Thursday, April 12, 2007

More dialogue with anonymous

My claim was, I hate to have to repeat myself, that no naturalistic reconstruction of the events surrounding Christ's life, death, and resurrection is likely to work. However, I am not attempting to prosecute irrationality charges against skeptics. That is not my point. You can, as a skeptic, absorb my point without being irrational. If one's conviction that nothing supernatural ever happens carries enough epistemic weight for you, then you inability to tell the story of Jesus shouldn't bother you a whole lot. When we think about issues like this, we have to take into account the totality of the relevant evidence and we have to not simply throw away our initial intellectual predispositions; our subjective Bayesian priors. Given my priors, I'm willing to give the miraculous a chance, and I think the evidence, all told, is sufficient for me to believe it. See this Infidels paper I published back in '98.
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/victor_reppert/miracles.html
In particular I said:
If my foregoing discussion is correct, opponents of, say, the resurrection of Jesus cannot appeal to a general theory of probability to prove that anyone who accepts the resurrection is being irrational. It is also a consequence that different people can reasonably expected to have different credence functions with respect to Christian (and other) miracle claims. If you want to convince some people that Christ was resurrected, you have a much heavier burden of proof than you have in convincing others. It must be noted that there is no way, on the model I have presented, to show that everyone who denies the Resurrection is irrational, or engaged in bad faith. Of course, one can still believe that unbelievers disbelieve because of "sin" or "suppressing the truth," or what have you. But given the legitimate differences that can exist concerning the antecedent probability of the miraculous, I don't see how such charges can be defended. So the lesson here, I think, is that both apologetics and anti-apologetics should be engaged in persuasion, not coercion, and that the attempt to ground irrationality charges against one's opponents is a misguided enterprise.[22]
Nevertheless, if we have a phenomenon, and one side says "I wouldn't have expected this evidence, but based on my assessment of the total evidence, I'm going to assume that the explanation exists even though I don't know what it is, and the other side says "If we accept my position, then we do have an explanation," then if the second party is right, it scores a point against the mystery-maneuvering opponent. If that's the situation with the problem of evil, then I have no trouble saying that the atheist scores a point with that argument. A point, mind you, not game, set, and match.
I would further add that "supernatural" claims only contradict science if there is no hope of coming up with "laws of supernature" that govern the activities of God. I don't see why this is impossible in principle, though it may be difficult to come up with in practice.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Victor, at the risk of me seeming to be tiresomely repetitive, I remind you again that your original claim was that 'no naturalistic reconstruction of the events surrounding Christ's life, death, and resurrection is likely to work' "from a naturalistic perspective". If you really meant to write "from a Christian perspective" or "from Victor Reppert's perspective" then you have no argument from me. But to claim that "X's explanation makes no sense from X's perspective" is to allege some sort of contradiction. This is a trivial semantic point, and does not depend on the details of the actual subject of discussion, whether it be the resurrection or baseball statistics.

The rest of your post touches on what, to my mind, is a more interesting and substantial topic: epistemic justification and (in particular) prior expectations. I asked at the end of my previous post what the source and epistemic value of expectations is in general, and I notice that in your essay on Hume you wrote "Expectations considering the possible intentions of supernatural agents are not grounded in experience..." That this is your attitude does not surprise me, but my original question remains: What exactly are expectations of the supernatural grounded in? Are they somehow innate, fixed in our minds at birth? Are they learned? Or are you implicitly assuming that supernatural events are, by definition, those events which do not conform to our (empirically-justified) expectations? I cannot find anything in your essay which addresses these questions directly.

Finally, I would take issue with your statement that '"supernatural" claims only contradict science if there is no hope of coming up with "laws of supernature" that govern the activities of God.' You seem to be appealing to a definition of "supernatural" here which is, to say the least, non-standard. The standard position, I believe, is to identify science with methodological naturalism (it is certainly the standard position amongst scientists). Thus, if testable "laws of supernature" were ever to be discovered, then "supernature" would become just another branch of science. In any case, whether you believe in this identification or not, your statement seems to imply that no claim can ever "contradict science", for there will always be the hope (no matter how slim) that new laws will be discovered to justify the claim. Obviously this is not the way that factual claims are normally assessed. To insist that "although all the evidence seems to indicate that this claim is false, if we wait long enough we might find some evidence pointing the other way" is not considered a valid line of argument in science, law or philosophy.

Anonymous said...

Sorry, that should have read:
..."supernature" would become just another part of nature...

Anonymous said...

'My claim was, I hate to have to repeat myself, that no naturalistic reconstruction of the events surrounding Christ's life, death, and resurrection is likely to work.'

Of course not. There is no evidence for Joseph of Arimathea or an empty tomb, or lots of people rising from the dead and appearing to 'many' in Jerusalem.

How can something be explained when nobody can find any evidence of it even happening?

Anonymous said...

A clarification: Comments 1 and 2 were written by me (Anon1). Comment 3 was written by some other Anonymous.

Anon1