RE: Testimony is Evidence
September 11, 2017 at 5:27 pm
(This post was last modified: September 11, 2017 at 5:42 pm by bennyboy.)
It's a pretty unquotable post, so let me try to respond without quotes:
re: needing a metric or not
Yeah, those quotes seem contradictory out of the context of the flow of discussion. In the first, I was arguing from "we" as in critical atheists considering religious evidence. In the second, I was arguing that people in general are not guaranteed to BE critical, and may therefore take as evidence that which really isn't evidence at all. Careful with context, please.
Let me make my position crystal-clear, and I'll retract all of what I've said before, right or wrong, in favor of this position:
1) People who are considering religious ideas CRITICALLY will be unswayed by testimonial arguments-- at least partly on the basis that the testimony of members of different religions is at odds, and no clear metric exists in which to decide which are true or false.
2) People who ARE NOT considering religious ideas critically may accept persuasive techniques rather than objective evidence-- things like emotional anecdotes "I felt Jesus touch my soul, and I broke down and started crying." Nobody can prove that they really felt this way, and they certainly cannot prove that if they did really have the feeling, their attributions were correct. But some people will recognize in the testimonial a mind-set which they consider better than their own: hope vs. hopelessness, comfort vs. terror, etc.
In other words, it is the irrational state of some people which allows them to take as evidence what a rational person would not. The statement "testimony is evidence" is truth-dependent not on the nature of testimony, but on the highly variable subjective standards of the individual considering it. It's evidence for those people which don't require evidence to separate material truth ("Jesus was a real person who actually walked on water, with witnesses") from abstract "truth," ("If you believe in Jesus, your life can be saved.")
re: kinds of evidence
"Other kinds of religious evidence" should, if God is omni-potent, include all of physics: the hand of God could be writ at the QM level and perhaps at every other level of physical organization as well. I'm one of the (very) few in this forum that might consider some of the squirreliness of QM interactions evidence for a kind of panpsychic "deity." But this would be a God idea so foreign to yours that you should count it as pretty strong evidence against your views.
Your view is that God is a person who interacts in the lives of people, who rewards faith and sacrifice, and who loves all. This idea is so inconsistent with itself and with objective observations that pretty much all material observation stands as evidence against it.
re: needing a metric or not
Yeah, those quotes seem contradictory out of the context of the flow of discussion. In the first, I was arguing from "we" as in critical atheists considering religious evidence. In the second, I was arguing that people in general are not guaranteed to BE critical, and may therefore take as evidence that which really isn't evidence at all. Careful with context, please.
Let me make my position crystal-clear, and I'll retract all of what I've said before, right or wrong, in favor of this position:
1) People who are considering religious ideas CRITICALLY will be unswayed by testimonial arguments-- at least partly on the basis that the testimony of members of different religions is at odds, and no clear metric exists in which to decide which are true or false.
2) People who ARE NOT considering religious ideas critically may accept persuasive techniques rather than objective evidence-- things like emotional anecdotes "I felt Jesus touch my soul, and I broke down and started crying." Nobody can prove that they really felt this way, and they certainly cannot prove that if they did really have the feeling, their attributions were correct. But some people will recognize in the testimonial a mind-set which they consider better than their own: hope vs. hopelessness, comfort vs. terror, etc.
In other words, it is the irrational state of some people which allows them to take as evidence what a rational person would not. The statement "testimony is evidence" is truth-dependent not on the nature of testimony, but on the highly variable subjective standards of the individual considering it. It's evidence for those people which don't require evidence to separate material truth ("Jesus was a real person who actually walked on water, with witnesses") from abstract "truth," ("If you believe in Jesus, your life can be saved.")
re: kinds of evidence
"Other kinds of religious evidence" should, if God is omni-potent, include all of physics: the hand of God could be writ at the QM level and perhaps at every other level of physical organization as well. I'm one of the (very) few in this forum that might consider some of the squirreliness of QM interactions evidence for a kind of panpsychic "deity." But this would be a God idea so foreign to yours that you should count it as pretty strong evidence against your views.
Your view is that God is a person who interacts in the lives of people, who rewards faith and sacrifice, and who loves all. This idea is so inconsistent with itself and with objective observations that pretty much all material observation stands as evidence against it.
