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    The evidential standard required to establish that a mira... — Carmelics
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    Home/Natural Theology
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    The evidential standard required to establish that a miracle has occurred is higher than that required for other unusual events

    Natural TheologyTruth & Knowledge
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Unusual but naturally possible events (e.g., a healthy man dying suddenly) are improbable but not contrary to all experience
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    • 2.Miracles are contrary to all other experience and observation
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    • 3.The ultimate standard for judging miracle claims must reflect the strength of evidence against them
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Hume's criterion illicitly assumes the very conclusion it purports to establish by treating 'uniform experience' as closed to revision by testimony.
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    • 2.A genuinely open empiricist epistemology must allow sufficiently strong testimony to count as evidence that revises prior probability distributions, including near-universal ones.
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    • 3.Treating prior experience as lexically superior to testimonial evidence is a dogmatic asymmetry incompatible with Bayesian norms of rational belief updating.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.John Earman argues in 'Hume's Abject Failure' that Hume conflates the prior improbability of a miracle-type with the posterior probability given specific testimonial evidence.
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    • 2.Even very low prior probabilities can be overcome by sufficiently reliable independent witnesses, as standard Bayesian analysis of conjunctive testimony demonstrates.
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    • 3.Therefore the claim that miracle evidence must always fail a fixed evidential threshold confuses a static prior with the dynamic output of proper probabilistic inference.
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    Natural TheologyTruth & Knowledge

    Related

    A genuinely open empiricist epistemology must allow sufficiently strong testimon...Even very low prior probabilities can be overcome by sufficiently reliable indep...Hume's criterion illicitly assumes the very conclusion it purports to establish ...John Earman argues in 'Hume's Abject Failure' that Hume conflates the prior impr...
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    Miracles are contrary to all other experience and observationThe ultimate standard for judging miracle claims must reflect the strength of ev...Therefore the claim that miracle evidence must always fail a fixed evidential th...Treating prior experience as lexically superior to testimonial evidence is a dog...Unusual but naturally possible events (e.g., a healthy man dying suddenly) are i...

    Similar

    The ultimate standard for judging miracle claims must reflect the stre...85%When every explanation requires unusual events, the assumption of a mi...79%The assumption of a miracle can sometimes be the most rational explana...79%This equating of evidential standards is too restrictive — the require...77%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: hume-religion
    View source passageHide passage
    A law of nature, as Hume interprets it, involves a uniform regularity of events. We discover laws of nature on the basis of our experience of constant conjunctions of events or objects. An obvious example of this, provided by Hume, is that “all men must die” (EU, 11.12/114). It would, therefore, be “a miracle, that a dead man should come to life” because we have “uniform experience” that tells against such a claim (EU, 11.12/ 115). When we have uniform experience that confirms the existence of r
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit