I think you’re trying to double-dip :-) The prior itself is a probability (or a set of probabilities). A “low prior” means that something is unlikely—directly. It does not offer proof that it’s unlikely, it just straight out states it is unlikely.
I meant that in response to your framing: “I don’t think Christianity is true, but that’s a probabilistic belief that potentially could change.”
If your belief changes in the future, it’ll be in response to evidence. I can’t know what evidence you’ll receive in the future, so I can’t refute it ahead of time. So all I can do is lower the probability for Christianity now, which will serve as a sufficiently low prior in the future so that any new evidence still doesn’t convince you.
Yeah, I didn’t phrase it well.
That is not so. Supernatural claims do not run “counter” to previous observations, they just say that certain beings/things/actions are not constrainted by laws of nature. Wright brothers’ airplane was not “counter” to all previous observations of transportation devices with an engine. Recall Clarke’s Third Law.
The Wright brothers’ plane wasn’t claimed to be, or perceived as, supernatural.
The reason miracles are advanced as proof of a religion—the reason they are in the discussion in the first place (and in the Nicene Creed) - is because they are very surprising events. If a prophet goes around performing miracles like curing sick people, and a second prophet goes around saying that whatever we already expect to happen is in itself a miracle (“the miracle of nature”) and lets the sick people die, then we have a reason to believe the first prophet’s other claims (“God is granting me this power”) but not the second one’s.
One meaning of “supernatural” is “unnatural”: that is, an event that cannot happen according to normal natural law. Since we deduce natural law from observation only (and not from revelation or from first principles), this just means unique, unforeseeable events contrary to what we believe are the laws of nature.
This is why many try to refute religious miraculous claims, not by denying the story of the claims, but by giving natural law explanations for the events.
Not to mention that “all previous observations” include a lot of claims of miracles :-)
Claims are cheap, proofs are hard. Christians deny the claims of miracles by non-Christians, at least ones made explicitly in the name of another religion (other than pre-Christian Judaism). They don’t deny the supernatural explanation, they just deny the claim that the miracle occurred. Similarly, if I really believed all the Christian miracles occurred as stated, I would probably believe in Christianity.
You could adopt the position that various miracles are in fact easy to produce, we don’t know how; and different people have discovered how and used those powers to advance their various religions. But that conflicts with the observation that more miracles are always reported of ancient times than of modern, and of highly religious and undeveloped regions than of secular and technologically modern ones. If there was a ‘trick’ to doing miracles without supernatural intervention, we would expect the correlation to go the other way.
Yep. But there is a conventional explanation for that (I do not imply that I believe it): different traditions take different views of the same underlying divinity, but find themselves in the position of the nine blind men and the elephant.
If that is true, then all the specific claims made by Christianity, as well as any other religion, are false, because they all contradict one another (even between the branches of Christianity). If we take only the common denominator of all religions as true, I’m not sure there’s anything left at all, certainly nothing about e.g. supernatural commands or moral law.
This point will also need to explain why large civilizations (e.g. China) did NOT develop anything which looks like monotheism.
If a single deity appears to some as monotheistic, and to some as an unbounded number of local and thematic spirits, and both sides claim to have received direct revelations (in human language) of this truth, what can you predict of the elephant?
That’s a wrong way to look at it. Imagine that you have an underlying phenomenon which you cannot observe directly. You can only take indirect, noisy measurements. Different people take different sets of measurements, they are not the same and none of them are “true”. However this does not mean that the underlying phenomenon does not exist. It only means that information available to you is indirect and noisy.
As above, if you are forced to discard any concrete result with which the majority of measurements disagree, you are left with nothing. There is no common set of core beliefs to all religions. There isn’t even one common to all branches of Christianity, except for the idea that “a man named Christ lived around 5BC-35AD in Judea, had disciples and was executed by the Romans”. After all, some people who call themselves Christians believe that Jesus was an ordinary man who performed no miracles.
See above—different people might well have human reasons to prefer this particular set of measurements or that particular set of measurements. Still does NOT mean there’s nothing underlying them.
If they end up disagreeing over all experimental results, and over all procedures to measure those results, then I think we have no evidence for there being anything underlying them, any more than there is for e.g. astrology.
Well, and why is that? Why is Christianity a huge world religion? It started with a small band of persecuted Jews, why did it spread so?
Survivor/selection bias. You’re only asking the question because it’s a huge religion. Many more religions vanished or remained small than survived. There are documented historical reasons for this, but the only way they could be related to the truth of Christian claims is if God was indirectly helping them spread. Which every other successful, large religion claims as well. Anyway, ‘we won the war so our epistemology is true and Arianism is a heresy’ is not a very convincing argument.
I think we might be starting to rehash the standard atheist/Christian debate. Of course there are counter-counter-arguments for my counter-arguments to your arguments. And there are counter-counter-counter-arguments to those, too. Unless you really like turtles, I am not sure there is much need to go there.
I know the arguments against religions. I find them sufficiently convincing to not be religious. I do not find them rising to the level of “proof”. YMMV, of course.
I meant that in response to your framing: “I don’t think Christianity is true, but that’s a probabilistic belief that potentially could change.”
If your belief changes in the future, it’ll be in response to evidence. I can’t know what evidence you’ll receive in the future, so I can’t refute it ahead of time. So all I can do is lower the probability for Christianity now, which will serve as a sufficiently low prior in the future so that any new evidence still doesn’t convince you.
Yeah, I didn’t phrase it well.
The Wright brothers’ plane wasn’t claimed to be, or perceived as, supernatural.
The reason miracles are advanced as proof of a religion—the reason they are in the discussion in the first place (and in the Nicene Creed) - is because they are very surprising events. If a prophet goes around performing miracles like curing sick people, and a second prophet goes around saying that whatever we already expect to happen is in itself a miracle (“the miracle of nature”) and lets the sick people die, then we have a reason to believe the first prophet’s other claims (“God is granting me this power”) but not the second one’s.
One meaning of “supernatural” is “unnatural”: that is, an event that cannot happen according to normal natural law. Since we deduce natural law from observation only (and not from revelation or from first principles), this just means unique, unforeseeable events contrary to what we believe are the laws of nature.
This is why many try to refute religious miraculous claims, not by denying the story of the claims, but by giving natural law explanations for the events.
Claims are cheap, proofs are hard. Christians deny the claims of miracles by non-Christians, at least ones made explicitly in the name of another religion (other than pre-Christian Judaism). They don’t deny the supernatural explanation, they just deny the claim that the miracle occurred. Similarly, if I really believed all the Christian miracles occurred as stated, I would probably believe in Christianity.
You could adopt the position that various miracles are in fact easy to produce, we don’t know how; and different people have discovered how and used those powers to advance their various religions. But that conflicts with the observation that more miracles are always reported of ancient times than of modern, and of highly religious and undeveloped regions than of secular and technologically modern ones. If there was a ‘trick’ to doing miracles without supernatural intervention, we would expect the correlation to go the other way.
If that is true, then all the specific claims made by Christianity, as well as any other religion, are false, because they all contradict one another (even between the branches of Christianity). If we take only the common denominator of all religions as true, I’m not sure there’s anything left at all, certainly nothing about e.g. supernatural commands or moral law.
If a single deity appears to some as monotheistic, and to some as an unbounded number of local and thematic spirits, and both sides claim to have received direct revelations (in human language) of this truth, what can you predict of the elephant?
As above, if you are forced to discard any concrete result with which the majority of measurements disagree, you are left with nothing. There is no common set of core beliefs to all religions. There isn’t even one common to all branches of Christianity, except for the idea that “a man named Christ lived around 5BC-35AD in Judea, had disciples and was executed by the Romans”. After all, some people who call themselves Christians believe that Jesus was an ordinary man who performed no miracles.
If they end up disagreeing over all experimental results, and over all procedures to measure those results, then I think we have no evidence for there being anything underlying them, any more than there is for e.g. astrology.
Survivor/selection bias. You’re only asking the question because it’s a huge religion. Many more religions vanished or remained small than survived. There are documented historical reasons for this, but the only way they could be related to the truth of Christian claims is if God was indirectly helping them spread. Which every other successful, large religion claims as well. Anyway, ‘we won the war so our epistemology is true and Arianism is a heresy’ is not a very convincing argument.
I think we might be starting to rehash the standard atheist/Christian debate. Of course there are counter-counter-arguments for my counter-arguments to your arguments. And there are counter-counter-counter-arguments to those, too. Unless you really like turtles, I am not sure there is much need to go there.
I know the arguments against religions. I find them sufficiently convincing to not be religious. I do not find them rising to the level of “proof”. YMMV, of course.