Jeff Lowder on "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" here.
On another blog, FideCogitActio, some theists of a "classical" stripe (that's to say, like Brian Davies, Edward Feser) are criticisng the Evil God Challenge (or I suppose, trying to show how it can be met, or sidestepped). The main post includes this: In book I, chapter 39 , Aquinas argues that “there cannot be evil in God” (in Deo non potest esse malum). Atheists like Law must face the fact that, if the words are to retain any sense, “God” simply cannot be “evil”. As my comments in the thread at Feser’s blog aimed to show, despite how much he mocks “the privation theory of evil,” Law himself cannot escape its logic: his entire argument requires that the world ought to appear less evil if it is to be taken as evidence of a good God. Even though he spurns the idea that evil is a privation of good, his account of an evil world is parasitic on a good ideal; this is no surprise, though, since all evil is parasitic on good ( SCG I, 11 ). Based on the conclusions of se...
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But the elephant in the room with all of Craig's Resurrection arguments is that he simply assumes that the Biblical account is unequivocally established as historical fact. Nothing could be farther from the truth, and that's where, in my judgment at least, Craig really needs to be hammered on these arguments.
What led you to that conclusion?
I think he claims that 75% of scholars believe the tomb was empty.
You can re-word Bayes Theorem not-so-mathematically to say that to find the probability of H when you have E you divide:
A. All the times you'd have E because of H
by
B. All the times you'd have E, whether because of H or not
If H were very, very unlikely (ie "extraordinary!") then the times you'd get E because of H would be very, very, few. This makes the probability of H (A/B) smaller and smaller the more and more extraordinary H is.
A/B would still be a large number if B were very, very small. The smaller A (the more extraordinary H) then the smaller B would need to be: ie the frequency of E from whatever cause would need to be lower and lower the more extraordinary H was.
And very, very infrequent events are, when they happen, "extraordinary!".
WLC, in his response, seems to take "extraordinary" evidence as "extraordinarily reliable evidence" and contrast this with "evidence that would be unlikely to arise if the hypothesis were not true". But this contrast is a sleight. "Reliable" evidence is rarely wrong: that is to say reliable evidence is evidence that would be unlikely to arise if the hypothesis were not true".
Isn't it just as straightforward to concede that what is extraordinary about extraordinary claims is that they violate our scientific knowledge of how reality works? They say sicence is not justifiable by introspection and logical a priori arguments. But can't you turn it around, say that cumulatively science now justifies the metaphysics of naturalism? That it is the notion of logical a priori proof that philosophy has refuted, leaving only experiential, after the fact justification (ex posteriori, I think the phrase is?) Yes that implies that only science produces knowledge in the sense of justified true (corresponding to reality) belief?