What "skeptics" really believe about vaccines, medicine, consciousness and the universe (Part 2)

Turns out that I was not the only one responding to this newsletter. Anyway, I probably shouldn't waste much more of my time on this, but this guy is so stupid it is funny to read:

http://www.naturalnews.com/028019_skeptics_thinking.html.

What 'skeptics' really believe about vaccines, medicine, consciousness and the universe

Somehow, I signed up for the NaturalNews newsletter. I got the following newsletter in my mail this morning:

http://www.naturalnews.com/028012_skeptics_medicine.html.

I replied the following message to the author Mike Adams (check out his wholesome smile on the website):

I consider myself a skeptic. For me, that means that I do not accept claims on minimal evidence. For extraordinary claims, I would like to see extraordinary evidence. For example, I do not believe in Christianity, astrology, numerology, etc. Do you really think it's fair to take a general group of people (such as skeptics) and proclaim that their most outrageous claims you can find on the web represent their mainstream opinion? You can do this with any group of people. Just find people on the fringe with radical ideas; they exist in any group of like-minded people. I myself do not agree with most of your statements. Many of them are patently false as stated, as most skeptics would agree.

Regarding the point about skeptics not believing in mind or consciousness. Many skeptics belief that we do have a mind, but that this is an emergent property of the physical brain. Just like individual water molecules do not have the property of being frozen, or being steam, an agglomeration of water molecules could have these properties. It is not a contradiction. Also, determinism does not necessarily exclude free will. There is such a thing as compatibalism. You might want do some research before you claim to know the skeptic's opinion.

Ehrman's Egregious Error or Craig's Clear Confusion?

In this article I address a few arguments given in a debate between Dr. William Lane Craig and Dr. Bart Ehrman for and against the historicity of Jesus' resurrection. Dr. Ehrman's main argument is that historians can only talk about what probably happened. Since the resurrection is a highly improbable occurrence, historians cannot prove that this in fact happened, by the event's very nature. Here are links to some of the relevant YouTube video's:

William Lane Craig vs Bart Ehrman 5/12

William Lane Craig vs Bart Ehrman 6/12

William Lane Craig vs Bart Ehrman 7/12

William Lane Craig vs Bart Ehrman 8/12

William Lane Craig vs Bart Ehrman 9/12,

or read the transcription.

First, Dr. Craig talks about four historical facts must be explained by any adequate historical hypothesis:

• Jesus' burial
• the discovery of his empty tomb
• his [supposed] port-mortem appearances
• the origin of the disciples' belief in his [supposed] resurrection.

He then claims that Jesus' actual resurrection is the best explanation of these facts. According to Dr. Craig, Dr. Ehrman makes a mistake regarding probabilities in two ways. Let us look at the first `mistake'.

Dr. Craig claims that Dr. Ehrman merely looks at the probability of the resurrection occuring, neglecting the evidence. To correct this, Dr. Craig uses a form of Bayesian probability to calculate the probability of the resurrection, with the evidence in mind. Let B be the background knowledge we have of the world, let E be the evidence for the resurrection (empty tomb, post-mortem appearances, etc), and let R represent the event of the resurrection. The probability is then given by

$\mathbb{P}(R | B \cup E) = \frac{\mathbb{P}(R | B) \cdot \mathbb{P}(E | B \cup R)}{\mathbb{P}(R | B) \cdot \mathbb{P}(E | B \cup R) + \mathbb{P}(\text{not } R | B) \cdot \mathbb{P}(E | B \cup \text{not } R)}$

Dr. Craig maintains that Dr. Ehrman confuses this probability with the probability of the resurrection happening merely on the background knowledge, ignoring the evidence. Let us grant Dr. Craig that the evidence E is obvious given the resurrection and background knowledge such that we can ignore the second factor in the numerator. Now Dr. Craig shows that this probability takes the form\[\frac{X}{X+Y},\]where, loosely speaking, X represents the probability of the resurrection occuring given the evidence, and where Y represents the explanatory power of the naturalistic explanations of the resurrection. He then goes on to say that as the value of Y tends towards zero, the value of the ratio tends towards one. In other words, towards absolute certainty. In his words: “... so what is really crucial here, is the probability of Y.” But this is misrepresenting the importance of the probability of X.

To illustrate this, suppose that the probability of X is high, say 0.5. If the proability of Y was only 0.01, then the probability of Jesus' resurrection occurring would indeed be close to one (about 0.98). However, if the probability of X is low, say 0.001, then the probability would be knocked down to near zero (about 0.002). Hence, using this probability calculus, the real question is about the comparative probabilities between X and Y. To conclude, we are still confronted with the basic question: what is more likely? A) the actual resurrection of Jesus, or B) evidence of resurrection without an actual resurrection.

This bring us to Dr. Craig's next point. He continues to say that Dr. Ehrman is right in saying that the probability of Jesus rising from the dead naturally is indeed very slim, but that no such thing can be said about Jesus' rising from the dead supernaturally. Thus, as Dr. Craig proclaims, one is then confronted with the question what the probability is that God exists. Since historians cannot talk about the existence of God, they cannot say anything about the improbability of Jesus' resurrection.

Dr. Craig argues on the contrary that historians cannot exclude God as a hypothesis a priori. He uses contemporary physics as an analogy. In modern physics, all sorts of hypotheses are considered that we do not have direct access to. Hypotheses such as string theory, theory of the multiverse, etc. But the analogy clearly does not hold. The difference is that the latter physical theories are falsifiable, whereas the God hypothesis is not. We can give all sorts of explanations for events (especially after the fact), as long as we do not require them to be falsifiable: think FSM.

In conclusion, whether historians can make claims about supernatural issues remains to be debated. I do believe that one can make claims about Jesus' resurrection being improbable in a philosophical sense. I will get back to this, together with a discussion of the book A Defense of Hume on Miracles by  Robert J. Fogelin in a later post.