mdbvp,
I don't know if I have misunderstood your counter to William Lane Craig's response to the often-used expression that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," nor do I recall seeing the video you referenced, but if I'm not mistaken, William Lane Craig goes into some detail over this in his book 'Reasonable Faith,' and what he is talking about is not his own mathematical calculations.
You are indeed misunderstanding it, and I will be happy to explain again how this is so, if you are interesting in learning. The video I referenced you can watch, because I provided you a link to it in my original post, in the very first sentence of the post. Here is the link again for you, anyway:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HgRWvqf-wM, because I like being helpful, and I even just verified that the video still works. The video title is "Don't Extraordinary Claims Need Extraordinary Evidence?" hosted by "drcraigvideos" on Youtube. I would like for you to watch the video, so you can actually see for yourself what Dr. Craig was recorded saying that I am specifically arguing against right here. The clip I have linked is less than 3 minutes long, and it's just Dr. Craig himself speaking in his own words exactly the thing I am refuting here.
On page 273 of that book, Craig says: There is a slogan beloved in the free thought subculture that "extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence."
He got it a little bit wrong there. The phrase is extraordinary *claims* require extraordinary evidence, not extraordinary *events*. Although claims about extraordinary events would apply. It's just a semantic nitpick, I admit, but events are things that have really happened, whether or not we have evidence to know they happened, and claims are just words that are said about things that may or may not have happened. I hope you can see the difference there. I think it's important because of the fact that claims can be made about things that have not really happened, and if we know that an event happened, then it's only because we have lots of really good evidence to prove it.
In case it still doesn't make sense, let me try to explain further: An extraordinary event is something that has happened that is unusual, or uncommon, but there may be enough evidence for it to make the claim that it happened an unextraordinary claim. For example, scientists have been making extraordinary discoveries about the universe, which are considered extraordinary because they are unprecedented. Einstein's formulation of the relativity equation is a prime example. But since extraordinary evidence has been discovered to support his theory, in the form of repeatedly testable data that accurate predictions can be made from, it is no longer considered an extraordinary claim for any person to say that E=MC^2, because most physicists agree it is true, and for good reasons, because the math actually works, both logically on paper and empirically in the real world. Plus it has become common knowledge, at least at a basic level, even among non-scientists. It is now considered extraordinary among scientists, and for any people who study it at all, for anyone to make any claims that directly contradict Einstein's relativity, even though the discovery itself was, historically, an extraordinary one at the time it was made. In short, very few people who know anything about physics are going to call you crazy for agreeing that Einstein was right about the relationship between energy and matter. I hope that makes sense.
In order to establish the occurrence of a highly improbable event, one need not have lots of evidence."
This statement is patently false and absurd, as I have already thoroughly demonstrated. Not to mention, it's actually quite scary to know that a man of his education could believe such a thing, and believe it so strongly. To further demonstrate how wrong this is, all one needs to do is, for example, imagine Dr. Craig in the position of a police detective who chooses to believe that one eye-witness's elaborately detailed claim that a missing person was abducted by aliens is true despite the lack of hard evidence that can be found to support that claim. Note that a single eye-witness's testimony would fully qualify as "not a lot of evidence", in Dr. Craig's own words. But maybe the person who made the claim in this scenario is someone the hypothetical detective really likes and trusts for personal reasons, and the detective doesn't want to believe that person could be so wrong about something so important. Also, it was clear to the detective that the person who told the story really believed that he saw everything he said he saw, and had no logical reason to lie about it. Of course, the person could have been mistaken, but as a result of his subjective bias, Detective Craig would call of the search for the missing person, refusing to look for any more evidence of what really happened, choosing instead to just wait and hope that the aliens will be kind enough to return the abducted person some day.
And as a result of his irrational negligence, the victim may never actually be found, and whoever may be truly responsible for the abduction may never be apprehended, and may therefore remain free to abduct someone else. I for one would certainly be very unhappy to have someone with Dr. Craig's level of logic skills working for the police department, especially if I was the friend or relative of a missing person whose case he had been assigned. Wouldn't you? Please consider the fact, as you just proved yourself by quoting his own words, that he really doesn't believe that strong evidence is needed for him to be convinced of "highly improbable" events. That is just nuts, because that is exactly the same thing as him outright admitting that he is totally and hopelessly gullible, and I have no reason to doubt his own words about that.
And he bases that statement on an example of Baye's Theorem on page 271.
I have already been given plenty enough reason, via watching videos of Dr. Craig speak at length on the subjects that he is most passionate about, to suspect that his math skills are not anywhere near good enough to correctly evaluate any form of math equations that might be too complex for me to understand myself, even though I fully admit that I am nowhere close to being a math genius. So whatever he might have to say about Baye's Theorem, whatever that is, is not going to be very convincing to me, especially on the subject of a godman dying and being resurrected by supernatural means, which is an inherently contradictory claim that has nothing to do with math, and considering alone what he has to say about simple subjects in simple terms that I can fully understand and totally disagree with him about.
What is the plainest and simplest evidence you would need to know that I was alive? All you would need would be to see me up and about walking around. No extraordinary evidence required.
Wrong. This is getting it backwards, again. Seeing another person up and walking around, especially if you can establish that other people that you can also see, can also see all the other people that you can see, is exactly what extraordinary evidence is. You keep getting it wrong, because you're falsely assuming that evidence that is easily accessible is automatically not extraordinary, when it actually is, when you consider the context in which the word is being used. But maybe I can help. Maybe this is where you're getting confused: the context of the word "extraordinary" when used in the sentence "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is simply used to mean "a large amount of" evidence. That's really all there is to it.
And I'll give you this, maybe the way it's worded is more confusing than it needs to be for people who don't already understand the concept, and maybe it's just worded that way to make it sound more catchy. But I admit that maybe the end result of it causing more confusion than necessary should indicate that the phrase should be worded more plainly in the future to avoid causing that confusion. Because, honestly, I can kind of see now why you're getting it wrong, since the word "extraordinary" kind of has a dual meaning in modern day usage. Note that the word is often used to convey the sheer greatness of something, rather than just the rareness of something, which in the latter case is what the word was originally intended to mean. And that could very well be an error in semantics, for those of us to like to use it in the former context. To be more grammatically correct, I would submit that the phrase should perhaps be re-worded to something more like: "all claims that are ever made about anything always require a great abundance of evidence to initially prove are correct". I hope that makes more sense, although it still contradicts what both of us have quoted Dr. Craig saying.
And obviously, those of us who reject Christianity are at the position where we do not believe that any honestly good or verifiable evidence has ever been provided to substantiate any of the claims made about the figure of Jesus in the bible. And in my case, personally, I am actually at the position where the arguments of Christ mythicists, who suggest it is likely that Jesus was never even a real person at all, make the most logical sense to me of all the arguments I've heard on the subject.
Even if I had been dead before, one look at me would settle the matter that I was now alive.
This is not true either, since it's a proven fact that people can hallucinate, or simply imagine things, very easily in some cases, especially if they are driven to by high emotions that have gone unchecked by objective rationality, and mass hysteria is also a documented occurrence, which is commonly exacerbated by religious or pseudo-scientific beliefs. For example, there are groups of people who claim to share common experiences involving contact with aliens, and there have been cults that have driven people to do things that the rest of us rightly think are insane. It's also not unheard of for a grieving person to believe that they are sensing or otherwise communicating with the spirit or ghost of a deceased loved one. Notice how people claiming to be physics are able to use this to their advantage on a regular basis to con large quantities of susceptible people all over the world, by making them truly believe that their powers are real, and get them to pay money for their phony services by preying on the emotions of those who have tragically lost loved ones and are traumatized by that loss.
Another good example of how easily people are able to fool themselves is the fact that there are many people who swear that they are really, physically helped, and even cured of serious ailments by taking homeopathic "remedies", even though homeopathy has been thoroughly debunked over and over by the very simplest of scientific tests that anyone in the world can do. So any good feelings that believers in this obvious form of pseudo-science may get after ingesting homeopathic products is in fact purely a placebo effect that is not doing anything in reality to help them with any actual problems they have with their bodies, even though it really feels to them like it is happening. The confirmation bias is a powerful aspect of our imaginations, and it's the reason why we are forced to use double and sometimes even triple-blind studies to get accurate and trustworthy results from medical trials.
At any rate, W.L. Craig's statement is not based on any mathematical calculations.
I agree. It's also not based on any sound form of logic, either.
Perhaps he can be found in error on some other basis, but it has nothing to do with any probability calculation mistakes he has made because that's not what he's basing his statements on.
I wonder what you think he is basing his statements on, then. Could it simply be faith? I think so. And I define faith as an irrational conviction based on emotion in the absence of objectively verifiable evidence, and which often persists in contradiction to such evidence that exists against the claim. And it disturbs me when people want to talk about faith like it's something they deserve to be praised for, when essentially it's just another word for gullibility, in my view.
