How can you gain information from a prediction you cannot test, until you die?
Well, the obvious answer is “by dying”. However, this also prevents me from communicating my results, calling the usefulness of the procedure into question...
Or have you encountered personal evidence of an afterlife already?
No, but there are people who have. Feel free to look them up.
Note that one of the requirements of canonisation as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church is that someone find evidence, sufficient to convince the Church, that the person being canonised is in the afterlife. So a look through the Vatican records will probably provide a number of examples to look over, if you’d like.
Why does free will or an afterlife require a God?
They do not require a God. My argument for both requires a God, but there may be other arguments that do not.
Regarding the sequences, you may find it easier to derive the same information from books popularizing a lot of the source material it is based on, if the sequences themselves turn you off.
Actually, by and large they don’t. There is one element of the Sequences which niggles at me a bit, but it doesn’t really bother me all that much; Eleizer is perfectly entitled to his opinions.
there are people who have. Feel free to look them up.
This would be more impressive if it didn’t so often happen that the ones with the best-sounding evidence so often turn out to be outright fraudulent. E.g., Eben Alexander’s book (“Proof of Heaven”) makes claims about his illness that are demonstrably untrue, and it turns out he’s been in trouble before for reasons that call his integrity seriously into question (e.g., there is reason to think he’s falsified patients’ medical records); Alex Malarkey (“The Boy who went to Heaven”) retracted his claims to have died and visited heaven.
one of the requirements of canonisation
Yeah, they do indeed require evidence sufficient to convince the church that the person is in the afterlife. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the church needs terribly good evidence. Typically what they want to see is a miracle performed by the proto-saint’s intercession. E.g., the miracle that qualified the former Pope John Paul II for beatification (he hasn’t been canonized yet) is that a nun had a neurological condition, she prayed for him to intercede for her, and she stopped having symptoms. But (1) no one actually knows exactly what condition she has or had, and hence no one knows how likely remission is even without divine intervention, and (2) she appears to have had a relapse since the alleged miracle.
This would be more impressive if it didn’t so often happen that the ones with the best-sounding evidence so often turn out to be outright fraudulent.
Yes, that is a problem—if you’re making up the claim, you can make up evidence to be as convincing as you want.
Yeah, they do indeed require evidence sufficient to convince the church that the person is in the afterlife. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the church needs terribly good evidence.
Considering that the Church already thinks that there is an afterlife, the burden of proof they require is almost certainly lower—possibly significantly lower—than the burden of proof that you would be looking for… it’s just the potential source of evidence that came most immediately to mind at the time.
John Paul II was canonized more than a year ago (you might have been looking at an older news source and not noticed the date on it.) There are definitely problems with the Church’s canonization process, and if they really cared about the validity of miracles like that, they should publish the facts of the case and an explanation of why they think it was a miracle. But they don’t do that, which allows for a lot more wishful thinking.
A more reasonable example of a miracle claim (which is not about the afterlife) is this. Most explanations which do not accept it as a miracle are mistaken in obvious ways, as for example Brian Dunning’s explanation in the linked article. I’m not sure where he got the idea that doctors did not testify to the amputation, but that is simply completely false.
Whoops, you’re right, he’s been canonized now. Sorry about that.
I agree that the most convincing miracle stories aren’t about the afterlife, but the question at issue here wasn’t “do miracles ever happen?” but “do we have good evidence of an afterlife?”; the question arose because CCC cited the existence of an afterlife as something better explained by his variety of theism than by atheism.
(As to the specific alleged miracle you mention: at a remove of nearly 400 years, it seems difficult to say much about what actually happened; e.g., I don’t see how we have enough evidence to rule out the possibility of a concerted fraud some time after the alleged events, the enquiry at Zaragoza being an outright fiction; or a smaller-scale earlier fraud along Dunning’s lines, but with the doctors having been bribed to say what they did. Of course either of those would be a strange and unusual happening—but stranger and more unusual than a completely amputated leg miraculously growing back?)
I agree that even the most convincing miracle accounts do not necessarily imply that it is more reasonable to accept them than to suppose that they most likely have strange and unusual human and natural explanations. That’s what I said earlier in comparing claims of revelation to claims of intelligent design in biology.
Of course either of those would be a strange and unusual happening—but stranger and more unusual than a completely amputated leg miraculously growing back?
This is circular reasoning. You can argue that your theory makes it likely that the miracle didn’t happen, but then you can’t use it as evidence for your theory.
It’s not circular reasoning; even without deciding between naturalism and the various candidate supernaturalisms we know from straightforward observation that major miracles are extremely rare and hoaxes are not so rare.
Well, the obvious answer is “by dying”. However, this also prevents me from communicating my results, calling the usefulness of the procedure into question...
No, but there are people who have. Feel free to look them up.
Note that one of the requirements of canonisation as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church is that someone find evidence, sufficient to convince the Church, that the person being canonised is in the afterlife. So a look through the Vatican records will probably provide a number of examples to look over, if you’d like.
They do not require a God. My argument for both requires a God, but there may be other arguments that do not.
Actually, by and large they don’t. There is one element of the Sequences which niggles at me a bit, but it doesn’t really bother me all that much; Eleizer is perfectly entitled to his opinions.
This would be more impressive if it didn’t so often happen that the ones with the best-sounding evidence so often turn out to be outright fraudulent. E.g., Eben Alexander’s book (“Proof of Heaven”) makes claims about his illness that are demonstrably untrue, and it turns out he’s been in trouble before for reasons that call his integrity seriously into question (e.g., there is reason to think he’s falsified patients’ medical records); Alex Malarkey (“The Boy who went to Heaven”) retracted his claims to have died and visited heaven.
Yeah, they do indeed require evidence sufficient to convince the church that the person is in the afterlife. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the church needs terribly good evidence. Typically what they want to see is a miracle performed by the proto-saint’s intercession. E.g., the miracle that qualified the former Pope John Paul II for beatification (he hasn’t been canonized yet) is that a nun had a neurological condition, she prayed for him to intercede for her, and she stopped having symptoms. But (1) no one actually knows exactly what condition she has or had, and hence no one knows how likely remission is even without divine intervention, and (2) she appears to have had a relapse since the alleged miracle.
Yes, that is a problem—if you’re making up the claim, you can make up evidence to be as convincing as you want.
Considering that the Church already thinks that there is an afterlife, the burden of proof they require is almost certainly lower—possibly significantly lower—than the burden of proof that you would be looking for… it’s just the potential source of evidence that came most immediately to mind at the time.
John Paul II was canonized more than a year ago (you might have been looking at an older news source and not noticed the date on it.) There are definitely problems with the Church’s canonization process, and if they really cared about the validity of miracles like that, they should publish the facts of the case and an explanation of why they think it was a miracle. But they don’t do that, which allows for a lot more wishful thinking.
A more reasonable example of a miracle claim (which is not about the afterlife) is this. Most explanations which do not accept it as a miracle are mistaken in obvious ways, as for example Brian Dunning’s explanation in the linked article. I’m not sure where he got the idea that doctors did not testify to the amputation, but that is simply completely false.
Whoops, you’re right, he’s been canonized now. Sorry about that.
I agree that the most convincing miracle stories aren’t about the afterlife, but the question at issue here wasn’t “do miracles ever happen?” but “do we have good evidence of an afterlife?”; the question arose because CCC cited the existence of an afterlife as something better explained by his variety of theism than by atheism.
(As to the specific alleged miracle you mention: at a remove of nearly 400 years, it seems difficult to say much about what actually happened; e.g., I don’t see how we have enough evidence to rule out the possibility of a concerted fraud some time after the alleged events, the enquiry at Zaragoza being an outright fiction; or a smaller-scale earlier fraud along Dunning’s lines, but with the doctors having been bribed to say what they did. Of course either of those would be a strange and unusual happening—but stranger and more unusual than a completely amputated leg miraculously growing back?)
I agree that even the most convincing miracle accounts do not necessarily imply that it is more reasonable to accept them than to suppose that they most likely have strange and unusual human and natural explanations. That’s what I said earlier in comparing claims of revelation to claims of intelligent design in biology.
This is circular reasoning. You can argue that your theory makes it likely that the miracle didn’t happen, but then you can’t use it as evidence for your theory.
It’s not circular reasoning; even without deciding between naturalism and the various candidate supernaturalisms we know from straightforward observation that major miracles are extremely rare and hoaxes are not so rare.
Depending on the scale of the hoax.