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Interview now available on Common Sense Atheism

Luke Muehlhauser of Common Sense Atheism interviewed me in August on a nexus of issues surrounding the evidence for Christianity, philosophy of religion, and the concept of "Christian philosophy." It was a long and enjoyable interview, and it is now up here at his web site.

I appreciated Luke's way of conducting the interview--we focused on the evidence and the issues and had an interesting discussion. It appears that one of his commentators is annoyed that Luke did not choose to make the interview a discussion of a set of completely different topics instead--specifically, my allegedly odious and Hitlerian political views, which should have been aggressively challenged. I suspect that Luke M. and I would both agree that the interview was far more worthwhile as it was than it would have been if he had done that.

That commentator refers to me as "fast-talking," obviously meaning this in a pejorative and at least partly metaphorical sense that includes the notions of being slippery and untrustworthy. Having just listened to the interview, I must own the soft impeachment in the literal sense only: For most of the conversation, I talked much too fast. I was trying to fit in a great deal of material, but I certainly should have slowed down. For whatever reason, too, I sometimes seem to have had a much more raspy voice than my usual one. I apparently got a good drink of water somewhere along the line and therefore sound better as things go on. (I mention this partly because of animadversions I have read against Sarah Palin's allegedly unbearable voice.)

The interview seems to me to have been a good opportunity to see what an atheist and a Christian, both analytic philosophy types, can do with a conversation on these subjects. It's about an hour and seventeen minutes long, but you can download it and listen to it in pieces. I hope my readers will enjoy it.

Comments (60)

First comment in and you're already being treated like a psychotic b---c....

When he and Vox Day had their letter exchange, his commenters must have been calling the FBI...

Can you imagine if Luke had interviewed Quine or Scott Soames without spending most of the interview denouncing them for their conservatism? It would have been a huge dereliction of duty!

Downloading. =)

Well, Bobcat, at least Quine and Soames didn't call themselves housewives. That term really seems to have been especially damning.

Still in the opening time of the interview, but the host keeps bring up the idea that the 'probability of someone rising from the dead" is low. Okay, a lot of this goes over my head but, is he not presupposing something like material determinism in asserting such a probability? The claim is not that Jesus rose from the dead /naturally/ but that God, a being capable of free will decisions chose to act in such a way. How do you assign probability to the free choices of someone?

I'm happy to acknowledge that the prior probability of a miracle is pretty low, if only because, even given that God exists, God doesn't appear to do them very often. But of course the prior probability of a miracle is going to depend very heavily on the prior probability that God exists and even more specifically that the Judaic God exists, since that was the context in which Jesus came and taught. There are all sorts of varieties of "low," and if we have no other evidence for the existence of God, the prior probability for R is going to be far lower than if we do. (This makes me think of Billy Crystal as Max the Miracle Man in _The Princess Bride_ talking about "sorts of dead.")

The connection between the prior for R and theism is one of the reasons we didn't address the prior probability of R (the resurrection) in our paper for Blackwell; to do so we would have had to get into all the other arguments for and against the existence of God. That would have taken us way afield.

I would be very reluctant to say that freedom renders probabilistic categories inapplicable. If it did, that would of course make the application of probability theory to _any_ interaction with or thinking about a free agent inappropriate. For example, it would in that case be incorrect to speak of the probability that Robert will write me back if I send him an e-mail. Informally, at least, I think that we _do_ have some notion that we can apply such categories to the actions of free beings. We will use other things we know about those beings, including other interactions, if any, that we have had with them.

But how do we know that God isn't working miracles all the time?
(This is assuming the definition of "miracle" is "God intervening in nature".)

I believe that God does miracles as a sign to man. That's one major thing that gives God a reason to do them. God _could_ do pointless and invisible miracles if He wanted, but ex hypothesi we would have no reason to know that they were happening. This gives them very low probability even on the hypothesis that God exists. It would be like my hypothesizing that you, C.D., have placed a totally invisible coded message in the letter arrangement of your recent comment which only you can see. It's not impossible, but it's much more probable that you would do something with your message that would communicate. In fact, it pretty much removes the meaning of the word "message" for it to be a "message" that no one else can read.

would be very reluctant to say that freedom renders probabilistic categories inapplicable. If it did, that would of course make the application of probability theory to _any_ interaction with or thinking about a free agent inappropriate

Not necessarily. It depends on the freedom that agent has. Man is relatively free, but God is absolutely free except in those areas he has bound himself to perform in a certain way (such as in moral matters). God does not get up one day and decide that what was good is now evil, for instance, so he is predictable in that way (Pope Benedict made this point in the Regensburg address), but if the Lord decided to suddenly stop speeching to a mystic who is receiving locutions, who am I to say he can't and that action would be completely unpredictable since it requires knowing the mind of God.

In other words, probability assessments can be made the easiest with systems that are either identical or similar to the system making the probability assessment. God, being only analogically related to man (in his Divinity), is a whole other thing. That he allows us to understand him at all is a concession of his love.

The Chicken

That he allows us to understand him at all is a concession of his love.

It's my contention, MC, that what it means for God to make that concession is, among other things, for God to communicate with us. And if we really have _no idea whatsoever_ of how to evaluate probabilities (even roughly and informally) w.r.t. what God is going to do, then God cannot communicate with us. For example: When Catholics evaluate the causes of saints, they check into the life of the saint-candidate. This makes sense, because if it is discovered that the candidate was swindling little old ladies out of their money, we can pretty much nix the idea that God would perform a miracle at the invocation of this person. (Consider the head of some group the name of which escapes me right now who was recently discovered after his death to have defrauded his order, fathered children out of wedlock, to have died unrepentant, etc., etc. Nobody's even going to bother to present his name to the Vatican as a potential saint.)

Or, to consider what I said about pointless miracles, I think we can reason that since God has reasons for his actions he would be particularly unlikely to go around pointlessly and invisibly rearranging molecules.

Or, if we have a correspondence between Jesus' death and certain prophecies (such as Isaiah 53), this raises the probability that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, which in turn raises the probability that God would raise him from the dead.

None of this gives us anything very precise (neither are our reasons concerning other human beings, for that matter), but it does mean that God's freedom doesn't render him completely separate from something like the kinds of inferences we normally make.

Lydia,

The interview was very helpful for me. I really appreciated your discussion of the resurrection of Jesus and assessing probabilities (along with your discussion of other miracle claims).

If I may ask a quick question. As an evidentialist, do you believe that those who are not aware of adequate evidence for Christianity should NOT become Christians? I'm thinking of those who have not studied enough or simply don't have access to the information (like island natives, or something). If they don't have the evidence for the Resurrection that we do, are they justified in accepting Christianity. And if they are not, why should they accept it?

How do you keep all that stuff in your head? How do you keep your thoughts logically sequential? When someone asks me a question, my favorite answer is, "I'll get back to you."

It was good to see Jeff Singer sticking up for you at the website.

Is it ok if I don't download it because I already have a preconceived idea of your thoughts, looks, and mannerisms in my mind and I don't want to mess that up?

Nice, job on the interview. I can't believe you were compared to Hitler by the commenter.

Bill, full disclosure: I had most of the questions in advance and prepared notes for responding. There were a couple that were added; I don't remember for sure all of those now. One concerned non-probabilistic "explanationism," and the section on theistic explanation and ad hocness was not in my prepared notes. For the latter, the interviewer stopped and asked me if we could go on and include a discussion of it, both because we'd already been talking for a long time and because I hadn't been warned about it. (That interruption has been edited out of the final version, which is fine.) That was nice of him, and I was fine with discussing that material. As it happened, I'd just dealt with all of the non-prepared questions in drafting my history and theism article for Routledge, so it was no problem to talk about them.

TDC, that's a _very_ difficult question. A lot depends on what background evidence we imagine the person as having. Sometimes more knowledge can make you less justified. For example, if you think (based on other legitimate evidence) that scientists are objective people who check their results and scrupulously tell the public about contrary data, then you may well be justified in believing some statement you read in the news when it says that it's backed by a "scientific consensus." When you find out more about scientific fraud and ideological bias, you may cease to be justified in that belief. Similarly, a child may be justified in believing what his parents tell him because of his lack of experience of the world. Later on, he may realize more about how fallible, etc., his parents can be, and at that point he had better have some better justification than, "This is what my parents taught me" for his religious beliefs, or he's going to cease to be justified in holding them. (This is true of any scientific and historical beliefs he got from his parents, too, but usually people find the outside world rushing in to supply any credibility deficit in those areas as they grow older.)

Now, the island natives in your scenario obviously can't believe in Jesus or his resurrection or anything if they haven't heard of them (as Romans says). Once they do hear of them, a lot depends on what reason they have to believe what that messenger tells them. They might--like ordinary Americans with scientists--be for at least a time justified in believing what the messenger tells them because they have good reason to accept that messenger's credibility. They could be _more_ strongly justified if they knew more details, but that might do for the present.

Another good analogy is to history: If you read in a history book that Napoleon said, "When I see a throne, I feel the urge to sit on it," you believe it because you figure the person who wrote the book did his research. Obviously, you could be _more_ justified if you found out exactly what original source his statement was based on, and if you are the kind of person who checks these things out and you find that book uncritically retelling legends about the things historical characters did and said as if they were facts, you may become more critical. But until that happens, there is nothing wrong with believing that Napoleon said that for the time being.

It's important not to assume that everyone even knows about skeptical doubts and questions concerning religion and the historicity of Christianity.

I myself think it's _extremely_ important to prepare Christians and especially young people to meet these questions in age-appropriate ways as they grow older. Otherwise, they are going to encounter the "If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you'd be a Muslim" argument and fall like ninepins.

Mulder, it's totally up to you. :-) I usually sound a bit better than I do on the interview--less croaky. I think I'd recently been stressing my voice somehow--maybe singing too much or something--in the previous day or so before the interview. But the mannerisms of speech and the marked Chicago accent (which becomes more noticeable under stress) are pretty typical.

It's my contention, MC, that what it means for God to make that concession is, among other things, for God to communicate with us. And if we really have _no idea whatsoever_ of how to evaluate probabilities (even roughly and informally) w.r.t. what God is going to do, then God cannot communicate with us

God can choose which topics to communicate with us on. All I'm saying is that there are topics for which it is definitely possible to assign probabilities when referring to God (as he has constrained himself to be knowable on those topics, such as sin and its effects), but there are some topics on which it is not (such as to whom and when he might wish to communicate). So, assigning probabilities with respect to what God is doing is not a simple number, but it depends on the category of action under discussion. Where God has bound himself, probabilities might be assigned; where he has not, no such probability can be assigned because in those cases, one must have some understanding of the mind of God on the issue and that is not always possible. An example might be why God allows some people to suffer and not others or allows some people to be healed an not others. We, often cannot know his reasons in that case. Scripture says:

Rom 11: 33 - 34

O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
"For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?"

and Isa 55: 8 - 9

For my thoughts [are] not your thoughts, neither [are] your ways my ways, saith the LORD.
[ For [as] the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Is it possible that I don't understand how you are using probability in the discussion? I am using it in a predictive sense, like a whether probability.

The Chicken

Usually, MC, I'm more interested in comparative probabilities than in point-valued probabilities, much less predictive numbers (i.e., probabilities _over_ a certain level).

So, rough and ready example: It wasn't particularly probable that I would see a comment purporting to be from you on this thread or that you would have chosen to comment on this thread. I couldn't positively have _predicted_ it. But it is _more_ probable that I will see a comment purporting to be from you if you have really chosen to post a comment than if someone totally different from our well-known Masked Chicken is impersonating you and posting the comment in your name. Very often a comparative probability intuition is more accessible than the individual probability on either side of the inequality.

Lydia,

We use point probability in science, so I assumed that is where you were starting from. I see.

I will have to talk to you sometime about all of this (perhaps by e-mail) because I have recently been doing work on believe revision in humor. At the punchline the probability assessments in the discourse change radically. I have been using Ramsey Theory (related to Bayesian probability) to do the modeling. For example, take the prototypical joke that Victor Raskin uses in his book on the semantic mechanisms of humor:

"Is the doctor at home?" asked the patient in his bronchial whisper. "No," the doctor's young and pretty wife whispered in reply. "Come right in."

You can see where the prior expectation (probability of this being a medical script) is demolished at the punchline. How the probabilities change with new evidence in humor is right up the alley of Bayesian analysis. Amazingly, no one has looked at it, yet.

If God will forgive me for saying this, the Resurrection is, after all, a type of cosmic joke. Totally unexpected. You can see why your research might be relevant to mine.

The Chicken

Hey Lydia, congrats for your interview and the comments given here.
Besides other things, they gave me new evidence for your Jekyll and Hyde nature. As an analytic philosopher you are thoughtful, well-tempered, always ready to consider and to calmly discuss different viewpoints. I don't agree with everything, of course, but it's interesting stuff.
However, as soon as it comes to politics, you will inevitably transform into a female version of the incredible Hulk, completely unable or unwilling to do justice to opposing views, let alone to consider the slight possibility that you might even be wrong in the end. In your world, everyone who strongly disagrees with you on politics or bioethics is either a satan or a complete dumb. It's not a coincidence that you (unintentionally, I know) attract people who think it a good idea to execute homosexuals and to bomb Muslim cities.
It is frightening that a remarkable intellect like yours can sink to such levels. Why not become a little bit more of an analytic philosopher in political debates as well? Even from a strategic or propagandistic point of view this might be a good idea.

Well, Grobi, that could take us into a whole 'nother discussion, but here are just a couple of things:

1) Political issues, being often tightly tied to ethical commitments, are usually not primarily about either history or technical matters. It's just apples and oranges to compare political blogging and philosophy writing and conversing, though of course I love having sites where I can do either. Example: If you found yourself in a society where more than 50% of the people thought random mob lynchings of blacks were perfectly fine, you probably wouldn't try to oppose them using either social science studies or technical philosophical analysis.

2) I tried a suaver, more "philosopher-like," approach for a couple of years at Right Reason. (If you read my posts at Right Reason, you might not agree, but that was certainly what I was trying to do, and that was, in fact, requested by the editor.) My own conclusion, speaking only for myself, was that it was a tremendous waste of my time and energy to try to be like that and that that was not my most useful role in political blogging. There is, I believe, plenty of more discursive and tactful writing on the right out there than mine, if that's going to be helpful to someone. But in a blog context, as written by me, I didn't find it worth doing.

Lydia thankyou for reaching out to Luke. I hope all the reasons for trusting and loving God make an impression on him soon. At the moment reading his weblog I can't help but feel pity and sadness for the young man. :(

He writes how a spiritual experience he had growing is at the heart of his turn away from God. Isn't that what Malachi Martin called the fatal mistake of identifying a turn in psyche or psychological release for a necessary turn toward good spirit? :(

He writes that during his teenage years the mode of relationship he had with God was unsatisfactory and that now he has feelings of at oneness with the empire of desire we live under. He has superadded what he calls a moral theory to these feelings - something he calls desirism. :(

His dad is a pastor. The psychological patterns in Paul Vitz's 'Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism' describes a young man quite possibly pretty mixed up. :(

He has a picture of himself near your post and it shows a marked degeneration to effeminacy from the one chosen in his biography, which all things equal is a strange one too. The moral chaos of atheist's live in James Spiegel's 'The Causes of Atheism' make me worried for him in the coming years. It must be a cause of distress to his family :(

Thank you again for keeping in contact with and praying for our lost brother. I hope your goodwill and sound arguments have a good effect in time. :)

Martin, I honestly know a good deal less about Luke M. than you do, as I rarely read around in the atheist/skeptic blogosphere. He got in touch with me some months ago and asked if I would like to do an interview. I agreed, and we had the interview. That was really all there was to it. I can't exactly say I've been keeping in contact with him, as this is the only contact we've had. But of course, he and the many others who have lost their faith in Christ or who never knew Christ do need our prayers.

Why, Grobi, are you just trolling for nasty reaction here? Lydia has plenty of disagreements with folks around here without thinking that they are a satan or just plain dumb. She disagrees with me on occasion, with Paul sometimes, with Jeff Culbreath sometimes, and with Jeff Singer often enough. And with Dr. Feser quite regularly. But she doesn't think these people are devils and knuckleheads (well, I won't lump myself in there - sometimes I AM a knucklehead for a stretch).

I like it that Lydia is willing to speak out with forthright disgust on occasion - it reminds me that some things ought to be revolted against, because they are revolting.

It's not a coincidence that you (unintentionally, I know) attract people who think it a good idea to execute homosexuals...

I didn't know she had fans in Iran.

This has been a theme of Grobi's for quite a while--my alleged Jekyll and Hyde nature. I can't remember if he was a reader at Right Reason. If so, perhaps he misses the blogger I attempted to be there.

I haven't figured out yet (because I don't go there) whether Grobi is a regular at Brian Leiter's blog. I _think_ I once figured it out, and he is. One wonders, if so, if he says similar things to Leiter about being more willing to admit that he might be wrong about political and ethical matters, not being bare-knuckled or a bully in dealing with opponents, and the like. At least I've never tried to ruin any student's career.

I'm glad that Grobi enjoys my philosophical work and says so. That's certainly worth a good deal, and I did the interview in hopes that even people who think as Grobi does on these other things could enjoy it and get value out of it.

I think it would probably help in his evaluation of my "Mr. Hyde" nature to consider that there are plenty of things that people on his side of the political spectrum think are beyond the pale (indeed, witness the reaction to _my_ views from one of Luke M's readers). And in fact there are things that we should all _agree_ are beyond the pale (see my comments above about mob lynchings). So it's not a true principle that all good philosophers should treat all things as open questions, and Grobi doubtless doesn't really believe that it is, either. In which case, I think he should allow that we simply differ in our ideas of what should or shouldn't be treated as debatable and on when it is time to engage in activism and troop-rallying rather than debate with the other side on some ethical issue.

Lydia

Congratulations! Incidentally, your voice sounded fine to me; and Grobi's about right too. But I'm interested in the implications of what you have to say about priors:

You say that ‘if we have a correspondence between Jesus' death and certain prophecies (such as Isaiah 53), this raises the probability that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, which in turn raises the probability that God would raise him from the dead.’

This is a scenario of the conversion of a Jew, i.e. of someone already committed to the Old Testament alone, to Christianity. But if you invoke the Old Testament to argue that who's been resurrected is the Messiah, you're assuming one's been resurrected. So there's no independent argument to be made from one's being the Messiah to one's being resurrected. And what are the priors for people who were raised Christians and are already committed to the New Testament? These arguments seem viciously circular to me.

For a theist who is neither Christian nor Jew, and therefore not committed to the Old or New Testament, the prior probability of the resurrection would be, as you seem happy to say, ‘pretty low’. And we know what the priors would be for a non-theist, who finds the concept of an omni-God incoherent! So it's not clear how you expect probabilities to go up here.

Masked Chicken

I’m not sure which category you fall under, asking for God’s forgiveness because you find the resurrection ‘totally unexpected’!

You’re right that you don’t need to be committed to some ‘principle of sufficient reason’, nor does God. That God has reasons for his actions, or wants us to know his reasons is often disputed in the context of discussing the problem of evil.

I didn't mean "totally" totally unexpected. Jesus told his disciples he would rise. If only they'd listened... I meant totally as in, "Like totally, dude...," i.e., relatively totally.

The Chicken

This is a scenario of the conversion of a Jew, i.e. of someone already committed to the Old Testament alone, to Christianity. But if you invoke the Old Testament to argue that who's been resurrected is the Messiah, you're assuming one's been resurrected.

No, no. I'm talking about after Jesus died but before there was any evidence that he had risen.

And although of course it helps if one has reason to believe the OT, the correspondence can be noted even if one doesn't, and that's relevant to the _conditional_ probability, expressed roughly as, "If the God of Israel exists, how probable is it that he would raise this person from the dead?"

As for "how I expect probabilities to go up," Overseas, there's a direct answer to that: It's called "conditionalization." In other words, the priors aren't, and shouldn't be, the whole story.

That’s OK, Masked Chicken!

You’re right that Bayes theorem can measure ‘surprise’: It explains why e.g. you’d be surprised if you bumped into your next-door neighbour during an exotic holiday, but not at the local supermarket.

Lydia

So we’re talking about re-conditionalising after the time of death but before the resurrection. That’s a pretty narrow window of opportunity, but I think I can see your point: The ‘strongest-case’ scenario would be an account of a Jew converting during those few days.

So is the strongest result that Jewish people in particular who did not convert were irrational? I’m trying to assess the wider implications, but it’s hard to see how e.g. the atheist assigning vanishingly small priors is affected compared to one already committed to the OT.

The ‘strongest-case’ scenario would be an account of a Jew converting during those few days.

No, the strongest case for the resurrection includes, in the end, the actual evidence of the resurrection--the accounts of the disciples, etc. But the prior and the conditional probabilities that go into that final conditionalization should include all evidence up to that point. This is true for anybody, including an atheist.

Yes, that’s what I meant, Lydia: That ‘in the end’ the strongest case would involve re-conditionalising after death so that, according to the argument, the strongest irrationality charge would apply to a Jew who re-conditionalised after death but did not become a Christian after the resurrection.

I just find it hard to see how the charge of irrationality applies to those who aren’t committed to the OT at all. I’m not pressing for real numbers, nor do I assume an incoherent concept should be assigned a prior of exactly zero. I’m claiming that your argument is much less effective in querying the rationality of the non-Jewish, and strongest in the case of Jewish believers. But perhaps we're in agreement.

Priors certainly make a difference, but let's remember too that in our own time there are even arguments for theism available that Jewish folks in the 1st century AD had (probably) not thought of--for example, the cosmological argument or the argument from mind. So different evidence sets can go in all kinds of different directions.

I think the evidence that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead is extremely, extremely strong and can overcome a prior probability so low that if the atheist wants to claim that his prior probability is lower than that, he has some talking to do to defend it.

Lydia

In this context, no one can have as much talking to do as a Jewish believer who does not convert to Christianity!

I’m puzzled by the change of scenery to ‘our own time'. I accept that you take the evidence for the resurrection to be 'extremely strong' rather than 'pretty low'. It's not clear to me if this is a prior, unconditional or posterior; and conditional on what? I’ve already queried how the argument would work for people who were raised into Christianity. I said I’m worried about vicious circularity. Aren't you?

Nope. I've done tons and tons of work on the whole issue of circularity. Epistemology is my philosophical specialty, and the issue of circularity has occupied me a great deal in the past ten years, issuing in several papers on this and related subjects. It just isn't a problem. Or at least it doesn't _have_ to be a problem. What individual people might or might not actually do is a different matter. That's psychology, not epistemology! It's an issue, but it's not one I can really do anything about. I can just try to show a good way to get a handle on the epistemic situation.

When I speak of the evidence which is extremely strong, I mean the type of evidence Tim and I canvassed in our resurrection paper for the Blackwell anthology. There we estimated a Bayes factor. A Bayes factor is an estimate of the strength of some piece or set of evidence vis a vis an hypothesis and its negation. When I speak of it as "extremely strong" I'm speaking of the magnitude of the Bayes factor, which is a ratio (roughly speaking) of the explanatory power of the hypothesis and its negation as explanations of the data. This is neither a prior nor a posterior in itself. The odds form of Bayes Theorem gives the ratio of the posteriors as equal to the ratio of the priors times the Bayes factor. You can think of what we're looking at as the evidence that changes a prior into a posterior.

People raised into Christianity can still analytically "dice up" (if I can put it that way) the evidence into different parts and treat some of the evidence as contributing to the prior probability and another part of the evidence as the evidence to be conditionalized on. This is a very useful analytic thing to do. I'm not saying it's always easy. Bayesians worry about what is called the "deletion problem," which is (roughly speaking) the question of how we should think about what our epistemic situation _would be_ if we didn't have some piece of evidence that we want to "delete" in order to then bring it back in in the form of a conditioning move. Still, in a rough and ready way I think it's often not that difficult to separate our evidence into what I call in the interview "direct" and "indirect." For example, there's what you might call all the "non-resurrection" evidence relevant to the existence of God and to Jesus' nature, pro and con. This would be things like various metaphysical arguments for theism, arguments concerning the appearance of fulfillment of prophecy from the Jewish Scriptures, arguments concerning Jesus' life and ministry (what kind of person he appears to have been, independent of whether he rose again or not), the problem of evil. Lots and lots of stuff, but roughly speaking, the "non-resurrection" stuff. Then the "direct" evidence is the "resurrection stuff"--things like what the disciples said after Jesus supposedly rose again, in what context they said it, how far they took it, how many of them said it, what happened to them, etc.

A believer can do this type of analysis move; a non-believer can do this. It's a matter of trying to itemize or break up our evidence to make it more manageable. To take it in chunks and consider it separately in those chunks.

Things only get really frustratingly difficult as far as priors are concerned when we are asked to start with _no_ evidence--as in the case where we are talking about whether or not the entire external world exists and therefore aren't supposed to reason from any proposition that assumes that the external world _does_ exist (e.g., "My computer screen is in front of me.").

Fortunately, the existence of God and the resurrection aren't at that level. We have a lot of other evidence to put into the priors.

Well, I just spent an interesting evening reading up on Bayesian statistics, Ramsey Theory, their connection to epistemology and the like. I will have to try to find a copy of the Blackwell anthology. One thing I would try to add to the probability theory (if I had the time and a few years) is a memory function that statistical physicists use in modeling the statistical properties of certain things like metals and gases. That might help in the problems of dealing with old evidence and new theories, since these are functions of memory. There are a couple of ways to do this: using a memory function wherein the prior probability decays (or amplifies) as a function of time or using time-lagged equations such that the effect of evidence on a probability is only felt after a certain amount of time. This is not my area of research, currently, but if there are any mathematical physicists out there reading, I see several papers, here.

The Chicken

Part of the problem is that there are _too many_ "problems of old evidence," and it can be very difficult to figure out which one a person is talking about at any given moment. But usually they are treated as epistemic rather than psychological/empirical problems. I think the most interesting thing sometimes called a "problem of old evidence" is the deletion problem. For example: Suppose Joe says that a conversation with Bob in the hallway of his department is evidence about whether or not someone else (Jones) will get tenure. Then how does Joe "delete" that evidence and imagine his situation without that evidence so as to get a prior and see its impact? For example, maybe he doesn't want _simply_ to go back to the evidential situation as it was temporally before the conversation. Maybe he's had other evidence come in since then (looking over Jones's dossier, for example) that he wants to take into account. He just wants to "snip out" that conversation with another colleague. So what does he do? Does he imagine having _no_ experiences during that walk down the hallway, as if he blacked out? That doesn't seem right. Besides, if he's having blackouts, that's going to have all sorts of other ramifications and is going to confuse the whole issue. It seems as though the best thing to do is a kind of fictional deletion-with-replacement, like this: "Suppose I'd just walked down the hallway to the copy machine and never run into old Bob and had that conversation about Jones, but everything else remained the same, _then_ what would my epistemic situation be concerning Jones's tenure?"

It's sort of an attempt to do an "all else being equal" deletion that really does leave all else equal.

I just did a quick literature search (i.e., I used Google :) ) and I found some papers on ArXiv by three Russian physicists who introduce static memory functions into the type of Markov chains that can be used to do Bayesian analysis in physics. I haven't found a single paper that handles the time-dependent memory function for Markov chains, but I think this has been done in statistical physics.

In other worlds, I think it makes a profound difference to the analysis whether or not Christ came back from the grave in three days or thirty years. If he had shown up thirty years later, the probability that he would have been resurrected goes to, essentially, to zero, since there would be much less evidence to support his statement, since there would be no one around who knew him and could independently verify his statements, such as his being born in Nazareth, or even that he had died. Likewise, the probability that he was resurrected is lower if he rose form the dead in thirty minutes (he could have been in a coma).

Thus, I would think the probabilities (including prior probabilities) is highly sensitive to two things: time and sample density - time, because evidence decays on a human time-scale (*unless preserved*, as in the OT) and density, because the number of witnesses in a given region of space, their influences on each other or lack there-of, changes depending upon the relationships between the witnesses (do they know each other, do they like each other, do they share the same beliefs, etc.), their migration patterns, etc., can have profound impacts on the probabilities If the apostles hated each other, but nevertheless, maintained the Resurrection were fact, this would give the Resurrection a high information content. This result is also obtained if they liked each other, but the results of believing in the Resurrection was a hated outcome (death). The worst possibility would be if they liked each other and only notoriety and no unpleasant consequences were gained by maintaining the Resurrection (similar to how opinions are aired on, The View - almost totally meaningless).

Imagine a world where short-term memory lasted only two days. What would the probability of the Resurrection be, then. Timing is a very crucial element.

I'm going to have to try to track down your article, because listening to at least part of the interview, I know you covered some of these topics in the article.

I'll shut up,now.

The Chicken

‘When I speak of it as "extremely strong" I'm speaking of the magnitude of the Bayes factor, which is a ratio (roughly speaking) of the explanatory power of the hypothesis and its negation as explanations of the data.’

What’s the ‘hypothesis’ and what’s the ‘data’?

A Christian may try to partition the evidence, as you suggest. But there are plenty of ‘live partitions’ around: Jewish believers, polytheists, atheists etc. If one involved them in the exercise, would one get the same results as when partitioning on one’s own? If not, why not, and what should one conclude?

Bayesians worry about a lot of things, such as ‘old evidence’; perhaps especially when there’s no ‘new evidence’! Look, I appreciate all the effort you’ve put into this reply and more generally what you’ve achieved all these years down a worthwhile road; I just don’t think it gets you where you want to go. Either the problem of evil or the skepticism invoked to circumvent it will undercut your project. And when it comes to the OT and then to ‘the resurrection stuff’, it’s just as well you appear nonchalant about vicious circularity; you can’t afford not to be. But you could have owned up outright.

I'm neither "nonchalant" nor "worried" about vicious circularity, Overseas, because I'm not even remotely close to committing it, nor need anyone be.

I don't invoke skepticism to "circumvent" the problem of evil. Perhaps you are confusing me with a philosopher named Steve Wykstra. I've heard his position described as a sort of theistic skepticism in response to the POE. If so, I'm not sure whether either he or I should be flattered or insulted (I've met him once), but as far as I can tell from what I've been recently learning about his response to the POE, it probably isn't the same as mine, and if it is, it shouldn't be called "skepticism." And there are, of course, a couple of different versions of the POE. The logical one can be knocked out of the ballpark by theists and has been many-a time. The probabilistic one worries some of both Christian and non-Christian philosophers, and for the same reason--no one seems quite sure how to formulate it rigorously in the first place, while everyone feels that there should be something to it. This hardly amounts to a major problem for Christianity in itself!

But there are plenty of ‘live partitions’ around: Jewish believers, polytheists, atheists etc.

That sounds to me like you're confusing a bunch of different things: Categories of different epistemic subjects with a variety of evidence sets, a partition over a particular proposition (e.g., H & ~H), and a sorting out of evidence for analytic purposes. These are all different.

Chicken, the interesting difference among the scenarios you bring up is (of course I'm going to say) that they constitute different sets of evidence. The evidence that, for example, Jesus stayed dead for 30 years and didn't rise again during the lifetime of his disciples would as you say make a huge difference, and for obvious epistemic reasons. The same with thirty minutes, for (as you say) a different set of reasons.

Your remarks on high information content given a hated outcome are, IMO, correct. We discuss the issue of independence in our article. Roughly, if the disciples were lying, they all knew they were lying, and lying about an empirical matter that one couldn't simply be vaguely and honestly mistaken about. Given the hated probable outcome, it wouldn't work for Disciple A to say to Disciple B, "Stand firm, my brother" if they both knew that nothing of the kind had happened such as they were testifying to. Disciple B would be as likely to tell Disciple A to go pound sand as to be strengthened by his urging. In general, assumptions of a type of dependence that undermines the strength of the argument arise from a confusion between a willingness to die for an _ideology_ or even for a faith one has had to take on the word of others and a willingness to die in attestation of an obvious and important fact accessible to the senses which one is in a position to know about. In the former case, people can encourage one another without this meaning that they really all share a special and strong evidence base. They may just be encouraging one another to speak and to stand firm, period. In the latter case, if the story is untrue, the encouragement is not likely to work under duress from outside to give up what one is saying.

Here's the link to the preprint version of our big resurrection paper. No page numbers, and a small number of words are different from the final Blackwell version, but it's basically the paper. Posted on our website in this form with permission from the final publisher:

http://www.lydiamcgrew.com/Resurrectionarticlesinglefile.pdf

Lydia,
First, I apologize for taking so long to listen to the interview.

I was glad to hear about your evidentialist standards when dealing with miracle claims. Although as I've implied before, if they were applied in a strictly unbiased fashion they would require conflicting religious beliefs or throwing out a whole bunch of similar miracles attributed to numerous religions (faith healing, prophetic visions). Maybe you are willing to toss out that many miracles, I'll be very impressed if you are.

Related to that, I think Plantinga's principle of dwindling probabilities is correct in that you are seriously begging the question by letting the Resurrection bootstrap the Old Testament. Remember that your own stated position on other religions permits you to consider the question of a deity's existence independently and prior to assigning any miracle claims to that religion.

Third, your characterization of the disciples seems contrary to their depiction in the Bible. The Gospel writers take apparent joy describing the twelve disciples of Jesus as being dense, since they were regularly unable to discern the meaning of his parables, at one point they consider abandoning him, and their temporary amazement at all the miracles Jesus provided was never enough to ease their doubts. Then finally after Jesus is crucified and buried they see the light, after a mysterious time in which they hear some stories from the womenfolk, meet strangers that turn out to be Jesus, and generally seem to be in shock and perhaps grief. But why would they be swayed by this miracle when all the others failed to convince? Virtually nobody doubts their belief that Jesus rose from the dead, but their reliability as perceptive witnesses is very disputable, and on top of that there is no way of accounting for the unknown biases of the people who wrote the Gospels.

Fourth, I can't believe you were trying to make an appeal to a figurative approach to reading the Bible. You know darn well you prefer a high degree of literal interpretation.

Step2, no time to do more tonight than to ask, When did I talk about a figurative reading of the Bible? I honestly can't remember. Oh, could it have been 6-day creationism alluded to at the very end? That gets a big shrug from me. If you thought I was a 6-day YEC, you were just wrong, is all I can say. I haven't been one for lo, these twenty-five years. I do believe in intervention, though, and have no problem with it in the context of creation. In fact, I think it highly probable in that context. But the age of the earth is a different question from intervention. Galileo was right when he indicated that Scripture and the truth of science cannot contradict one another (there being only one truth) and that other info. that we have may rightly influence our interpretation of Scripture. Welcome to the real world, where Lydia isn't _really_ a hidebound fundamentalist, though she occasionally plays one on the Internet.

A few responses to Step2, though obviously this could all go into all sorts of directions:

--I wouldn't exactly use the term "throwing out" miracle claims, because of course most miracles were never "in" for me in the sense of my having previously believed them. As I emphasized repeatedly in the interview, it's extremely important that Christians not say that we believe anything any witness attests to. I may use "testimonial evidence" as a shorthand for the _general type_ of evidence, but by no means is all testimonial evidence created equal. I have no problem at all with saying that there have been a huge number of miracle claims that are, in fact, false. Many of them are the sorts of things people could be honestly mistaken about (e.g. healing that actually took place by natural means).

--I don't "bootstrap" anything. Double-dipping is not allowed. If, for example, I have already taken into account internal evidence that makes it more likely that the OT is in fact an account of the dealings of the true God with Israel, that evidence gets taken into account only once. I do wonder, Step2, if it occurs to people who throw around terms like "circularity" and "bootstrapping" in such a confident way that this really is the kind of thing that people can avoid by careful thinking and analysis, and that just perhaps I've done it. I'm working on a post right now about the very interesting epistemic issue of mutual support. I will add here only that all evidence gets used only once and that my (and my husband's) interest in mutual support goes back _before_ we ever expected to be writing on apologetics issues. It was first and foremost an issue in pure epistemology and in reconciling the phenomenon of mutual support with a foundationalist evidential structure. We even published an _incorrect_ solution first some years before working out the correct solution. So this is hardly something I'm doing or have done in any partisan religious fashion or spirit.

--Your characterization of the disciples is invidious. Even people who are dense about understanding spiritual meanings can figure out whether or not the person who is talking to them right now, repeatedly, in a group, is their dear friend who died a few days ago. That isn't, by itself, heavy theology or anything else to which mere "denseness" is relevant. Similarly, even someone who is in some senses "unreliable" can be completely believable about particular, empirical things he is in a position to know and maintains under duress with no hope of gain. The idea that their meetings with Jesus were meetings with "strangers" is exaggerated. The Road to Emmaus account does not concern members of the eleven. There is only _one_ account in which the eleven temporarily (very temporarily, as in, for a few seconds) don't recognize Jesus, and this is when they are out in a boat in the early morning and he is on the shore. There are, in contrast, a number of accounts of different meetings (not the one by the seashore) in which they have _no_ trouble recognizing him, and mention of many other contacts he had with them. Actually, the Bible says his disciples believed on him after his _first_ miracle at Cana of Galilee. Their "denseness" concerned things like their believing that he would die and rise again from his sheer prediction (rather a tall order, we should admit), not their believing on him in any sense at all.

As you say, nobody doubts their belief that Jesus rose again. That's worth pondering, because it isn't like they claimed that they merely caught a glimpse of somebody from a distance and decided after much pondering that this might have been Jesus.

Lydia

Perhaps we can’t begin to tackle the problem of evil if we can’t agree whether circularity is a bad thing or not; or if we can’t tell a circle when we see one! I quote you: ‘But of course the prior probability of a miracle is going to depend very heavily on the prior probability that God exists and even more specifically that the Judaic God exists, since that was the context in which Jesus came and taught.’ The analogy here with the problem of evil, in your own terms, is that no one seems quite sure how to formulate the imperative for a miraculous sign in the first place or that it’s not sufficient to claim that the resurrection is merely ‘a possible sign' from God amongst infinitely many other possibilities: You clearly need something stronger, which I don’t see how you can get to without circularity.

I somehow missed your exchange with the Masked Chicken, who beat me to bringing up the ‘old evidence’. You may say again that you’re not worried; but the question is whether you should be rather than whether you are.

‘But there are plenty of ‘live partitions’ around: Jewish believers, polytheists, atheists etc.’: I may well be confusing a bunch of different things here; you said a lot of things, no doubt trying to be helpful. But it’s not clear to me what the ‘partitioning-one’s-own-evidence’ exercise is useful for, or that it doesn’t involve psychology. The interesting question is how to handle clashes between one’s own results and other real people’s. If I can only satisfy myself as to my own rationality at the expense of pronouncing the majority of other people irrational, I know I’ll want to think again. Christian believers have always been a minority over 2,000 years; I think your argument proves too much.

Popularity, Overseas, has always been a poor test of truth.

There really is no "problem of evil" in Christianity. Evil's existence is actually a prerequisite for Christianity, as the very foundation of our theology is that evil exists in clearly observable ways and cannot be undone without a savior. Christianity would have a "problem of evil" if man's behavior were clearly oriented toward good and love, not evil and selfishness.

If you take Christianity's claims at face value, you are evil. The world around you is contaminated by evil. Christianity teaches that even our perception of true good is hopelessly out of touch with reality. There's a reason why Isaiah's reaction to seeing true righteousness was (paraphrasing) "we are undone because we're dirty, sinful bastards and I've seen what God's righteousness looks like." If he'd had a gun during the first part of Isaiah 6, he probably would have put it to his head in despair that's how contaminated and out of touch we are.

So really, if we take Christianity seriously, we're not in a position to lecture God on evil. If for no other reason than we are so personally and collectively deep in it, we couldn't even talk intelligently to Him about it.

Lydia: God _could_ do pointless and invisible miracles if He wanted, but ex hypothesi we would have no reason to know that they were happening. This gives them very low probability even on the hypothesis that God exists.
I never said they we're "pointless". They would obviously have a point to God.

I was in a vehicle accident as a teenager. I could have been seriously hurt, but wasn't - due to a cable that snapped at just the right time. At the time, I thought nothing of it (I wasn't a Christian then.) Later however, I wondered if God hadn't intervened. I still don't know.

My point is that God could be intervening a lot (how many people have similar stories?) and we may be largely unaware of it. One of the central tenets of Thomism is that God is actively sustaining the universe at all times. If that's the case, then everything we see is a miracle and nature itself is founded on the miraculous.

Food for thought. (I hope!)

Chucky, I'm sure Thomists would distinguish _miracles_ in the strict sense from God's sustaining of the universe. I had certainly always assumed those to be different things in Thomist thought.

That miracle would not have been pointless: It would have saved your life so that you would have a chance to become a Christian! (Which still doesn't mean it was a miracle but does mean it wasn't the kind of thing I was talking about as a "pointless" miracle.)

I have no problem at all with saying that there have been a huge number of miracle claims that are, in fact, false. Many of them are the sorts of things people could be honestly mistaken about (e.g. healing that actually took place by natural means).

Okay, consider me partially impressed then.

I don't "bootstrap" anything. Double-dipping is not allowed.

If the God of Israel has lower probability than the Resurrection, which was what your comments in the interview suggested, there could potentially be a different or unknown god that caused the Resurrection.

Your characterization of the disciples is invidious.

I suspect the disciples really were not as bad as they were portrayed in the Gospels. For their sake I hope not, but that doesn't change how they were portrayed.

Even people who are dense about understanding spiritual meanings can figure out whether or not the person who is talking to them right now, repeatedly, in a group, is their dear friend who died a few days ago.

I think that is false based on a personal experience I had after my good friend died in June. I was profoundly depressed after his funeral and after a week or so of going through anger, denial, etc., and obsessively thinking about how unfair yet unavoidable it was, I had a short memory of him saying my name that was so sharp that I distinctly heard it as if he was a few feet away from me. I even had a compulsion to look around to see if he was there, that's how clear the impression was. Now, imagine a group far less skeptical of the supernatural than myself, who have recently lost by betrayal and injustice their leader, prophet, and savior, and there is simply no limitation on what they might experience.

As you say, nobody doubts their belief that Jesus rose again.

Well, I said virtually nobody. I've read accounts from some skeptics that think the discovery of the empty tomb was the end of the testimonial, which is much less determinative than a visitation, and they assume the rest of the story was embellishment added later to answer critics. My relevant point is that this shared experience or belief in an experience doesn't make the miracle true, since many thousands of people claimed to witness the Hindu milk miracle, and neither you nor I accept that as a true miracle.

‘Popularity, Overseas, has always been a poor test of truth.’

Did you mean to change the subject, Lydia, or just hats?

It’s unfortunate our posts clashed, so I hadn’t seen your response to Step2. I think I understand better now why it was so important to you, in an earlier conversation, to undermine any claim that the Greeks might have believed in miracles; I'd found it quite puzzling then. But as you know, I don’t think this can be done as easily as you seem to think: Dismissing or accepting miracle claims on the grounds of your having or not having ‘previously believed them’ sounds lame to me.

I take it that ‘no double-dipping’ has to do with the partitioning exercises you commend. You’ll recall I’d granted you all the likelihoods and acknowledged the Jewish believer’s case as the strongest. But you can’t expect the ‘no double-dipping’ rule to entice those who don’t already consider the OT to be ‘an account of the dealings of the true God’ to agree to dip in the OT even once! I hope that’s clear enough; hence the circularity claim. I have no reason to doubt that you’re capable of careful thinking and analysis, but so are many other people and I have no reason to privilege your intellectual capabilities either; hence the ‘over-kill’ claim.

Perhaps you’ll post something here when you’re ready with ‘mutual support’. I like it that you and your husband have an interest in mutual support; good for you!

I had a short memory of him saying my name that was so sharp that I distinctly heard it as if he was a few feet away from me. I even had a compulsion to look around to see if he was there, that's how clear the impression was.

And suppose when you looked around he was indeed there and stepped forward to say, "Touch me, I'm real," and you touched him and even sat down to dinner together. (Fish on the menu.) What would you have concluded then?

Even people who are dense about understanding spiritual meanings can figure out whether or not the person who is talking to them right now, repeatedly, in a group, is their dear friend who died a few days ago.

I think that is false based on a personal experience I had after my good friend died in June. I was profoundly depressed after his funeral and after a week or so of going through anger, denial, etc., and obsessively thinking about how unfair yet unavoidable it was, I had a short memory of him saying my name that was so sharp that I distinctly heard it as if he was a few feet away from me. I even had a compulsion to look around to see if he was there, that's how clear the impression was. Now, imagine a group far less skeptical of the supernatural than myself, who have recently lost by betrayal and injustice their leader, prophet, and savior, and there is simply no limitation on what they might experience.

Step2, let me put it this way: Suppose that I considered you a pretty dense person. Suppose I had stories about times when you "didn't get it," etc., such as you discuss re. the disciples. That wouldn't really have anything to do with my evaluation of what you have just told me, because what you have just told me has nothing to do with "denseness" in that sense of "not getting" things.

Now, I don't doubt the sensory experience you've just recounted. I don't doubt that you actually had it. If you told me, further, that you turned around and actually seemed to see your friend, as clearly as when he was alive, that the two of you sat down and had a whole, long detailed conversation together, and that it seemed to you that you ate together, then we would be pushed to the point where I would have to conclude either a) that you were lying to me now, b) that you suffered a fairly serious mental problem after your friend died, at least to the point of being unable to tell sleep from waking or of having vivid, lengthy, hallucinatory experiences or c) that something usually called "supernatural" had happened to you.

As it is, the brevity of your experience still seems to me, off the cuff, to be within the range of normal for a grieving person without the need for any of these more extreme explanations.

But whether or not you are in general a kinda dense person just doesn't enter the equation.

Overseas, that the texts of the OT documents exist and that, say, the texts of Isaiah and of Psalm 22 were written hundreds of years before the Gospel accounts of Jesus' crucifixion are not in question between theists and atheists. To that extent, any correspondences between them can be observed and any evidential import of them mulled even by an atheist. That would be a way of his "single dipping."

Suppose I had stories about times when you "didn't get it,"...

You don't need stories, I'll admit there are plenty of times when I don't get stuff. That quality would matter if I told you that my experience convinced me that my friend's ghost had come back to warn me or something. You would be much more inclined to think that I was jumping to a wrong conclusion if you started with an impression I am dense.

In addition to reasons a) through c) I would add another.

d) During times of mental anguish, the mind is far more vulnerable to external suggestions and internal wish fulfillment, approaching the level of a hypnotic state. As long as one person in a group is convinced, they can spread their sincerely held beliefs through the typical channels of mass hysteria.

Step2, if the "mass hysteria" went to the point of all these people saying that they repeatedly talked to this person _in groups_, if they recounted some of their conversations, if they said that this series of interactions with all of them as a group went on over a period of 40 days, and if they were not brought to their senses by the danger of death, I'd put this down as a version of b for all of them.

It would also at that point be kind of odd that, while they stuck to their tale, the hysterical visions suddenly ceased after 40 days. Kind of a self-limiting illness, but not quite self-limiting enough to save their skins.

Step2, if the "mass hysteria" went to the point of all these people saying that they repeatedly talked to this person _in groups_, if they recounted some of their conversations

The Gospel writers say they all talked to Jesus, that isn't the same thing as them saying it themselves. It is critically important that the disciples mentioned by name in Acts performing healing and casting out demons are reduced to three (Peter, John, Phillip). I mean, if Thomas wasn't out there vigorously preaching after his doubts were overcome, there are legitimate reasons to doubt that it really happened.

if they said that this series of interactions with all of them as a group went on over a period of 40 days

Right, it isn't like 40 days is a significant time period in biblical symbolism.

and if they were not brought to their senses by the danger of death, I'd put this down as a version of b for all of them.

If it was something akin to hypnotism, then they would have no reason for questioning its validity, even under pain of death. Although it is interesting that Peter goes into a sudden trance in Acts 10 and in Acts 12 thinks he is having a vision when the angels release him from prison, so even in the text there is a blurring of lines between dream and reality.

Just wanted to note that Lydia's sheer *command* in this interview is nothing short of astonishing. Mr. Muehlhauser, by contrast, comes across as the proverbial "deer in the headlights."

Nothing necessarily to do with being right or wrong - it's more a matter of poise, charisma, & stuff like that.

I seem to remember Lydia saying, somewhere or other, that she wouldn't do a video interview. But I would *so* love to see her on "bloggingheads." And I would *so* pity anybody put up against her.

Steve, thanks _very_ much, but honesty compels me:

Luke M. sent me almost all of the questions in advance. As I recall, there was a little more discussion of Hume that I ad libbed plus the discussion of Dawes and Sober that wasn't included in the original question list, but he actually asked me (and edited this out) if it was okay for us to keep going and get into some of those other questions that hadn't been previously sent to me.

So I had plenty of opportunity to prepare, which of course was very helpful. He had also told me that his goal in these interviews is to understand rather than debate, and I think he stood by that, or he might have been more aggressive and not appeared at all "deer in the headlights"-like.

Fair's fair, so I thought I'd better say all that.

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