Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?

[Amarok]

In this thread, what we see is nothing less than a three pronged attack upon traditional reasoning, posed in order to make the Christian hypothesis more plausible.  First is an attack upon the oft repeated maxim that implausible claims require greater evidence to be believed than do more probable events.  This is nothing more than an attempt to lower the bar for their pet theory.  The second is an attempt to confuse the issue of the plausibility of miracles with a quick two step and dismissal.  The third is in the attempt to put forward belief in the supernatural as a "properly basic belief."  Most won't recognize the origins of that phrase, but it is a shibboleth for those who believe in a Christian backed fringe theory in epistemology known as reformed epistemology.  It is a cloaked appeal to a theory which undermines traditional thinking about justification.  It's yet another attempt to lower or erase the bar so as to make Christian beliefs more plausible.

The first of these prongs is an attempt to make events having a low probability only require the same degree of justification as beliefs about events that are relatively probable.  And what is the basis of this attack?  Nothing more than a semantic argument about what the word extraordinary means in the phrase "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."  It's nothing more than an attempt to undermine this common sense intuition with word play.  We don't accept implausible claims on the basis of run-of-the-mill evidence.  If we did, there is no end to the number of things we would believe based upon such evidence.  In that case, the implausible would become common in our beliefs, which would represent the improbable as being rather quite probable.  There is a mismatch there.  Believing the improbable to be probable.  As a practical matter, unless we wish our thinking to be infected with such a ludicrous situation, we demand more from improbable claims than that somebody wrote about them in ancient times.  That's not only poor evidence, it's piss poor.

But more than an attack upon pragmatic considerations, it is a direct attack upon Bayesian reasoning about the probabilities.  In Bayesian inference, the prior probability of an event occurring has a predictable effect on the ultimate probability that the event occurred given the evidence we have.  An example from Wikipedia is illustrative of this fact.



In particular, note how a low base rate results in a low posterior probability, in spite of our intuitions about the drug test's accuracy.  In this case the base rate is analogous to the prior probability in the case of miracles.  The theist in this case wants to eliminate this effect any way they can because it argues directly against the probability of miracles being higher on the basis of mundane evidence.  Note that two attacks are made upon the acknowledgement of this fact, first the semantic bullshit about the word extraordinary, and then an attempt to justify the plausibility of miracles by more wordy nonsense about the acceptability of the supernatural.  Rather than face the fact that their evidence simply doesn't measure up, they attack traditional reasoning.

The second attack is to confuse and obfuscate the natural intuition that miracles are improbable events.  This includes a couple of jabs at the Bayesian reasoning, which I'm not going to go into.  And of course, accompanied by more semantic arguments about miracles, including the last resort of referring to reformed epistemology by declaring belief in the supernatural to be a "properly basic belief."  This is, like the attack on Bayesian inference, made plausible only by the fact that most people are unfamiliar with it and thus don't understand what is being claimed.  Reformed epistemology is nothing but a fringe epistemological theory, advocated by Christian philosophers primarily because it is more 'friendly' to the Christian's pet beliefs.

In all three cases we see the typical apologist's tactic, if they can't win the game on the merits of their evidence, they attempt to change the rules.  It's nothing but an illegitimate attempt to undermine traditional reasoning so they can refashion it to make it more amenable to their pet beliefs.  It's nothing but bullshit.

Indeed they will always insist extraordinary is too subjective . When it's anything but under Bayesian reasoning .