A Measure of Faith - Probability in Religious Thought · bblais on the web

https://bblais.github.io/posts/2019/Jul/15/a-measure-of-faith-probability-in-religious-thought/

If he acts supernaturally, as would be expected, then it cannot be studied by naturalistic means, with experiments etc.

again, you're conflating two things -- the cause and the effect. I think the word "miracle" does this automatically, which is a bad thing. Let's be clear, there is a claimed effect (e.g. someone was sick and is not anymore, someone had an injury and doesn't have it any more, someone was dead and is now alive) and a claimed cause (e.g. an agent acting supernaturally did it, magic did it, aliens did it, some unknown natural process did it). One can accept that a particular cause (e.g. God) is working in some unknown way, but be able to study the predicted effects which are all natural. No one is saying these miracles are only having supernatural effects. It's been demonstrated again again (regardless of the proposed cause) if the proposed cause produces effects that are indistinguishable from nothing doing it, or adds nothing to the straightforward natural explanation, then it is not likely the cause actually exists. Predictions from psychics, UFO enthusiasts, faith healers, and homeopaths run up against this all the time. Admitting that there is no observation which requires an agent that can violate physical law is an admission that it is not reasonable to believe it.

what it would take for you to accept a miracle and you say it has to be understood in naturalistic terms. Well then, it would not be a miracle, would it?

As I say above, the word miracle mixes the effect and the cause. I would need confirmation of the effect, at a bare minimum to even consider it. There have been many examples which, on the face, seemed to be interesting. In every case that I've looked, the data have been underwhelming so it hasn't gone past that point. Once that hurdle is overcome, then I'd need to see that the effect requires an agent (regardless of method, natural or supernatural) to be compelling. No one has come even close to this.

And suppose he does not interact at all, being either the deist god or the source of all being?

this is possible, but it seems both to be a nearly content-free statement and disingenuous -- if all theists were deists we wouldn't need atheists. :-)

He exists, but likewise cannot be studied! In that case you say we don’t have good reason that God exists.

yup. if he's playing the biggest game of hide-and-seek, then he can't really judge us, right? If he gives me reason itself, and no good reasons to believe in him because the only methods available to me (other then credulousness) he hides from, whose problem is that? surely not mine.

This is your naturalistic mindset again.

nope, that's your excuse for me not buying your snakeoil. This sounds harsh, but your response is the same response psychics and con-men use when you're skeptical of their claim -- "you're just biased against such things!"".

Consider the case of the deistic god, who designed the universe and then let it run without intervening. Suppose he exists, for the sake of argument. He does not interact, and yet the evidence is all around us in the form of the design of the universe. Are you really saying that he left no good reason to believe he exists?

I'd say, if there was good reason to see design in the universe, that might be at least something to point at. We don't even have that! What we do have is, from every direction, are a bunch of stories from around the world supposedly from this-or-that great-being, telling us stuff about how the world is like or how it was made, that now we know to be false. Water flowing before the Earth? Day and night before the sun? Animals made separately from humans? Humanity starting with 2 people? Death completely caused by people's actions? Global flood? Disease caused by spirits?

After all that, we're left with people making excuses for this appalling lack of evidence for this being that, in many of the stories, was obviously visible in his actions but as our ability to confirm these actions disappears.

Be that as it may, the main point is that the creator of all, if he exists, cannot be one of his own creations, cannot be ‘a thing’ in the universe. The sustainer of all cannot also be one of the things sustained.

You have two choices. Either this God interacts with the world, in which case you need to pony up the evidence for the natural effects that can only be explained by this agent. Or, this God doesn't interact, and you need to abandon Christianity because that is not the God of Christianity. There are no other options.

Here are two reviews of a book written 4 years ago by Rupert Shortt, to give an idea of what I am saying.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/24/god-no-thing-rupert-shortt-review-response-new-atheism

(correct me if you don't agree with any of the quotes I use from these articles, in case I'm arguing against a position you're not taking)

From Shortt: The claim made by religious philosophers of a certain kind is not that God can be invoked to plug a gap, but that there must be some fundamental agency or energy which cannot be thought of as conditioned by anything outside itself, if we are to make sense of a universe of interactive patterns of energy being exchanged. Without such a fundamental concept, we are left with energy somehow bootstrapping itself into being.

I find this argument kind of silly, really an argument from incredulity. There are physical models with things appearing out of nothing, uncaused, and in some of those theories (backed by evidence!) entire universes can come into being in such a way. The fact that the author finds this hard to believe is understandable -- quantum mechanics is profoundly unintuitive -- but the way to argue against it is to put up a competing mathematical model, and demonstrate that this model makes better predictions. You can't just complain that you find it personally ridiculous -- that train left 100 years ago.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2016/03/26/god-is-no-thing-but-he-is-in-charge-of-things/

(this one is behind a paywall)

Here also is the Unbelievable podcast discussion on the book.

I'll check it out, thanks! I did watch that entire 3-hour take-down of Calum and Matt. Very interesting.

During the writing of this post, I did listen to this episode. As far as I could tell, Shortt was talking in deepities -- no real content, and the atheist brought this up saying that this wasn't the God most Christians are actually talking about. I kept wanting him to ask "so, is this 'foundation of all reality' an agent that can make choices?" I don't see how he could possibly justify this given his approach. His primary motivation seemed to be his dislike of the idea of infinite regress, but infinities are weird so why should they conform to our intuitions? One has to be really really careful with the math when dealing with infinities -- which physics does all the time, btw.

Depends what you mean by evidence, doesn’t it? God is not a thing that you can put under the microscope.

You seem to like this statement, as if it is a "checkmate", but it really isn't. Where is the evidence of effects that can't be explained with plausible naturalistic explanations and require some kind of agent? That's it.

Do you really imagine that he is such, that you could test his works and existence like that of a (eg) a fruit fly?

You can't have it both ways -- either the effects of God in the world are observable or they are not. If they aren't, then there is not need to posit the God hypothesis and no good reason to believe. If they are, point them out and defend them, and stop making excuses for it. If I said any of these excuses in any other context, people would not take me seriously.

But Psalm 19 says that the heavens declare the glory of God. Have you ever wondered why there is anything at all, why all this existence comes from?

sure! and I'll believe explanations that can actually be explanations, and not "magic did it". I will probably not know the entire answer before I'm gone, but already the story is pretty compelling. We live in an amazing time where we understand more about where we came from than any other time in the human race, and none of it came from our religious stories.

Do we have all the answers? No, but I'd rather be able to say "I don't know" than to make up something or convince myself of something just because it feels good to have an answer.

Yes exactly. And this is true about most statements about the distant past, where by ‘distant’ I mean that the only sources are written, and there are no more available. No eyewitnesses to questions, no more written sources, no DNA evidence, no videos … So differences in probabilities about things like Mark, Jesus’ resurrection cannot be reconciled by probability theory. We are stuck with the evidence we have, and we don’t have a way of reconciling.

It depends on the claim, right? I can imagine some convergence on mundane claims -- say, the city of Jerusalem existed in the first century. Then, we might be able to get convergence with most informed people on somewhat less mundane claims, like Paul wrote the Letter to the Romans. There are some holdouts that all of Paul's letters are not written by him, but by-and-large the evidence can overcome the modestly low prior of that claim. Something with a really low prior, like a resurrection or flying, there could never be any historical evidence to rescue the prior so the conclusions will be nearly entirely dependent on the prior. This is totally natural, and what we'd expect. It is in fact exactly what I've been saying about the limits of historical claims and their evidence.

The atheist alternative hypothesis of grave robbing plus women and Peter experiencing hallucination plus disciples wanting to believe it is just about plausible I think.

Really? How many reports of grave robbing to we have, compared with people being raised from the dead? How about claims of people rising from the dead vs those confirmed to have been? How do you establish that comparison? I don't think the women finding the tomb is one of the "minimal facts", has no external attestation (Paul doesn't even mention it) and has seemingly good literary reasons for inclusion. A grave robbing, plus an expectation to see Jesus, plus a pentacostal-like spiritual experience seems pretty reasonable as one possibility (there are others) -- we have working examples of each of these. None for bodily resurrections, plus many counter-examples, so I don't see the probabilities falling that way.

But there is no way of adjudicating between it and the resurrection hypothesis.

Actually, pointing out that we have observations of the non-resurrection components and none of the resurrection components, and we have counter-examples of the resurrection components, should place resurrection a-priori below the non-resurrection. Now, bringing in the lousy data we have, shouldn't push someone over to the resurrection model unless they are starting with a bias towards it.

Even if we agreed on the Bayes’ factors, we would be stuck on the difference between our priors.

and that's a signal that the data is lousy. If you have a high probability for something, so you believe it, but then you find out that it is highly dependent on priors then you have two choices:

justify your priors (one person's prior is another's posterior)
recognize there actually is no good reason to believe

Yes but you would not concede that any miracle has been ‘verified’, would you?

they haven't! that's the point! same with the psychics, which is why I don't believe them. any new psychic has to do some heavy lifting to get over the previous data. They never seem to want to. Same with the theists -- they never seem to want to put in the hard work, and are amazed when people don't take their claims seriously.

According to your previous statements, for verification you want to identify the mechanism and have proof of the existence of the agent.

Can we stop it already with the word "proof"!!! Please??!! I didn't use that word, so stop trying to say I did. I want evidence, and that is not impossible.

This, for a naturalist, is impossible (as I have already pointed out).

Again, you're making excuses...stop that. Put up the evidence.

So, short of a change in priors (eg me becoming an atheist or you becoming a believer) there would be no convergence.

Seems like you're saying one or more of:

I'm dogmatically biased against any evidence you want to put forward
The evidence that you can put forward is not sufficient to convince anyone
The only good reason to believe is just to believe ahead of time, without evidence

agree? disagree?

I don’t think confidence is the same as P=1, is it?

right, confidence is large P, not P=1.

I would say that P(Trump supporters invaded the Capitol building on 6 Jan 2021) is not quite = 1, and you agree. But we can still claim certainty can’t we?

it's a matter of being pedantic, mostly on my part, but I reserve "certainty" to mean "proof" to mean p=1, so no we can't claim certainty. Colloquially we will use the word "certain" if the probability is so close to 1 that we just don't want to bother with the difference, but I dont do this -- especially in these conversations -- because it is too often misused. Theists love to jump on the possibility that the atheist is demanding too much evidence, and being able to claim that the atheist is setting P=1 or P=0 is a way of doing that.

Try to imagine cases where it is a good thing for someone to break one of the rules above

Yes absolutely we cannot prove them to be desiderata for all reasoning.

Again, can you imagine a case where it is a good thing for someone to break one of those rules?

My point is that you have nothing to say to someone who does not use them, beyond “You are being irrational”.

yup, that's about it. it's like someone saying 2+2=5, I can say you're not following the math rules. if they say, "so what?" can the conversation continue?

but just pointing out the obvious, that you cannot enforce your standard of reasoning onto others (unless you are a worldwide dictator with power to read peoples’ thoughts!)

you're correct, but I think most people -- at least in their own view -- do value being consistent and rational. My entire point really has been to say, if you want to be rational -- almost by definition -- you need to follow the rules set out by Jaynes and others. These lead directly to the rules of probability, so as a corollary, one must follow the rules of probability to be rational.

But if we see above, we see that we seem to agree that convergence is impossible if there are not enough data.

right!

Even if we both have all the info in front of us, we could treat it differently, put different weights on different parts, according to our own background knowledge and preferences.

correct.

It looks like you are (now) agreeing with me.

wow, it does look like this!

There is not an automatic process of convergence.

it can't be automatic, it's a limit dependent on the evidence. if you have zero (literally zero) evidence, then the probabilities are going to be exactly the priors. If you have a little evidence, but not much, then the posteriors will be similar to the priors. Convergence always comes with more data.

A slight wrinkle in this is that when one says "prior", one might not be meaning "prior to all data" but "prior to new data", which is "posterior from the old data". If you're talking about the probability of the sun rising tomorrow, with no data that might be 50-50, but with hundreds of data points it might be 99-1 and that's what you're using for your "prior" today. One has to be careful about that. (see https://bblais.github.io/posts/2014/Sep/22/will-the-sun-rise-tomorrow/)

A ‘study of the origin of our solar system’ is not a law of nature, surely?

no, but it informs laws of nature. The study of the ancient solar system helps to clarify our understanding of gravity and thermodynamics. There is the confirmation of specific events in the past (e.g. the collision which caused the formation of the Moon) and the clarification of physical processes which make predictions for other systems and observations. Just like history, there is the confirmation of specific events in the past (e.g. the rise of the Roman Empire) and the clarification of the sociological/psychological/cultural processes which make predictions for other systems and observations. I don't see these things as particularly different in structure, although they do differ substantially in our ability to interact with the data. Dividing claims into scientific vs historical does not seem to me to be a useful distinction.

You can define it all mathematically, using functions and sets.

No we are not talking about a real pack cards, it is all abstraction.

And probabilities in this simple sense are all unconditional.

Conditional probability and Bayes’ Theorem came later.

I agree with all four of these statements. However, I still don't see it as a useful distinction. You are just saying that prior probabilities predate posterior (both historically and mathematically, it seems).

You are defining science as anything that applies mathematics to the world. But then by definition you are right.

So I'm right! :-) Actually, I prefer to think of it as math is the language of science, so in that way it really is by definition just because it is the language used.

I thought by science you meant modern empirical science, as practiced in the West since c1500. But in your new definition, the hunter-gatherers were using science when they counted how many nuts they have!

Next time you redefine a word, warn me first!

People use inference a lot, but they didn't formalize it until much later. I think of probability as being the formal backdrop of this, much of which is not used explicitly. Hume would have been greatly improved if he could have used probability theory directly. Having the formalism allows one to be much more specific, see where the structure works even in non-quantitative cases, and to see which specific rules one is violating when one deviates from the process.

But the rest of your answer shows we are making progress. Can we be even more specific? What would move YOUR (not anyone else’s) needle for belief in (the Christian) God above 50%?

a) The stars rearranged to spell BRIAN BLAIS BELIEVE IN ME YAHWEH one night and then returned to their original position the following.

Or

b) You personally witnessed a healing miracle, like the one in Times Square where a man’s legs reattach to the body after someone prays in the name of Jesus.

Or …

Please tell me.

As I've said before, I never know what will convince me, or even more-likely-than-not because science is a process, one that I can't foresee the outcome. It could be I am initially moved by some evidence, but then someone comes forward with an alternative explanation which is more compelling. It's only after a lot of that back-and-forth that we arrive at being convinced. However, it should be enough to move the needle in the right direction. ironically, suggestion (a) is so extreme, especially with the lack of any other evidence for God, that my first inclination would be to question my own sanity. (b) is a bit better, but my first inclination would be to suspect trickery. In both cases, I'd need some follow-up that eliminated these options.

So what would start to move the needle for me? My conditions tend to be a bit more modest. What if the specific claims of theists tended to be right more often then wrong? If the texts say there was a global flood, that there is evidence for that independently of the texts. If there was a resurrection to vindicate that Jesus conquered death, how about appearances to more people -- perhaps to the Chinese, who has a printing press at the time? How about the people who say that prayer actually works, can demonstrate that it works above chance and placebo? How about people who claim God can heal you, can show well-documented examples that aren't easy to refute -- amputees, for example. How about a specific claim from a religion that actually makes a specific set of predictions about the origin of life, the universe, biology, something useful? Every time theists make specific claims, and I can investigate them, they fall apart and we're only left with vague claims (i.e. creation story = metaphor) or excuses (i.e. God can't be investigated). The parallels with psychics is remarkable.

Does that help?

I think we agree on this. There is no difference in principle, only difference in the values of probabilities. Exactly, no real difference in principle, just difference in quality and amount of data.

this is the most we've agreed upon from the beginning! :-)

OK, but I think you should have been clearer, when you give words meanings different from the usual. Most people would think ‘prove’ means much the same as ‘establish’, don’t they?

Sometimes people do that, but I try to be more careful, because to do otherwise invites misuse. I've been bitten by that before -- someone using the word "prove" instead of evidence, then I use it that way, then they say that I insist on 100% certainty because "proof" is used in that way in maths.

You demand that an alleged supernatural event be demonstrated as a natural event before you accept it, a contradiction in terms.

No, I demand that an alleged supernatural cause be observed as a natural effect. One can possibly infer the cause even if you don't know its specifics. I am not even sure what a supernatural effect would be, and how we would know it, or care.

We should know better now. Do you disagree?<

No I don’t, taking your point.

amazing! more agreement! yay!

I take your point, but I thought you were making a blanket statement, which I then refuted.

So, going back a month and a half (2020-12-02), I found my original statement about eyewitnesses. Did you refute this?

The claim "people who knew at first hand the details of his life and teaching or people who spoke with those eyewitnesses" is not agreed upon by most historians. Paul was no eyewitness, and the other texts are from anonymous texts. The Gospels (with the exception of one small verse in John) make no claim to being eyewitnesses and that verse is John is also suspect.

Notice I even point out the exception of that one passage in John! I get tired of writing that whole paragraph out, but the bottom line is that there is no good reason for believing the Gospels are written by eyewitnesses or are even informed by eyewitnesses. I also read all of Bauckham, in addition to listening to that entire youtube series.

Why ‘not convincing’? What would that verse need to say, to make it convincing, in itself?

I am no a scholar in ancient literature, but I would expect (at a minimum) something like what other ancient historians did -- name their sources. They even often go so far as to critique those sources, pointing out where they might be mistaken, or not. I understand that the standards in ancient history are far lower than we have come to expect, but even they took some steps to establish dates and sources. We get none of that from the Gospels. even the one passage you site does not actually say the name of the person writing it!

The narrative in Acts does not describe a 3 years interval when Paul went to Arabia, but is not inconsistent with it. For all we know, there is 3 years between Acts 9:25 and 9:26. Luke does not say ‘immediately’.

This kind of reasoning gets us things like https://bblais.github.io/posts/2013/Feb/15/resurrection-linear-regression-and-the-art-of-harmonization/

I imagine that you can harmonize the nativity stories, saying that Luke doesn't mention the flee to Egypt, but doesn't say he didn't go there, and maybe the timeline is adjustable? Acts is not agrees upon by scholars as representing eyewitness testimony, and there seems to be a very clear direction to the differences between Acts and the statements in Paul -- in the direction of making Peter and Paul agree. Again, I'd have to study Acts a lot more for more detail on this, but it doesn't seem as if most theists are willing to have their points dependent on the veracity of Acts.

Logical reasoning does not use probability theory, as I keep saying.

Let's make an analogy, which might help. There are multiple formulations of mechanics in physics. Two of them are Newtonian and Lagrangian. The Lagrangian formulation makes no use of forces, yet is entirely consistent with the Newtonian form and in some cases more convenient. Probability theory is a different way of framing the same problems as traditional Boolean logic, and can generalize to those cases where there is uncertainty. So, it can both be the case that traditional Boolean logic does not use probability or the vocabulary of probability and that Boolean logic is a limiting case of the rules of probability.

What evidence have you asked for?

I am not trying to give you evidence for the resurrection, God’s existence, am I?

At some point, yes. It's not enough to criticize someone's approach to a problem, ask what it means to be considered evidence, to ask what would convince me. At some point, given that the answers have been generally "I'll believe when I see the evidence, do you have any", it is time to present some. I find it much easier to talk about reasoning and beliefs when addressing specific claims.

You've tried to paint me as unreasonable, suggesting I wouldn't accept any evidence.

I keep asking you what evidence exactly (for God’s existence, miracle last week) you would accept, and you don’t tell me.

Because you don’t tell me, I infer that you would not accept any evidence.

Hopefully I've answered this, at least enough to proceed. Not knowing exactly what would convince me is not the same as declaring that nothing will convince me. The proper response, in the case of the former, is to try me out -- show the best evidence, and why it may or may not be convincing.

You've tried to imply that priors are just arbitrary, implying that you'd be justified in whatever bias you come in with and that I have no recourse to disagree.<

I never said they were arbitrary. I said the opposite, that they are based on background, judgment, preferences …

background = data, so we are not dealing with priors. judgment must be based on prior evidence, so we are not sharing the same information -- let's get that info out. preferences are pretty arbitrary. Let's see where the priors are actually coming from, so we can see what is shaping them.

If you want to get into me setting out the evidence for God, that is a different discussion, and I thought we were winding down!

do these discussions ever wind down? :-)

Should we finish on these points first?

Then we could start a new thread just on that?

We can do both-and, depending on time/energy. As for a new thread, you can either find a relevant post I've already done (the search bar works on the site) or I can post something new on a topic you'd like, and then have the thread start from that. either works.

Thanks Brian

If he acts supernaturally, as would be expected, then it cannot be studied by naturalistic means, with experiments etc.<< again, you're conflating two things -- the cause and the effect. I think the word "miracle" does this automatically, which is a bad thing. Let's be clear, there is a claimed effect (e.g. someone was sick and is not anymore, someone had an injury and doesn't have it any more, someone was dead and is now alive) and a claimed cause (e.g. an agent acting supernaturally did it, magic did it, aliens did it, some unknown natural process did it). One can accept that a particular cause (e.g. God) is working in some unknown way, but be able to study the predicted effects which are all natural. No one is saying these miracles are only having supernatural effects. It's been demonstrated again again (regardless of the proposed cause) if the proposed cause produces effects that are indistinguishable from nothing doing it, or adds nothing to the straightforward natural explanation, then it is not likely the cause actually exists. Predictions from psychics, UFO enthusiasts, faith healers, and homeopaths run up against this all the time. Admitting that there is no observation which requires an agent that can violate physical law is an admission that it is not reasonable to believe it.<

No I don’t think I am conflating cause and effect. But ‘miracle’ does imply supernatural cause and effect inexplicable in naturalistic terms. Yes we do need to define ‘miracle’, and I suppose there are different definitions. I would say, for our purposes, ‘a supernatural action by a supernatural agent resulting in some effect which would normally be welcomed (healing etc) and which cannot be explained in normal naturalistic terms. But I think you are still blind to the obvious fact that, by definition, a supernatural act cannot be studied naturalistically, ie investigated scientifically. Such (alleged) acts are usually one-off, so they cannot be studied. I have said this a few times to you. I wonder if we are misunderstanding each so completely on this point, that everything we each say goes past the other. Is that so, do you think?

(this exchange moved up to fit with the point above)

You demand that an alleged supernatural event be demonstrated as a natural event before you accept it, a contradiction in terms<< No, I demand that an alleged supernatural cause be observed as a natural effect. One can possibly infer the cause even if you don't know its specifics. I am not even sure what a supernatural effect would be, and how we would know it, or care.< I do not understand you, sorry. Maybe you could illustrate with eg Jesus’ alleged resurrection?

what it would take for you to accept a miracle and you say it has to be understood in naturalistic terms. Well then, it would not be a miracle, would it?<< .As I say above, the word miracle mixes the effect and the cause. I would need confirmation of the effect, at a bare minimum to even consider it. There have been many examples which, on the face, seemed to be interesting. In every case that I've looked, the data have been underwhelming so it hasn't gone past that point. Once that hurdle is overcome, then I'd need to see that the effect requires an agent (regardless of method, natural or supernatural) to be compelling. No one has come even close to this., But you previously said that you would also need the existence of the agent to be ‘established’. You said (about 5 January) … Third, say we've ruled out everything that we could think of (yet) and someone is claiming a specific causal agent (e.g. Christian God), they'd need to establish that the agent actually exists, propose and demonstrate how that agent could interact with the world, etc... otherwise it would contain the same explanatory power as "magic did it".<

What would move YOUR (not anyone else’s) needle for belief in (the Christian) God above 50%?<< a) The stars rearranged to spell BRIAN BLAIS BELIEVE IN ME YAHWEH one night and then returned to their original position the following. Or b) You personally witnessed a healing miracle, like the one in Times Square where a man’s legs reattach to the body after someone prays in the name of Jesus. Or … Please tell me.<< As I've said before, I never know what will convince me, or even more-likely-than-not because science is a process, one that I can't foresee the outcome. It could be I am initially moved by some evidence, but then someone comes forward with an alternative explanation which is more compelling. It's only after a lot of that back-and-forth that we arrive at being convinced. However, it should be enough to move the needle in the right direction. ironically, suggestion (a) is so extreme, especially with the lack of any other evidence for God, that my first inclination would be to question my own sanity. (b) is a bit better, but my first inclination would be to suspect trickery. In both cases, I'd need some follow-up that eliminated these options. So what would start to move the needle for me? My conditions tend to be a bit more modest. What if the specific claims of theists tended to be right more often then wrong? If the texts say there was a global flood, that there is evidence for that independently of the texts. If there was a resurrection to vindicate that Jesus conquered death, how about appearances to more people -- perhaps to the Chinese, who has a printing press at the time? How about the people who say that prayer actually works, can demonstrate that it works above chance and placebo? How about people who claim God can heal you, can show well-documented examples that aren't easy to refute -- amputees, for example. How about a specific claim from a religion that actually makes a specific set of predictions about the origin of life, the universe, biology, something useful? Every time theists make specific claims, and I can investigate them, they fall apart and we're only left with vague claims (i.e. creation story = metaphor) or excuses (i.e. God can't be investigated). The parallels with psychics is remarkable. Does that help?< No it does not, but thanks for trying, even though you don’t answer the question.

It seems you are contradicting yourself. On the one hand you think that everyone thinks the same way, treats data the same way. On the other hand you cannot say what data will turn a known prior into a posterior of (say) 0.6. Don’t you see the contradiction? I repeat, what evidence would convince you that the existence of the Christian God ia more probable than not? Please be specific.

And suppose he does not interact at all, being either the deist god or the source of all being?<< this is possible, but it seems both to be a nearly content-free statement and disingenuous -- if all theists were deists we wouldn't need atheists. :-)< Why ‘content-free statement and disingenuous’? I don’t understand. Seems that the proposition ‘The universe was created by an intelligent designer’ has quite a lot of content. And disingenuous, how?

He exists, but likewise cannot be studied! In that case you say we don’t have good reason that God exists.<< yup. if he's playing the biggest game of hide-and-seek, then he can't really judge us, right? If he gives me reason itself, and no good reasons to believe in him because the only methods available to me (other then credulousness) he hides from, whose problem is that? surely not mine.< I'd say, if there was good reason to see design in the universe, that might be at least something to point at. We don't even have that! What we do have is, from every direction, are a bunch of stories from around the world supposedly from this-or-that great-being, telling us stuff about how the world is like or how it was made, that now we know to be false. Water flowing before the Earth? Day and night before the sun? Animals made separately from humans? Humanity starting with 2 people? Death completely caused by people's actions? Global flood? Disease caused by spirits? After all that, we're left with people making excuses for this appalling lack of evidence for this being that, in many of the stories, was obviously visible in his actions but as our ability to confirm these actions disappears.< Him judging us is not the issue. The OT stories are irrelevant here. My point is the fairly obvious one that if we see something with the appearance of design, we naturally infer a designer. You might disagree that the universe shows evidence of design, or that the universe as a whole is not the same type of case as a football found on a beach, but do you accept the general principle of inference of a designer from appearance of a design?

Be that as it may, the main point is that the creator of all, if he exists, cannot be one of his own creations, cannot be ‘a thing’ in the universe. The sustainer of all cannot also be one of the things sustained.<< You have two choices. Either this God interacts with the world, in which case you need to pony up the evidence for the natural effects that can only be explained by this agent. Or, this God doesn't interact, and you need to abandon Christianity because that is not the God of Christianity. There are no other options.<

You ask for evidence for (the Christian?) God.
But I have said that I am not trying, in this discussion of your book, to provide evidence for theism.
That is another discussion. It is also another discussion whether I should abandon my belief in God for lack of evidence. We could talk about that later if you like.

In any case you have not addressed my point. I repeat. The creator of all, if he exists, cannot be one of his own creations, cannot be ‘a thing’ in what he has created.

Yes he might interact in some way, or he might not. But in neither case is he an agent in the universe whose interactions can be studied. If he interacts, his interactions will be one-off. So, for instance, suppose that the Christian God of the universe exists, and that his only action was to raise Jesus from the dead? How could you, now in 2021, possibly study that miracle and ‘verify’ it? There is no way, as I think, you now agree. But he still exists, by supposition! Your naturalism does not allow belief in such a god, even supposing he exists. NB I don’t understand your reference to ‘natural’ effects (see above about the need to explain it).

(sorry about paywall, I will attach the article by Howse)

From Shortt: The claim made by religious philosophers of a certain kind is not that God can be invoked to plug a gap, but that there must be some fundamental agency or energy which cannot be thought of as conditioned by anything outside itself, if we are to make sense of a universe of interactive patterns of energy being exchanged. Without such a fundamental concept, we are left with energy somehow bootstrapping itself into being. I find this argument kind of silly, really an argument from incredulity. There are physical models with things appearing out of nothing, uncaused, and in some of those theories (backed by evidence!) entire universes can come into being in such a way. The fact that the author finds this hard to believe is understandable -- quantum mechanics is profoundly unintuitive -- but the way to argue against it is to put up a competing mathematical model, and demonstrate that this model makes better predictions. You can't just complain that you find it personally ridiculous -- that train left 100 years ago. During the writing of this post, I did listen to this episode. As far as I could tell, Shortt was talking in deepities -- no real content, and the atheist brought this up saying that this wasn't the God most Christians are actually talking about. I kept wanting him to ask "so, is this 'foundation of all reality' an agent that can make choices?" I don't see how he could possibly justify this given his approach. His primary motivation seemed to be his dislike of the idea of infinite regress, but infinities are weird so why should they conform to our intuitions? One has to be really really careful with the math when dealing with infinities -- which physics does all the time, btw.< I don’t think you get the point that Shortt, and many others (I am currently reading David Bentley Hart’s ‘The Experience of God’), are making, as shown by your comment “deepities -- no real content”. The point is about the contingency of existence. Why is there anything at all? Science cannot deal with this, as it deals only with existence. Rowan Williams says this in his review of Shortt ‘He quotes the British scholar Denys Turner to good effect on the fact that “nothing” ought to mean what it says – “no process … no random fluctuations … no explanatory law of emergence”. The problem of origins cannot be defined out of existence, and the highly complex notion of creation by an act that (unlike finite agency) is not triggered or conditioned needs to be argued with in its own terms, not reduced to the mythical picture of a Very Large Person doing something a bit like what we normally do, only bigger.’

You say science models ‘things appearing out of nothing’. That is not the ‘nothing’ of non-existence, because that ‘nothing’ is some kind of quantum vacuum, aubject to various laws. If it were not subject to those laws, you would not get things appearing out of it! Shortt (and many others) are talking of the ‘nothing’ of nonexistence.

Depends what you mean by evidence, doesn’t it? God is not a thing that you can put under the microscope. Do you really imagine that he is such, that you could test his works and existence like that of a (eg) a fruit fly?<< You seem to like this statement, as if it is a "checkmate", but it really isn't. Where is the evidence of effects that can't be explained with plausible naturalistic explanations and require some kind of agent? That's it. You can't have it both ways -- either the effects of God in the world are observable or they are not. If they aren't, then there is not need to posit the God hypothesis and no good reason to believe. If they are, point them out and defend them, and stop making excuses for it. If I said any of these excuses in any other context, people would not take me seriously.< Your reply here shows your naturalistic blinkers. I think you are conceding (also see above) that if God did exist you would not be able to see evidence for him. See above about supposing that God did only one supernatural act 2000 years ago. See elsewhere about your refusal to accept ANY supernatural acts (you would first need proof of the existence of the agents …). Your dilemma is apparently quite powerful, but on reflection it is a false dilemma. You accuse me of conflating cause and effect but you are doing the same. We may ‘observe’ an apparent miracle eg the Times Square example. That might well be ‘observing the effects of God’. But you will deny that it is an effect of God because you have said that you want proof of the existence of God first (I have quoted you several times on this). So, if God really did exist, and did the miracle, you would be unable to ‘observe his effects’. You would have observed something strange, yes, but you would deny that it was the effect of God because it was a one-off, and you have not seen proof of the existence of God enough to satisfy you. So, some people may be able to observe ‘the effects of God’, but others not. Moreover, as discussed above. What about the deist god? We see the universe as apparently designed, and some conclude a designer, but others do not. The dilemma, superficially quite a powerful one, rather dissolves when it is looked at closely.

But Psalm 19 says that the heavens declare the glory of God. Have you ever wondered why there is anything at all, why all this existence comes from?<< sure! and I'll believe explanations that can actually be explanations, and not "magic did it". I will probably not know the entire answer before I'm gone, but already the story is pretty compelling. We live in an amazing time where we understand more about where we came from than any other time in the human race, and none of it came from our religious stories. Do we have all the answers? No, but I'd rather be able to say "I don't know" than to make up something or convince myself of something just because it feels good to have an answer. Yes exactly. And this is true about most statements about the distant past, where by ‘distant’ I mean that the only sources are written, and there are no more available. No eyewitnesses to questions, no more written sources, no DNA evidence, no videos …< Do you really think science will ever be able to find out why there is anything at all? (See above as well)

So differences in probabilities about things like Mark, Jesus’ resurrection cannot be reconciled by probability theory. We are stuck with the evidence we have, and we don’t have a way of reconciling.<< It depends on the claim, right? I can imagine some convergence on mundane claims -- say, the city of Jerusalem existed in the first century. Then, we might be able to get convergence with most informed people on somewhat less mundane claims, like Paul wrote the Letter to the Romans. There are some holdouts that all of Paul's letters are not written by him, but by-and-large the evidence can overcome the modestly low prior of that claim. Something with a really low prior, like a resurrection or flying, there could never be any historical evidence to rescue the prior so the conclusions will be nearly entirely dependent on the prior. This is totally natural, and what we'd expect. It is in fact exactly what I've been saying about the limits of historical claims and their evidence.< Yes I think we agree. For the resurrection, you and I could agree about the significance of all the evidence, thus having the same Bayes’ factors, but the difference between our priors would result in different posteriors – yours very small and mine > 0.5.

The atheist alternative hypothesis of grave robbing plus women and Peter experiencing hallucination plus disciples wanting to believe it is just about plausible I think.<< Really? How many reports of grave robbing to we have, compared with people being raised from the dead? How about claims of people rising from the dead vs those confirmed to have been? How do you establish that comparison? I don't think the women finding the tomb is one of the "minimal facts", has no external attestation (Paul doesn't even mention it) and has seemingly good literary reasons for inclusion. A grave robbing, plus an expectation to see Jesus, plus a pentecostal-like spiritual experience seems pretty reasonable as one possibility (there are others) -- we have working examples of each of these. None for bodily resurrections, plus many counter-examples, so I don't see the probabilities falling that way. But there is no way of adjudicating between it and the resurrection hypothesis. Actually, pointing out that we have observations of the non-resurrection components and none of the resurrection components, and we have counter-examples of the resurrection components, should place resurrection a-priori below the non-resurrection. Now, bringing in the lousy data we have, shouldn't push someone over to the resurrection model unless they are starting with a bias towards it.< I don’t think you understood me. I was conceding that the alternative hypothesis to resurrection was plausible.

Even if we agreed on the Bayes’ factors, we would be stuck on the difference between our priors.< and that's a signal that the data is lousy. If you have a high probability for something, so you believe it, but then you find out that it is highly dependent on priors then you have two choices:

justify your priors (one person's prior is another's posterior)

recognize there actually is no good reason to believe< Depends on the prior, and also the subjective importance of belief about the topic. There is not much good evidence for lots of things in early history, but it does not bother most people because they do not care a fig about eg Babylonian society in 1500BC and see no need to have a belief about it! So there is a third option

Not have a belief about it Incidentally I think many non-religious people in the West today are in category 3 about religion, in particular things like the resurrection of Jesus. They have heard about it, but do not care enough about it to have a view either way. It does not matter enough to them to have a belief. But interestingly for people like you it DOES matter to have a belief, and it matters enough for you to write a book about religious belief. I wonder why this is so. Do you have a view why some non-religious have such a strong anti-theistic program, and care enough to write books etc. but most do not?

Yes but you would not concede that any miracle has been ‘verified’, would you? they haven't! that's the point! same with the psychics, which is why I don't believe them. any new psychic has to do some heavy lifting to get over the previous data. They never seem to want to. Same with the theists -- they never seem to want to put in the hard work, and are amazed when people don't take their claims seriously. According to your previous statements, for verification you want to identify the mechanism and have proof of the existence of the agent. Can we stop it already with the word "proof"!!! Please??!! I didn't use that word, so stop trying to say I did. I want evidence, and that is not impossible.< OK, sorry. You actually said they'd need to establish that the agent actually exists, propose and demonstrate how that agent could interact with the world, etc... < So you require that it be established, ‘not proved’, that the agent exists. How do you do this? What evidence would do the job? See above.

This, for a naturalist, is impossible (as I have already pointed out).<< Again, you're making excuses...stop that. Put up the evidence.< You are changing the topic, as pointed out above. I am asking you what evidence you would need for the existence of God to be established, in your eyes. We are not talking about me trying to prove God to you.

So, short of a change in priors (eg me becoming an atheist or you becoming a believer) there would be no convergence.<< Seems like you're saying one or more of:

I'm dogmatically biased against any evidence you want to put forward

The evidence that you can put forward is not sufficient to convince anyone

The only good reason to believe is just to believe ahead of time, without evidence agree? disagree?< Disagree. You have a rather one-dimensional view of belief. It is not just considering belief for P in light of evidence for P conditional on nothing else. In fact our beliefs are a rather complex interconnected web, based around what some people call ‘worldviews’.
The worldviews of the theist and naturalist are profoundly different, as we are discovering. My belief in God comes from many things in my life, and a view of the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is only one little thing in that pile. I would suggest that your atheism and naturalism also comes from many things in your life, maybe including upbringing, and that you did not yourself consider the historical evidence for the resurrection with a blank slate. Perhaps you did not start studying it until you were a convinced atheist?

but just pointing out the obvious, that you cannot enforce your standard of reasoning onto others (unless you are a worldwide dictator with power to read peoples’ thoughts!)<< you're correct, but I think most people -- at least in their own view -- do value being consistent and rational. My entire point really has been to say, if you want to be rational -- almost by definition -- you need to follow the rules set out by Jaynes and others. These lead directly to the rules of probability, so as a corollary, one must follow the rules of probability to be rational.< Yes, perhaps since the Enlightenment a majority of people in the West value being rational. But I think you ignore how precarious a hold rationality has! Only since the Enlightenment … Only in the West … Only a majority, and perhaps just a small majority in these days of fake news and post truth. I wonder how many Trump supporters value rationality? I think more than half. What proportion, do you think? Fundamentalists of all persuasions would value the word of their scriptures over rationality – that is a lot of people. People educated in authoritarian states value obedience to the Party or the Leader more than rationality. Also, for the many millions in the world who do not have enough to eat, for instance, they would understandably give up ‘rationality’ for a good meal. After all, rationality does not put food on the table. So I hope you see how your high view of rationality as a desideratum is rather limited to people like you: well-educated, fairly well-off, liberal inhabitant of a Western democracy. Do you disagree?

There is not an automatic process of convergence<< it can't be automatic, it's a limit dependent on the evidence. if you have zero (literally zero) evidence, then the probabilities are going to be exactly the priors. If you have a little evidence, but not much, then the posteriors will be similar to the priors. Convergence always comes with more data.< I disagree. Again, you assume that everyone must think the same way, treat data the same way. I know you would like to think this true, but see just above about your belief that everyone is or wants to be ‘rational’.

A ‘study of the origin of our solar system’ is not a law of nature, surely?<< no, but it informs laws of nature. The study of the ancient solar system helps to clarify our understanding of gravity and thermodynamics. There is the confirmation of specific events in the past (e.g. the collision which caused the formation of the Moon) and the clarification of physical processes which make predictions for other systems and observations. Just like history, there is the confirmation of specific events in the past (e.g. the rise of the Roman Empire) and the clarification of the sociological/psychological/cultural processes which make predictions for other systems and observations. I don't see these things as particularly different in structure, although they do differ substantially in our ability to interact with the data. Dividing claims into scientific vs historical does not seem to me to be a useful distinction.< No there is not much difference in the logic between past events in the solar system and past events in human history. They are both past events. What I was trying to point out that past events are a different kind of thing from laws of nature, with different kinds of truth conditions.

You can define it all mathematically, using functions and sets. No we are not talking about a real pack cards, it is all abstraction. And probabilities in this simple sense are all unconditional. Conditional probability and Bayes’ Theorem came later.<< I agree with all four of these statements. However, I still don't see it as a useful distinction. You are just saying that prior probabilities predate posterior (both historically and mathematically, it seems).< No I am not. I am saying that, in the development of probability, unconditional probability predate conditional probability and Bayes’ Them.

You are defining science as anything that applies mathematics to the world. But then by definition you are right. I thought by science you meant modern empirical science, as practiced in the West since c1500. But in your new definition, the hunter-gatherers were using science when they counted how many nuts they have! Next time you redefine a word, warn me first!<< So I'm right! :-) Actually, I prefer to think of it as math is the language of science, so in that way it really is by definition just because it is the language used. People use inference a lot, but they didn't formalize it until much later. I think of probability as being the formal backdrop of this, much of which is not used explicitly. Hume would have been greatly improved if he could have used probability theory directly. Having the formalism allows one to be much more specific, see where the structure works even in non-quantitative cases, and to see which specific rules one is violating when one deviates from the process.< If you want to define ‘science’ as any practical activity involving maths, fine. Just don’t expect others to understand you, unless you warn them first!

So, going back a month and a half (2020-12-02), I found my original statement about eyewitnesses. Did you refute this? The claim "people who knew at first hand the details of his life and teaching or people who spoke with those eyewitnesses" is not agreed upon by most historians. Paul was no eyewitness, and the other texts are from anonymous texts. The Gospels (with the exception of one small verse in John) make no claim to being eyewitnesses and that verse is John is also suspect. Notice I even point out the exception of that one passage in John! I get tired of writing that whole paragraph out, but the bottom line is that there is no good reason for believing the Gospels are written by eyewitnesses or are even informed by eyewitnesses. I also read all of Bauckham, in addition to listening to that entire youtube series.< OK I get you. But saying ‘one small (?) verse in John’ is misleading isn’t it? Read at face value it covers one quarter of the gospels. And why call it small? You read Bauckham, all the way to the end? Well done!

Why ‘not convincing’? What would that verse need to say, to make it convincing, in itself?<< I am not a scholar in ancient literature, but I would expect (at a minimum) something like what other ancient historians did -- name their sources. They even often go so far as to critique those sources, pointing out where they might be mistaken, or not. I understand that the standards in ancient history are far lower than we have come to expect, but even they took some steps to establish dates and sources. We get none of that from the Gospels. even the one passage you site (sic) does not actually say the name of the person writing it!< That is not an answer to my question. You said that John 21:24 was not convincing and I asked you what would that verse need to say, to make it convincing, in itself.

Commenting on what you do say, I don’t think that the authors of Matthew, Mark and John were seeing themselves as historians. I think that they were writing as best they could memoirs of Jesus for the believers, and certainly that they had no idea that their works would be examined by sceptical non-believers 2000 years later. I myself am sceptical of some of the things in Matthew eg the flight to Egypt, the manner of Judas’ death, the resurrection of the saints. By contrast I think the author of Luke-Acts did aim to write something like history. Note his attempts to be exact about dates, names and titles. Note also his prefaces, where he makes it clear that he is trying to write an accurate record, based of course on sources (written and eyewitness) plus his own eyewitness account from Acts 16 onwards. It is true that Luke does not name his sources, and many people wish that he did and wonder why he didn’t. But still, Luke-Acts is prima facie an attempt at historical writing.

The narrative in Acts does not describe a 3 years interval when Paul went to Arabia, but is not inconsistent with it. For all we know, there is 3 years between Acts 9:25 and 9:26. Luke does not say ‘immediately’.<<s This kind of reasoning gets us things like https://bblais.github.io/posts/2013/Feb/15/resurrection-linear-regression-and-the-art-of-harmonization/ I imagine that you can harmonize the nativity stories, saying that Luke doesn't mention the flee to Egypt, but doesn't say he didn't go there, and maybe the timeline is adjustable? Acts is not agrees upon by scholars as representing eyewitness testimony, and there seems to be a very clear direction to the differences between Acts and the statements in Paul -- in the direction of making Peter and Paul agree. Again, I'd have to study Acts a lot more for more detail on this, but it doesn't seem as if most theists are willing to have their points dependent on the veracity of Acts.< No I don’t believe a flight to Egypt can fit into Luke’s narrative Luke 2:2 says ‘And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord’ Purification is 30 days max, so I say no time for a quick trip to Egypt. I have debated this on a few forums, and seen the various fixes proposed. The most popular is to say that Matt 2 is about 1-2 years later (so it took the Magi a really long time to get there!). Paul’s 3 years in Arabia is different. Luke, like everyone writing history, compresses to leave out things he does not want to mention.

Logical reasoning does not use probability theory, as I keep saying<< Let's make an analogy, which might help. There are multiple formulations of mechanics in physics. Two of them are Newtonian and Lagrangian. The Lagrangian formulation makes no use of forces, yet is entirely consistent with the Newtonian form and in some cases more convenient. Probability theory is a different way of framing the same problems as traditional Boolean logic, and can generalize to those cases where there is uncertainty. So, it can both be the case that traditional Boolean logic does not use probability or the vocabulary of probability and that Boolean logic is a limiting case of the rules of probability< OK but that is not what you were saying about logic/maths vs probability. You said that the former is a branch, subset, of the latter.

I am not trying to give you evidence for the resurrection, God’s existence, am I?<< At some point, yes. It's not enough to criticize someone's approach to a problem, ask what it means to be considered evidence, to ask what would convince me. At some point, given that the answers have been generally "I'll believe when I see the evidence, do you have any", it is time to present some. I find it much easier to talk about reasoning and beliefs when addressing specific claims< We have never talked about me trying to prove God to you. I never said that I could, and I don’t think anything I said would satisfy you. I never even implied that I could.

You've tried to imply that priors are just arbitrary, implying that you'd be justified in whatever bias you come in with and that I have no recourse to disagree.<< I never said they were arbitrary. I said the opposite, that they are based on background, judgment, preferences …<< background = data, so we are not dealing with priors. judgment must be based on prior evidence, so we are not sharing the same information -- let's get that info out. preferences are pretty arbitrary. Let's see where the priors are actually coming from, so we can see what is shaping them.< No, background does not equal data. Your background is all your whole life up to now, including genetic factors, upbringing, experiences as well as acquired knowledge. It is manifestly hard if not impossible to see where priors come from. If it were easy, psychology would be a sought-after discipline. I raise this above. Can you detail the ‘data’ in your life that have resulted in you being an atheist / naturalist? I can point to my upbringing and three seminal experiences, but not ‘data’ as such. I mean, could you ever describe a conversion experience as just ‘data’?

do these discussions ever wind down? :-)< I guess we will have to stop at some point, but I am finding this continually interesting, even though at some points we go round in circles.

Should we finish on these points first? Then we could start a new thread just on that?<< We can do both-and, depending on time/energy. As for a new thread, you can either find a relevant post I've already done (the search bar works on the site) or I can post something new on a topic you'd like, and then have the thread start from that. either works< Gosh I don’t know. This has been fun, but I am not sure I can handle doing more than one of these long posts every couple of days. Like you I am a teacher (I teach higher maths in school), so it is busy in term (teaching everything remotely of course). But on the existence of God, as I said above, I don’t think anything I could say would satisfy you. Furthermore I don’t think that many people actually come to faith from historical study – although J. Warner Wallace’s Cold Case Christianity is an exception. Let us see how this one goes in the next week or so? Maybe soon we will decide we have said everything we want to say on these points?

Regards David

again, you're conflating two things -- the cause and the effect. I think the word "miracle" does this automatically, which is a bad thing. Let's be clear, there is a claimed effect (e.g. someone was sick and is not anymore, someone had an injury and doesn't have it any more, someone was dead and is now alive) and a claimed cause (e.g. an agent acting supernaturally did it, magic did it, aliens did it, some unknown natural process did it).

I would say, for our purposes, ‘a supernatural action by a supernatural agent resulting in some effect which would normally be welcomed (healing etc) and which cannot be explained in normal naturalistic terms.

that is exactly what I am saying. the word "miracle" contains both the cause and the effect, so the problem with answering the question "do you believe in miracles" is that you have to be convinced of both. You chastised me for both needing to be convinced of the existence of the effect and the existence of the agent causing that effect, when the word miracle demands both. It is possible to not believe in either, it is possible to be convinced of the effect but not the proposed cause, and it is possible to be convinced of both. It's even possible to believe in the cause and not the effect (e.g. believe in God and not be convinced that God did a particular effect).

But I think you are still blind to the obvious fact that, by definition, a supernatural act cannot be studied naturalistically, ie investigated scientifically. Such (alleged) acts are usually one-off, so they cannot be studied.

Let's stick with cause and effect language here. You are saying that supernatural causes cannot be studied naturalistically, at least because they are (usually) one-off but also that they are supernatural -- no natural mechanism.

One issue that you don't seem to notice is that most miracle claims are not truly one-off, in the sense that they are part of a category of claims. Any given miracle may be a one-off, but people claim miraculous action by the same God many times. If God only acted once, then perhaps it might be challenging to study -- although not impossible. The Big Bang happened only once in our universe (probably) but we can still study its properties because the event has downstream effects (e.g. microwave background, motion of galaxies, etc...) So I don't see one-off as necessarily being a deal breaker. Of course, if the claim truly is a one-off, and we don't have access to the data, and the claim is something extraordinary these all combine to not having a good reason to believe it.

But the other aspect of it, that it is a supernatural cause and thus not accessible to naturalistic explanation, misses the point.

No, I demand that an alleged supernatural cause be observed as a natural effect. One can possibly infer the cause even if you don't know its specifics. I am not even sure what a supernatural effect would be, and how we would know it, or care.

I do not understand you, sorry. Maybe you could illustrate with eg Jesus’ alleged resurrection?

So, imagine that we have a claim of a resurrection, and further (just for simplicity) let's say we were there for the events described. First, we could have naturalistic explanations for the existence of the person -- I can see the person, interact with the person, check their pulse, etc... Next, if they died, I could have naturalistic explanations for that -- observe loss of blood, lack of pulse, lack of breathing, etc... Next, they get buried, and I can confirm that -- all naturalistically. Next, they come out the grave and say "Hi!", which I can also investigate the same way -- I can see the person, interact with the person, check their pulse, etc... Other than the possible cause of their resurrection, all of the other observations are of natural things, all other explanations for the changes in state are naturalistic and measurable and thus a scientific approach could confirm the event, even if the cause was outside of nature. One need not accept the purported cause to have evidence for the event, right? One could scientifically verify the event while leaving the cause unknown, right?

Now, at what point does it become a miracle? If it is only when science doesn't currently have an answer, how is this not a God-of-the-gaps? I'd go a little further, and say that even if you are including supernatural causation, saying science can't explain it isn't quite enough. I could have an ingrown toenail suddenly get fixed, and our incomplete medical knowledge may not know how it happened, but I'd probably be reticent calling it a miracle.

But you previously said that you would also need the existence of the agent to be ‘established’.

Yes, because the word miracle mixes the two, so that is your requirement. What would convince me that someone rose from the dead is somewhat less than what would convince me that God rose someone from the dead, as a basic mathematical fact of conjunctions.

On the one hand you think that everyone thinks the same way, treats data the same way.

I think that, if people want to be rational, then they need to follow the same rules. Some people don't want that, and thus "think differently". I'd argue, they are thinking less productively, but clearly people choose to think differently. We have lots of shortcuts in cognition that we fall back on. it takes some discipline to overcome them.

On the other hand you cannot say what data will turn a known prior into a posterior of (say) 0.6.

Don’t you see the contradiction?

Nope, because it is hard to be quantitative in some fields. If you're flipping a (possibly) biased coin, I can probably be specific. If you're talking about the actions of people in history, I am dubious of attaching numerical values. However, the mathematical structure is useful to describe the process. Does that help?

I repeat, what evidence would convince you that the existence of the Christian God is more probable than not?

Please be specific.

I can't be specific, and no scientist could. Try to tell me what it would take for you to be convinced that the speed of light can change by 10%? I doubt you could, or anyone. it is a process -- I can tell you which things that would start to move the needle towards higher probability, but I recognize that the probability could easily go the other direction with the same data if someone came up with a plausible alternative I had not considered. This is inherent in the structure of probability theory -- your posteriors depend on the data, the prior, and the alternative models you are considering. Change any or all of those, and your posterior changes.

What I have insisted on are a few things:

historical data is insufficient to overturn any physical law or theory
every miracle claim I have ever investigated either had no available data or the data pointed to obvious plausible alternatives

These two combine to make it not rational for me to believe in miracles, either modern or ancient, and thus the basis for Christianity. Am I making an error anywhere here?

And suppose he does not interact at all, being either the deist god or the source of all being?

this is possible, but it seems both to be a nearly content-free statement and disingenuous -- if all theists were deists we wouldn't need atheists. :-)

Why ‘content-free statement and disingenuous’?

"content-free" means it makes no predictions, and cannot be distinguished from "nothing". "disingenuous" because Christians believe in a God that acts currently in the world and supposedly has a relationship with individuals. To consider cases where this is not the case diverts from the actual claims of most actual theists. I don't really care to argue with deists, because they really aren't saying a whole lot.

My point is the fairly obvious one that if we see something with the appearance of design, we naturally infer a designer. [...] do you accept the general principle of inference of a designer from appearance of a design

We might naturally do that, but many times we are wrong (e.g. supposed design in biological forms) and when we infer design, we are generally contrasting it with not-design (e.g. nature), so to turn around and say nature itself is designed falls flat. I don't see the evidence of design, or where we see it (e.g. biological forms) we have non-design explanations. Either way, no good reason to infer design. People love to see design in random things, or in non-random things that we think should be random and thus fail to see how they came about from non-agent-based processes. Newton himself made this error with the orbits of the planets along the ecliptic (and attributed God to the obvious design), that later was corrected by Laplace. This history of mistakes makes me very cautious doing it with things we don't understand currently.

You have two choices. Either this God interacts with the world, in which case you need to pony up the evidence for the natural effects that can only be explained by this agent. Or, this God doesn't interact, and you need to abandon Christianity because that is not the God of Christianity. There are no other options.<

You ask for evidence for (the Christian?) God.

But I have said that I am not trying, in this discussion of your book, to provide evidence for theism.

That is another discussion.

It is also another discussion whether I should abandon my belief in God for lack of evidence.

We could talk about that later if you like.

I see these as all related.

If he interacts, his interactions will be one-off.

why? This doesn't seem to be a requirement, and also not what most Christians claim, and certainly not what is depicted in the Bible. Seems like a retreat, because of lack of evidence. The same thing is said about the aliens -- they really are there but are only choosing to abduct certain people, and defy our abilities to confirm. Same thing is said of psychic abilities. It's a retreat. Do you think for a second that, if God chose to be a lot more obvious, that anyone would be making this kind of argument? Look how the Christians jump on any purported scientific verification of their claims -- science can't speak to religious claims, except when it confirms them and "yay, science proves God!".

So, for instance, suppose that the Christian God of the universe exists, and that his only action was to raise Jesus from the dead?

How could you, now in 2021, possibly study that miracle and ‘verify’ it? There is no way, as I think, you now agree.

right, and I'd have no good reason to believe it. case closed. luckily he seems to do lots more than that, unless you're claiming that's all he has done? I doubt it, so why bring it up? this is one of the problems I have with your line of argumentation. You bring up these hypotheticals which are seemingly not what you actually believe, or what most theists are claiming, or what I wrote my book for, so why do it? it feels like a long-winded way of trying to show I'm being irrational so you don't have to justify your actual claims.

But he still exists, by supposition! Your naturalism does not allow belief in such a god, even supposing he exists.

I can of course suppose things that are not physically measurable. The quantum mechanical wavefunction is one such thing -- not measurable even in principle, but is extraordinarily useful in making very specific predictions so we keep it in our physical theories. The problem with the supposition of the agent of God is that it doesn't add any value -- makes no predictions, except when it does and can be shown to be redundant at best and wrong at worst. I don't believe in God not because I can't suppose it, or physical theories do not allow supposing non-physical things, it's because there is no evidence for it and it is a redundant assumption at best.

The point is about the contingency of existence. Why is there anything at all? Science cannot deal with this, as it deals only with existence.

Not sure if that's entirely true. Science can propose mechanisms where something comes from nothing, and look at its effects. Or, perhaps the notion of "nothing" is not something that can exist (and I do recognize the difficulty in the vocabulary here).

As a side-note, theists don't propose something out of nothing either, because God exists eternally. All you're saying is something like "something out of no-physical-thing (including physical law itself)". It may be true that there are things beyond our physical understanding, but it seems like the notion of God has retreated into a little corner of our ignorance.

I think you are conceding (also see above) that if God did exist you would not be able to see evidence for him.

You could at least see evidence of the effects. I don't think "supernatural" is well-defined, so I am not sure what evidence would convince me of it, but I should be able to at a bare minimum be convinced of the effects in the world.

We may ‘observe’ an apparent miracle eg the Times Square example. That might well be ‘observing the effects of God’. But you will deny that it is an effect of God because you have said that you want proof of the existence of God first (I have quoted you several times on this).

I agree here, I would probably want to rule out every other possible explanation. It may be that at that point I would be satisfied with "I don't know", it may be that it would be enough to convince me that an agent did it (e.g. aliens, Loki, etc...), it may be that it would be enough to convince me that the Christian God did it. It's hard to say because....and this is the important step....not a single miracle claim has ever even come close to having the evidence for its effect that I was faced with that second question. Either the data wasn't there, or there were mundane explanations. In. Every. Case. So that's the minimum that needs to be demonstrated before the second question becomes relevant.

Now, let's say we follow your Times Square example, and we were convinced that the event happened as described and further that some agent did it. How would you distinguish between aliens, Loki, and Yahweh?

So, if God really did exist, and did the miracle, you would be unable to ‘observe his effects’. You would have observed something strange, yes, but you would deny that it was the effect of God because it was a one-off, and you have not seen proof of the existence of God enough to satisfy you.

As stated above, I would deny (if there was no good evidence) that the cause was God, even if you could convince me that the effect was real, that there was some amazing transformation before/after that you had solid evidence for. We can observe the effect (e.g. rotation speed anomaly with galaxies) and then label the cause something unknown (e.g. dark matter) to be figured out later. It is done all the time in science, and is not helped by trying to merge the cause and the effect together into one inference.

Do you really think science will ever be able to find out why there is anything at all?

I don't know, but I am also not convinced that the question is well-posed -- it may not be. I am also unwilling to jump to some "explanation" that has no more predictive content than "magic did it" just because it might make me more comfortable to have "an answer". It's likely that, whatever answer is true, the answer for such a fundamental question will be profoundly unintuitive.

Yes I think we agree. For the resurrection, you and I could agree about the significance of all the evidence, thus having the same Bayes’ factors, but the difference between our priors would result in different posteriors – yours very small and mine > 0.5.

Right, but priors should not be arbitrary. One person's prior is another's posterior -- priors, where they are important, need to be justified. If there is enough data then the prior is not generally important.

The atheist alternative hypothesis of grave robbing plus women and Peter experiencing hallucination plus disciples wanting to believe it is just about plausible I think.<<

Really? How many reports of grave robbing to we have, compared with people being raised from the dead?

But there is no way of adjudicating between it and the resurrection hypothesis.

Of course there is -- one justifies the priors, using reasoning I just outlined -- how many cases of each have we observed? do any of them violate any physical laws we know of? this informs which models are more or less likely, and pushes resurrections way down in comparison.

I don’t think you understood me. I was conceding that the alternative hypothesis to resurrection was plausible.

sure, and because the alternative is far more likely a-priori, the posterior for resurrection is much less in comparison. right?

There is not much good evidence for lots of things in early history, but it does not bother most people because they do not care a fig about eg Babylonian society in 1500BC and see no need to have a belief about it!

So there is a third option

justify your priors (one person's prior is another's posterior)

recognize there actually is no good reason to believe

Not have a belief about it

sure, but that's not under consideration. we are discussing the application of probability theory to a problem, and to say "I'm not interested in that problem" is outside of the discussion. Plus, Christians are telling us that we need to care about it for really important reasons.

Incidentally I think many non-religious people in the West today are in category 3 about religion, in particular things like the resurrection of Jesus. They have heard about it, but do not care enough about it to have a view either way.

sure, but if they were asked "do you believe in God", saying "I have no opinion" is an atheistic position. this part of the discussion also seems like a diversion.

I wonder why this is so. Do you have a view why some non-religious have such a strong anti-theistic program, and care enough to write books etc. but most do not?

not a question I've given a lot of thought to. I like any context where I can explore rational thought, and I am vehemently against any case where bad thinking is used to manipulate people or where I see people thinking badly leading to being credulous with often bad outcomes. thus, I think a lot about the anti-vax movement, and about psychic phenomenon, and religion. It'a all the same kind of pattern for me. Why I can seemingly write endlessly about it is anyone's guess. Some people like cars, I just see them as getting me from one place to another. whose to say what strikes people's fancy? :-)

So you require that it be established, ‘not proved’, that the agent exists.

How do you do this? What evidence would do the job? See above.

I've said before, and above, I don't know -- and that's not my problem. If you put some evidence forward for the positive claim, I can evaluate it. I can't tell ahead of time what would be convincing. It's not a change of topic to demand evidence for claims, and to admit that I don't know ahead of time what would convince me for any claim, not just the religious ones.

Seems like you're saying one or more of:

I'm dogmatically biased against any evidence you want to put forward

The evidence that you can put forward is not sufficient to convince anyone

The only good reason to believe is just to believe ahead of time, without evidence

agree? disagree?<

Disagree. You have a rather one-dimensional view of belief.

perhaps, however I think you may be reacting to something a bit different. it is common for physicists to propose the simplest explanations, push them as far as they can go until they break, and then modify them only as needed. My book is an exploration of how to use the straightforward structure of probability theory to describe many different aspects of theology. Discussions like ours here are useful in seeing which parts land and which don't, where things can be clearer, where it may be incomplete.

It is not just considering belief for P in light of evidence for P conditional on nothing else.

There is always a conditional, which is why it is important to try to tease that out. As I've said earlier, as a matter of notation, I tend to be a bit lazy writing:

$P(\text{model}|\text{data}) \sim P(\text{data}|\text{model}) P(\text{model})$

instead of

$P(\text{model}|\text{data},I) \sim P(\text{data}|\text{model},I) P(\text{model}|I)$

where $I$ is some background info. disagreements happen, even with the same models and data when the $I$ is different for different people. That's why it is important to see where that difference comes from, by breaking apart the $I$ for each person to see where that comes from. Not always possible, but it is useful to try.

In fact our beliefs are a rather complex interconnected web, based around what some people call ‘worldviews’.

The worldviews of the theist and naturalist are profoundly different, as we are discovering.

My belief in God comes from many things in my life, and a view of the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is only one little thing in that pile.

I would suggest that your atheism and naturalism also comes from many things in your life, maybe including upbringing, and that you did not yourself consider the historical evidence for the resurrection with a blank slate. Perhaps you did not start studying it until you were a convinced atheist?

I have never found the use of the word "worldview" to be all that helpful. The only context I have ever heard it is from theists, to the effect of excusing poor thinking. Being able to say "oh, you have a naturalistic worldview so you don't believe my claim" is the same as the accusations of having a prior P(M)=0, or "you have naturalistic blinkers", etc... If there was good evidence, these excuses would never be used. Sure, people have different backgrounds but that doesn't change the truth. The world is round, regardless of my worldview, and it is demonstrably unreasonable to hold a contrary view on it. Same with the Earth orbiting the around the Sun and not vice versa. We can be confident with a super-high probability for these things. We never hear about worldviews with these situations. Why not? Because there is evidence. Theists would love there to be evidence of God of such magnitude, but instead we don't have it and we get excuses.

But I think you ignore how precarious a hold rationality has!

Only since the Enlightenment … Only in the West … Only a majority, and perhaps just a small majority in these days of fake news and post truth.

I wonder how many Trump supporters value rationality? I think more than half. What proportion, do you think?

Fundamentalists of all persuasions would value the word of their scriptures over rationality – that is a lot of people.

Perhaps I'm too much of an optimist. Clearly multiple strategies are needed. I prefer to outline the reasoning process for those who value being consistent. I actually think that is nearly everyone -- but certainly the apologists that are claiming to use the tools of logic and reason. People, of course, do not like to be wrong and unfortunately social media allows one to be in a bubble and never have to feel that feeling of being wrong.

Also, for the many millions in the world who do not have enough to eat, for instance, they would understandably give up ‘rationality’ for a good meal. After all, rationality does not put food on the table.

Someone needing a meal is not reading my book, nor any of the things I am responding to. I can't speak much to those in that situation, and it seems a bit of a stretch of a critique of what I am doing. Do you do this for, say, Richard Swinburne or Tim McGrew saying "all this philosophy is fine, but you really haven't dealt with the case where someone is starving and doesn't value philosophy"?

There is not an automatic process of convergence<<

it can't be automatic, it's a limit dependent on the evidence. if you have zero (literally zero) evidence, then the probabilities are going to be exactly the priors. If you have a little evidence, but not much, then the posteriors will be similar to the priors. Convergence always comes with more data.<

I disagree. Again, you assume that everyone must think the same way, treat data the same way.

I know you would like to think this true, but see just above about your belief that everyone is or wants to be ‘rational’.

This is getting a bit ridiculous. If someone doesn't want to be rational, they won't follow the Jaynes/Cox rules and they will violate one of the Jaynes/Cox axioms. If they want to be, but aren't for some reason, they will violate one of the Jaynes/Cox axioms. That's it. Saying there are people who don't want to follow the process of reason, as if this is a problem with what I'm saying, is like saying that someone who doesn't take their medicine is the fault of the doctor.

No there is not much difference in the logic between past events in the solar system and past events in human history. They are both past events.

What I was trying to point out that past events are a different kind of thing from laws of nature, with different kinds of truth conditions.

Ok, but I don't find that distinction particularly useful. It's more general to say that we have access to data of varying degrees, and that informs our probabilities to varying degrees. There may be past events that we have better access to than current events. I may actually know more about the number of soldiers in Caesars army than I do stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. It has nothing to do with past vs present, and everything to do with access to data.

I still don't see it as a useful distinction. You are just saying that prior probabilities predate posterior (both historically and mathematically, it seems).<

No I am not.

I am saying that, in the development of probability, unconditional probability predate conditional probability and Bayes’ Them.

First, to be pedantic, all probabilities are conditional -- even the abstract ones -- the condition is the description of the problem.

P(draw a joker | standard deck of 52 + 2 jokers)

is different than

P(draw a joker | tarot deck)

even in the abstract.

but, if you want to use the descriptions as assumed and not put them in explicitly (which I often do to make the notation less cumbersome) you'll notice that unconditional probabilities are the priors and the conditional probabilities are then the posteriors and likelihoods.

If you want to define ‘science’ as any practical activity involving maths, fine. Just don’t expect others to understand you, unless you warn them first!

probably my habit as a physicist, seeing everything as physics. :-)

OK I get you. But saying ‘one small (?) verse in John’ is misleading isn’t it?

Read at face value it covers one quarter of the gospels.

And why call it small?

I'm not calling the Gospel small, I'm calling the verse small -- there is only one verse in the entire Gospel of John that mentions eyewitnesses (and doesn't actually name the witness), and nowhere else in the Gospels does it even hint at eyewitness testimony. If that one verse is an interpolation, the entire case disappears. It could have been mentioned throughout the gospel and not be quite as sensitive to this problem.

You read Bauckham, all the way to the end? Well done!

I turned it into an audiobook, and had the computer read it to me over a pretty long time.

That is not an answer to my question. You said that John 21:24 was not convincing and I asked you what would that verse need to say, to make it convincing, in itself.

It's not just the issue with that verse (e.g. it doesn't mention any specifics we can verify) but the fact that it is only one verse. Like with everything else, I don't know what it would take to "make it convincing" only what would move the needle in that direction -- but it would at least have to be convincing to historians, the bulk of whom do not think the gospels reflect eyewitness testimony.

Commenting on what you do say, I don’t think that the authors of Matthew, Mark and John were seeing themselves as historians. I think that they were writing as best they could memoirs of Jesus for the believers

myself am sceptical of some of the things in Matthew eg the flight to Egypt, the manner of Judas’ death, the resurrection of the saints.

why would Matthew include stories that weren't true if they were writing "as best they could memoirs of Jesus"? Seems odd.

By contrast I think the author of Luke-Acts did aim to write something like history.

yes, something like history, but I think it is a token -- trying to give the appearance of history. He doesn't follow any of the standard methods of the time from my understanding (e.g. naming and critiquing sources), and he copies verbatim much of Mark. I think the preface is included specifically to give an air of credibility but much of the rest of his style doesn't reflect proper historical methods, even for the time.

A good comparison can be found here: https://infidels.org/library/modern/matthew_ferguson/gospel-authors.html

Paul’s 3 years in Arabia is different. Luke, like everyone writing history, compresses to leave out things he does not want to mention.

OK but that is not what you were saying about logic/maths vs probability. You said that the former is a branch, subset, of the latter.

I think we're arguing semantics here, but since it is a confusion I'll consider a more careful wording in another edit of the book.

At some point, yes. It's not enough to criticize someone's approach to a problem, ask what it means to be considered evidence, to ask what would convince me. At some point, given that the answers have been generally "I'll believe when I see the evidence, do you have any", it is time to present some. I find it much easier to talk about reasoning and beliefs when addressing specific claims

We have never talked about me trying to prove God to you.

I never said that I could, and I don’t think anything I said would satisfy you.

I never even implied that I could.

I agree -- you haven't and you didn't. However, as I said in above paragraph, my answers have been generally "I'll believe when I see the evidence, do you have any", and "I find it much easier to talk about reasoning and beliefs when addressing specific claims" it would seem like a reasonable direction to take.

I think the only reason you don’t think anything you could say would satisfy me is because the evidence is not really there, and you're making excuses ahead of time. I see this a lot with theists. In contrast I never see it at all in the sciences when the data is actually there. I do see it in cases, like psychics and aliens, when the data is not actually there.

It is manifestly hard if not impossible to see where priors come from.

Depends on the problem. For example, the priors probability for rolling a (possibly) weighted die can be established objectively -- but of course, that's an really easy problem. The priors for, say, some figure in history existing is obviously much harder. However I still stand by the observation that if your posterior is sensitive to your prior, then you don't have enough data.

Can you detail the ‘data’ in your life that have resulted in you being an atheist / naturalist?

I think it is a combination of failed predictions (lots of failed miracle claims), moral hypocrisy (people claiming moral superiority, while either doing or advocating obviously immoral behavior), and a better understanding of the science which produces a story far more intricate, interesting, and inspiring. I can go into more detail if you'd like. I've even spoken in tongues and have a brother who did at least one faith healing, but I can't say that I've had a lot of experiences that were powerfully religious.

I can point to my upbringing and three seminal experiences, but not ‘data’ as such. I mean, could you ever describe a conversion experience as just ‘data’?

the word "data" may be a bit cold when talking about personal experiences, but in a raw sense it is accurate. You can replace that word with observation, or evidence, or experience. one issue that comes up is whether personal experience should ever be convincing to someone else -- I'm not sure it should, if there is no way to access it from the outside.

>do these discussions ever wind down? :-)<

I guess we will have to stop at some point, but I am finding this continually interesting, even though at some points we go round in circles.

Glad that's the case! Sorry for the large delay on this one...out of my control.

Gosh I don’t know. This has been fun, but I am not sure I can handle doing more than one of these long posts every couple of days. Like you I am a teacher (I teach higher maths in school), so it is busy in term (teaching everything remotely of course).

every couple of days is a tough during the semester, for sure.!

But on the existence of God, as I said above, I don’t think anything I could say would satisfy you. Furthermore I don’t think that many people actually come to faith from historical study – although J. Warner Wallace’s Cold Case Christianity is an exception.

I doubt he even came to it that way. Most people come to religion for emotional/social reasons and back-justify with "reasons". At least, from my experience.

Maybe soon we will decide we have said everything we want to say on these points?

We can go whichever direction you'd like. If you want an in-person (ie. zoom/skype) discussion sometime, that might be fun too.

Anyway, sorry about the serious delay! Hopefully I'm back on track a bit. :-)

Thanks Brian Here is my reply I will try to post as well

Let's stick with cause and effect language here. You are saying that supernatural causes cannot be studied naturalistically, at least because they are (usually) one-off but also that they are supernatural -- no natural mechanism. One issue that you don't seem to notice is that most miracle claims are not truly one-off, in the sense that they are part of a category of claims. Any given miracle may be a one-off, but people claim miraculous action by the same God many times. If God only acted once, then perhaps it might be challenging to study -- although not impossible. The Big Bang happened only once in our universe (probably) but we can still study its properties because the event has downstream effects (e.g. microwave background, motion of galaxies, etc...) So I don't see one-off as necessarily being a deal breaker. Of course, if the claim truly is a one-off, and we don't have access to the data, and the claim is something extraordinary these all combine to not having a good reason to believe it. But the other aspect of it, that it is a supernatural cause and thus not accessible to naturalistic explanation, misses the point.<

So, imagine that we have a claim of a resurrection, and further (just for simplicity) let's say we were there for the events described. First, we could have naturalistic explanations for the existence of the person -- I can see the person, interact with the person, check their pulse, etc... Next, if they died, I could have naturalistic explanations for that -- observe loss of blood, lack of pulse, lack of breathing, etc... Next, they get buried, and I can confirm that -- all naturalistically. Next, they come out the grave and say "Hi!", which I can also investigate the same way -- I can see the person, interact with the person, check their pulse, etc... Other than the possible cause of their resurrection, all of the other observations are of natural things, all other explanations for the changes in state are naturalistic and measurable and thus a scientific approach could confirm the event, even if the cause was outside of nature. One need not accept the purported cause to have evidence for the event, right? One could scientifically verify the event while leaving the cause unknown, right?

But I raised the hypothetical example of a genuine one-off miracle, and I don’t think you have really addressed it. There is no way that such a miracle could be ‘verified’ naturalistically. I gave earlier a tentative definition of a miracle

‘a supernatural action by a supernatural agent resulting in some effect which would normally be welcomed (healing etc) and which cannot be explained in normal naturalistic terms.’

I further claimed ‘But I think you are still blind to the obvious fact that, by definition, a supernatural act cannot be studied naturalistically, ie investigated scientifically. Such (alleged) acts are usually one-off, so they cannot be studied.’ It seems that your replies above are just confirming my point! If all we have are various unexplained events but nothing actually observed that seems to be supernatural that we certainly could not confirm them to be the result of a miracle, IF we think along naturalistic lines. All you naturalists could say is ‘It is unexplained’. BUT now consider where an alleged miracle involves a supernatural event that is actually observed. Consider again my Times Sq example. You observe personally those parts of the body reassemble after someone prays. It is totally one-off and apparently ‘a supernatural action by a supernatural agent’. You cannot experiment. It is a one-off. The man walks away perfectly normally. Nothing more to see. You only have your memory, traffic cameras, testimony of the other people there. What do you say? Are you still going to say ‘God of the gaps’?

But you previously said that you would also need the existence of the agent to be ‘established’. Yes, because the word miracle mixes the two, so that is your requirement. What would convince me that someone rose from the dead is somewhat less than what would convince me that God rose someone from the dead, as a basic mathematical fact of conjunctions.< OK I get your point. But your statement implies that you would NEVER accept a miracle as such unless you had proof, presumably independent, of the existence of the agent. This would be impossible, because your naturalistic worldview makes belief in God impossible for you.
Take my Times Sq example. You could not accept it as a miracle, even as ‘a miracle by unknown supernatural agent’. You have set the bar against miracles impossibly high. Nobody of your worldview could ever accept a miracle as such, no matter how miraculous. Anything that happens, even the stars rearranged to spell ‘Hello Brian I am God believe in me’', would always be, for you, an ‘unexplained event’. Am I correct?

On the one hand you think that everyone thinks the same way, treats data the same way<< I think that, if people want to be rational, then they need to follow the same rules. Some people don't want that, and thus "think differently". I'd argue, they are thinking less productively, but clearly people choose to think differently. We have lots of shortcuts in cognition that we fall back on. it takes some discipline to overcome them.< Why should we all have to think the same way? Why should we all be ‘rational’, in the way you Brian understand it? What, indeed, is so special in the way Brian and Jaynes understand thinking as to make it necessary that all humans must think in that way? Why should we have to work to overcome shortcuts in our thinking? What is wrong with shortcuts? NB It is quite significant that you have apparently gone back from everyone thinking the same way to everyone SHOULD be thinking the same way (as you and Jaynes), – a quite different matter!

On the other hand you cannot say what data will turn a known prior into a posterior of (say) 0.6. Don’t you see the contradiction?<< Nope, because it is hard to be quantitative in some fields. If you're flipping a (possibly) biased coin, I can probably be specific. If you're talking about the actions of people in history, I am dubious of attaching numerical values. However, the mathematical structure is useful to describe the process. Does that help?< No, because the question was very specific. It was about what would move the needle for belief in (the Christian) God above 50% You are contradicting yourself On the one hand, you think everyone thinks, or should think (see above) the same way On the other hand, you cannot say what evidence will turn a given prior into a posterior above 0.5, for the specific case of the Christian God. It seems that you don’t see how you are contradicting yourself. And I think that the real reason for your (apparent) evasion is that your prior for God is actually zero, and thus there is NO evidence that would yield a posterior of more than 0.5. Am I correct? (and see next)

I repeat, what evidence would convince you that the existence of the Christian God is more probable than not? Please be specific<< I can't be specific, and no scientist could. Try to tell me what it would take for you to be convinced that the speed of light can change by 10%? I doubt you could, or anyone. it is a process -- I can tell you which things that would start to move the needle towards higher probability, but I recognize that the probability could easily go the other direction with the same data if someone came up with a plausible alternative I had not considered. This is inherent in the structure of probability theory -- your posteriors depend on the data, the prior, and the alternative models you are considering. Change any or all of those, and your posterior changes.< You also say I've said before, and above, I don't know -- and that's not my problem. If you put some evidence forward for the positive claim, I can evaluate it. I can't tell ahead of time what would be convincing. It's not a change of topic to demand evidence for claims, and to admit that I don't know ahead of time what would convince me for any claim, not just the religious ones.< You indicate your leaning towards scientism (belief that only significant propositions are scientific ones, see below) worldview (again) by classifying belief in God as a scientific question (‘I can't be specific, and no scientist could’). I don’t think you really get the difference between scientific issues and metaphysical / religious issues. Do you really think that the only significant issues are those that can be treated by science? Aside from metaphysical questions, there are moral, aesthetic etc issues that are important but outside science. But anyway, back to what it would take you to believe in the Christian God. I really do not want to allow you to keep evading! Also, I do not understand why you don’t see how you are contradicting yourself! Brian 1: We all think the same way Brian 2: I don’t know how my prior for God would be changed by what evidence. Do you think you could get these two Brians to talk together?!

I think that your prior for God is actually zero, and thus that there is NO evidence that would yield a posterior of more than 0.5. If not, could you please tell me what IS your prior for the existence of (the Christian) God? And again, if your hypothesis about rational thinking is correct, you should be able to say EXACTLY what will ‘move the needle’, for you and indeed for any other ‘rational’ thinker. Please be specific this time. You should be able to cite the numbers.

Your prior odds.
Bayes’ factor of the evidence you think would be enough. 1 x 2 giving the posterior odds > 1 and Brian thus believes in God. Please no more ‘I can’t be specific’! If what you say about thinking is true, you must be able come up with answers.

What I have insisted on are a few things:

historical data is insufficient to overturn any physical law or theory

every miracle claim I have ever investigated either had no available data or the data pointed to obvious plausible alternatives These two combine to make it not rational for me to believe in miracles, either modern or ancient, and thus the basis for Christianity. Am I making an error anywhere here?< Your error is premise 1, for two reasons 1) Any data is historical, ie in the past, as soon as it has been collected. Your premise implies the impossibility of new discoveries overturning ANY scientific theory I am sure you did not mean that! 2) Historical data includes peoples’ experiences of alleged supernatural events. Suppose there is a physical law ‘dead people stay dead’, and that you were one of the witnesses of the Times Square incident. Your premise implies that, whatever you might have seen on that day, there is no way that this particular law would be overturned. But this is absurd. If it is found, by you and others, that dead people do not always stay dead, then the law ‘dead people stay dead’ is overturned by the data of last week.

And suppose he does not interact at all, being either the deist god or the source of all being? this is possible, but it seems both to be a nearly content-free statement and disingenuous -- if all theists were deists we wouldn't need atheists. :-) Why ‘content-free statement and disingenuous’? "content-free" means it makes no predictions, and cannot be distinguished from "nothing". "disingenuous" because Christians believe in a God that acts currently in the world and supposedly has a relationship with individuals. To consider cases where this is not the case diverts from the actual claims of most actual theists. I don't really care to argue with deists, because they really aren't saying a whole lot< I see. Your definition of ‘content-free’ as making no predictions shows your scientific bias. Perhaps you don’t really mean to say that nothing in life is worthwhile, not worth thinking about, unless it can be measured and analysed using the scientific method and used to make predictions, but that is what comes across when I talk to you. Perhaps you are even a follower of scientism, by which I mean the belief that only scientific statements are meaningful? Are you?
Or do you believe that it is possible to find meaning outside the scientific realm? And on there being God who is the source of all being but does not directly intervene in the sense of behaving like a supernatural agent, I think that it IS saying a whole lot! We are talking ultimate truth here, ultimate reality, what it is to be human and to find meaning and joy in one’s life. I understand that this is not something you can immediately relate to the claims of Christianity. However it IS meaningful. Personally, if I were not a Christian I would still be a theist in this sense.

My point is the fairly obvious one that if we see something with the appearance of design, we naturally infer a designer. [...] do you accept the general principle of inference of a designer from appearance of a design?<< We might naturally do that, but many times we are wrong (e.g. supposed design in biological forms) and when we infer design, we are generally contrasting it with not-design (e.g. nature), so to turn around and say nature itself is designed falls flat. I don't see the evidence of design, or where we see it (e.g. biological forms) we have non-design explanations. Either way, no good reason to infer design. People love to see design in random things, or in non-random things that we think should be random and thus fail to see how they came about from non-agent-based processes. Newton himself made this error with the orbits of the planets along the ecliptic (and attributed God to the obvious design), that later was corrected by Laplace. This history of mistakes makes me very cautious doing it with things we don't understand currently.< I reject your claim that it has been proved that biological systems are not designed. Do you really think so? If so, what exactly are the mechanisms by which natural selection results in a human being? Regarding Newton, it is of course begging the question to say that he was wrong in seeing design in the laws of nature. That is what we are talking about!

If he (the Christian God) interacts, his interactions will be one-off<< why? This doesn't seem to be a requirement, and also not what most Christians claim, and certainly not what is depicted in the Bible. Seems like a retreat, because of lack of evidence. The same thing is said about the aliens -- they really are there but are only choosing to abduct certain people, and defy our abilities to confirm. Same thing is said of psychic abilities. It's a retreat. Do you think for a second that, if God chose to be a lot more obvious, that anyone would be making this kind of argument? Look how the Christians jump on any purported scientific verification of their claims -- science can't speak to religious claims, except when it confirms them and "yay, science proves God!". This is a familiar point. You cannot expect the creator of the universe to intervene just when you would like him to do, in order to study him! The analogies with alien abductions and psychic abilities are inappropriate. NB I don’t jump on alleged scientific verifications!

So, for instance, suppose that the Christian God of the universe exists, and that his only action was to raise Jesus from the dead? How could you, now in 2021, possibly study that miracle and ‘verify’ it?<< … right, and I'd have no good reason to believe it. case closed. luckily he seems to do lots more than that, unless you're claiming that's all he has done? I doubt it, so why bring it up? this is one of the problems I have with your line of argumentation. You bring up these hypotheticals which are seemingly not what you actually believe, or what most theists are claiming, or what I wrote my book for, so why do it? it feels like a long-winded way of trying to show I'm being irrational so you don't have to justify your actual claims< I am trying to expose your worldview, and also to expose what I think is your muddled thinking. Your worldview will never allow you to ‘verify’ an alleged miracle, even if it happened last week in front of your very eyes! I keep on at this, because you keep talking about ‘verifying’ and ‘confirming’. There is absolutely no way that a naturalist like you will ever accept a miracle. Face it!

The point is about the contingency of existence. Why is there anything at all? Science cannot deal with this, as it deals only with existence<< Not sure if that's entirely true. Science can propose mechanisms where something comes from nothing, and look at its effects. Or, perhaps the notion of "nothing" is not something that can exist (and I do recognize the difficulty in the vocabulary here). As a side-note, theists don't propose something out of nothing either, because God exists eternally. All you're saying is something like "something out of no-physical-thing (including physical law itself)". It may be true that there are things beyond our physical understanding, but it seems like the notion of God has retreated into a little corner of our ignorance< I think this is quite a deep issue. ‘Nothing’ may be ambiguous – absence of physical matter vs absolutely no existence of anything even a vacuum. The sheer contingency of existence is actually quite mind-boggling, at least to me. The notion of God as source of all being is rather different from a personal being who decides to create a universe at some point in his time.

We may ‘observe’ an apparent miracle eg the Times Square example. That might well be ‘observing the effects of God’. But you will deny that it is an effect of God because you have said that you want proof of the existence of God first (I have quoted you several times on this).<< I agree here, I would probably want to rule out every other possible explanation. It may be that at that point I would be satisfied with "I don't know", it may be that it would be enough to convince me that an agent did it (e.g. aliens, Loki, etc...), it may be that it would be enough to convince me that the Christian God did it. It's hard to say because....and this is the important step....not a single miracle claim has ever even come close to having the evidence for its effect that I was faced with that second question. Either the data wasn't there, or there were mundane explanations. In. Every. Case. So that's the minimum that needs to be demonstrated before the second question becomes relevant. Now, let's say we follow your Times Square example, and we were convinced that the event happened as described and further that some agent did it. How would you distinguish between aliens, Loki, and Yahweh?< If someone at the scene prayed in the name of Jesus (as I think I said in one version of this). But it still would not be enough for you, I think.

Do you really think science will ever be able to find out why there is anything at all?<< I don't know, but I am also not convinced that the question is well-posed -- it may not be. I am also unwilling to jump to some "explanation" that has no more predictive content than "magic did it" just because it might make me more comfortable to have "an answer". It's likely that, whatever answer is true, the answer for such a fundamental question will be profoundly unintuitive< Indeed, the question is not ‘well-posed’, if you think of it as a scientific question. That is my point! Metaphysics lies outside science. I think there is a fundamental division between a theist like me and an atheist like yourself. There is an existential wonder at the idea that there is anything at all. I feel it every time I think about it. Do you ever wonder about it? It is not a scientific question, and any ‘explanation’ will not have predictive content.

Yes I think we agree. For the resurrection, you and I could agree about the significance of all the evidence, thus having the same Bayes’ factors, but the difference between our priors would result in different posteriors – yours very small and mine > 0.5<< Right, but priors should not be arbitrary. One person's prior is another's posterior -- priors, where they are important, need to be justified. If there is enough data then the prior is not generally important< Ah, this is another important question! It is I think a big debate in the literature. How DO we justify priors? I can give a reason for my prior for the resurrection, that I am a theist and therefore it is not unlikely that God could raise a man from the dead. Is that what you call a justification? What is your prior for the resurrection of Jesus and how would you justify it?

I was conceding that the alternative hypothesis to resurrection was plausible<< sure, and because the alternative is far more likely a-priori, the posterior for resurrection is much less in comparison. right?< But, as we have been saying, you and I have different priors for the resurrection of Jesus. Therefore our posteriors are different. I believe in a God who can raise people from the dead, and more generally that there is a lot of ‘weird stuff’ in the world that cannot be explained naturalistically.
Do you know the line from Hamlet (after Hamlet has just been talking with his father’s ghost) “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”? And you do not believe in any of those things, do you? If there are reports of telekinesis, NDE’s, people walking up walls, ghosts etc as well as miracles, you will say that they must be either hallucinations or be capable of explanation naturalistically, won’t you? But I am with Hamlet on this. Hence the difference in our priors, and thus in our posteriors.

sure, but if they were asked "do you believe in God", saying "I have no opinion" is an atheistic position. this part of the discussion also seems like a diversion< It’s not an atheistic position, it is agnostic. “I don’t know if there is a God, and I don’t care” is the secular mindset of many in the West.

But I think you ignore how precarious a hold rationality has<< Perhaps I'm too much of an optimist. Clearly multiple strategies are needed. I prefer to outline the reasoning process for those who value being consistent. I actually think that is nearly everyone -- but certainly the apologists that are claiming to use the tools of logic and reason. People, of course, do not like to be wrong and unfortunately social media allows one to be in a bubble and never have to feel that feeling of being wrong< I think the proportion of adults presently alive in the world who try to be rational and consistent and who actively seek for truth, is less than 5%.
You think it is nearly everyone.
Big difference between us! Think about what your claim implies.
Nearly all the populations of, say, Chad, China, Yemen, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil are actively seeking truth and trying to be rational …

Also, for the many millions in the world who do not have enough to eat, for instance, they would understandably give up ‘rationality’ for a good meal. After all, rationality does not put food on the table< Someone needing a meal is not reading my book, nor any of the things I am responding to. I can't speak much to those in that situation, and it seems a bit of a stretch of a critique of what I am doing.< Exactly. So it is not ‘nearly everyone’!

Do you do this for, say, Richard Swinburne or Tim McGrew saying "all this philosophy is fine, but you really haven't dealt with the case where someone is starving and doesn't value philosophy"?< This is not the point. I am not making the grand claim that you are, that ‘nearly everyone’ is a rational truth-seeker. I think it is a minority pursuit.

On the wider point here, you should acknowledge that people do NOT think the same way and do NOT have the same concern for truth. Lots of people don’t care about ultimate reality, religion, aesthetics or even the higher moral questions. They are more concerned with putting food on the table, personal fulfilment, enjoyment etc. We do not all think the same way. (your later reply put here)

This is getting a bit ridiculous. If someone doesn't want to be rational, they won't follow the Jaynes/Cox rules and they will violate one of the Jaynes/Cox axioms. If they want to be, but aren't for some reason, they will violate one of the Jaynes/Cox axioms. That's it. Saying there are people who don't want to follow the process of reason, as if this is a problem with what I'm saying, is like saying that someone who doesn't take their medicine is the fault of the doctor.< As with ‘knowledge’, you define ‘rational’ in your own particular way, and then assume that this is the everyday meaning. Even if two people are both interested in a particular issue and one could quantify their probabilities, they may well have quite different priors, and different ways of handling subsequent data, resulting in different posteriors. There is no way in which, in general, their probabilities will converge to the ‘correct’ value on any issue, even supposing that they both care enough to bother trying. You have a unrealistic view on what people think about and how people think.

My belief in God comes from many things in my life, and a view of the historical evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is only one little thing in that pile. I would suggest that your atheism and naturalism also comes from many things in your life, maybe including upbringing, and that you did not yourself consider the historical evidence for the resurrection with a blank slate. Perhaps you did not start studying it until you were a convinced atheist?<

I have never found the use of the word "worldview" to be all that helpful. The only context I have ever heard it is from theists, to the effect of excusing poor thinking. Being able to say "oh, you have a naturalistic worldview so you don't believe my claim" is the same as the accusations of having a prior P(M)=0, or "you have naturalistic blinkers", etc... If there was good evidence, these excuses would never be used. Sure, people have different backgrounds but that doesn't change the truth. The world is round, regardless of my worldview, and it is demonstrably unreasonable to hold a contrary view on it. Same with the Earth orbiting the around the Sun and not vice versa. We can be confident with a super-high probability for these things. We never hear about worldviews with these situations. Why not? Because there is evidence. Theists would love there to be evidence of God of such magnitude, but instead we don't have it and we get excuses.

The goal of science is to be able to demonstrate the claims about the universe that have evidence sufficient to overcome all but the most biased priors (there will always be some people who can't be convinced no matter what). Theism just hasn't risen to that level, on any front, and has had to retreat from centuries of false claims.< We are going round in circles a bit, with you demanding that evidence for (say the Christian) God has to be of a same kind as evidence for the world being round, or for a scientific theory. God is not a ‘thing’ in the cosmos whose existence and effects can be investigated scientifically. I have kept on asking what evidence you would accept for the existence of God, and you keep evading. There is no such evidence is there? Not even the stars rearranging to spell BRIAN BELIEVE IN ME would do the job, would it? Your true position, I suggest, from your naturalistic worldview, is NOT that there is not enough evidence for God. I think your position is that there is NO evidence that you would ever accept to be enough (and see above). Difference in worldviews! Am I correct? If not, please say what evidence you would accept (again).

It's not just the issue with that verse (e.g. it doesn't mention any specifics we can verify) but the fact that it is only one verse. Like with everything else, I don't know what it would take to "make it convincing" only what would move the needle in that direction -- but it would at least have to be convincing to historians, the bulk of whom do not think the gospels reflect eyewitness testimony.< You are confusing the claim with evidence for the claim. They are quite different. Like it or not, John 21:24 is a claim for eyewitness testimony for the whole of John’s Gospel. Why should it matter that it is only one verse? It is prima facie a claim that the whole gospel is eyewitness testimony. Whether that claim is justified is another matter, which was not what we were discussing at that point. As to that you say bulk of historians do not think the gospels reflect eyewitness testimony< Really? This seems like the sort of sweeping claim that is made without evidence ready to hand to justify it. ‘Reflect eyewitness testimony’ is a rather vague phrase. At its weakest, the claim is just that at least one incident or saying in at least one gospel or Acts has its basis in something that actually happened. Not a very strong claim, is it? So its denial by ‘the bulk of historians’ is a very strong claim. I suppose if you ask atheist historians, the majority of them might say that the gospels were fiction. But I doubt even that. I myself have no idea of the statistics, but my guess is that most historians, of whatever religious belief, would say that there is SOME historical content in the gospels and Acts.

why would Matthew include stories that weren't true if they were writing "as best they could memoirs of Jesus"? Seems odd< Yes it seems odd to us. Difficult to put ourselves in the mindset of a first century Jew. I don’t think he was writing primarily as a historian. He was writing to Christians, to show how Christianity slotted seamlessly into Judaism.

By contrast I think the author of Luke-Acts did aim to write something like history<< yes, something like history, but I think it is a token -- trying to give the appearance of history. He doesn't follow any of the standard methods of the time from my understanding (e.g. naming and critiquing sources), and he copies verbatim much of Mark. I think the preface is included specifically to give an air of credibility but much of the rest of his style doesn't reflect proper historical methods, even for the time.< Yes, I agree in part. If only he named his sources. To correct you, he does not copy verbatim from Mark. He takes Mark as a source and edits it, sometimes quite heavily. According to the Farrer hypothesis (Luke used both Mark and Matthew and there is no ‘Q’ source), he does actually copy verbatim from Matthew.

A good comparison can be found here: https://infidels.org/library/modern/matthew_ferguson/gospel-authors.html< Thanks for this. Interesting article which makes good points. But they are not all unanswerable. I agree that the gospels are strictly speaking anonymous, and that the authors of Mark, Matthew and John were probably not John Mark, the disciple Matthew and the disciple John son of Zebedee. But that is no reason to conclude that Mark and John are not based on eyewitness testimonies. I think Mark was written down in the 50s, within the lifetimes of witnesses, and that Luke was able to supplement this with his own interviews with eyewitnesses. I am not convinced by Ferguson’s ‘many scholars’ justification of his denial of eyewitness testimony in Acts: ‘The author of Luke-Acts only uses the first person singular in the prologues of his works (Luke 1:3; Acts 1:1), without describing any biographical details about himself, and it is doubtful that the use of the first person plural, scattered throughout the "we" passages in Acts (16:10-17; 20:5-15; 21:1-18; 27:1-28:16), reflects the personal experiences of the author.’ Prima facie these passages are eyewitness testimony.
Of course one can make up a theory that they are fictionalised, just as one can say the whole of Acts is fiction. One could say that the whole of the NT was written in the 2nd century, if one wishes to be ultra sceptical. However IF one accepts that Jesus and the disciples, and Paul, were real people, Paul really wrote (at least some of) those letters, Acts was written in part by a companion of Paul, then we have a historical ‘kernel’. Do you want to be ultra sceptical or are you willing to accept some of the NT is historical? Dialogue proceeds according to what you reply!

We have never talked about me trying to prove God to you<< I think the only reason you don’t think anything you could say would satisfy me is because the evidence is not really there, and you're making excuses ahead of time. I see this a lot with theists. In contrast I never see it at all in the sciences when the data is actually there. I do see it in cases, like psychics and aliens, when the data is not actually there< Again you reveal your naturalistic worldview. I repeat that the god of the universe, if such a being exists, is not a part of this god’s creation and capable of being investigated scientifically. I repeat, if we were to suppose this god DID actually exist, you would not be able to be convinced of it, wearing your naturalistic spectacles (see above, what it would take you to believe).

It is manifestly hard if not impossible to see where priors come from<< Depends on the problem. For example, the priors probability for rolling a (possibly) weighted die can be established objectively -- but of course, that's an really easy problem. The priors for, say, some figure in history existing is obviously much harder. However I still stand by the observation that if your posterior is sensitive to your prior, then you don't have enough data< Yes of course we are not talking about mathematical probability. From where DO we get priors for beliefs about history, religion, future events …? I say that our priors in all these difficult areas are often very personal and derived from many factors, and not at all scientifically derived. Do you disagree?

Can you detail the ‘data’ in your life that have resulted in you being an atheist / naturalist?<< I think it is a combination of failed predictions (lots of failed miracle claims), moral hypocrisy (people claiming moral superiority, while either doing or advocating obviously immoral behavior), and a better understanding of the science which produces a story far more intricate, interesting, and inspiring. I can go into more detail if you'd like. I've even spoken in tongues and have a brother who did at least one faith healing, but I can't say that I've had a lot of experiences that were powerfully religious< Thanks. Interesting! Were you ever a professing Christian? If so, were you so when you spoke in tongues?

But on the existence of God, as I said above, I don’t think anything I could say would satisfy you. Furthermore I don’t think that many people actually come to faith from historical study – although J. Warner Wallace’s Cold Case Christianity is an exception<< I doubt he even came to it that way. Most people come to religion for emotional/social reasons and back-justify with "reasons". At least, from my experience< I think I agree with you. Pine Creek says “I will bet that Wallace’s wife was a Christian and influenced his inquiries”. That seems plausible. Without a strong prior for theism and/or personal experience and/or strong Christian family background it is difficult to see how anyone could become a Christian just by reading the Bible.

We can go whichever direction you'd like. If you want an in-person (ie. zoom/skype) discussion sometime, that might be fun too< This discussion has been so interesting. And I have discovered, through it, some sources of atheist critical thinking which have got me questioning my assumptions. The authorship and credibility of the NT books and the resurrection seem less secure to me now. Yes zoom would be nice, just to chat and see each other’s faces.
(Warning, I am an old man, aged 68) But I don’t think such discussion would advance us much more than these exchanges!

regards David

bblais / bblais.github.io

A Measure of Faith - Probability in Religious Thought · bblais on the web #5

A Measure of Faith - Probability in Religious Thought · bblais on the web