First, i've enjoyed reading your posts, Doulos.
Glad to have you on board.
Doulos:
It defies modern standards of evidence
Not quite. It doesn’t beat modern standards, or sidestep modern standards, or ascend above modern standards, or defy them like a righteous peasant before a tyrant king. It fails to meet modern standards.
What you're talking about is whether the evidence is accepted, which is a different question.
This is the thing. What you posted, and what I posted are not evidence, but the claims for which we need evidence.
The bible claims a man died and was resurrected. There needs to be evidence for this. If it says this on page 3, then on page 6 it says, “Yeah, what happened on page 3 is totally true.” That is not corroborating evidence.
If Dr. Robert Smith, Professor Erin Flieslots and yourself give up your jobs and highly promising art careers to stand behind your 300 page document, it would add weight to your contention.
If your contention does not lead to material gain, but rather ostracism, persecution and no stars in kindergarten, that too would weigh.
This would only speak to our conviction, or alternatively how far we are willing to go to perpetuate a hoax. In the case of religion, I have no doubt at all that people sincerely believe the things they say about Jesus and the afterlife. But really, really, REALLY believing a thing is not the same as that belief being true. And that wouldn’t change if you lost your job, moved to the return address listed for anti-ion-thrust industries, divorced your wife for not trusting in the document, or started murdering hobos so you could make a launch pad out of their tanned and stretched hides.
All of that is evidence that you BELIEVE what you say you believe. Not that what you believe is TRUE.
If hundreds of people who are not in your employ also stand behind your testimony, that too would add to the weight of your evidence.
If you and those others who witnessed it accepted death and torture for no apparent gain, merely to stand behind the truth of what you saw, that too would add to the strength of your witness.
People are convinced of things all the time without evidence. A persuasive argument is not evidence. Indoctrination is not evidence. An a-priori bias is not evidence. The people who might join on and donate money to the anti-ion thrust project will have done so on the basis of the 300 page document comprised of nothing but unfamiliar, vaguely-credible sounding jargon, and page after page of unsubstantiated assertions.
They might in turn write their own documents extolling the virtues of the anti-ion thrust drive without my supervision. They might envision new arrangements of hardware, or even more efficient versions of the device. They might say that they have “proven conclusively” that the system is better than the internal combustion engine. They might start to teach classes on my invention, all on the basis of this one document.
All that additional content, not generated by me or my employees, is still nothing but unfounded assertion. It would not matter if the whole planet believed or was convinced by this persuasive argument, it still does not equate to evidence.
Part of the extraordinaryness of the evidence lies in the reliability of the people who espouse it. We live in a world where few people demonstrate real strength of chracter, and I include many of our popular religious leaders in this failure. Strength of conviction does not equal truth, but especially when it stands firm till the end, it does deserve a careful look.
This again only speaks to the PRESENCE of the belief. Not the VERACITY of the belief. Having an outstanding brand of loyalty to your friends, caring for animals, looking after the weak, sick, old and young, none of this automatically equips a person with a great bull-shit detector. They are different skills, and good people can be as wrong in their tightly held beliefs as bad people.
Interbane:
In my experience, people who support the bible want extremely low standards of support for their belief to be accepted.
Doulos:
I am within your experience Interbane.
Have I demonstrated low levels of proof?
This is exactly what we are discussing. You are asserting that the claims are evidence of the things which they are claiming. This is a very substantial misunderstanding of evidence.
You're confusing the concept of proof and evidence with whether that proof and evidence has universal application. You're essentially saying that IF it is sufficient proof and evidence for you, it must also be sufficient proof and evidence for me.
Which is why the best evidence is that which cannot be spun. Which is why evidence should be factual, verifiable, and can be discovered independent of someone’s a-priori biases. Which means that whether you want to believe in it or not, if you look where others have indicated there will be evidence, there it will be!
Facts are just data, until they can collectively indicate one hypothesis over another at which point they can become evidence. This is the evidence you need to convince someone of an incredible claim. Evidence is evidence regardless of someone’s acceptance of it. Evidence is a thing which exists independent of our discovery.
Proof is appropriate for mathematics and in the court of law, but a scientist will not use the word proven when speaking accurately, and in that vein, I also am not thinking of proof in these discussions, but evidence which indicates one thing over another.
You are pointing at evidence OF the belief and calling it evidence FOR the belief, which it simply is not.
Interbane:
Fire up that ion drive!
AHEM….. ANTI-ion drive.
Interbane:
You're quite bright, and you have plenty of understanding. But I think you're with the majority of humanity in your misunderstanding of how difficult it is to justify support for a belief or claim.
Most people rely on fallacious reasoning because they have no idea it's fallacious. It seems reasonable that since a million people believe something, that should lend support to that belief, right? But you truly need to dig deeper. It doesn't support the belief. It is secondary to the belief, unless the belief is about the million people.
I agree with interbane on this 100%.
I also agree that you seem to be a very intelligent person. But like being a good person (which I’m sure you are that as well) being intelligent is likewise no foil against an uncontested bias.
You have demonstrated a misunderstanding of what your evidence indicates. You have presented evidence OF belief and called it evidence FOR belief. You need to get that straightened out to see this clearly.