The no evidence charge revisited

Loftus asks if there is any evidence for Christianity. Of course, he's not the only one, lots of people say that about religious beliefs, not that there is poor evidence, or that the evidence is outweighed, but that there is no evidence. 

Wouldn't it be an idea to come up with a concept of what we mean by evidence before we ask whether we have any? X is evidence for Y just in case Z? 

To me, X is evidence for Y just in case X is more likely to exist if Y than if not-Y. But now, if we go with that definition, then the existence of reports that Jesus was resurrected from the dead is unlikely given the claim that Christianity is false. After all, most people do not have people claiming they were resurrected after they died. (Not even Elvis Presley, though there are people who claim he never actually died). But we should expect it to be reported if Christianity is true, so, in and of itself, the existence of resurrection claims on behalf of Jesus are evidence that Christianity is true. Plug it into Bayes' theorem and it ups the probability. 

Now, you might say that that's crummy evidence, and in and of itself it surely wouldn't persuade much of anyone. But if you want to deny that it is evidence at all, you need to supplant my definition with one of your own. 

I am willing to embrace the logical consequence that the testimony to the Golden Plates is evidence for Mormonism. But my view would be that the weight of the evidence is against Mormonism, not that there is absolutely no evidence at all for it. I've, for a long time, been asking for a definition of evidence that allows us to draw the conclusion that there is no evidence for Christianity, a claim I would NOT make even about such patently false claims as Mormonism, or even Scientology. 

Why naturalism excludes the supernatural

The problem with naturalism excluding the supernatural is that, at least in one sense, it's trivially true. Of course if everything is natural, then the supernatural is excluded. But that doesn't tell me, by itself, what is natural and what is supernatural. If God could be a theoretical entity in a scientific explanation, then we could say that whatever appears in a scientific explanation is natural, and therefore God is a natural entity. If you say God can't be a theoretical entity in a scientific explanation, then you have to come up with characteristics of God that require God's exclusion.

What would physical proof of God look like?

Would would it be like to physically prove that there is a God? It seems to me that whatever appeared to us physically, we could draw the conclusion that whatever it is, it isn't God? It would, for example, have to occupy space, but God is not supposed to be a being with a location. 

The Stanford Encyclopedia Entry on Naturalism

Written by well-known naturalist defender David Papineau. 

A rebuttal to the wishful thinking objection

The Wishful Thinking Argument seems to be becoming more prevalent these days. My inclination is to say "circumstantial ad hominem" and be done with it. But it may not be quite that simple.

Here is a discussion of it.

Walls on what's wrong with Calvinism

Here. 

Vallicella on believing beyond the evidence

He considers it rational in many instances. Here. 

Law Contra Dawkins on the Value of Philosophy

Here. 

The Trouble with Materialism

A redated post.

This is a follow-up to my previous post, The Concept of Matter

I see a fundamental problem that is going to plague any materialist account of the mind. Materialists often piggy-back the case for materialism on the success of reductive analyses in science. But let's take one of the most successful scientific reductions, the reduction of heat in a gas to the mean kinetic energy of that gas. From one perspective, this reduction appears to explain heat away, in particular the element of heat that feels warm. By knowing that the air molecules are moving faster we can infer nothing about the fact that people are more likely to take their jackets off when that happens. They also feel warmer. But that, says science, is not an intrinsic feature of heat that is what happens to human minds in the face of heat. By siphoning off secondary qualities to the mind, the mechanistic reduction of heat is enabled. But when we get to the mind, we have no place to siphon of the "mental" properties.

Edward Feser writes:

One result of this is that materialists have, in the view of their critics, a tendency to give accounts of mental phenomena that leave out everything essential to them: qualia, consciousness, thought and intentionality get redefined in physicalistic terms, with the consequence that materialist analyses convey the impression that the materialist has changed the subject, and failed genuinely to explain the phenomenon the analysis was supposed to account for. This is arguably the deep source of the difficulties that have plagued materialist philosophies of mind. If the materialist conception of explanation entails always stripping away from the phenomenal to be accounted for anything that smacks of subjectivity, meaning, or mind-dependence, then a materialist “explanation” of the mind itself will naturally seem to strip away the very essence of the phenomena to be explained. Being, at bottom, attempts to explain the mental in terms that are intrinsically non-mental, such would-be explanations appear implicitly to deny the mental; that is to say, they end up being disguised forms of eliminative materialism. Some professedly non-eliminativist philosophers of mind come close to admitting this: Fodor, for instance, has famously written that “If aboutness (that is, intentionality) is real, it must really be something else.”

A Short Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford; Oneworld, 2005) pp. 172-173,

This results in an interesting phenomenon; materialist philosophers attempt to give an account of some mental phenomenon. But either they implicitly bring in the very concepts they are trying to explain materialistically, or they give an account of the mental phenomenon in which the phenomenon to be explained isn’t recognizable. A good example would be Richard Carrier’s critique of my book where time after time he claims that intentionality can be explained in physicalistic terms while using one intentional concept after another to explain intentionality!