Really desperately bizarre that.

There are hundreds upon hundreds of these kinds of things. I can only bother to answer a rare few.

No, I don’t consider that one worth responding to. What they say is either already refuted in my writings, or their fallacy is easily spotted.

That’s really well put.

You’re quite right I think. People don’t want to admit how much guessing actually goes into all their beliefs and conclusions and decisions.

A fuzzy signal indeed. Hence the wide margins of error.

We have signal here and we have noise. And we have a set of historical claims that were written with the express purpose of establishing some sort of basis for a spiritual claim. And then we have the effect of censorship. How much of the original signal can we recover?

http://www.rightreason.org/2012/richard-carrier-on-the-resurrection-part-2/

Thanks. I’ll be hoping for a reply soon.

Kris,

You raise a valid point that over a continuous hypothesis space, an apparently obvious choice of ignorance prior may (and often will) turn out to lack transformation invariance.

Edwin Jaynes showed how to find the appropriate unique distribution in such cases that lack transformation invariance using group theory (see this paper, for example). The principle of indifference (used to obtain a uniform distribution over a discrete hypothesis space) is a special case of this method.

In many other cases where there seems to be ‘not enough information to determine a prior’, one may also find the appropriate unique distribution using the method of maximum entropy.

It is always a mistake to think that there isn’t enough information to conduct a probability calculation – probability theory is the machine we use to quantify what we do know, so what we don’t know can’t possibly interfere!

“I still don’t see it as the best tool for making a positive argument in this case.”

Which case?

Using it to refute the arguments of historicists is another matter. It is really clear that there is a massive inconsistency at the core of modern Christianity and Judaism. An inconsistency that priests try to skim over by telling us ‘God moves in mysterious ways’ with a smug little smirk.

I find the argument for trinitarianism to be most peculiar. The support for it in scripture is pretty much non-existent yet it is central. And the position of the messiah in Judaism is equally odd. Shouldn’t such a central character be mentioned rather more often?

The approach I take is a little different: First, if someone is arguing vehemently against something it is quite probably because it is true. Second, any ancient text that has survived was almost certainly written as a commentary on the times in which it was written rather than the time it purports to describe.

Only if they resort to a Cartesian Demon.

Presuppositionalism is incoherent, so it doesn’t really need a Bayesian rebuttal. It is plain illogical from the word go.

But usually what they are arguing is for (some variant of) the hypothesis that God causes logic to be correct, and then they sort of try to argue that P(e|h) = 1 (where e = logic is correct) and P(e|~h) = 0 (again where e = logic is correct). They go wrong precisely there. Not only does a P(e|~h) = 0 require a demonstration of logical impossibility (and they never present any), because only the logically impossible has a P of 0 (everything else has a nonzero probability, even if small: see PH, axiom 4, pp. 23-26); but also, they don’t even ever demonstrate that P(e|~h) is low. They never explain what a universe without logic in it would look like, or why a godless universe would allow logical contradictions to exist in it.

Whereas, since the LNC (the Law of Non-Contradiction) is simply a physical description of all universes that contain distinctions (start here for that analysis), and universes without gods in them can contain distinctions (in fact, nearly all of them imaginable do), the presuppositionalist claim that a godless universe would not have distinctions in it is false (and therefore the claim that it would not be described by the LNC is false).

The more so when we realize L (the existence of living observers) is in b (our background knowledge) which entails P(e|~h) = 1. Because P(e|~h) is properly P(e|~h.b) and therefore P(e|~h.L), and L can never be true in a universe without distinctions–and this can be demonstrated as a logically necessary truth–therefore if L, even if ~God, then always LNC; because L will never, as in literally 0% of the time, observe itself in a universe not governed by LNC, regardless of whether a god had anything to do with that universe (e.g. even if there are godless universes not described by the LNC, L will never observe itself being in one; so L observing that it is in a universe described by the LNC cannot tell you whether that universe is connected to a god or not, as it could just as easily be one of the imaginable godless universes described by the LNC).