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Pieman333272
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HELLO. I said if the testimony was DEMONSTRABLY RELIABLE. ALL Alien Abduction testimonies AREN’T reliable. So not testimony alone, but reliable testimony and circumstance.
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Windfish
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TruthSeeker60, I am trying to get you to see that you are not thinking this all the way through. I have repeatedly asked you what your epistemic grounds are for categorically dismissing testimony as evidence for so-called “extraordinary” claims, and all your attempts at answering my question have been pure bluff. There is no epistemic grounds for such a categorical dismissal.
As always, we must evaluate evidence on a case-by-case basis, taking into account their unique contexts that affect their quality and sufficiency in supporting a claim, supernatural or not. If testimony is insufficient to establish a claim, it will NOT be just because it is testimony, it will be because that particular testimony is insufficient for epistemic warrant. Your categorical dismissal is just sloppy epistemology.
As always, we must evaluate evidence on a case-by-case basis, taking into account their unique contexts that affect their quality and sufficiency in supporting a claim, supernatural or not. If testimony is insufficient to establish a claim, it will NOT be just because it is testimony, it will be because that particular testimony is insufficient for epistemic warrant. Your categorical dismissal is just sloppy epistemology.
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TruthSeeker60
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If by “testimony [is] demonstrably reliable” you mean that the claim that the source makes is verifiable by evidence, then your use of the word reliable is redundant (we would be back to the issue of what qualifies as evidence for the claim)?
If instead you mean that the person who believes the miracle happens is worthy of trust, then you have a lot of explaining to do for why a testimony can possibly be evidence for such a claim (regardless of the circumstance), and why the testimonies of the miraculous occurrences you think happened are more compelling than those of things you don’t think happen (such as alien abductions, Sathya Sai Baba raising people from the dead, etc.).
If you mean something else, please clarify.
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TruthSeeker60
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It’s funny that your saying I haven’t thought this through when in fact you are having problems with the very fundamental issue of philosophical burden of proof. I explained to you that I was not making a claim, but rather expressing a lack of conviction in the assertion that account of miracles or magical events can be evidence of miracles or magical events.
Those who think that considering an account of a miraculous or magical events can, in any circumstance, be evidence of that miracle or magical event need to explain why that is a reasonable burden of proof. You seem to think that you’ve won a victory by trying to reverse this.
To be clear, I do think there are circumstances in which testimony is evidence for a claim. HOWEVER, what I’ve been talking about is that I’m not convinced that there are any circumstances in which testimony, regardless of how sincere, can be evidence for claims of miraculous or magical events (at least without an objective way of verifying it, like asking god to give you the location of the Ark of the Covenant).
A good analogy about being objectively verifiable would be claims of out of body experiences. I don’t doubt that many people who claim to have an out of body experience do have an awesome experience, but I’m not convinced that they are actually conscious outside of their body. A way that this subjective experience to be proven to probably be an actual experience of consciousness outside of the body, one could objectively test this by using playing cards. One could randomly place a card on high up on a surface where it can only be seen if one is genuinely conscious outside of the his/her body. If you saw the right card a statistically significant amount of times, then you have real evidence which derived from your experience. If you got it right about as often as you would if you guessed, you shouldn’t consider your experience to be an experience of being genuinely conscious outside of your body.
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Windfish
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WHY?
You still have not answered that question. It simply makes no sense to categorically dismiss testimony as support for so-called “extraordinary” claims. Rather, it depends on a case-by-case basis. If a testimony is insufficient to establish a claim, it will not be just because it is testimony, it will be because that particular testimony is insufficient given the context and factors in that case. I want to know where you got this epistemological claim.
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Windfish
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I first want to note that the above post is almost unintelligible; it is often very difficult reading and understanding your posts, TruthSeeker60. I think brevity is a concept that might help your writing.
If I am understanding you correctly, you seem to think that testimony as a category of evidence is insufficient to support a so-called “extraordinary” claim. That is baseless. Whether or not a given testimony supports a claim must be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Not all testimonies carry the same weight, and not all contexts from which testimonies can emerge are the same. These and other factors need to be considered carefully so that we can evaluate the pedigree of a testimony in support of a claim, supernatural or not. It’s really that simple.
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TruthSeeker60
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Because I have not been presented with any compelling argument that I should (please don’t attempt to reverse the burden of proof again).
Why don’t you read what I actually wrote? I explained above multiple times that I’m not making the claim that testimonies cannot be evidence for miraculous or magical claims, but that I’m unconvinced that it can because I have never been presented with a scenario and compelling argument that it can.
Can you actually acknowledge what I actually wrote rather than saying I’m claiming something that I’m not, then asking me to defend that claim that I’m not making?
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TruthSeeker60
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My point is that I have never been presented with a single compelling case in which the fact that a person believes he experienced a magical event is evidence at all that the magical event actually happened. Is that simple enough for you?
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Windfish
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Windfish
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That is not what you said before, but fine. I will go with it. I do not think you are really saying much, though. The fact that a person attests to something does not mean that the content of that attestation is true - but that goes for any claim, ordinary or “extraordinary.” It is always possible that the person is mistaken. The conclusion we reach will depend on the quality and quantity of the data and a good heuristic to assess that data. Pretty simple.
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Qoeleth
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You are falling into the trap of logocentrism, of supposing there is a something beyond the text (a transcendental signified), in relation to which a statement/testimony may have truth or not. Now, the past has no physical substance- the past does not exist in any physical or scientific sense, but only a narrative of the past, or more accurately, a narrative which we call “the past”. Since the actual past has no existence, it is meaningless to attempt to determine whether a particular narrative of the past is ‘true’ or not. The best we can do is evaluate the narrative for aesthetic value, as a literary, mytho-poetic object.
If you ‘believe’ you assume one particular relationship to the narrative, if you disbelieve, you assume another. I like Noah and the flood, so I choose to ‘believe’ it. Whatever that means.
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tonyrey
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Then look into your own mind and discover the source of consciousness, reason, insight, self-control, good and evil, science and love. If you didn’t have a mind you wouldn’t even know you had a hat, let alone hang it on something!
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Calvin_Hobbs
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Have you considered gunpoint? Could be his come to Jesus moment!
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Pieman333272
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Not funny. :dts:
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Pieman333272
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One who is refuses to explain the rationale behind his belief rarely has any.
You are making a negative claim. Back it up. It’s a **sweeping ** generalization, and needless to say historically dishonest, to say that a testimony of any sort, by anybody, cannot, no matter what, be used as evidence for something supernatural. Also, you need to explain where the line is drawn between supernatural and natural. I can say Quantum Physics is supernatural because a bunch of wacky stuff can happen based on what it points to. You also need to explain why natural is always > than supernatural. It’s not “reversing the BOP”. It’s giving you a fair BOP. Just because your position, in the extended form, is the negative or suspended judgement doesn’t mean you always have no BOP no matter what. You made a negative claim, which needs to be backed up as much as a positive one:
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Pieman333272
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I really mean both, it depends on the circumstance.
I’ve NEVER heard of Sai Baba’s miracles from a reliable source, in addition to there being little evidence to back up the testimonies I HAVE heard as well as there being evidence against him.
The thing with the alien abduction is, again, context. The person who alleges this could have been a former hobo who is now rich. I would doubt he is honest because that’s his only source for money, and he is rather uneducated. The people who were allegedly abducted could have been high, or on Acid, or drunk, or on a drug, or hypnotized when they experienced it or attested it. So many things.
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TruthSeeker60
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I apologize for responding too late. I’ve been busy with a difficult Summer class.
If a friend tells me that he went to Disneyland, that testimony may be sufficient grounds for believing him, so long as he is a trustworthy person.
If, on the other hand, the friend claims to have warped to Mars and back by waving a magical wand, his testimony by itself, regardless of how sincere and consistent it is, is generally not accepted as grounds for believing the claim because the nature of the claim has changed. I’m not convinced that the quality or quantity of the claims by themselves should change this. Thus, I’m not convinced that testimony, by itself, can be evidence for certain claims. Perhaps something in addition to the testimony, such as a rock from Mars, photos, etc, can arguably be evidence in conjunction with their testimonies.
Am I being clear on that last point? It’s an important point, so I want to be clear about it.
You do realize that disputing a claim is not necessarily the same as making a claim, right? It means to question the validity or truth of something. A skeptic may dispute the person’s claim that he was probed by aliens without claiming that he wasn’t. Perhaps next time I’ll use different words to avoid confusion.
Attestations can be evidence (although not proof) in cases where we know that things ordinarily do happen.
If a friend tells me that he went to Disneyland, that testimony may be sufficient grounds for believing him, so long as he is a trustworthy person.
If, on the other hand, the friend claims to have warped to Mars and back by waving a magical wand, his testimony by itself, regardless of how sincere and consistent it is, is generally not accepted as grounds for believing the claim because the nature of the claim has changed. I’m not convinced that the quality or quantity of the claims by themselves should change this. Thus, I’m not convinced that testimony, by itself, can be evidence for certain claims. Perhaps something in addition to the testimony, such as a rock from Mars, photos, etc, can arguably be evidence in conjunction with their testimonies.
Am I being clear on that last point? It’s an important point, so I want to be clear about it.
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TruthSeeker60
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To be clear, I’m saying I’m not convinced that the fact that a person believes something happened, even if they believed they experienced it firsthand, can be evidence at all for magical claims.
We have entire groups of people who will tell you, in all apparent sincerity, that they were abducted by aliens. I’m not convinced that this testimony alone, no matter how sincere and consistent, should alone be reason for me to believe their claim.
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TruthSeeker60
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NO! Saying that I’ve never been presented with an argument for X that I found compelling is not a claim about X.
A juror who says, “I do not think he is guilty,” is not making a claim, while another juror who says, “I think he is innocent,” or, “I think he is not guilty,” is making a claim.
I’m not going to list every argument I’ve heard before. Rather, if you think that testimony, by itself, can be evidence for any magical claims, convince me.
Perhaps using the word “supernatural” was not the right approach for explaining my point. Perhaps “magical” is a more general word that would work. Things that are “magical” would be things that are well outside our ordinary experience of this word (counter-intuitive and extraordinary claim), which has not been demonstrated to a reasonably high degree of certainty (rule out quantum physics).
Quantum physics can be very counter-intuitive, yet it doesn’t qualify as magical because it is supported by evidence (I’ve been told that the evidence is so accurate that it would be equivalent to measuring the distance from San Francisco to New York within a few centimeters). As soon as an extraordinary claim is verified to a very high degree of objective evidence, it stops becoming magical and starts becoming something that we can observe in nature.
If under the right laboratory conditions, one was able to work make a rabbit appear by waving a wand, and this was done consistently, it would no longer be considered magic. However, the methodology for verifying the claim would have to be flawless, since extremely talented magicians like Penn and Teller can do “magic” tricks which extremely smart people cannot tell how it is done.
I hope you can see how my last point about magicians ties into the rest of what I’ve been trying to say. We can have people sincerely attest to the fact that they witnessed something, or that something happened to them. Fortunately, in the case of magicians, we know that what appears to happen does not happen, since we know that it’s just a performance.
I think that the same standards for testing actual claims of magic (similar to tricks that magicians do) aught to be applied to claims that are just as extraordinary. Of coarse, how extraordinary a claim is can be the matter of much debate.
The point was that I’m not convinced that testimony, by itself, is evidence for certain claims. In the case of the former of the two above, if the testimony is verified by other data, then it’s the other data that’s evidence. Regarding the latter, I’m not convinced that the most sincere and consistent testimony is, by itself, evidence for the claim.
Take, for example, the movie Contact. I don’t think that the main character’s extraordinary claim at the end of the movie can be, by itself, evidence that it actually happened, regardless of the sincere and consistent her testimony is. However, if there was some other data, such as video footage of the event, that might be evidence for the claim.
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Pieman333272
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Not counting something as evidence for something, regardless of the nature of the circumstance, does require a BOP. You need to back up your naked assertion that all testimony for supernatural events is not evidence by default no matter what. It’s not “reversing the BOP” or “copping out”. You made a sweeping statement, back it up.
Acts on God’s part are not “magic”. There is a significant theological difference between magic and miracles, which I can explain later. In addition, there IS objective evidence of God’s existence and performance of miracles.
But, NOBODY IS BOTH SINCERE AND RELIABLE when attesting to magicians, because we all know it’s just illusory. I’m talking about if the attestation if SINCERE and RELIABLE. So, your argument is just a strawman.
It’s subjective. That’s the problem with that whole thing about “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. ANYBODY can claim ANY claim is extraordinary. Heck, the entire statement basically becomes a case of cognitive dissonance, unsurprisingly.
It’s not EVIDENCE at ALL? It doesn’t present the slightest shred of evidence for the belief? If that’s what you mean, you really have to back it up epitimologically. The BOP is undeniably on you for that.
I never saw the movie (in fact never heard of it), but if there were multiple consistent, accurate testimonies on the issue, and all other explanations were ruled out, than it would be sufficient evidence for her claim.
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