The real religion?

[Angrboda]

Regarding the old (and tired) Humean argument of "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", while it sound like common sense, it is actually demonstrably false.

While the actual argument in the article does not have to do with what we are discussing, some have brought it up the evidence argument.  WLC commenting on Stephen Law's argument where his primary premise was "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence":

Probability theorists studying what sort of evidence it would take to establish a highly improbable event came to realize that if you just weigh the improbability of the event against the reliability of the testimony, we’d have to be sceptical of many commonly accepted claims. Rather what’s crucial is the probability that we should have the evidence we do if the extraordinary event had not occurred. This can easily offset any improbability of the event itself.


Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/stephen-l...z4H2pq2SLR

I have yet to hear a good rebuttal of this.

This is pure hogwash. All he's done is repackage the extraordinary claims maxim to make it sound like it supports his position. It's nothing more than semantic tom foolery. 'Probability theorists' have long recognized that this is a problem of Type I statistical error, not Type II, as Craig implies. When dealing with extraordinary claims it is perfectly reasonable to demand greater confidence intervals in the result. That's all it says, and it's a well respected principle of science. That's why you have different confidence intervals in the physical sciences than in the medical sciences. That Craig wants to beg out of standard scientific principles is understandable, but hardly acceptable.