Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?

[Thumpalumpacus]

Assuming that one is not biased to automatically rule out supernatural causes, is there anything wrong with tentatively accepting them until a reasonable natural cause is posited? Or is something only considered explained if attributed to some visible efficient cause?

I have no problem with living in accord with reality. If I see something outlandish, I'm not going to unsee it because I cannot explain it. I'm not going immediately chalk it up to a deity and call it a day. I'm going to look into the matter and see if the cause might not be hidden from my view for this or that reason.

If it turns out I cannot explain it, then that means I cannot explain it. I'm unsure why "God's miracle" should be the default here, though.

[SteveII]

[...] Steve, why is it so important to you that atheists think your justifications for you belief have merit?  Is it about fulfilling your subscription quota or do our voices substitute for ones you'd be arguing with internally without us?

dingdingdingding, we have a winnah!

I have always regarded evangelism of any stripe, atheist included, as a mark of insecurity.

To answer both of you, the reason I do this is twofold. First, I observe incredible amounts of misconceptions that atheist (and even some Christians) have about Christianity. If I can get one person here to move off their silly positions such as "the Bible IS the claim" or "there is NO evidence", then it was productive. Second, I learn and exercise my mind while I respond to a hundred variations of the question. 

I don't think you could characterize my two goals above as evangelism.

[Neo-Scholastic]

...you are an asshole a big puckered red asshole. From the stick you have jammed up there . An asshole no one wants to be near as you blast hot shitty smelling air and call it reasoning .

Maybe if you weren't the illigitimate butt-baby of an internationally sodomized cock-leper, you could use the piss-soaked rag you call a brain to croak out two words almost as intelligent as a dead slug's shit.

(BTW if you're going to continue to violate my request for privacy at least have the decency to spell my name right.)

If it turns out I cannot explain it, then that means I cannot explain it. I'm unsure why "God's miracle" should be the default here, though.

My general principle is that things are as they appear to be until shown otherwise. That seems to serve me pretty well personally, so all I'm really doing is extending. I've had many uncanny experiences and bizarre improbable encounters, that defy any naturalistic explanation. Every family has some ghost story. I haven't a clue what the alien abduction/UFO phenomena is all about but something is going on that does't fit any model we have for how the world works. Yes, these are anecdotes, but ones that are so widespread, universal, and persistent down through the ages that I cannot simply rule them out as "improbable". They happen all the time. So for me the Bayesian argument doesn't really apply.

On a side note, I just watched an interesting movie that seems relevant - Spectral. In it US special forces in Moldavia battle against invisible entities that seem to behave in almost every way like evil spirits. But this is superlative science fiction (despite the one exception I have with the quantity of weapons produced and the resources to do so) and eventually a very creepy natural explanation is provided. Another more recent and entertaining mockumentary, Trollhunters, does the same with trolls in the Nordic countries. They give natural and amusing explanations for things like turning in stone in sunlight, some having two heads, etc.

[SteveII]

Bayesian probabilities... hmmm.... How about we apply it to psychology?

What are the odds that an extraordinary claim has extraordinary origins, with the prior knowledge that humans have:
- a fertile imagination
- the ability to Willingly Suspend Disbelief
- the ability to lie
- the tendency to follow charismatic people
- a prior belief system already composed of a few similar extraordinary claims
- a natural evolutionary based tendency to accept a claim if it comes from a trustworthy source (parents at a young age, for example)
- a relatively short lifespan
- a brain that tends to be affected by the Dunning Kruger effect ("a cognitive bias wherein persons of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is.")
- an inability to accurately assess non-intuitive probabilities
- senses that make it challenging to measure the very small quantum world and the very large extra-galactic Universe.
- etc, etc, etc...

Yet that would be all wiped away in a second if the paralyzed guy got up and walked. Instead of applying the probability to the event, you are applying it to the reliability of the witness. So you really are not talking about the event anymore, you are describing an a priori assumption that witnesses cannot be reliable in the case of extraordinary events without any actual facts that would mitigate these issues on a case by case basis.

[Whateverist]

Addressed to Steve, primarily.  Astonished here brings up what I was just thinking too.

Extraordinary evidence is first and foremost evidence that the extraordinary phenomenon exists at all and in what its nature lies.  If you insist on defining 'God' as that which is beyond nature, then you have defined it right out of our known universe.  You've as much as said it does not exist in any way already known..

To show that an ordinary, garden variety common-as-dirt event occurred it is relevant at least to show that the opportunity was there.  But when the phenomenon in question is of the absolutely mysterious variety, the opportunity is indeterminable.  No one knows under what conditions it could be induced.  

With the ordinary, you can argue that X is precisely the sort of occurrence one might expect for a well-known phenomenon.  But with the deeply mysterious, no one knows what is or isn't likely.  No one knows under what condition the mysterious phenomenon would be expected to occur.

Extraordinary evidence would be that which grounds the extraordinary phenomenon in the world as we know it.  By defining it as outside the known, you raise the bar for what would constitute acceptable evidence by first and foremost establishing what it is and by what it is known.

Not to mention, how one would determine the cause of said phenomenon. He probably wouldn't give half a shit if the extraordinary thing didn't let him be all like,

Not the video, but the words.  Supernatural events probably lie outside our senses altogether.  We don't see the miraculous, we infer it.  All we can see are common place actions: rising from a prone position, walking albeit on a surprising surface, etc.  It is only our inability to account for a sequence of common place actions which leads some to infer a category of causation outside of the known, what we're calling supernatural, miraculous or extraordinary.

In the real world, things with substance do not behave as if they were figments of the imagination.  I do assume that real objects do and only can be moved by natural means, natural meaning by way of forces already understood and those not yet discovered but which are equally part of the fabric of reality.  The idea that real objects are for some class of beings (gods) like thought objects are for us is fanciful.  To be taken seriously you must convince the skeptical that is even possible.  Pointing to events recorded by people living 2000 years ago who apparently observed sequences of comprehensible events whose causation they could not explain is not enough.

While we don't have any unambiguous instances of real objects behaving as thought-objects do, we certainly have plenty of unambiguous instances of people's perceptual/cognitive faculties working in aberrant ways.  We project the objects of the mind into our fields of perception all the time, sometimes in disturbing ways but also in fleeting and ordinary ways.

Since there exists a plausible pathway for explaining the extraordinary it is a small step to attribute the miraculous/mysterious to such a well known cause.  To even consider that there are beings for whom real objects behave as their actual thought-objects (in other words, not by natural means) you must first point to an unambiguous instance of the phenomenon.  But all you have is your favorite holy book just as other cultures have had theirs.  Likely the whole tendency to god belief and the miraculous is rooted in our minds capacity to misfire.  While those misfires may actually have had some beneficial use in our development as a species they are no longer a useful way to explain surprising sequences of events.

[Mister Agenda]

Assuming that one is not biased to automatically rule out supernatural causes, is there anything wrong with tentatively accepting them until a reasonable natural cause is posited? Or is something only considered explained if attributed to some visible efficient cause?

Something for which the cause is unknown should stay under the 'unexplained' label until the cause is known, though we can discuss which scenarios are more likely to be the cause. 'I don't know' is not a gap that must be filled with 'some explanation' until the real one comes along.

However, if your opinion is that some scenario is more likely and you want to tentatively accept it, that's your business. Whether it's reasonable for you to do so depends on why you're doing it.

---

Yet that would be all wiped away in a second if the paralyzed guy got up and walked. Instead of applying the probability to the event, you are applying it to the reliability of the witness. So you really are not talking about the event anymore, you are describing an a priori assumption that witnesses cannot be reliable in the case of extraordinary events without any actual facts that would mitigate these issues on a case by case basis.

Yep, if you could establish that that actually happened, we wouldn't have to wonder about the psychology behind the story. But you can't, so all we have is a story, which is the claim, not the evidence.

Incidentally, the 'heal the paralyzed person' is a trick still beloved by faith healers today.

[Thumpalumpacus]

My general principle is that things are as they appear to be until shown otherwise. That seems to serve me pretty well personally, so all I'm really doing is extending. I've had many uncanny experiences and bizarre improbable encounters, that defy any naturalistic explanation. Every family has some ghost story. I haven't a clue what the alien abduction/UFO phenomena is all about but something is going on that does't fit any model we have for how the world works. Yes, these are anecdotes, but ones that are so widespread, universal, and persistent down through the ages that I cannot simply rule them out as "improbable". They happen all the time. So for me the Bayesian argument doesn't really apply.

I have no clue what Bayesian statistics has to say about it. I tried reading it upthread but my eyes glazed over and I think my chin hit my chest once or twice. My point is simply that I find "I don't know" to be a perfectly acceptable provisional answer, and I don't understand why your particular god should be the default answer in the face of ignorance.

[Neo-Scholastic]

Assuming that one is not biased to automatically rule out supernatural causes, is there anything wrong with tentatively accepting them until a reasonable natural cause is posited? Or is something only considered explained if attributed to some visible efficient cause?

Something for which the cause is unknown should stay under the 'unexplained' label until the cause is know, though we can discuss which scenarios are more likely to be the cause. 'I don't know' is not a gap that must be filled with 'some explanation' until the real one comes along.

However, if your opinion is that some scenario is more likely and you want to tentatively accept it, that's your business. Whether it's reasonable for you to do so depends on why you're doing it.

That approach is fine with respect to academic or esoteric issues. It doesn't affect my life one way or the other how the world was created or whether tarot cards work. However, topics that touch on how we interpret and live our lives, such as questions of value, character, and identity do matter. And they are unavoidable, affecting everything from parking dibs and tax policy to family relationship and aesthetic appreciation. Life requires people to take either tacit or explicit stances on the profound existential questions.

It is an open question as to whether the fundamental values of Western civilization, such as egalitarianism, human dignity, and individual liberty, will long persist once they are divorced from their Greco-Roman philosophical and Christian theological roots. Whether God exists or not is not an esoteric concern. In my opinion, belief in the existence of a transcendent moral good is the only thing that stands between traditional Western values and dangerous secular justifications for infanticide (Peter Singer), eugenics (Margaret Sanger) and collectivist tyranny (Karl Marx).

my point is simply that I find "I don't know" to be a perfectly acceptable provisional answer, and I don't understand why your particular god should be the default answer in the face of ignorance.

See above. It is not a option to say "I don't know" when, for example, faced with certain end of life decisions, such as pulling the plug on a critically injured loved one.

[The Grand Nudger]

-and none of those explicit or implicit stances on any of those issues requires a god.  God, in those examples, is in the same position as tarot cards.

I think that it's the height of irony that the adherents of a religion that directly cribbed it;s ethics now maintain that their religion is somehow indispensable -to- those stolen ethics, particularly in direct contradiction to the brute fact that a person who does not subscribe to their religion or their perversion of those same ethics is plainly and demonstrably capable of living an ethical life.

[Whateverist]

my point is simply that I find "I don't know" to be a perfectly acceptable provisional answer, and I don't understand why your particular god should be the default answer in the face of ignorance.

See above. It is not a option to say "I don't know" when, for example, faced with certain end of life decisions, such as pulling the plug on a critically injured loved one.

Aren't you really just arguing for comfort in the face of death? Think I'll wing it without a security blanket. I'm sure I'm not worried about any awkward posthumous interview at the pearly gates. So really it just seems to be about spinning our mortality in a candy-land direction.