What counts as evidence?
In my previous blog post, Rapoport’s
Rules Meet the Outsider Test, I mentioned the dispute over what
counts as evidence:
When discussing religion with persons of faith, try to be aware of
their tactic of framing the argument in terms of positive arguments for
their particular faith, rather than in terms of negative arguments
against all competing faiths. This was on display in the
four-way debate video that John W. Loftus posted about the Virgin
Birth. John’s Orthodox Christian interlocutors demanded that John
clearly define what he would consider to be sufficient evidence for
their religious claims. But they did not mention that they must think
that no competing religion has met the same standard of evidence for
them. So they must know what “evidence” is, well enough to conclude that
no other religion has it. Perhaps they have just never thought this
through before.
In this blog post I’ll dig deeper into this dispute about evidence. I
include my own manual transcriptions of the dialogue from the video with
time markers, but transcribing is hard so refer back to the video for
each’s speakers statements in his own words.
Solid teaching, solid truth
I’ll start with a sort of mission statement from the senior opponent
to John in the video:
12:26 Fr. Jonathan Ivanoff:
“And right now I’m just very very interested in bringing the
knowledge of that [Orthodox] faith to a public that is hungry and
thirsty for solid teaching, solid truth.”
This statement about audience demand sounds plausible enough. It
stands to reason that if Fr. Ivanoff has a job, he must have found an
audience that likes what he has to say. Good for him. A man’s gotta eat.
But I have some questions about what he means by “solid teaching, solid
truth.” Those are rather bold claims. Presumably Fr. Ivanoff is aware
that there are other audiences who are equally hungry for other “solid”
teachings, other “truths.” For example, Fr. Ivanoff seems to hail from
the Orthodox side of the Great Schism of
1054. The folks on the other side, for the past 950+ years, are
Roman Catholics (and by extension, the Protestants who later schismed
off from them like so many proliferating species). I’m pretty sure the
current Pope would say he has “solid teaching, solid truth” as well. Yet
these two equally solid teachings have been in conflict for fully half
of the Christian era. Thus I think it’s fair to ask (a) whether
Fr. Ivanoff views his own teaching as more “solid” and “truthful” than
the Pope’s teachings (I’m guessing he does!), and (b) how he knows
this.
I’d also like to know how comfortable Fr. Ivanoff feels about
worshipping in a Roman Catholic Church.
If Fr. Ivanoff believes the Pope is wrong about something that
matters, enough to break off fellowship, Fr. Ivanoff must have some sort
of evidence to support his belief. For example, one point of
contention between Catholic and Orthodox Christians is that bizarre filioque thing. I’d
like to know how the rules for evidence work on that one, and how the
Pope came to have different rules for evidence than Fr. Ivanoff has.
What evidence is not
And this hints at something I’ll elaborate more on below: the word
“evidence” means different things to different folks. In the next
excerpt, Fr. Ivanoff wants to know how John W. Loftus defines
“evidence”:
18:38 Fr. Jonathan Ivanoff:
“Beyond that, when John speaks of relevant evidence, I’d like to hear
his definition of what relevant evidence is so we can talk about that
and move forward.”
And John replies at 18:53 in the video similarly to the exerpt from
his recent article “Is
Atheism a Faith?”. I’ll quote from the article as it is cleaner than
my transcription:
In response, apologists claim that nonbelievers have no objective
criteria for determining what counts as extraordinary evidence for
miracles. But I know what doesn’t count as extraordinary evidence, which
says it all. Second-, third-, and fourth-hand hearsay testimonial
evidence doesn’t count; nor does circumstantial evidence, or anecdotal
evidence as reported in documents that are centuries later than the
supposed events they recount, documents which were copied by scribes and
theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries. I also know
that subjective feelings, experiences, and inner voices don’t count as
extraordinary evidence, nor do the reports of someone who tells others
that his writings are inspired or conveyed by divine revelation through
dreams or visions.[13])
In the video, John adds:
That’s – let’s just talk about that – because I claim that’s all you
have.
That last sentence is key. A proper way to refute John here would be
to show that’s not all they have, but that the Orthodox spokesmen have
some additional evidence, something that might pass muster with a
rational skeptic like John. Suffice it to say we won’t be getting any
shocking new divine revelations here. Instead we’ll get an attempt to
shift the burden of explanation onto John, when the Subdeacon tags into
the dustup later:
Pressing for a
positive definition of evidence
30:43 Subdeacon Daniel Kakish:
…but when you’re asking what is the evidence, I’m asking you what is
the evidence that you would accept. Father Jonathan already asked you,
but you just went on with another list of what is not evidence, you
didn’t answer the question of evidence would be for me. When I see
people like you guys mentioned Luke earlier, Luke was a journalist, a
physician, he was a Hellenic Jew maybe … or a Greek somehow or just the
Greek but it was counterintuitive for him to believe in this, he
converted, and we know the story of Saul of Tarsus, another
counterintuitive story, why would he change his whole life, so then you
have these early figures not to mention everyone who was the
eyewitnesses Dr. Price mentions the evidence for the resurrection if the
one who born from Mary is proven to be the Son of God which I think
there’s a lot of evidence for that then automatically the virgin birth
would be true. However, again I want to ask you what evidence would you
accept for what uh for the virgin birth?
My transcription might be a bit sloppy, but I think Subdeacon Kakish’
gist is clear: he wants to know, if the evidence for his flavor of
Christianity isn’t good enough for John, what evidence would be? And
then he segues into what appears to be his own view of the relevant
evidence, namely:
The “counterintuitive” actions of Luke and Saul of Tarsus who became
known as the apostle Paul.
The unnamed “eyewitnesses” to the Resurrection of Jesus.
The Resurrection itself as a kind of evidence for the Virgin Birth,
the main topic under discussion. Left unsaid is any coherent connection
between the Resurrection (even if it occurred) and the Virgin Birth.
After all, the bible contains stories of other people who were
resurrected, including vast numbers of dead saints at Jesus’
Crucifixion, and nobody is arguing for any of them being
Virgin-born.
If we go back up and look at what John says isn’t evidence (for him),
he’s already undermined all three of Kakish’ lines of evidence, as we
only have “Second-, third-, and fourth-hand hearsay testimonial
evidence” for them, in the form of scriptures which were arbitrarily
selected by committees of self-appointed men some centuries later to be
canonized into what we now recognize as the various bibles of the
various Christian brands (yes, there is more than one biblical canon).
So what Subdeacon Kakish takes to be established fact – that men like
Luke and Paul existed and we have reliable evidence that they did
“counterintuitive” things, and that there were “eyewitnesses” to the
Resurrection, and this somehow counts as evidence for Mary to have
divinely conceived the Son of God, and that Joseph learned reliably in a
dream that this was the Gospel Truth – John doesn’t find convincing for
precisely the reasons he listed.
Extraordinary
claims require extraordinary evidence
Another point Kakish doesn’t mention is the extraordinary
nature of his claims. Insofar as modern science has been able to
tell, the Virgin Birth and Resurrection stories are impossible.
Since the scriptures were written long before the start of modern
science, people at the time wouldn’t have understood the impossibility.
To them these might have just seemed like more signs and wonders to go
along with other seemingly fantastic natural occurrences like volcanoes,
earthquakes (and no surprise that Jesus’ Crucifixion is capped off with
an earthquake in the Gospel account!), plagues, lightning bolts, and so
on. After all, if a mountain can literally explode, why can’t a god
impregnate a woman? The prescientific mind cannot imagine the
difference. The prescientific mind doesn’t understand the rules that
govern the real world – the rules that make exploding volcanoes not only
possible but just about inevitable in certain parts of the world (the
parts near particular subduction zones or
hotspots)
while simultaneously making unfertilized
births of male offspring all but impossible for humans, along with
the resurrection of a substantially decayed human body.
Why volcanoes are not miracles, image from Wikimedia Commons
Extraordinary events like those two have never been
reliably attested – that is, with modern trained experts in all
the relevant science (and magician’s tricks!) present and recording. And
thus we’re going to need evidence which is correspondingly
extraordinary. Kakish’s “evidence” in the form of “counterintuitive”
behavior by Luke and Saul / Paul is far from extraordinary. People do
counterintuitive things every day. See for example the behavior of Tom
Cruise after he learned about Scientology. Or all
the Mormon converts who died for their beliefs during their wars with
Christians and the US government. Or how about the 9/11 terrorists
who flew airplanes into buildings, because they believed they would be
rewarded with virgins in the afterlife? (It seems more than one religion
has odd fixations with human female virgins.) People behaving
“counterintuitively” is not evidence for anything but the fact that our
intuitions are not a sufficient basis for the science of psychology.
Probably every religion has its examples of people behaving
“counterintuitively.” See for example Melanesian Cargo
Cults. Or the snake-handling
Christians of America’s Appalachia. And everything else in Seth Andrews’ by
turns amusing and alarming book Sacred
Cows: A Lighthearted Look at Belief and Tradition Around the
World.
And it’s hardly enough to point to dramatic behavior changes by
religious converts. What religion does not have similar stories? Do they
count as evidence that every religion’s supernatural claims are equally
true?
And even outside religion, people do counterintuitive things every
day, and some fraction of people dramatically transform their lives, for
better or worse. With or without various faiths, these are things people
do.
Subjective evidence
So the disagreement seems to be that John and his Orthodox
interlocutors have drastically different notions of evidence. This makes
complete sense if we adopt a functional, subjective definition of
“evidence”: whatever makes you believe something. By this
definition, everybody with a belief has some sort of “evidence” for
their belief – at least something they consider to be evidence. As this
definition is inherently circular (you believe because you have
evidence, and you have evidence because you believe), to say that people
disagree over evidence merely restates that they disagree over
belief.
The challenge, as we see in the video, is in persuading someone else
to accept your own subjective definition of evidence. If the Orthodox
spokesmen had done their homework, they would immediately recognize that
John’s definition of evidence is closer to the definitions you’d find in
the scientific or legal/judicial communities.
Intersubjective evidence
If you want to work as a scientist, or as an attorney, or as an
historian for that matter, you’ll have to learn what counts as evidence
in those professions. While history might be viewed as kind of a “pure”
intellectual pursuit, science and the law tend to be considerably more
practical. Pure science has given rise to a lot of applied science and
technology, often with billions of dollars and the fate of the entire
biosphere on the line. The law, for its part, makes hugely consequential
decisions every day. Therefore both fields must have ways to resolve the
sorts of endless disagreements that have shattered Chrstianity into tens
of thousands of warring brands. And the way that science and the law do
this is by coming up with definitions of “evidence” that vast numbers of
people from different backgrounds can agree on.
That is, “evidence” in science and the law is not merely subjective,
but intersubjective.
From Wikipedia:
Intersubjectivity describes the shared understanding that emerges
from interpersonal interactions. The term first appeared in social
science in the 1970s and later incorporated into psychoanalytic theory
by George E. Atwood and Robert Stolorow, the term has since been adopted
across various fields.
In most everyday contexts, “evidence” is strongly intersubjective.
Few of us have ever struggled to establish the fact of our own existence
in the minds of other people. My subjective evidence for my own
existence seems acceptable to just about everyone else. All we have to
do is show up, and allow other people to use their senses to evaluate
the evidence we constantly broadcast. The particulars of my claimed
identity might be faked (I could hypothetically be a deep cover
operative whose cover story is massively prosaic and boring), but my
existence as a human would be very hard to fake with current technology.
In the future, robots might be able to imitate humans with increasing
levels of fidelity, but that’s a way off for now.
And that’s why John and his Orthodox sparring partners are not
demanding evidence for each other’s existence. They have a strong
intersubjective agreement about what counts as evidence for the
existence of a human being, and they had this agreement long before they
met each other.
The reason why it’s easy to prove that I exist, and hard to prove
that God exists (or that the Son of God was born of a virgin female,
etc.) is because I am real. When it’s hard to prove that
something exists, then either that thing is not real, or it is so subtle
that it cannot be detected by human senses or scientific instruments.
Modern scientific instruments are highly sensitive, able to photograph
distant galaxies and nearby molecular structures. X-ray scanners can
“see” through clothing to detect hidden weapons and contraband. Medical
scanners can produce detailed images of our innards. Radar can track
distant aircraft and weather systems. Analytic chemists can identify
thousands of different chemical compounds in a sample. Modern
statistical methods can detect tiny effect sizes in samples of thousands
or millions of people. And so on. For God to remain invisible to modern
science is quite an achievement, particularly when the bible claims that
God was easy for unaided humans to detect for centuries.
To be fair, modern science can’t detect everything yet. Things like
dark matter and
dark energy can
be inferred by the effects they have on visible matter, but physicists
don’t yet know how to detect them directly. But that’s OK – for a long
time scientists couldn’t detect the Higgs boson either,
until they did. But no religion postulates such things, which weren’t
even imaginable until modern science gave people ideas. Religions are
all about gods that ordinary pre-scientific peoples could observe or
interact with in some way. The God of the bible, for example, is
routinely portrayed as crashing about through history, working miracles,
slaying people in vast numbers for misbehaving, torturing Job to win a
bet with Satan, and generally making himself impossible to ignore. That
sort of God has simply disappeared like a puff of smoke with the rise of
modern science. So either God went away, or pre-scientific people were
lying or mistaken when they attributed natural phenomena to God.
Evidence: you know it when
you see it
Potter
Stewart was a US Supreme Court justice who immortalized the saying
“I know
it when I see it.” He originally said this about obscenity, but
evidence is another thing that’s easy for people to recognize and hard
to define precisely.
Most people rarely think about what evidence actually is. Therefore
when Subdeacon Kakish asks John to clearly define what he means by
“evidence”, Kakish implies that the discussion is not about ordinary,
everyday things. When you go to the grocery store, for example, you
don’t accost the workers and demand them to define what they take to be
evidence that the jug of milk contains milk and sells for the marked
price. To argue about “evidence” in that situation would seem pretty
nuts. Therefore, when a debate becomes a debate about what “evidence”
is, it’s a sign that someone is skating on thin ice. And I think we know
which side that is: the side that claims their religion is right and all
other religions are wrong. They must have some sort of evidence for that
claim, if we take the broadest definition of “evidence” – whatever
causes you to believe something.
Evidence: what the
philosophers have said
Lots of philosophers have spilled lots of ink on the question of what
evidence is. See for example Evidence from
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It begins with a quote:
And when we try to define ‘evidence’ … we find it very
difficult.
—R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History
That Enclopedia has a separate article on The Legal
Concept of Evidence.
The Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy weighs in too, as does the Routledge
Encyclopedia, and the English Wikipedia. For
Kakish to ask John to give a positive account of what constitutes
evidence is a bit like asking someone to briefly explain particle
physics, or calculus, or Baroque music. We’re talking about subjects
that would take months or years of study to get a good handle on.
Thus I don’t think it’s entirely fair to demand that John give a
definition of “evidence” that works for everyone on all subjects. The
discussion video would have to get a lot longer for that! But I think
Fr. Ivanoff and Subdeacon Kakish might agree that no religion’s
supernatural claims meet the evidentiary standards of science or the
law. That is, claims about the existence of God, the Virgin Birth and
Resurrection of Jesus, have never been and probably will never be
established as scientific or legal facts. If either of those two men
switch careers to science or the law, they’ll quickly discover that they
won’t make headway with their peers by advancing a scientific theory or
a legal argument predicated on the claim that a specific God – or any
god – exists. Imagine a defense attorney who tried to argue that the
client is innocent of all charges because an angel appeared to him in a
dream and said so! That attorney would get laughed right out of court,
and probably even by Christians who forget that they accept the same
quality of “evidence” for the Virgin Birth.
When an argument is insane everywhere outside of the bible, it’s
probably insane in the bible too.
But of course both men do “switch careers” whenever they clock out of
work and face practical problems in the real world. Then they probably
do apply the same standards of evidence that a scientist or an attorney
would use. If the lights don’t come on, they probably don’t wait for an
angel to appear in a dream and tell them what the problem is. Instead
they probably troubleshoot the problem as best they can, and if that
doesn’t help they call an electrician, who will bring even better
evidence-based reasoning to bear.
Special pleading
The act of applying inconsistent types of reasoning depending on the
problem has a name in informal logic: special
pleading. The disagreement between John and his interlocutors is
that they seem to think special pleading is OK, and John does not. In
the pre-scientific world this wouldn’t have been much of a problem; back
then, religion was the “only game in town.” But now there’s a new player
in town: science. Science spawns technology, its own form of “signs and
wonders following”. Readers of the bible will recognize that phrase, as
it appears in Mark’s Gospel, the book of Acts, and elsewhere. Signs and
wonders were supposedly the evidence that Men of God provided for the
truth of their theological claims. But today the signs and wonders of
religion no longer hold up to scientific examination. We saw this in the
video as neither the Father nor the Subdeacon could wow John with any
miracles, like a good old-fashioned biblical prophet of God.
The “signs and wonders” of
science
But signs and wonders are no problem at all for science. They are as
impossible to ignore today as the God of the bible allegedly once was.
The irony seems lost on the good Father and Subdeacon as they use the
modern quasi-miracle of YouTube to share their ancient superstition with
the world. If I were the dictator of the world, I would demand
behavioral consistency from people who deny science, or who reject its
methods. If you don’t like the scientist’s rules for evidence, fine:
adopt the Amish
lifestyle and stop consuming the benefits of science every day.
The power of science, demonstrated in every second of every minute of
every day, sets the standard for evidence for me. That’s why, for
example, I accept the “evidence” for the Higg’s boson, even though I
lack the specific years of study necessary to understand it. I have
enough background that I might be closer to getting it than some people,
but I’d still have to work long and hard to get the specifics. And
replicating the results independently would probably be out of the
question, as that would cost billions.
So why do I take the Higgs boson on something akin to “faith”? Mainly
because of all the signs and wonders following. The existence of
technologies like smartphones and the Internet proves a lot. They prove
that a very large fraction of science must be true or all but true, as
even a slight error in the enabling science would make it impossible to
build working devices. And then there is all the science that enables
the supply chain, including the tripled crop yields that manage to feed
the workers and customers, and the medical sciences that heal some of
their ailments. The truth of science is so interwoven into our modern
existence that only an idiot or a lunatic could deny it – at least, not
without some overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
So even if the Higgs boson is not exactly a logical consequence of
smartphones, it’s not too far removed from it. It would be very hard for
the science that gives us smartphones to tolerate a hoax on that scale.
There are too many scientific experts incentivized to check each other’s
results. Now, it’s possible for various frauds and errors to occur in
science, especially in obscure work of little or no importance, that
nobody bothers to replicate. But it’s a lot harder to get away with a
scientific fraud when billions of dollars are at stake. See for example
the Theranos
fiasco. That particular fraud had a fairly short shelf life because
venture capitalists expect results rather quickly.
Religion, in contrast, can disagree about filioque for 950+
years.
So, let us return to the Subdeacon’s question to John: “I’m asking
you what is the evidence that you would accept.” For my money, the
“evidence” I would accept for the Virgin Birth and other miracle claims
of the bible is the evidence that the whole scientific community would
accept. Just because a claim seems far-fetched doesn’t stop scientists
from being convinced of it, when the evidence is there. Many findings of
science that most educated people take for granted today were
revolutionary in the past, such as heliocentrism, evolution, and plate
tectonics.
Convince the
relevant experts, then get back to me
Therefore, to theists, I give my own refinement of Hitchens’
Razor: Get back to me when you’ve convinced the scientists of your
claims. It’s not my job to be the adjudicator of everything. I’m hardly
the only or best person to decide that current science is all wrong and
Jesus was born of a Virgin. There are people better-equipped than I am,
and you haven’t convinced them yet. The world is full of religions
making thousands of supernatural claims and counter-claims which none of
them can demonstrate as scientific facts. The Father and Subdeacon have
done nothing to distinguish themselves from that mob. Until they do, I’m
no more inclined to believe them than all the rest. I’m equally
unimpressed by the claims of the followers of Sathya Sai
Baba. No matter how many of those followers might be doing
“counterintuive” things.
Furthermore, if any religion does become the first one in history to
prove its claims, I won’t have to make any effort to find out. It would
be front-page news on every news outlet in the world. It would likely
give rise to whole new fields of science, and spinoff technologies, much
like finding a crashed alien spaceship in the desert might do. (Which
incidentally is a strong argument against the Area
51 folklore – where are the technological spinoffs?)
Debunking Christianity
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