If someone believes the Bible is central to question of whether God exists, you can challenge that without having a definition of “evidence” that is informed by Bayes’ theorem.
Fair comment. I should have said “all things”, not “things”, and I’ve edited the grandparent appropriately.
It could be flawed if there are things that effect the number of phone calls other than Geller’s proposed psychic powers.
There’s an implicit “all else being equal” in such statements, which really shouldn’t need to be spelled out if all parties are respecting the principle of charity. Any number of things (time of day, stooges working for Uri, number of listeners, service to the telephone system) could also affect the number of calls received, but if all else is equal as far as we are aware then Uri getting more calls than the skeptic is more likely in a universe where he has psychic powers. Hence by Bayes’ theorem it’s evidence he has psychic powers—just extremely weak evidence which is alone insufficient to shift our prior probability much.
It’s also more likely in a universe where Uri has more listeners, has stooges working for him, or has some other non-psychic factor working in his favour of course, and those hypotheses have much, much higher prior probabilities.
Fair comment. I should have said “all things”, not “things”, and I’ve edited the grandparent appropriately.
There’s an implicit “all else being equal” in such statements, which really shouldn’t need to be spelled out if all parties are respecting the principle of charity. Any number of things (time of day, stooges working for Uri, number of listeners, service to the telephone system) could also affect the number of calls received, but if all else is equal as far as we are aware then Uri getting more calls than the skeptic is more likely in a universe where he has psychic powers. Hence by Bayes’ theorem it’s evidence he has psychic powers—just extremely weak evidence which is alone insufficient to shift our prior probability much.
It’s also more likely in a universe where Uri has more listeners, has stooges working for him, or has some other non-psychic factor working in his favour of course, and those hypotheses have much, much higher prior probabilities.