^^^^^^This. What astounds me is the desperate need to make one’s beliefs look like so much more than beliefs.
Came across this earlier and figured you, in particular, would get a kick out of it. Enjoy…
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I always find the assertion that people won’t die for a lie really strange. It depends on the person, it depends on the lie, and it depends on the degree to which the person’s beliefs actually turn on the lie. And people may be lying about evidence while believing in the conclusion – so a follower might die for Jesus believing Jesus was resurrected, while lying about having seen him in his resurrected form; he might die for Jesus believing Jesus was divine, while lying about Jesus having been resurrected.
It seems to me that a lot of the ID Creationists are engaged in exactly that type of lying. They know that the case they make is evidentiarily worthless, and they know that they make that case by lying about the evidence. But they probably believe in their particular superstitions about the origins of living things, and likely think that until the evidence is discovered (surely it will be some day, right?) which supports them, they should make up evidence and advance worthless arguments in order to defend the position.
But, yeah. What is the probability, when a thing is impossible, that human deception is involved? Geller’s bent a lot of spoons, and convinced a lot of people. And self-deception is powerful, too; Donald Trump probably really does think of himself as intelligent.
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There are vanishingly few people who are as proudly ignorant of such a wide variety of subjects as is Dr. Stephen Meyer.
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Thanks. Gawd, Meyer is awful. It’s hard to tell whether this is mostly dishonesty or mostly just a complete failure of understanding. But he doesn’t seem to be well versed in the physics except in a wordy, colloquial sense. Whether that’s because telling the truth would be unhelpful to his case, or because he just hasn’t a clue, I’m not sure.
In biology, of course, his dishonesty is obvious and extreme – so I’m not much inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt here. We know the man’s character.
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Not really. I’m done buying the idea they’re just deluding themselves.
They can’t all so consistently misunderstand so much in a way that always favors their view.
I’m less sure of what many of these people “know.” We saw a DI person, right here on the forum, post educational materials that he uses with kids. One slide removed one of the three “pillars of Darwinian theory,” which this DI person had accurately described at least twice before (in books), and replaced it with the OOL. He showed us this without shame and tried to defend it. To this day I am disturbed by that incident and have never been able to make sense of it. “Lying” seems to be an insufficient descriptor for the behavior.
Years ago, I described how Hugh Ross literally fabricated a chapter of scientific history involving “junk DNA.” Calling that a “lie” didn’t seem right to me. It still doesn’t.
But anyway, on the topic of why Christians lie and why (it seems to me) the “conservative” groups of this religion are so deeply immersed in systems of falsehood, lies, and bullshit, I offer not a quote from the sick manual we call the bible, but one originating from an unknown wise person:
The first casualty of war is truth.
My guess is that the one thing that the ignorant dingbats at that Seattle-based propaganda outlet actually know is this: they are at war, where all is fair.
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Hi Puck
When you label something impossible you take on a burden of proof that is not attainable.
This is a mistake some of the iD guys have made.
The documentation in the bible and some other sources is evidence.
Your claim puts you in a position to disprove every piece of evidence which you cannot.
You misunderstand.
The whole method of historical inquiry is to weigh evidence, which comes down to us via such things as the accounts given by people at the time, to ascertain what sorts of interpretations of past events are most probable. Turning to that tale of which all are familiar, the War of the Spanish Succession, for examples: Did the Duke of Marlborough keep his march that culminated in the Battle of Blenheim so secret purely for operational security, or did he also mistrust his Dutch allies so profoundly that he was afraid they would put the kibosh on the whole proceeding if they knew the audacity of the plan? Did Queen Anne eventually make peace with the French due to genuine pragmatic considerations, or because of the malign influence of new personalities in her Parliament? Was Marlborough an unfaithful servant in financial matters, making illegitimate profit from the army, or are such accusations merely the baseless attacks of bitter political enemies?
Such propositions may be weighed and judged in relation to the evidence we have because there are multiple possible answers, on which the evidence has some likelihood of bearing. If one does find the written account of some grand slush fund run by the Duke, it really does make the likelihood of financial impropriety much greater than the picture looks without that account. But what all interpretations of the evidence have about them is an equal access to physical possibility. That the Duke embezzled, or did not embezzle, would upset no settled understanding of physics or chemistry; all such interpretations must deemed, at least in principle, to be possible; and so it is the job of a historian embarking on such an inquiry to collect such evidence as he can and assemble it toward a better view.
History cannot, however, be the source of validation for things that are not possible. And so, to return to my usual example:
If someone says that Napoleon was highly skilled at throwing stones, and could hit a small target on a fencepost nine times out of ten at a distance of fifty feet, and if this skill is well attested by a variety of people who knew Napoleon and had the opportunity to observe him, then the hypothesis that Napoleon was indeed a splendid stone-thrower is meaningfullly advanced. But change the details: let us suppose that our witness instead claims that Napoleon was able, with the mere flick of his wrist, to throw a one-pound cobble a distance of ten miles. And let us suppose this witness is not alone; that, indeed, dozens of witnesses of the highest credibility insist that they personally saw the man do this. Does it advance the hypothesis? It is quite obvious that it does not. The historian may indeed seek an explanation for these accounts, but that explanation absolutely will NOT be that Napoleon really did possess this ability and demonstrated it before all of these witnesses.
Now, history deals with the possible. If independent evidence – say, field tests with Olympic hammer-throwers and shot-putters, or professional baseball pitchers – showed that while it is difficult to do, hurling a one-pound cobble ten miles with the mere flick of a wrist is indeed within human physical capability, then we would have to admit that, even if the skill is rare, it is possible that Napoleon did possess such a skill. But living, as we do, in a world where nobody can do this at all, and where our understanding of the biology of human muscles, together with the physics of the thing, show us no reason to believe anyone could do this, we are still where we are: no number of highly credible witnesses to the thing can advance the possibility of its being true one iota.
Well, resurrection after a couple of days is exactly like that. We never see it. All observation we are able to bring to bear on it shows that it doesn’t actually happen. We have good reason to believe that it cannot, because we actually understand a lot about what happens to one’s body at and shortly after death. And so if my family history searches turn up an account that says that my great grandfather was laid, cold and dead, in a rock tomb and then got up a couple of days later, again: all sorts of interesting conclusions might be drawn from the account, but certainly not the conclusion that this actually happened.
Now, people may believe miracle accounts, of course, and like all claims of distant one-off occurrences, there is no sense in which these things can be “disproven” utterly. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I am talking about the competency of historical evidence to show not only the occurrence of a possible event, but the possibility of an event where all physical evidence shows the thing to be impossible. History may do the former; but only demonstration can do the latter. You’ve only got to raise one guy from the dead to make the point, but that one guy is very, very important to the project. Any case that asserts that the resurrection happened, and that purports to rest upon evidence, has as its single largest task the demonstration that such things do in fact occur. Once that’s established, one can move on to the next question, which is whether it actually did occur in a particular case.
But, of course, the resurrection would not be important to Christians if it were possible. A miracle, to be worthy of the name, must indeed be something known not to be possible in any ordinary sense of the word. If we had, instead, a claim that Jesus loudly burped during the last supper, nobody would be all that impressed, and no amount of declaring it a miracle would help. The darned thing HAS to be impossible in order to be worthy of the designation “miracle,” and that situation in itself shows us that historical evidence, excellent at adjudicating disputes about which, among various possible accounts of events, we ought to believe, is utterly outside of its competency here.
Now, if you do think that resurrections in the days-in-the-tomb-without-care sense are indeed possible, then it seems to me that it is quite fair to ask you to demonstrate the truth of this astonishing proposition in the here and now. You will not find examples. When the doctors tell the family that a loved one has died, they don’t say that it’ll take a few days to see if the bugger just pops up out of the morgue and goes back to eating fish and playing poke-me-in-the-hole. There’s a reason they don’t.
Can you believe such things? Sure, but to say that you believe them on the basis of historical evidence is to err grossly in understanding what historical evidence can and cannot do.
By the way, in the law we recognize the principle that “evidence” of impossible things fails to be “evidence” in the legal sense – that is, a thing which makes some fact in issue more or less likely – at all. This is why you cannot call a psychic to the stand in a murder trial to say that she, through her powers of clairvoyance, witnessed the defendant murdering the victim.
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I’m convinced it’s the former.
It also falls apart as theology, because if one truly believes in an omnipotent God, why does the IDcreationist need to tell so many blatant lies to assist Him?
And why do it so readily if one of the Ten Commandments prohibits it?
IMO the pathological avoidance of getting such clues is very deliberate.
Well, it’s hard to disagree that it’s dishonesty. Stephen Meyer can barely be convinced to open his mouth for any purpose other than lying. I guess that what I’m saying is that while it’s really obvious to me how intentional his misrepresentations in biology are, part of why that’s so is that he does seem to have a sort of rough general grasp that makes the “pure incompetency” argument impossible. Indeed, he shows great competency at misassembling the facts just so, and misrepresenting the work of others just so, to create specific false impressions.
I just get the sense, though, in listening to this thing that while of course he’s being dishonest, there is also a greater extent to which he is truly out to sea, with not even a sufficient understanding of the subject matter to compose a well-crafted deception. In biology, he is coherent (which is NOT to say honest); here, I’m not quite sure he really is.
And I do think that if a person wanted to defend the man’s honesty on the basis that he really is this incompetent, another roadblock emerges. To make an analogy:
If you and I are standing on a bridge which is swaying in a windstorm, and you ask me whether I think the bridge is safe, it’s not dishonest of me to give my opinion. You, knowing me not to be a structural engineer (and perhaps knowing that I also have done no detailed inspection of the underpinnings of the structure we are now standing on), will also understand that my opinion is of very little persuasive value one way or the other. Perhaps you, too, lack the expertise or knowledge I would need to give a proper evaluation, and you are merely looking for the opinion of another conveniently located layman while considering whether to get off the bridge. But if I have gone to lengths to hold myself out as an expert in structural engineering, with knowledge of the very bridge in question, my expression of an ignorant opinion about the bridge becomes dishonest because it comes not alone, but freighted with all of the associated lies. I know that you may be induced, if you have accepted my misrepresentations of my qualifications and knowledge, to believe my opinion is well-founded, when I know very well that it is not.
And that type of dishonesty would be obvious here, even if we did not already know the grossly dishonest character of Meyer. He plainly has very little idea what he’s talking about, but has held himself out, to his audience of halfwitted rubes and pseudointellectuals, as someone who knows a great deal about these things, and whose opinions therefore ought to be regarded as those of an expert, carrying considerable weight.
If a person were honestly in the position of feeling that “intelligent design” was a legitimate scientific hypothesis that ought to be framed and investigated empirically, his first task would be to discard and disavow the entire corpus of “intelligent design” literature, and to be sure that people to whom he addressed his ideas knew that he had nothing to do with this insane and dishonest culture-war proposal. That none of them do is strong evidence that they all share the same suite of dishonest motives.
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Hi Puck
When you claim it is impossible you have taken all the burden of proof on. If you claim that we have not experienced this as you have in your argument above that works and now those claiming the resurrection have a burden to support the claim that the evidence is adequate to support a unique event.
Sure.
Is there something you believe is impossible?
If so, what convinced you of this? Or how would you argue to someone else that it is impossible?
You still aren’t getting it, at all.
I am not writing about “burdens of proof.” More about that expression below, but this isn’t about that. This is about the competency of evidence: that is, the question whether a certain class of evidence, in this case historical evidence, has any possibility of shifting the probability of the resurrection having actually happened. As I have indicated, it can’t. This has nothing to do with the question of “who has the burden of proof” in any sense. It has only to do with the question whether historical evidence has any possible value on such a question.
A good essay on a similar theme is Huxley’s The Value of Witness to the Miraculous. I highly recommend it.
Now, as you have mentioned “burden of proof,” I will have to repeat what I’m sure I’ve explained to you many a time: that I don’t think that concept is particularly relevant. As a practicing litigator I was quite familiar with “burden of proof” in its actual practical usage. We even break that concept down into sub-concepts, because there is a big difference between its use as meaning the “burden of production” and its use as meaning the “burden of persuasion.”
“Burden of proof” is useful when you have some sort of proceeding where argument and the presentation of evidence are formally structured, with opposing parties having contentions on issues of fact. There is, ordinarily, in such things, a neutral and disinterested person or body – a judge, a magistrate, a panel of judges, what have you – and it is precisely because such a body must make a decision that “burden of proof” becomes important. Let us suppose that there is a trial of an automobile accident case, and both the plaintiff and defendant simply fail to appear – or they do appear, but neither of them offers any evidence. Because the law assigns the burden of production to the plaintiff, in this circumstance the plaintiff will lose and the defendant will win. Let us say, instead, that the plaintiff presents a weak case, but the defendant presents no case. The plaintiff is also deemed, by the law, to bear the burden no only of production but of persuasion: the tribunal now may decide either way, because while the burden of production has been met, the tribunal may be unpersuaded by the evidence as given. Without such burdens, the tribunal would be utterly unable to decide a case in which no evidence is offered for either party, or bound to accept a profoundly weak case in the event of the defendant demurring to the whole affair. Note that this has nothing at ALL to do with the merits of the underlying facts. It may be that the evidence, were it offered, is plain and uncontroverted, and all bends in the plaintiff’s favor. That doesn’t matter here.
But legal proceedings are not primarily exercises in epistemology; they are exercises in law. The law has a series of constructs like “burden of proof” which dictate, in such settings, who it is who must come forward. Non-liability is generally the presumed state of affairs, and the burden of proof, both in the “production” and “persuasion” senses, therefore, falls upon the plaintiff who seeks to establish such liability. Similarly, in criminal matters, the state ordinarily bears the burden of proof (though there are some cases, e.g., particular forms of defense, where the defendant may bear it). These things form part of the rules of decision, and a complex system of liability really cannot work without rules of decision.
Contention over facts in the wild, between persons who argue not for the sake of persuading a neutral and disinterested arbiter, but for the sake of convincing one another, is not like that. There may be social conventions surrounding burdens of proof, but they are only that. A person may demand to be persuaded, and declare, therefore, the burden of proof to fall upon the other. The legal constructs have no force at all here.
Now, regardless of whether anyone has a burden of proof, it is clear enough that a person who lacks competent evidence really doesn’t have a contention worth making. When the evidence for the resurrection is purely historical and not empirical, that’s the case. Evidence of other types is indispensable if one wishes to make any argument for the position that the resurrection actually happened. For such purposes it is quite irrelevant to even think of “burdens of proof.” A person without competent evidence can neither satisfy such a burden nor rebut the simplest case to the contrary. The clairvoyant can neither, through her visions, substantiate the prosecution’s case by testifying that she witnessed the murder, nor substantiate the defense case by testifying that she witnessed the defendant being elsewhere while the crime was committed.
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That’s one of the main weaknesses I see in arguments for the resurrection or other miracles. If it is such an epistemological error to discount supernatural phenomena as explanations, then why don’t believers in the resurrection routinely endorse supernatural explanations in other situations. One of the more prominent, though admittedly not scholarly writers, on the resurrection is J. Warner Wallace, who makes hay of the fact that he formerly worked as a homicide detective, and claims to approach the question of Jesus’s resurrection in the way he did cases in his previous profession. The Youtube counter-apologist Paulogia raised a good point: Did Wallace ever suggest that a murder was committed by a vampire, ghost or other supernatural being?
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Perhaps that’s why he’s a former homicide detective.
I always find these “I’m an expert in figgerin’ stuff out” clowns amusing. How many of his homicide cases, I wonder, involved parsing the meanings of a variety of hearsay accounts by people long dead, written in Aramaic? How many of them involved claims of the paranormal which he just credulously accepted? Did he accept the words of a man who, caught red-handed, insisted that the crime had been committed by someone else who’d already been dead at the time of the crime, but had been briefly resurrected, commited the crime, and then returned to being dead again (or was taken up into the heavens)?
I recall some years ago being told about some apologist who, the fundies insisted, had been a lawyer and, specifically, an expert in “evidence”. Aha, says the crazy man: an expert in evidence will be better than anybody else at judging the value of evidence, right? I had to explain that being a lawyer with expertise in “evidence” means knowing the rules of admissibility of evidence in courts, not knowing how to weigh evidence.
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Hi Puck
I understand your position relative to a court of law where the burden of proof is set by the type of case you are participating in. In discussions like we are having you can manage the burden of proof you take on by the claims you make. When you claim something is impossible you take on a burden of proof that is essentially impossible to meet.
This is the mistake some of the ID guys have made.
Again, you do seem to have missed the point. I have no interest at all in claims about “burden of proof,” a concept which is quite meaningless except in specific contexts where rules of decision are required.
There’s no competent evidence that resurrection is possible. That is the case regardless of whether anyone declares somebody or other to have a “burden of proof.” Burdens of proof are social constructs; they have no purchase upon reality. But evidence does bear upon what conclusions can be drawn about reality. If we were in court with the question of the possibility of resurrection in issue, and if there were evidence on both sides of that question, burden of proof would be a useful concept – not to deciding what is real, but to setting the rules of decision upon which the case would turn. But we are not in court, and there is not evidence on both sides.
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Given what we know about organism death leading to cell death, the second law of thermodynamics, stages of human death, etc, etc – a fairly strong prima facie case can be made that that resurrection is “impossible”.
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This is a meaningless assertion unless the claim is supported. Since you have taken on a burden of proof that is not possible to defend it will remain a meaningless assertion.