrected.

They were told he was resurrected and witnessed his ascension.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Andy:

This is simply wrong, you don´t have to “trust scientists” – you certainly cannot reproduce every experiment yourself, but everyone with the required training and equipment can do it. If it´s not reproducible, it´s not reliable.

How is that not trusting scientists? If team A reproduces the results of team B (and so on) I am trusting that both teams performed the experiment as they describe. Since I’m not doing all the experiments myself I’m trusting someone at some point.

The resurrection was not “witnessed by 500 people”, one person claimed that it was witnessed by 500 people. So it is 2 vs. 1

Even if you are going to doubt Paul’s claim of the 500, we still have more than two witnesses.

And you cannot possibly know what state of mind the alleged witnesses to the resurrection were – in fact, you don´t know anything about them whatsoever.

We can infer it on the basis of the resurrection appearance accounts. Just as you can infer that the author of Revelation was in an altered state of consciousness when he saw his vision.

And that is the difference – we have actual, living, breathing eyewitnesses for alien abductions, eyewitnesses that could and were examined, interrogated etc.

The early Christians were also questioned.

And that is why the evidence for alien abductions is objectively better, it can be proven that eyewitnesses for alien abductions exist, it cannot be proven that eyewitnesses for the resurrection of Jesus exist.

That sounds like mythicist quackery. What percentage of historians doubt the existence of Paul, John, Peter, James, etc.?

What would be a useful criterion would be that the event in question violates the laws of nature.

I can agree with that.

Yes, but they cheated. See my earlier comment regarding “weighing the evidence”.

Assuming ten eyewitnesses existed sounds like a low estimate to me. To what degree the eyewitnesses were independent sounds like one of the subjective problems that plagues the Bayesian approach to history.

Not at all. I would completely agree with Lowder – with the single exception that I don´t see a point in including people that lived before it was common to record history.

So you now believe only males should be included in the calculation? What changed your mind?

All of them do count obviously, my question was rather if you would call the millions of people who saw the video footage “eyewitnesses” or not.

Did the people watching on TV actually see Armstrong on the moon or did they merely see a human figure (I don’t claim to have watched all the video footage so I don’t know)? Maybe Collins took Armstrong’s place and Armstrong was stuck orbiting the moon (how many people on earth, even at NASA, would know if this occurred?). Since the Bayesian historian can’t come up with objective prior or posterior probabilities for any of these scenarios he can’t really tell us anything at all, can he?

That some humans visited the moon in 1969 can indeed be demonstrated with much more certainty than demonstrating that it was indeed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin – although both claims can be established beyond any reasonable doubt, one of them (the one that some humans were on the moon in 1969) is much closer to absolute certainty than the other.

I’m not seriously doubting either claim. But it shows how physical evidence and testimony are again inter-linked. The physical evidence does not point unambiguously to a specific historical claim.

And how can you possibly know which interpolations, omissions and other kinds of forgery were applied to the scriptures in the first two centuries ? Example: the story about Jesus and the adulteress

The same method that allows textual critics to determine that the adulteress passage is an interpolation allows them to determine that other passages have not been tampered with. It would be, well, a double standard to accept the findings of the method in one passage but not another. Based on the location and dating of a manuscript you can see how it links together with other manuscripts. Then you can discern a tree of transmission pointing back to an earlier time and place. The further you push back the closer you get to the autograph.

Again, which definition of “miracle” does he use ?

He defines a miracle as “an extraordinary event with an unusual supernatural cause”. As you may imagine, he notes it has its own problems.

It is very simple – if the body was not decaying, it is a completely natural and well understood process

Really? Suppose someone was executed by hanging and left on the rope for hours. He was then resuscitated. What is the completely natural and well understood process at work here (death row inmates would like to know)? Or, how about someone who bleeds out and dies. If she is resuscitated what is the completely natural and well understood process at work?

Certainly! So where is this alleged evidence and why didn´t Keener investigate the case ?

See my earlier comment. Keener went right to the source.

I don´t have to rely on testimony and I´m certainly not going to. If this alleged miracle happened, they can make the evidence available and invite experts and skeptics to study it (and Numbere can claim a million dollars from James Randi).

But the skeptic can merely assert the woman never had her fallopian tubes removed in the first place and the hysterosalpingogram is faked. How will the physical evidence, by itself, convince such a skeptic?

Also, the woman prayed at one of Numbere’s meetings. Numbere is peripheral to the account. And unless Numbere claims to be able to work healings on demand then he wouldn’t have reason to enter Randi’s challenge to begin with.

Where are these doctors ? Do you have a telephone number or an email address ? Have your or Keener checked whether these doctors actually exist ? Have you checked if those alleged doctors are even registered anywhere ? Have you checked whether they are employed by Numbere´s organization ? Have you checked anything about their testimony ?

Especially, did you ask the doctors how they excluded natural causes and how they could be certain that the woman did not undergo tubal ligation reversal.

See, this is what I don´t get – just one of these alleged miracles would be sufficient to disprove materialism once and for all, so why do people like Keener collect thousands of cases that are based on nothing but hearsay instead of spending their ressources on selecting the most convincing dozen or so cases and hire PIs and experts to study the available evidence ?

Keener interviewed the witness who observed the surgery. You said the regrowing of human body parts would be a violation of the laws of nature so I’m going to hold you to it.

And Keener collects tons of eyewitness testimony. He himself has witnessed multiple miracles. He’s published all of this and skeptics can go through it. He does highlight specific strong cases in a chapter so that criticism is moot.

So you think it is more likely that thousands of nigerian children showed “witch-like behaviour” than the alternative explanation that pentecostal pastors in Nigeria are evil and greedy frauds with incredibly gullible and superstitious followers ? (hint: this is exactly what is found when those cases are investigated).

They aren’t mutually exclusive options. For example, one of your links states: “Abigail was accused by a “prophet” from the Apostolic Church, because the girl liked to sleep outside on hot nights – interpreted as meaning she might be flying off to join a coven.” I find nothing improbable about a girl sleeping outside even though this was witch-like behavior in the eyes of the locals.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

I think you miss the point, as Carrier himself sets out. Historians are not mathematicians. And nor are most of us. But they and we use Bayes’s Theorem (BT) to weigh up probabilities whether we know it or not. Giving it the proper formula only codifies this.

Do you disagree with this statement:

Historians weigh up the evidence in order to postulate the most likely theory.

How about this:

Past behaviour, since humans work in patterns, can inform us of future behaviour.

Because denying this denies BT. As Carrier says elsewhere:

The most common objection is usually to insist that historical reasoning isn’t mathematical. But it obviously is. As soon as you start talking about some things being more probable than other things, you are talking about math, even if you aren’t aware of doing that. And yet as a historian you do this all the time. For example, saying a theory is “implausible” is just code for “improbable,” and in fact not merely improbable, but usually you mean “so improbable that we can dismiss it out of hand,” which is not merely improbable, but very, very improbable. This corresponds to a mathematical statement of probability. For example, when you call a claim “implausible,” you surely don’t mean 50% (1 chance in 2 that the claim is true) or even 10% (1 in 10 chance the claim is true), but something closer to 1% (1 in 100 chance that the claim is true) or indeed much less (since, remember, even claims that objectively have a one in a million chance of being true, will have turned out to be true at least a hundred times in the first century). At any rate, you must mean some probability by this assertion, otherwise your assertion is meaningless. You cannot avoid the consequences of this. All historical thinking is inherently mathematical, and
the more you avoid admitting that, the more easily you will come to illogical or invalid conclusions. It’s better to bite the bullet and just learn how to deal with this fact.

The second most common objection is that mathematics implies a false sense of precision. We can never know the “exact” probabilities of anything, especially in ancient history, and using math could even give us conclusions to the tenth decimal place if we wanted, which is absurd when our uncertainties extend above even the first decimal place. But this is a common lay misunderstanding of mathematical reasoning. Although hucksters and propagandists can manipulate numbers and statistics to fool and mislead the public, that does not invalidate correct and honest uses of numbers and statistics. And honestly, mathematics is fully robust enough to model any
uncertainty or ambiguity. You simply define your uncertainty mathematically. As long as you recognize that this is being done, there can be no risk of false precision.

For example, I do not know what the probability is that an airplane will crash into my house tomorrow, but I certainly know it is less than 1 in 100. The actual odds are known: insurance companies could tell you, and those odds are vastly smaller than 1 in 100. But I don’t need to know that. I already know enough to be more than reasonably certain that whatever that probability is, it is less than 1%. Any conclusion I then derive from that premise will retain that uncertainty: any concluding probability P will be in fact “P or less,” and I will be more than reasonably certain that that
conclusion is true. We can therefore select probabilities, with which to answer those “three fundamental questions” identified earlier, that are certainly higher or lower than we know them to be (just as I know the probability of a plane crashing into my house tomorrow is certainly lower than 1%), and when we do that, we can be certain of the premises, and that entails we must be as certain of the conclusion that follows from them. That is, the conclusion that follows from those premises. If we don’t like that conclusion or it’s too vague to be of use, we can seek to push the limits of our uncertainty, and see what results. That is one of the most useful things about Bayes’ Theorem.
Andy_Schueler

How is that not trusting scientists? If team A reproduces the results of team B (and so on) I am trusting that both teams performed the experiment as they describe. Since I’m not doing all the experiments myself I’m trusting someone at some point.

But in principle you could prove every single claim for yourself – nobody would stop you, most scientists would even encourage you. Publicly funded scientists are required to make their results, raw data, samples etc. available on request. If you believe that there is a worldwide conspiracy to hide the fact that the geological column actually supports biblical creationism (for example), then you can just go fossil hunting and convince yourself, many Lagerstätten are publicly accessible. You don´t have to trust scientists – every discipline has an associated group of amateurs, there are hobby geologists, hobby astronomers, hobby taxonomists etc. pp. That is one of the main reasons why science works – trust is actively discouraged and skepticism encouraged.

Even if you are going to doubt Paul’s claim of the 500, we still have more than two witnesses.

Really ? Prove it.

The early Christians were also questioned.

You mean eyewitnesses to the resurrection were questioned ? Really ? So who questioned them ? What questions were asked ? What did they reply ? And most importantly, how do you know that ?Curiously, even if Acts gives an accurate account of what happened to the apostles, the authorities apparently didn´t give a damn about the alleged resurrection – Paul, Peter, John etc. were on trial as troublemakers – nobody asked them about the resurrected body of a convicted criminal that wandered around and “appeared to many”.

That sounds like mythicist quackery. What percentage of historians doubt the existence of Paul, John, Peter, James, etc.?

I don´t doubt that they existed, I also don´t doubt that early christians had no problems with forgery – they wrote entire letters in Paul´s name after he was already dead, they added stuff to his letters, they omitted stuff etc. So I don´t only have to trust Paul that he was not insane and not lying (“Deluded or lying” would be my first guess when a guy claims to have a conversation with a talking light in the sky that no one else could hear – why should I make an exception for Paul ?), I also have to trust dozens of unknown scribes that they didn´t mess with his letters (although I know that they did exactly that, so the best I could even hope for is that they left the parts about the ressurection untouched).Primary sources are always better than hearsay, that´s why the evidence for alien abductions is objectively better.

Assuming ten eyewitnesses existed sounds like a low estimate to me.

If you can´t even prove that one existed, it is a very high estimate.

To what degree the eyewitnesses were independent sounds like one of the subjective problems that plagues the Bayesian approach to history.

The default assumption would be that eyewitnesses are NOT independent because they virtually never are in practice. If you claim that they were, you have to demonstrate that. And not only did they not demonstrate that - if Paul and the Gospel authors are right, the eyewitnesses were definitely NOT independent – counting them as statistically independent is simply cheating.

So you now believe only males should be included in the calculation? What changed your mind?

I don´t think that, I thought that was your idea ?

Did the people watching on TV actually see Armstrong on the moon or did they merely see a human figure (I don’t claim to have watched all the video footage so I don’t know)? Maybe Collins took Armstrong’s place and Armstrong was stuck orbiting the moon (how many people on earth, even at NASA, would know if this occurred?).

If Armstrong and Collins swapped places, Collins would have had to learn to speak with Armstrong´s voice or Armstrong would have had to live narrate without actually seeing what happens. Not a completely impossible scenario but close to.

I’m not seriously doubting either claim. But it shows how physical evidence and testimony are again inter-linked. The physical evidence does not point unambiguously to a specific historical claim.

Oh it most certainly does, the physical evidence unambigiously proves that humans visited the moon in 1969. You don´t need any testimony for this at all – all you need is a not too expensive laser and some basic understanding of physics (for example, there would be countless other ways that all don´t rely on testimony).

The same method that allows textual critics to determine that the adulteress passage is an interpolation allows them to determine that other passages have not been tampered with.

Nope, it only means that other passages were not tampered with after the 4th century. They cannot indentify the earliest forgeries by definition because there are no sources whatsoever from the first century and virtually nothing from the second.

It would be, well, a double standard to accept the findings of the method in one passage but not another. Based on the location and dating of a manuscript you can see how it links together with other manuscripts. Then you can discern a tree of transmission pointing back to an earlier time and place. The further you push back the closer you get to the autograph.

And how could you possibly trace back to a time earlier than the 4th century for most NT texts and the 3rd for some ?

He defines a miracle as “an extraordinary event with an unusual supernatural cause”.

That sounds like circular reasoning.

Really? Suppose someone was executed by hanging and left on the rope for hours. He was then resuscitated.

If that actually happened (afaik, there are two reported cases), the reasons were a) that someone performed a field tracheotomy on the prisoner and b) that the prisoner inserted a silver tube in his throat before he was hanged.

Or, how about someone who bleeds out and dies. If she is resuscitated what is the completely natural and well understood process at work?

So you claim that a women bled out (how do you know that she did ?) had no blood transfusion (how do you know that ?) and still survived ?
Yeah, that would be magic alright – where is the evidence ?

But the skeptic can merely assert the woman never had her fallopian tubes removed in the first place and the hysterosalpingogram is faked.
How will the physical evidence, by itself, convince such a skeptic?

Let an independent doctor do a new x-ray, get a PI to investigate whether the woman actually works / worked for Numbere and so on. Read one of the books by this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Nickell
=> he has decades of experience investigating such cases, if Keener or someone else want someone with his expertise to investigate a miracle claim, he would even do it for free as long as he can write a book about it afterwards.

Also, the woman prayed at one of Numbere’s meetings. Numbere is peripheral to the account. And unless Numbere claims to be able to work healings on demand then he wouldn’t have reason to enter Randi’s challenge to begin with.

Well, this sounds like healing on demand. How much are you willing to bet that the guy is not a fraud ? Every single miracle healer that was ever investigated turned out to be a fraud – this guy will be no different.

Keener interviewed the witness who observed the surgery. You said the regrowing of human body parts would be a violation of the laws of nature so I’m going to hold you to it.

No, I actually said regrowing an amputed arm would be impossible (regrowing a fingernail for example would not be very impressive). Also, the fallopian tubes are not surgically removed during tubal ligation, and – A tubal ligation is approximately 99% effective in the first year following the procedure. In the following years the effectiveness may be reduced slightly since the fallopian tubes can, in some cases, reform or reconnect which can causeunwanted pregnancy. (if this case is not based on fraud, that does sound like a very likely explanation, doesn´t it ?). Also, the operation can be reversed.

And Keener collects tons of eyewitness testimony. He himself has witnessed multiple miracles. He’s published all of this and skeptics can go through it. He does highlight specific strong cases in a chapter so that criticism is moot.

I´ve heard this many times, and I always ask – so what is the single best supported miracle then ? And I´ll either get no answer at all or a story that is supported by not even a shred of physical evidence.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

I think in every case you present, and in your posts, you seem unaware that h, the hypothesis (miracles happened) has to be a higher probability than ~h. All alternate hypotheses need be considered too.

“P(~h|b) = 1 – P(h|b) = the prior probability that h is false = the sum of the prior probabilities of all alternative explanations of the same evidence (e.g. if there is only one viable alternative, this means the prior probability of all other theories is vanishingly small, i.e. substantially less than 1%, so that P(~h|b) is the prior
probability of the one viable competing hypothesis; if there are many viable competing hypotheses, they can be subsumed under one group category (~h), or treated independently by expanding the equation, e.g. for three competing hypotheses [ P(h|b) x P(e|h.b) ] + [ P(~h|b) x P(e|~h.b) ] becomes [ P(h1|b) x P(e|h1.b) ] + [ P(h2|b) x P(e|h2.b) + [ P(h3|b) x P(e|h3.b) ])

P(e|~h.b) = the consequent probability of the evidence if b is true but h is false = the probability that all the evidence we have would exist (or something comparable to it would exist) if the hypothesis we are testing is false, but all our background knowledge is still true. This also equals the posterior probability of the evidence if some hypothesis other than h is true—and if there is more than one viable contender, you can include each competing hypothesis independently (per above) or subsume them all under one group category (~h).”
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

Andy

Wairse still, there are many cases of incorrectly performed tubal ligation that result in further pregnancies. As one doctor states:

“Fallopian tubes cannot grow back. However, depending on how the procedure was performed, recanalization can occur where one side of the tube touches the other.If a “Pomeroy” tubal ligation is done, a loop is created and tied or clamped. At the base of the tube, an opening can be created. The two times [ways] that you became pregnant after the tubal ligation, the procedure may have been performed incorrectly, or it could be that they cut and burnt a structure other than the tube. Believe me that I know what I am talking about. I have been in practice for 26 years and have been performing gynecological surgery for 26 years. ”
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

This is interesting:

Tubal Ligation Failure – Causes of Pregnancy After Sterilization

http://www.healthhype.com/tubal-ligation-failure-causes-of-pregnancy-after-sterilization.html

It lists 10 ways in which it can fail, naturally.

eg
“Spontaneous reanastomosis or fistula formation where the cut ends of the tube sometimes grow back together when the gap between them is not large enough. A Falope ring used for tubal ligation can fall off or a clamp can get loose. All these conditions result in re-establishing continuity of the fallopian tubes, thus making pregnancy possible. A fistula formation or a passageway into the tube, sometimes seen in unipolar electrocoagulation method of tubal sterilization, can also result in entry of ovum into the tube and subsequent fertilization, resulting in an unintended pregnancy.

Improperly done procedure – the tube was not cut off completely or blocked totally, or the occluding device may not have been placed in the correct position.”
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

So what it comes down to is this:

Do the background evidence, priors and so on better support the hypothesis of a miracle.

Or, given that this has happened naturally before, does the evidence and priors support a naturalistic explanation?

Because, really, and with only 10 minutes googling on a subject I didn’t previously know, I have found tons of evidence to support the naturalistic hypothesis.

Did Keener really do the required work to support his claims? Really?

Does he have any grasp of probability?
Andy_Schueler

And there we are back at the double standard. As I understand it – Keener relies on nothing but eyewitness testimony and does not do any actual investigation of any of the alleged miracles. But if one accepts miraculous claims supported by nothing but eyewitness evidence – how could one rationally reject the claims that people are routinely abducted by aliens or that there are many non-christian miracle workers like Sai Baba ? It simply cannot be done without applying a double standard.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

For sure. i cannot see how it cannot be double standards. I really can’t. This is not rhetorical, but I simply cannot see how Jayman (except through cognitive dissonance) can disagree. Every example he gives actually defends our case!
Andy_Schueler

The account of the two-year-old girl whose decomposing body was raised is found on p. 168 of:
Koch, Kurt E. God Among the Zulus. Translated by Justin Mitchell and Waldemar Engelbrecht. Natal, R.S.A.: Mission Kwa Sizabanu.
I found an online translation here and found the account on p. 69 (at least when I opened it in Open Office):

Reference may also be made to the island of Timor, where there has been a deep and far-reaching revival since 1965. In my book, The Wine of God, I have also reported on the issue of the raising of the dead, as well as in the book Uns, Herr, wirst du Frieden schaffen (To us, Lord, You will give peace). A two-year-old girl died in a hospital and was returned to her parents for burial. The parents searched and sent for a woman from the revival area, who came at last – but two days late. The little corpse was already beginning to show signs of decomposition in the tropical heat. Nevertheless, the Lord answered the prayer of the messenger and raised the child. This report is from a European missionary, who has never made this public before for fear of criticism.

Surprise, surprise – another alleged miracle that no one can check. You know, all these alleged miracles really do sound like a boy who says “I can fly! But only when no one is watching…”.
stuart32

It might seem to some people that sceptics have an irrational prejudice against the supernatural. I can give an example where I would reject apparently solid scientific evidence of the supernatural without further inquiry. Consider a study that apparently demonstrates precognition. Suppose that it appears to have been conducted with all the required scientific rigour and has been published in a respectable journal. Surely it would be unreasonable not to accept this as evidence of a phenomenon that violates the laws of nature?

No, it wouldn’t. The reason is that the question has already been settled. The biggest scientific study of precognition that you could imagine has been carried out and the results are negative. The study involves millions of people and has been carried out for years. It’s called the lottery. No parapsychologist could ever hope to conduct a study on that scale. It is a waste of time for parapsychologists to carry out any further studies into precognition which would necessarily be on a much smaller scale and have looser controls against cheating and yet they still do.
stuart32

Jayman, thank you for your reply. It’s the most interesting thing that I have heard a Christian say in a debate. I hope other people appreciate its significance.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

Stuart

“I suppose you might have to wait for him to die again. On the other hand, eternal life refers to a quality of life and not merely the duration of life. The resuscitated might fall ill, for example, while the resurrected person would not.”

What was the significance? I fear I may have missed it…
stuart32

Jonathan, sorry for being cryptic. Jayman said that the disciples knew Jesus was resurrected because they were told that he had been resurrected. In other words, if Jesus had walked into the room seemingly alive and well after the crucifixion that wouldn’t be enough to let the disciples know that he had been resurrected.

After all, Lazarus supposedly came back from the dead but no one called it a resurrection. Therefore the debate about the evidence for the resurrection becomes irrelevant. You know that a resurrection has happened when you are “told” that it has happened.
pboyfloyd

You said, “..whether theists apply a double standard towards the supernatural”, is the issue, but this:-

“If you were already convinced the house was haunted or if you, say, saw the car keys thrown out the window by an unseen force then the poltergeist explanation suddenly becomes more probable.”, isn’t knowledge, you just yanked that straight out of your ass.

What you’re doing there is presupposing that a supernatural rationale for the supernatural(“If you were already convinced the house was haunted..”), AND, presupposing that a supernatural effect (“..saw the car keys thrown out the window by an unseen force..”) might be involved.

So, in fact you’re twisting Johno’s scenario to give it a presupposed supernatural flavour, which, it seems to me is EXACTLY what he’s saying theists do do!! But of course they(as you just did) only do that when it suits them! Hence the accusation of a double standard!!

(My imagined theist reasoning) “Well, we don’t have a double standard at all, the supernatural might just be plain for us theists to see!”

Trying to jumble this up with some Bayesian calculation or other, as if that has anything at all to do with your tweaking of Johno’s point about whether we NORMALLY jump to conclusions about possible poltergeist activity concerning lost keys, is completely disingenuous of you.

It is doubly disingenuously of you since you seem to be trying to introduce supernaturalism into a Bayesian calculation with your introduction of this supposed new ‘knowledge’ about the mere possiblity of self- defenestrating car keys and a person already convinced that supernatural forces were involved.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Jonathan:

But they and we use Bayes’s Theorem (BT) to weigh up probabilities whether we know it or not.

If this is all subconscious how do you know you are using BT and not, say, a non-Bayesian neural network to form your beliefs?

Historians weigh up the evidence in order to postulate the most likely theory.

Past behaviour, since humans work in patterns, can inform us of future behaviour.

I agree with the general statements while remaining skeptical whether this weighing of evidence is Bayesian, or even quantitative at all. And even if, for the sake of argument, I grant that historians (subconsciously) use quantitative Bayesian analysis, that does not mean it is at all objective.

At any rate, you must mean some [mathematical] probability by this assertion, otherwise your assertion is meaningless.

If we take this kind of thinking seriously we would need to claim qualitative statements are meaningless. Yet we clearly can find meaning in qualitative statements. Furthermore, even if history is mathematical you still need to provide an additional argument to assert it is Bayesian.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Andy:

But in principle you could prove every single claim for yourself

But in reality no one does this. Everyone relies on testimony and trust to a large degree.

Curiously, even if Acts gives an accurate account of what happened to the apostles, the authorities apparently didn´t give a damn about the alleged resurrection – Paul, Peter, John etc. were on trial as troublemakers – nobody asked them about the resurrected body of a convicted criminal that wandered around and “appeared to many”.

And they were “troublemakers” because they preached the gospel, whose most important point was the resurrection. Acts 4:1-2, 33: “1 The priests and the captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees came up to Peter and John while they were speaking to the people. 2 They were greatly disturbed because the apostles were teaching the people, proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead. . . . 3 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.”

I don´t think that, I thought that was your idea?

No, I somehow convinced Lowder to accept that idea while pointing out one could also choose other reference classes (e.g., animals, Jews, prophets). Depending on the reference class you choose your odds will vary tremendously.

Oh it most certainly does, the physical evidence unambigiously proves that humans visited the moon in 1969.

My claim involved Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, not whether humans visited the moon. I suppose a conspiracy theorist could also suggest a robot left physical evidence on the moon.

And how could you possibly trace back to a time earlier than the 4th century for most NT texts and the 3rd for some ?

I’ll leave it up to you to study ancient scribal tendencies and NT textual criticism. Try not to read only Bart Ehrman books.

Let an independent doctor do a new x-ray, get a PI to investigate

I’ve already pointed to the miracles at Lourdes. That involves many doctors. You still aren’t convinced.

I´ve heard this many times, and I always ask – so what is the single best supported miracle then ?

It’s a very subjective question. The cases I’ve brought up were in response to hints in your comments as to what might be convincing to you. The Lourdes example seems to fit your criteria (physical evidence, multiple independent doctors). There’s really not anything else I can do for you. I suppose the only option left is for you to get sick/injured and then miraculously healed. But even if that happened you might just conclude you’ve lost your mind.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Jonathan:

Your quotes supporting the natural hypothesis appear to rely on the tubes not being removed. But in the account I gave the tubes were removed.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

stuart32:

You know that a resurrection has happened when you are “told” that it has happened.

That’s an oversimplification of what I said.
stuart32

You would agree that knowing that a resurrection has happened involves something other than or at least more than physical evidence?
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

You would agree that knowing that a resurrection has happened involves
something other than or at least more than physical evidence?

Yes, but then I don’t think physical evidence is unambiguous in more mundane historical matters either. Direct observation, testimony, and physical evidence are inter-related.
stuart32

If someone who is assumed to be dead turns up alive and well you don’t immediately think that the person has been resurrected. Something more must be involved. That something more is presumably a sense of revelation. So if a number of the disciples had some sort of vision of Jesus after his death, as long as their experiences were accompanied by a sense of revelation they would believe that Jesus had been resurrected.
Andy_Schueler

But in reality no one does this. Everyone relies on testimony and trust to a large degree.

Well, if you equivocate between an expert consensus involving thousands of experts (and just as many amateurs) from all cultures and one guy “testifying” that he saw a flying pig or a miracle healing or a spaceship – then yes, we all rely on “testimony”.
But in one of those cases, trust is well earned and rational (especially since you know that you could check every claim for yourself – which you simply cannot do when some guy tells you about an alleged miracle that left behind no physical evidence whatsoever).

And they were “troublemakers” because they preached the gospel, whose most important point was the resurrection. Acts 4:1-2, 33: “1 The priests and the captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees came up to Peter and John while they were speaking to the people. 2 They were greatly disturbed because the apostles were teaching the people, proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead. . . . 3 With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.”

And still, not a single roman authority or a single member of the Sanhedrin seemed to have believed that Jesus was actually risen if Acts gives an accurate account. If Jesus indeed bodily rose from the dead, and appeared to hundreds of people in Jerusalem including the disciples, and that for weeks – than the disciples would have been guilty of aiding a fugitive criminal, but clearly, neither the romans nor the Sanhedrin believed that for even a second – they were apparently simply annoyed by some madmen continually preaching this BS.

No, I somehow convinced Lowder to accept that idea while pointing out one could also choose other reference classes (e.g., animals, Jews, prophets). Depending on the reference class you choose your odds will vary tremendously.

I honestly fail to see why the reference class should be anything different than what I argued for – all you say is that you could plug something else in the equation, that certainly is true, but if you can´t argue for it, it is simply cheating.

My claim involved Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, not whether humans visited the moon.

I already addressed this part.

I suppose a conspiracy theorist could also suggest a robot left physical evidence on the moon.

Nope – robotics was not advanced enough (and still isn´t actually….).

I’ll leave it up to you to study ancient scribal tendencies and NT textual criticism. Try not to read only Bart Ehrman books.

I don´t have the impression that you are being honest here. I asked a very simple question – we only know that the story of Jesus and the adulteress is an interpolation that was not in the autograph because it was added rather late, the same with the ending of Mark – so how could we possibly know of interpolations and omissions that happened in a time from which we have no sources whatsoever ? You casually dismiss that with “well, I´m not going to answer that, but you are still wrong and you clearly read the wrong books!” You are bluffing.

I’ve already pointed to the miracles at Lourdes. That involves many doctors. You still aren’t convinced.

Ok, now you are certainly being dishonest. You absolutely insist on several equivocation fallacies despite my efforts to be clear about the language and to define our terms – I´m not interested in the common miracle definition “something very unlikely” because those events clearly do happen, I´m only interested in the definition “something impossible without the laws of nature being suspended”. And I´ve said so many times alread – hell, you even agreed to that!
But you still insist on equivocating “medically inexplicable” (not a miracle) with “medically impossible” (miracle). There are no reported “miracles” at Lourdes using this definition and most reported events are not even medically inexplicable today. This really is quite pathetic.

It’s a very subjective question. The cases I’ve brought up were in response to hints in your comments as to what might be convincing to you. The Lourdes example seems to fit your criteria (physical evidence, multiple independent doctors).

No it doesn´t. You are simply being dishonest. You talk about actual miracles, like corpses being resurrected, for which you have no evidence (beyond hearsay) whatsoever – and when I point out that I´d like to see some evidence, you point to events that are not miracles at all based on the definition that we both agreed on! You should ask yourself why you have to resort to such dishonest tactics.

In summary:
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – you tried your best to deny that statement. First you tried to argue that the resurrection of Jesus is no ”extraordinary claim” because it can be phrased as a combination of ordinary claims – “Jesus died” + “Jesus was seen”. But this is simply cheating – you hide the context that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. “I went for a walk on the planet Mars” also wouldn´t be an extraordinary claim when I simply hide the context and just say “I went for a walk”.

Then you tried to argue that there is no such thing as “extraordinary evidence” because everything ultimately relies on “testimony” – but you are simply wrong about this, I can check for myself if the geological column looks like Geologists say it does (for example), I cannot check for myself if St. Paul was lying or not.

And then finally you tried to argue that prior probabilities cannot be assigned objectively and therefore Bayes theorem (which really is just a mathematical phrasing of ”Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”) should not be used for historical claims. But even if we grant you that – it still remains a fact that you either have to demand MUCH more evidence for a claim like “Jesus was resurrected from the dead” than for any historical claim about events that are not extraordinary OR you could apply a double standard and believe christian miracle claims based on nothing but eyewitness testimony in the best case or hearsay in the worst case, but you don´t do the same for non-christian miracle workers like Sai Baba or for claims like ”People are routinely abducted by aliens”.

You seem to have settled for the latter. And we are back at the beginning – christians do apply a double standard (except for those christians who really do believe everything for which there is at least one eyewitness).
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Andy:

I honestly fail to see why the reference class should be anything different than what I argued for – all you say is that you could plug something else in the equation, that certainly is true, but if you can´t argue for it, it is simply cheating.

Unfortunately Lowder’s blog is in the process of moving so I can’t link to his exact reasoning. But he was trying to find the smallest homogenous reference class for which there are reliable statistics. We have reliable statistics for the class of human males but not for the class of Jewish males. The class of human males is smaller than your reference class of humans. Of course, I seriously doubt he would be willing to go with a much smaller reference class even if there were reliable statistics since that would favor Christianity even more. I find the arguments for either reference class to be underwhelming. I don’t think that makes either of you cheaters, it just shows how subjective this is.

how could we possibly know of interpolations and omissions that happened in a time from which we have no sources whatsoever ?

Study the more than 5,000 Greek manuscripts we do have. Note the provenance and date of each manuscript. Note the similarities and differences between the manuscripts. Note the scribal tendencies at play over the centuries. Note the NT quotations found outside the Bible. Note the translations of the Greek into other languages and study the manuscripts in these other languages.

Once that is done you will see something like a familial relationship between manuscripts. From the “family members” you do have, you see where “common ancestors” must have been. From the scribal tendencies you observe you can infer that the scribes in the first couple centuries were probably not making radical interpolations or omissions.

Now let’s look in more depth at why textual critics think John 7:53-8:11 is an interpolation. The lessons here can apply to the NT as a whole.

First, it is absent from early and diverse manuscripts (both Greek and non-Greek). That diversity is important because it points to earlier, no longer extant manuscripts that must have shared the same omission of the pericope of the adulteress.

Second, no Greek Church Father comments on the passage until Euthymius Zigabenus in the 12th century, and he notes that the accurate copies of the Gospel do not contain it. So if some really early manuscript contained a pericope that has not made it down to the later manuscripts there might be mention of the pericope in extra-biblical sources. The lack of such mentions is a strike against the notion that the scribes omitted whole pericopes from the manuscripts.

Third, the adulteress pericope does not match the Johannine style and vocabulary. It is quite difficult to add a pericope in the style and vocabulary of the original author. The fact that we can detect an identifiable style and vocabulary in NT books implies the manuscripts we do have were copied from older manuscripts that were written by one person.

Fourth, the adulteress pericope interrupts the sequence of the Gospel.

Fifth, many of the manuscripts that do contain the pericope mark it in some way to denote its questionable authenticity. Let us suppose that some second-century scribe interpolated a new story about Jesus. If some other scribe came along and created a new manuscript based on it he was likely to note the new story when he compared multiple manuscripts to each other.

I´m only interested in the definition “something impossible without the laws of nature being suspended”. And I´ve said so many times alread – hell, you even agreed to that! But you still insist on equivocating “medically inexplicable” (not a miracle) with “medically impossible” (miracle). There are no reported “miracles” at Lourdes using this definition and most reported events are not even medically inexplicable today. This really is quite pathetic.

I didn’t think you’d be so pedantic. You seem to think that my original use of the term “medically inexplicable” could not overlap with “medically impossible”. If you looked at some of the cases from Lourdes you’d see something like your terminology is applicable. As one example, Marie Bire Lucas was cured of blindness from bilateral optic atrophy. As far as I can tell, this is incurable even today.

You talk about actual miracles, like corpses being resurrected, for which you have no evidence (beyond hearsay) whatsoever – and when I point out that I´d like to see some evidence, you point to events that are not miracles at all based on the definition that we both agreed on!

How is the regrowing of fallopian tubes not a miracle on your definition? Jonathan’s own source states: “Fallopian tubes cannot grow back.” Merely pointing out that the fallopian tubes are not normally removed does not change the facts of the specific case under discussion.

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – you tried your best to deny that statement. First you tried to argue that the resurrection of Jesus is no “extraordinary claim” exists because it can be phrased as a combination of ordinary claims – “Jesus died”

Now who’s being dishonest? I wrote “But when those ordinary claims are combined in the gospel they point to an extraordinary claim” and “it is only when the ordinary claims are combined do we come to an extraordinary claim.”

Then you tried to argue that there is no such thing as “extraordinary evidence” because everything ultimately relies on “testimony” – but you are simply wrong about this,

I wrote: “Since the authenticity of material evidence is filtered through eyewitness testimony we would have to conclude extraordinary evidence doesn’t exist.” If eyewitness testimony can’t be extraordinary evidence (you wrote: “Eyewitnesses for example do not count as extraordinary evidence”) and material evidence is linked with testimony (as I’ve argued), then I don’t see how extraordinary evidence exists. You might want to appeal to your direct observation but that’s not reasonable for historical claims. There’s a problem with your method.

it still remains a fact that you either have to demand MUCH more evidence for a claim like “Jesus was resurrected from the dead” than for any historical claim about events that are not extraordinary

But I do. It’s just that I have a different opinion on the probabilities than you do (including whether they can be quantified or Bayesianized).

but you don´t do the same for non-christian miracle workers like Sai Baba or for claims like “People are routinely abducted by aliens”.

What about the Rosenheim poltergeist? Is that a Christian miracle? I don’t know much about Sai Baba or alien abductions so I won’t offer an opinion.

Good night.
Andy_Schueler

But he was trying to find the smallest homogenous reference class for which there are reliable statistics.

??? This makes no sense, the “smallest homogeneous reference class” would be exactly one person, by definition.

Study the more than 5,000 Greek manuscripts we do have. Note the provenance and date of each manuscript. Note the similarities and differences between the manuscripts. Note the scribal tendencies at play over the centuries. Note the NT quotations found outside the Bible. Note the translations of the Greek into other languages and study the manuscripts in these other languages.

Of which you don´t have anything from the first century and virtually nothing from the second.

Fifth, many of the manuscripts that do contain the pericope mark it in some way to denote its questionable authenticity. Let us suppose that some second-century scribe interpolated a new story about Jesus. If some other scribe came along and created a new manuscript based on it he was likely to note the new story when he compared multiple manuscripts to each other.

And when the overall number of manuscripts in circulation was still very small because they were just written a few years or decades ago, adding forgeries was the easiest – exactly at the point in time where you have no sources whatsoever.

From the scribal tendencies you observe you can infer that the scribes in the first couple centuries were probably not making radical interpolations or omissions.

Which means extrapolating over three centuries – and the best you get is “probably not making radical changes”. And considering how many forgeries were still added in the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries – why exactly should anyone believe that the 1st century scribes were not “improving” the text as they went along ?
An argument can never be better than it´s weakest assumption, an argument for the resurrection of Jesus can thus never be better than ”probably not making radical changes”.

I didn’t think you’d be so pedantic.

And I didn´t think it would be so hard for you to understand the concept of an equivocation fallacy.

You seem to think that my original use of the term “medically inexplicable” could not overlap with “medically impossible”.

Yes and I explained the difference.

If you looked at some of the cases from Lourdes you’d see something like your terminology is applicable. As one example, Marie Bire Lucas was cured of blindness from bilateral optic atrophy. As far as I can tell, this is incurable even today.

Bullshit. Based on her alleged story, this was most likely toxic optic neuropathy (which was quite common at that time), a condition that could be easily cured by treating the gangrene from which she was suffering (and this was apparently treated because she wouldn´t have survived otherwise). The same for any other form of optic neuropathy – this might have been “inexplicable” a century ago, it certainly isn´t so today.

How is the regrowing of fallopian tubes not a miracle on your definition? Jonathan’s own source states: “Fallopian tubes cannot grow back.” Merely pointing out that the fallopian tubes are not normally removed does not change the facts of the specific case under discussion.

1. But they were talking about tubal ligation(“ligation”=”tying together”), which does not mean surgically removing them by definition – surgically removing them would be a salpingectomy, a completely different procedure.
2. Yes, regrowing them would be miraculous. Which is why I don´t get why neither your nor Keener nor any other christian have any interest in investigating this case. Hire two independent doctors to examine the woman and get a PI to investigate the people involved and ask some questions in the hospital where this allegedly happened (but first of all, ask the Dr. Tonye for an explanation if the woman really had her fallopian tubes removed and if so, why he referred to that as “tubal ligation” although it was actually a completely different operation).

Now who’s being dishonest? I wrote “But when those ordinary claims are combined in the gospel they point to an extraordinary claim” and “it is only when the ordinary claims are combined do we come to an extraordinary claim.”

You´ve just got to be kidding. So taking a walk on Mars is totally not an extraordinary claim! I mean, I just combine the ordinary claims “I travelled somewhere” and “I took a walk” – presto, no evidence required to support this totally ordinary claim at all.

I wrote: “Since the authenticity of material evidence is filtered through eyewitness testimony…

No it isn´t. If the material evidence is not made accessible for other researchers that are working on the same subjects, it doesn´t exist in the eyes of science.

…we would have to conclude extraordinary evidence doesn’t exist.” If eyewitness testimony can’t be extraordinary evidence (you wrote: “Eyewitnesses for example do not count as extraordinary evidence”) and material evidence is linked with testimony (as I’ve argued), then I don’t see how extraordinary evidence exists.

I already explained that in detail – you are equivocating between a subjective experience which cannot be reproduced (“eyewitness testimony”) and the expert consensus of thousands of researchers and amateurs all across the globe, based on physical evidence that is accessible by anyone and experiments that are reproducible by anyone.

You might want to appeal to your direct observation but that’s not reasonable for historical claims. There’s a problem with your method.

Many historical claims are supported by physical evidence – epigraphical, numismatic, archaeological etc. – and without such support, extraordinary claims can never be established beyond reasonable doubt.

What about the Rosenheim poltergeist? Is that a Christian miracle?

I don´t think this is a miracle, it rather seems to be a fraud at work:
“His critics alleged him already before this of overseeing manipulation attempts by his focus persons. For instance, the criminal marshal of Herbert Schäfer of the Land Office of Criminal Investigation in Bremen effected a confession of the focus person. Bender had seen the haunting issue “Heinrich Scholz” as authentic in 1965. The focus person, who was a trainee in a china store back then did not only manipulated deliberately in the store, but also during the screening in his laboratory. Bender’s assistants countered with expertise that at least some of the manipulations should not have occurred.
The problem of manipulations also exists in the most known haunting case of Bender, “the haunting of Rosenheim”, that occurred in an attorney’s chancellery between 1967 and 1968. This case was not only documented by Bender and his assistants, but by technicians of the Post Office and the power plant, by the police and physicists of the Max Planck Institute in Munich. Notwithstanding the fact that the physicists wrote in their expert opinion that not all the phenomena observed could be explained with the laws of physics, at least in one case, a manipulation of the focus person, a clerk, could be detected.[1] Bender and his assistants explained the case such that the often psychologically labile focus persons manipulate in order to have the focus of attention, when the real parapsychological phenomena fail to appear.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Bender

I don’t know much about Sai Baba or alien abductions so I won’t offer an opinion.

You do know enough about alien abduction claims, you read one account – and you cannot dismiss that without applying a double standard.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

“If we take this kind of thinking seriously we would need to claim qualitative statements are meaningless. Yet we clearly can find meaning in qualitative statements. Furthermore, even if history is mathematical you still need to provide an additional argument to assert it is Bayesian.”

But if you had read up on BT analysis, you would know that qualitative statements are quantitative. I will repeat Carrier:

The most common objection is usually to insist that historical reasoning isn’t mathematical. But it obviously is. As soon as you start talking about some things being more probable than other things, you are talking about math, even if you aren’t aware of doing that. And yet as a historian you do this all the time. For example, saying a theory is “implausible” is just code for “improbable,” and in fact not merely improbable, but usually you mean “so improbable that we can dismiss it out of hand,” which is not merely improbable, but very, very improbable. This corresponds to a mathematical statement of probability. For example, when you call a claim “implausible,” you surely don’t mean 50% (1 chance in 2 that the claim is true) or even 10% (1 in 10 chance the claim is true), but something closer to 1% (1 in 100 chance that the claim is true) or indeed much less (since, remember, even claims that objectively have a one in a million chance of being true, will have turned out to be true at least a hundred times in the first century). At any rate, you must mean some probability by this assertion, otherwise your assertion is meaningless. You cannot avoid the consequences of this. All historical thinking is inherently mathematical, and
the more you avoid admitting that, the more easily you will come to illogical or invalid conclusions. It’s better to bite the bullet and just learn how to deal with this fact.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

“I’ve already pointed to the miracles at Lourdes. That involves many doctors. You still aren’t convinced.”

For any kind of analysis concluding Lourdes works, one would have to have independent work from respected experts.

You would also need to work out the number of people who normally get better from stuff in any given sample. You would also need to know the number of people who think they are ill but aren’t. You would also need to know the value of psychosomatic recovery in any given sample. You would need double blind experiments.

And so on and so forth.

The problem is that Lourdes is soooooooooooooo anecdotal and unverified as to be meaningless.

Because if it was so good, the local hospital would be sending people there all of the time. If these things worked, we would know about it. I mean KNOW.

Cognitive dissonance does many things to people’s minds.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

At the last Skeptics in a Pub talk, I got speaking to a Christian who turned up. We politely argued over a lot. He was quite well read in Christian areas, but clearly had not read anything critical or analysed his beliefs with any modicum of skepticism.

We talked prayer.

He was adamant prayer worked and had done on his friend. He claimed that his friend, on the “edge of Christianity”, had some sort of leg injury; some sort of fairly serious leg problem (something like his dad may have died of something similar). At this time, this man I spoke to, his wife and someone else held a prayer session for this other man. Amazingly, after holding prayers for this guy (or maybe several, I can’t remember), his leg ‘miraculously’ healed.

Now, this man was clearly intelligent, but he was so blind to the startlingly obvious rebuttals here. He had nothing to say to my riposte:

This is meaningless and concluding as he did was very poor indeed. In order to have any sensible conclusion one must know:

the number of people with such leg injuries
the number of people who get better with such leg injuries
the number who don’t
the number prayed for
the number who aren’t
the number prayed for who DON’T get better
the number who get prayed for who DO, but also the timeframes. If they get better 3 months after prayer, does that qualify?

So on and so forth. One case proving prayer? Ridiculous. And this is the double standards, and is more to do with WANTING to believe overcoming any critical analysis.

What was interesting is that he employed this lack of analysis with his reading of the Gospels too, on talking to him.

In other words, he employed an epistemology to the claims of his religion, including prayer, that he would not apply to any other aspect of his life.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

“Your quotes supporting the natural hypothesis appear to rely on the tubes not being removed. But in the account I gave the tubes were removed.”

No, they rely on the tubes not being fully or properly removed.

What proof, given that it happens not uncommonly, that the tubes were fully or properly removed?

Your claim fits with many I have read online. Just google it. There are accounts of mothers who had ligation with removal and who amazingly became pregnant again.

Priors support non=-miracle.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Andy:

Of which you don´t have anything from the first century and virtually nothing from the second.

That doesn’t effect the cumulative argument I put forth. In fact, you barely engaged the argument at all. Not every hypothesis about what happened in the first three centuries fits with the manuscript evidence we do have. Your apparent concerns about massive changes aren’t shared by the scholars who study the subject.

And when the overall number of manuscripts in circulation was still very small because they were just written a few years or decades ago, adding forgeries was the easiest – exactly at the point in time where you have no sources whatsoever.

You still haven’t argued why it is at all plausible that a very early addition would make it into extant manuscripts without detection. How would a very early addition to a manuscript in Rome effect the manuscripts from Alexandria? How come these alleged additions are not reported in external sources like they are in later times? How likely is it that the scribe could write in the style and vocabulary of the original author? How likely is it that the scribe would fit his narrative seamlessly into the original?

Which means extrapolating over three centuries – and the best you get is “probably not making radical changes”.

One can note the habit of scribes in general during the early NT period and Christian scribes in particular in later times. There’s no reason to propose that Christian scribes in the first centuries behaved wildly different than other scribes (the next quotation from you implies that you accept this). You might have a point if scribal behavior changed rapidly.

And considering how many forgeries were still added in the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries – why exactly should anyone believe that the 1st century scribes were not “improving” the text as they went along ?

The critical edition by the UBS deems about 98% of the Greek words in the NT as certain. To entertain your hypothesis, let’s assume this applies to the NT text in the year 300 and not the autographs. Also note that variants usually involve minor matters of grammar and not large additions like the adulteress pericope. Given these assumptions, it appears the number of large-scale forgeries in the 3rd to 5th centuries are quite small. Why should we believe the first-century scribes were “improving” the texts at a far greater rate or with far better skill than later scribes?

Bullshit. Based on her alleged story, this was most likely toxic optic neuropathy (which was quite common at that time), a condition that could be easily cured by treating the gangrene from which she was suffering (and this was apparently treated because she wouldn´t have survived otherwise). The same for any other form of optic neuropathy – this might have been “inexplicable” a century ago, it certainly isn´t so today.

First of all, it is not just her story. If the evidence is so bad why do you need to downplay it? More importantly, why should we take your diagnosis over that of the doctors (blindness from bilateral optic atrophy due to the cerebral incidents [intracranial hypertension])? In toxic neuropathy, if we go with your diagnosis, “vision generally recovers to normal over several days to weeks, though it may take months for full restoration and there is always the risk of permanent vision loss.” That is not consistent with her sudden healing.

But they were talking about tubal ligation(“ligation”=”tying together”), which does not mean surgically removing them by definition – surgically removing them would be a salpingectomy, a completely different procedure.

A tubal ligation and the removal of the tubes is mentioned. From my reading, a tubal ligation and resection involves the removal of parts of the tubes.
http://biblicalscholarship.wordpress.com Jayman

Jonathan:

But if you had read up on BT analysis, you would know that qualitative statements are quantitative. I will repeat Carrier

You haven’t yet explained how you jump from quantitative to Bayesian so don’t get ahead of yourself. Even if history is quantitative it might not be Bayesian (perhaps you think it ought to be Bayesian).

Carrier’s example is too short to be convincing (I haven’t read the book in question but it’s on the ever-expanding reading list). How does he quantify things like explanatory power or parsimony, for example?

For any kind of analysis concluding Lourdes works, one would have to have independent work from respected experts.

What do you think the Lourdes Medical Bureau is? It’s run my doctors, not clergy. Wikipedia notes: “members of any religious affiliation or none are welcomed.”

You would also need to work out the number of people who normally get better from stuff in any given sample. You would also need to know the number of people who think they are ill but aren’t. You would also need to know the value of psychosomatic recovery in any given sample. You would need double blind experiments.

Isn’t that why Andy is stressing a medically impossible cure? These kinds of cures should never occur, period.

The problem is that Lourdes is soooooooooooooo anecdotal and unverified as to be meaningless.

The examination of a patient by a medical team is “meaningless”?

Because if it was so good, the local hospital would be sending people there all of the time. If these things worked, we would know about it. I mean KNOW.

I think you misunderstand the nature of the claims. I’m not aware of anyone claiming that a high percentage of visitors will be miraculously cured. The claim is that a very small percentage of the total visitors to Lourdes have been miraculously cured.

No, they rely on the tubes not being fully or properly removed. What proof, given that it happens not uncommonly, that the tubes were fully or properly removed?

The doctors’ testimony and the hysterosalpingogram.

There are accounts of mothers who had ligation with removal and who amazingly became pregnant again.

I didn’t come across any that didn’t involve a tubal reversal. And there is a difference between pregancy and the tubes regrowing.

Priors support non-miracle.

Of course the posteriors support miracle.
Andy_Schueler

How would a very early addition to a manuscript in Rome effect the manuscripts from Alexandria?
….
One can note the habit of scribes in general during the early NT period and Christian scribes in particular in later times. There’s no reason to propose that Christian scribes in the first centuries behaved wildly different than other scribes (the next quotation from you implies that you accept this). You might have a point if scribal behavior changed rapidly.
….
Why should we believe the first-century scribes were “improving” the texts at a far greater rate or with far better skill than later scribes?

Scribal behaviour apparently did change quite drastically. The earliest scriptorium where professional scribes made copies might have been one in Alexandria, roughly in the year 200. And it took much more time until christians had the ressources to maintain several scriptoria and use professional scribes as the standard mode of transmission for the NT texts.
So, for early christianity this means that amateurs had to make the copies under sometimes extremely harsh conditions (persecution) with very few source manuscripts (persecution sometimes also meant that many manuscripts were destroyed).
And this seems to be well accepted in the area of NT textual criticism, I got that information from “The Text of the New Testament” by Kurt and Barbara Aland, which is one of the standard texts on NT textual criticism afaict.
And the first two centuries would therefore have been the best time to introduce a forgery and get away with it. Also, the stability of transmission for the NT improved with each century, which in turn means that, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, the transmission was most likely least stable in the first two centuries for which we have virtually no sources.

Also note that variants usually involve minor matters of grammar and not large additions like the adulteress pericope. Given these assumptions, it appears the number of large-scale forgeries in the 3rd to 5th centuries are quite small.

True but misleading. The number of forgeries of this scale was small, the overall number of forgeries however was very high. And you don´t need to insert a large chunk of text – just altering a few words for example can be enough to remove an otherwise blatant contradiction between the gospels.

How likely is it that the scribe could write in the style and vocabulary of the original author? How likely is it that the scribe would fit his narrative seamlessly into the original?

Why should that be so difficult ? To go back to the example of the ending of Mark – afaik, scholars still cannot agree on whether the long ending was lost in the earliest copies we have or whether it was added in later copies. If the problem could simply be solved by contrasting the vocabulary and style with the rest of the text, we wouldn´t have this problem (I don´t doubt that this is generally a good approach to identify interpolations, but it simply doesn´t work for all cases).

First of all, it is not just her story. If the evidence is so bad why do you need to downplay it? More importantly, why should we take your diagnosis over that of the doctors (blindness from bilateral optic atrophy due to the cerebral incidents [intracranial hypertension])?

Same thing, the term “optic atrophy” just got out of fashion.

In toxic neuropathy, if we go with your diagnosis, ”vision generally recovers to normal over several days to weeks, though it may take months for full restoration and there is always the risk of permanent vision loss.” That is not consistent with her sudden healing.

The story doesn´t say that the healing was “sudden”, if the account is accurate:
“Examined by an oculist the same day at the M.B.V., it had to be admitted
that although she still showed signs of “retinal pallor of cerebral origin”more marked on the right than on the left, she could read “the smallestprint in a newspaper” (Dr. Lainey of Rouen).
To summarize, anatomical signs persisted, consistent with a total loss ofvision. Nevertheless, vision had been restored!
In September 1908, several weeks later, three ophthalmologists made anotherdetailed examination, and noted: .. evidence of optic atrophy no longer
present, and the cure is complete,..”

=> then it says nothing about vision immediatly returning to normal (this and only this would be surprising about the story), and since pallor apparently gradually declined, it doesn´t sound as if vision immediatly returned to normal, quite the oppossite. And “she could read the smallest print in the newspaper” is not exactly a medically accurate statement (did she really have vision in both eyes ? How was normal and farsight ? Did she have normal color vision ?)
Overall, not a miracle (again).

A tubal ligation and the removal of the tubes is mentioned. From my reading, a tubal ligation and resection involves the removal of parts of the tubes.

So what is it then ? Were the fallopian tubes (not parts of them, the fallopian tubes) removed or were they not ? Tubal ligation + resection means she could get pregnant afterwards – unlikely but completely possible, no “miracle” required.
Andy_Schueler

What do you think the Lourdes Medical Bureau is? It’s run my doctors, not clergy. Wikipedia notes: ”members of any religious affiliation or none are welcomed.”

I don´t know much about the Lourdes Medical Bureau, but it seems obvious that they don´t try to give an assessment of what would have been medically impossible, but rather of whether the change in the patient´s condition made sense to them or not (again “medically inexplicapable” vs “medically impossible”). The list of approved miracles contains many cases of people being cured of Tuberculosis without apparent reason – they didn´t understand the cause of the disease (the pathogen had already been identified but how it works exactly was almost completely unknown) so they also obviously could not know under which conditions spontaneous remissions happen – although every doctor should have been aware that spontaneous remission of Tuberculosis (which was very widespread in europe around the time of WWI) is absolutely possible and has nothing to do with praying or holy water or anything like that.
The same problem as with other church-approved “miracles”, spontaneous remission of tuberculosis is not a miracle just like winning the lottery (much more unlikely than spontaneous remission of tuberculosis…) is not a “miracle”.

Isn’t that why Andy is stressing a medically impossible cure? These kinds of cures should never occur, period.

What do you mean by “these kinds of cures” ? The list of the alleged Lourdes miracles contains almost nothing that would be medically impossible (the guy with the broken leg that allegedly healed instantly would be a medical impossibility for example, but that particularly story is highly suspect:
“Dr. Van Hoestenberghe’s responses of April and May 1875 to Mgr Faict, which were lost during the canonical inquiry, are found again in 1956 and published in 1957. In the second of these responses, Dr. Van Hoestenberghe (who, as we saw, would report to the Commission of 1907-1908 that he had examined the injured leg ten or twelve times, the last time three or four months before the pilgrimage) says he saw the leg only once, more than three years before the pilgrimage.”
=> Curious coincidence that those letters were “lost” just when they wanted to declare it a miracle (and after they were found, they of course didn´t go back and declared the alleged miracle to be not miraculous after all…).

No, they rely on the tubes not being fully or properly removed. What proof, given that it happens not uncommonly, that the tubes were fully or properly removed?
The doctors’ testimony and the hysterosalpingogram.

1. So the doctor says they were fully removed. This is weird, because then he must have either confused a tubal ligation with a salpingectomy OR they first tied her tubes and THEN cut them out – both options are quite ridiculous, either the doctor cannot tell two completely different procedures apart, or they performed a completely unnecessary surgical procedure on a body part that they were going to surgically remove anyway.
2. So where is the hysterosalpingogram ? (since they certainly did an x-ray before the operation as well, I´d like to see both the one from before the operation and the one from after the operation. Optimally with a sworn testimony from a hospital official that both are indeed from the patient file from the Lady we are talking about). If this evidence is not made available, it is for all intents and purposes not existing at all.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

“From my reading, a tubal ligation and resection involves the removal of parts of the tubes.”

Here is your double standards, in clear English:

You take miracles through prayer in healing a ligation as more probable an explanation of the pregnancy than poor / incorrect original surgery or similar which empirically happens not uncommonly. In fact, this is what wiki says:

A tubal ligation is approximately 99% effective in the first year following the procedure. In the following years the effectiveness may be reduced slightly since the fallopian tubes can, in some cases, reform or reconnect which can cause unwanted pregnancy. Method failure is difficult to detect, except by subsequent pregnancy, unlike with vasectomy or IUD.
Of those failures, 15-20% are likely to be ectopic.[1] 84% of those failures occurred a year or more after sterilization. According to one study, approximately 5% of women who have had tubal ligation will have a failure due to ectopic pregnancy. Time seems to be a factor as the risk of failure increases after 1 or more years post-surgery. The risk of ectopic pregnancy is 12.5% for women who have had tubal ligation, which is a greater risk than for those who have not had the surgery. Recanalization or formation of tuboperitoneal fistulas occur, the openings of which are large enough for passage of sperm but too small to allow an ovum to push through, resulting in fertilization/implantation in the distal tubal segment.

Figures are about 1.6% ligation failures, from what I have read. That means almost 1 in 75 result in further pregnancies.

And yet, in this case, you prefer, without so much as decent evidence other than Keener’s testimony, which tells you almost nothing anyway, the less probable cause. This, I imagine, is because you are Christian, and prefer the cause which attunes to your worldview over the cause which is statistically the most probable.

That, my friend, is epistemological double standards.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

“What do you think the Lourdes Medical Bureau is? It’s run my doctors, not clergy. Wikipedia notes: “members of any religious affiliation or none are welcomed.”"

Welcome, but chosen? They are mainly made up of doctors practising in or visiting Lourdes – one would assume, then, an interest in the healing qualities of Lourdes… The head is chosen by the Bishop, and findings are presented to the Bishop who decides. Hmm.

“The claim is that a very small percentage of the total visitors to Lourdes have been miraculously cured.”

Even given that they are remarkable to the point of miracle, you would have to show that these things don’t happen naturally anyway, and that these people may, indeed, be putting an awful lot of psychological effort into being cured.

On ligation, one woman I read about had 2 ligations and fell pregnant after both!!!! And the nurse even SHOWED her the removed tubes after the first one!

Go figure.

Of course, if you would RATHER Goddidit, then so be it.
http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

Jayman:

You haven’t yet explained how you jump from quantitative to Bayesian so don’t get ahead of yourself. Even if history is quantitative it might not be Bayesian (perhaps you think it ought to be Bayesian).
Carrier’s example is too short to be convincing (I haven’t read the book in question but it’s on the ever-expanding reading list). How does he quantify things like explanatory power or parsimony, for example?

Carrier details this in much more length, but I thought it would have been pretty obvious. Probability is rated form 0-1, or 0 to 100%. Whilst each qualitative term is often vague, it is comparative, such that x MIGHT have happened implies <50%, "well, it IS possible" implies probably <15%, it is unlikely is 50% and so on. Every time a person, historian or otherwise, invokes such comparative language, they are invoking the mathematics of probability.
There are many sites which give % values to the modal verbs of probability. Go check ‘em.

Supernaturalist double standards

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