Stephen Law has just put up a post with links to all of his interviews for the PBS program Closer to Truth. I highly recommend watching them, Stephen is a dynamite philosopher who has a real talent for taking complex ideas and simplifying them for your everyday person.
Here’s a news report that bees are capable of deductive reasoning. Neat! I’ve been suspecting, more and more, that natural selection has programmed us and other animals with instincts for when to believe things, and that such instincts could be written out as formal rules, and that those formal rules are justified by Bayes’ theorem and other formal logic. It is interesting that David Hume wrote along similar lines about induction, saying that induction must be a kind of “instinct implanted within us by nature.” Hume lamented that he was not able to find a a priori proof of induction, though I think we do have good a priori arguments for them based on Bayesian reasoning. Richard Carrier’s book Proving History also demonstrates that a number of intuitions we have about how to reason are validated by Bayes’ theorem. What a great day for philosophers of knowledge! Interestingly enough, Carrier also posted an article on a similar note about robots that can reason.
I also wanted to comment an argument that is becoming more and more common among apologists today. In the Marshall-Carrier debate, David Marshall says that there are tons of Christian miracles, and if even one of them is right, the Christian religion is thereby established. The same fallacious reasoning has also been used to support appearances of the virgin Mary. One Catholic had written that there were nearly 400 sightings of the virgin mary, and it seems unlikely that every single one would be false! I’ve even seen atheists make this kind of an argument before: there are millions of examples of horrible evil in the world, and if even one of those examples constitutes something that a good God would never allow, then atheism is thereby established.
The trouble is, this isn’t the right way to look at probability. What we should be asking is this: given that there millions of Catholics all over the world, is it that improbable that a few hundred would lie, hallucinate, or in some way be mistaken and think they’ve seen the great virgin? No. In fact, known facts about the frequency of hallucinators, attention-seeking fibbers, and human mistake-making already lead us to expect as much. To carry the analogy over to other Christian miracles, the millions of Christians who exist, combined with the millions of events that happen to each individual Christian, plus some well-established facts already entail that even if Christianity is false we will hear of some remarkable coincidences about prayers being answered, for example. The atheist argument is likewise invalid, because if one grants that God will allow certain forms of evil to exist, the world is so large that those forms of evil certainly will manifest themselves millions of times over, and as such even if atheism is false we would still expect to see millions of examples of horrendous evil, provided that one allows God will allow some forms of evil. I’ll add that, although this take on the problem of evil is fallacious, the problem of evil in general is in no way solved, because one still has to ask if God would really allow any evil at all, or even certain forms of suffering generally.
