When the Higgs Boson was first detected by CERN, how was this confirmed? Did a handful of people just say, “Hey, everyone! We saw a Higgs Boson last week!” And did the physics community say “Good job, guys! Here’s your Nobel.”
No. They had to submit reams and reams of objective, hard data that was then subject to rigorous peer review for, literally, months before the discovery could be confirmed and announced to the public.
And, mind you, this was not something that violated our understanding of the laws of physics. Rather, it was something that was so strongly predicted by those laws that the existence of the particle had been treated as a fact for decades before it was physically detected.
Is it unreasonable to expect at least that degree of confirmation for something that would violate the laws of physics?
If you can give any aspect in which the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus even remotely approaches that for the existence of Bigfoot, I am all years. For instance, where are the video recorded accounts of people who claim to have seen Jesus post mortem?
There’s a lot more where those came from. Youtube is full of them.
You’re smearing together scientific terms with things that are not scientific in any way, particularly “hypothesis.” Hypotheses must account for all extant data. Hypotheses must be mechanistic so that they generate empirical predictions–not necessarily things that will happen in the future, but things that you don’t know today.
Hypotheses, at least scientific ones, don’t answer questions period, much less in any particular way.
Faizal, I agree with the principle you are pressing in the Higgs comparison: the more radically a claim departs from what is otherwise extremely well established about the natural world, the stronger the evidence required before we should accept it. I would not give the Resurrection a lower evidential bar merely because it is a religious claim.
There is one distinction I would keep in view. If the Creator under discussion is transcendent to the created universe, I would not expect an experiment designed to detect physical entities within that universe to detect the Creator as one more object within it. The physical consequences of an alleged event are another matter and remain open to empirical investigation.
On Bigfoot, I am quite willing to grant that there is vastly more contemporary testimonial material, including recorded accounts from people who say they saw one. But quantity of testimony and probative force are not the same thing. A thousand recorded Bigfoot accounts would not become a thousand independent confirmations merely by being numerous; their force would still depend on independence, reliability, corroboration, alternative explanations, and whatever physical evidence we should expect if Bigfoot exists. And I would apply exactly the same rule to the Resurrection: four Gospels do not prove it merely by being four, and a thousand Gospels would not prove it merely by being a thousand. More testimony can matter, but it is not equivalent to proportionately more confirmation.
That brings me back to the claim with which your cow analogy originally began:
That was the specific claim I questioned. The Higgs comparison gives a strong argument for a very high evidential bar. The Bigfoot material gives a good example of why even abundant testimony may fail to meet such a bar. But neither point yet establishes the particular double standard you originally attributed to the “typical believer”: that the believer rejects an outside extraordinary claim by one evidential consideration and then refuses to allow that same consideration against the Resurrection. So I think that question is still on the table: what establishes that specific asymmetry as the typical pattern you described?
John, you are a polemical GENIUS. I was using terminology that was already on the table in a thread literally titled What is the Resurrection Hypothesis?
If using that term requires a scientific license that I have carelessly failed to obtain, I am perfectly happy to replace it throughout with “proposed explanation”; nothing in my argument changes. And yes, when I wrote that it had to “answer” a question, I meant that the proposed explanation must specify whatever is necessary for its own internal coherence. I did not mean that hypotheses literally answer questions.
