Testimony is Evidence

[Amarok]

I will spell it out more fully:

Take your claim "Witness testimony is demonstrably unreliable as a form of evidence". That is simply not true. We rely on it to some degree millions of times a minute all over the world: In court cases of all types (criminal, civil, family), the running of governments of all levels, the running of corporations, the reporting of news, writing of articles/books, etc. These are all defeaters to your premise A. 

Perhaps you will backpedal and say "some witness testimony is demonstrably unreliable as a form of evidence". I would agree with this premise. But there are ramifications of this backpedaling: The converse is also true: some witness testimony is reliable as a form of evidence. If that is true, your conclusion is no longer a conclusion that follows from the premises--but a statement of opinion. Now you have:

    1. Some witness testimony is demonstrably unreliable as a form of evidence
    2. Some witness testimony is demonstrably reliable as a form of evidence
    3. Therefore the evidence is reliable on a case by case basis. 

Wait! that looks familiar.

For the third time, tell me why this is not more accurate:

     1 A witness's recollection could be wrong
     2 The witness's character, cognitive ability, subject knowledge, experiences, and track record serve can minimize the possibility of error
     3 The context of the event can minimize the possibility of error
     4 Therefore the reliability of testimony varies depending on the witness and the context

Since you've omitted a critical piece of my position twice now in order to bolster your own, I will phrase my response such that you cannot ignore it again.  

Just because we are forced to trust (or 'rely on', if it pleases you) for practicality purposes, the most mundane and inconsequential testimony in order to be functional living beings, the fact that we do so does not change the inherently unreliable nature of witness testimony as a form evidence.

It just means that in order to function from day to day, we must make choices about about which types of claims are worth accepting solely on an extremely fallible form of evidence, and which ones aren't.  We do this by evaluating the risk; the consequences of the testimony being wrong.  More serious claims beyond the mundane, (religious ones, for example), carry far-reaching consequences that effect our world views, and the ways in which we value our lives, and the lives of others.

Example 1.   My husband testifies to me that he fed our son Macaroni and cheese for lunch.  Maybe he did.  Or maybe, due to sleep deprivation, he forgot that he actually fed him French toast, and was remembering mac and cheese from the day before.  What do I do?  Dig further?  Pull the garbage can apart in search of the empty mac and cheese container?  Interrogate my three year old?  Smell his breath?  Assess the color and consistency of the food stains on his shirt?  Of course not.  I'm going to go ahead and accept his testimony alone, despite the fact that I know it could be wrong. Why?  Because, there are literally ZERO negative consequences to my son having French toast instead of mac and cheese.  Any further investigation for corroborating evidence is simply not worth the trouble.

Example 2.   On the other hand, if my husband tells me god came to him in a dream and said our son has been chosen to be an angel, so we must toss him into the Grand Canyon, well...lol.  Needless to say, I'm not going to accept on his testimony alone, that he's having conversations with God about our son's divine future.

In both examples, my husband's testimony could be erroneous.  This is why testimony, as a form of evidence, sucks.  It's been demonstrated to suck over and over.  It's is just a matter of which claims we're willing to risk being wrong about, and what the implications of being wrong about them are.

Agreed testimony is awful evidence. When it really matter .

[Thumpalumpacus]

I was referring to his spiritual placebo, not his medicine cabinet.

Oh okay I guess I must have misread something

Probably not, I was just being subtle, uncharacteristically.

[Minimalist]

Right, Thump.  With religitards the sledge hammer is far more useful.

[bennyboy]

Do you have any method to add to this?  (People still seem to be avoiding this point)  

Yeah, I'd add one thing. You take as a starting point an idea (let's say the God idea), and then establishing what evidence will / won't be accepted in considering the idea's validity. That's fine. If one is exposed to the God idea, then you'd start looking around and seeing if your experiences, your world view, and the things other people have told you are consistent with that idea.

But what we haven't talked about is how you come up with a starting point worth bothering with. People say all kinds of stupid garbage that I don't even bother with, because it's so obviously made up or just plain false that I don't want to waste my mental effort.

The problem with the religions today (in my opinion) is that we now have easy access to better quality information, and this makes it impossible to consider mainstream religious ideas. Yeah, you might have a billion testimonials from faithful Christians. But unfortunately, Muslims, Hindus, etc. are online too. That it's so easy to communicate makes testimonial much LESS valuable. A thousand years ago, you might only have social access to say a few dozen or a few hundred people. Now it's maybe 3 billion. If you start trying to collect and openly consider 3 billion flapping mouth-holes' evidence, you'll be dead LONG before you get through even 0.1% of it all. The solution is this: "La la la la la I can't hear you." But if you do that, nobody will listen to you, either.

Consider this. People, on average, are pretty damned stupid. And HALF of them, by definition, are even stupider than that. But they can figure out how Youtube works. So you've got maybe a billion yokels all over the internet saying all kinds of shit about all kinds of things. I'm not thinking about whether there are alien abductions, or magic crystals, or ghosts in the Whitehouse, or the earth is flat (holy shit, this is a thing, now!). So if you want to even GET to the evidentiary stage, you'll have to show that your idea deserves to get past my filter.

So this is what I'd add to the process-- you need subsidiary evidence just to get to trial, so to speak, before you even challenge anyone to consider or refute the evidence by which you mean to establish the truth of an idea. And I don't think that the Christian position has even enough evidence for me to start the process of seriously considering it.

[Astonished]

Also can someone name a situation in which someone simply personally prefers mere testimonial claims over physical evidence in everyday situations, or where the combination of the two is less desirable than testimony alone? I mean, unless you're REALLY hoping for uncertainly because a definite answer would be devastating, then really, this doesn't even appeal to people emotionally, which is the easiest path to manipulation that religion exploits.

[Minimalist]

Take your claim "Witness testimony is demonstrably unreliable as a form of evidence". That is simply not true. We rely on it to some degree millions of times a minute all over the world: In court cases of all types (criminal, civil, family), the running of governments of all levels, the running of corporations, the reporting of news, writing of articles/books, etc.

Bullshit.  We know who the witnesses are.  Attorneys have the opportunity to cross examine them.  They can question them about competing evidence that may have already been introduced OR they can trap them by introducing additional evidence later which discredits their testimony.

What YOU and your ilk are saying is that anonymous/forged/pseudoepigraphical works which have been repeatedly edited over the course of centuries MUST be accepted at face value with no further examination.

Fuck you.  Fuck your god.  Fuck your holy horseshit.

[Astreja]

It cannot even be demonstrated that the Gospels are eyewitness accounts. The authorship is unknown; the earliest plausible time of composition is circa 70 CE, decades after the alleged events; and regardless of who they were, all the authors are dead and cannot be cross-examined to validate or discredit their testimony. At this point they're no better than hearsay.

[Ravenshire]

I will spell it out more fully:

Take your claim "Witness testimony is demonstrably unreliable as a form of evidence". That is simply not true. We rely on it to some degree millions of times a minute all over the world: In court cases of all types (criminal, civil, family), the running of governments of all levels, the running of corporations, the reporting of news, writing of articles/books, etc. These are all defeaters to your premise A. 

Perhaps you will backpedal and say "some witness testimony is demonstrably unreliable as a form of evidence". I would agree with this premise. But there are ramifications of this backpedaling: The converse is also true: some witness testimony is reliable as a form of evidence. If that is true, your conclusion is no longer a conclusion that follows from the premises--but a statement of opinion. Now you have:

    1. Some witness testimony is demonstrably unreliable as a form of evidence
    2. Some witness testimony is demonstrably reliable as a form of evidence
    3. Therefore the evidence is reliable on a case by case basis. 

Wait! that looks familiar.

For the third time, tell me why this is not more accurate:

     1 A witness's recollection could be wrong
     2 The witness's character, cognitive ability, subject knowledge, experiences, and track record serve can minimize the possibility of error
     3 The context of the event can minimize the possibility of error
     4 Therefore the reliability of testimony varies depending on the witness and the context

Since you've omitted a critical piece of my position twice now in order to bolster your own, I will phrase my response such that you cannot ignore it again.  

Just because we are forced to trust (or 'rely on', if it pleases you) for practicality purposes, the most mundane and inconsequential testimony in order to be functional living beings, the fact that we do so does not change the inherently unreliable nature of witness testimony as a form evidence.

It just means that in order to function from day to day, we must make choices about about which types of claims are worth accepting solely on an extremely fallible form of evidence, and which ones aren't.  We do this by evaluating the risk; the consequences of the testimony being wrong.  More serious claims beyond the mundane, (religious ones, for example), carry far-reaching consequences that effect our world views, and the ways in which we value our lives, and the lives of others.

Example 1.   My husband testifies to me that he fed our son Macaroni and cheese for lunch.  Maybe he did.  Or maybe, due to sleep deprivation, he forgot that he actually fed him French toast, and was remembering mac and cheese from the day before.  What do I do?  Dig further?  Pull the garbage can apart in search of the empty mac and cheese container?  Interrogate my three year old?  Smell his breath?  Assess the color and consistency of the food stains on his shirt?  Of course not.  I'm going to go ahead and accept his testimony alone, despite the fact that I know it could be wrong. Why?  Because, there are literally ZERO negative consequences to my son having French toast instead of mac and cheese.  Any further investigation for corroborating evidence is simply not worth the trouble.

Example 2.   On the other hand, if my husband tells me god came to him in a dream and said our son has been chosen to be an angel, so we must toss him into the Grand Canyon, well...lol.  Needless to say, I'm not going to accept on his testimony alone, that he's having conversations with God about our son's divine future.

In both examples, my husband's testimony could be erroneous.  This is why testimony, as a form of evidence, sucks.  It's been demonstrated to suck over and over.  It's is just a matter of which claims we're willing to risk being wrong about, and what the implications of being wrong about them are.

(My emphasis above)

[/thread]

The problem with the brick walls around here is that they want to conflate mundane testimony evidence (what they had for lunch), legal testimony evidence (I saw Joe running away from the murder scene) and hearsay testimony evidence supporting extraordinary claims and claim that we should accept it all equally. Fuck! That!

[bennyboy]

The problem with the brick walls around here is that they want to conflate mundane testimony evidence (what they had for lunch), legal testimony evidence (I saw Joe running away from the murder scene) and hearsay testimony evidence supporting extraordinary claims and claim that we should accept it all equally. Fuck! That!

This is it, and we called it right from the start. If you can take eye-witness accounts, prove that they sometimes matter and can be called "testimony," they yay! you've proven beyond any reasonable dummy's doubt that anyone not willing to entertain fairy tales is ignoring evidence.

[Pat Mustard]

For god questions I think there are no objective criteria for evidence.  It convinces you?  It's evidence.  If it doesn't it isn't.  There appears to be absolutely nothing about god belief which is objective.

For god matters there is the same standard of evidence as for scientific matters, is it verifiable, repeatable & testable?
Gid botherers don't like this standard though, mainly because they know they've nothing which approaches that level of evidence.