I was reading a post by Don Severs over on Enough’s Enough entitled (deliberately confusingly, methinks) “Is it wrong to be resistant to opposing Anti-supernaturalism? Or not?”. The post talks about “anti-supernatural bias”, as if atheists reject the claims of the Bible out of presupposition (which can happen) rather than the fact that they are just ridiculous and completely improbable. We can even use objective methodology to arrive at such conclusions (Bayes’s Theorem).
In this short post, all I want to do is quickly point out the double standards of theists in the context of their accusation. for example, if a theist lost their car keys, they might list these explanations:
1) I misplaced them, forgetting where I put them
2) My partner took them
3) My child has hidden them as a prank
4) My cat has knocked them onto the floor somewhere
etc.
What the theist does NOT do is make a list as follows:
1) I misplaced them, forgetting where I put them
2) My partner took them
3) My child has hidden them as a prank
4) My cat has knocked them onto the floor somewhere
5) A poltergeist took them
6) Satan ordered a demonic minion to steal into my house and take the keys, hiding them, most diabolically, under the flowerpot
and so on.
Why does the theist not do this? Because these are wildly improbable claims. So it comes down to strength of evidence using something like Bayes’s again. Can the exceptionally low prior probability of such a wild claim be countered by the fantastically superior and indubitable evidence, which is of the highest quality? the answer is always, it appears, no. And this is the same historiographical problem that the claims of the Bible face in trying to work in tandem with the evidential quality of the Bible.
Theists have double standards in that they recognise the incredibly low prior probabilities of such supernatural claims, and utilise this conclusion on a daily basis. but when it comes to the Bible, they throw that out of the window and use a completely different epistemological method.
Which is, in my book, known as double standards.
