Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence?

[SteveII]

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.

Prong 1 - "Implausible claims require greater evidence to be believed than do more probable events".

Substituting "implausible" for the typical "extraordinary" is poisoning the well and question begging. No one has told me yet why "Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence" (instead preferring a long discussion on the evidence). It sounds intuitive, but in fact is demonstrably false. Let's go with an example from Luke 5:17-39:

17 On one of the days while Jesus was teaching, some proud religious law-keepers and teachers of the Law were sitting by Him. They had come from every town in the countries of Galilee and Judea and from Jerusalem. The power of the Lord was there to heal them. 18 Some men took a man who was not able to move his body to Jesus. He was carried on a bed. They looked for a way to take the man into the house where Jesus was. 19 But they could not find a way to take him in because of so many people. They made a hole in the roof over where Jesus stood. Then they let the bed with the sick man on it down before Jesus. 20 When Jesus saw their faith, He said to the man, “Friend, your sins are forgiven.”

21 The teachers of the Law and the proud religious law-keepers thought to themselves, “Who is this Man Who speaks as if He is God? Who can forgive sins but God only?” 22 Jesus knew what they were thinking. He said to them, “Why do you think this way in your hearts? 23 Which is easier to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or, ‘Get up and walk’?

24 “So that you may know the Son of Man has the right and the power on earth to forgive sins,” He said to the man who could not move his body, “I say to you, get up. Take your bed and go to your home.” 25 At once the sick man got up in front of them. He took his bed and went to his home thanking God. 26 All those who were there were surprised and gave thanks to God, saying, “We have seen very special things today.”

The healing of the paralyzed man was extraordinary. However there was only one piece of evidence:the man walked away.  Is this what you mean by "greater evidence" (extraordinary)? If so, how so? I contend that any event only needs ordinary evidence (not greater in quantity or quality) because a simple probability equation can be made: is the probability of the event having a supernatural cause more than offset by the probability of seeing the effect had the event NOT had a supernatural cause. In other words, how probable was the man walking away had a miracle not occured? I contend that it is way lower. So, therefore the evidence of the man walking away is sufficient to reasonably believe in the supernatural cause--for someone present.

Let's reason a step further. Say someone was there and wrote about it. Well, we have the same circumstances, evidence and assessment, so really there is no justification to reexamine the event itself. Instead we turn to the eyewitness's dependablity on relating the event. Is there anything that can be extraordinary about a single witness's dependability? I don't think so. We can increase the confidence we have in this eyewitness by seeing if there are other eyewitness accounts. We can further increase the confidence by the existence of other similar (not the same) supernatural events--a pattern--related by several eyewitnesses.  The number of these accounts needed to meet some standard of 'dependable' will be very different between individuals and groups depending on the bias or preconceived beliefs about the supernatural. For instance, most of the world does not have a big problem believing in the supernatural, so their dependability threshold will be different than an atheist. If the threshold is subjective, then 'extraordinary' loses any meaning at all. 

It seems you might be going the route that any eyewitness testimony written in the first century is insufficient. If so, then in effect you are denying that any evidence is possible--because really, what other evidence could there be? Tell my why that isn't question begging. 

I did not attack Bayesian probability. You can see my post from page 2 with the equation here. Tell me why that is not way more appropriate to the discussion than your example.