Don Page is one of the world’s leading experts on theoretical gravitational physics and cosmology, as well as a previous guest-blogger around these parts. (There are more world experts in theoretical physics than there are people who have guest-blogged for me, so the latter category is arguably a greater honor.) He is also, somewhat unusually among cosmologists, an Evangelical Christian, and interested in the relationship between cosmology and religious belief.
Longtime readers may have noticed that I’m not very religious myself. But I’m always willing to engage with people with whom I disagree, if the conversation is substantive and proceeds in good faith. I may disagree with Don, but I’m always interested in what he has to say.
Recently Don watched the debate I had with William Lane Craig on “God and Cosmology.” I think these remarks from a devoted Christian who understands the cosmology very well will be of interest to people on either side of the debate.
Open letter to Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig:
I just ran across your debate at the 2014 Greer-Heard Forum, and greatly enjoyed listening to it. Since my own views are often a combination of one or the others of yours (though they also often differ from both of yours), I thought I would give some comments.
I tend to be skeptical of philosophical arguments for the existence of God, since I do not believe there are any that start with assumptions universally accepted. My own attempt at what I call the Optimal Argument for God (one, two, three, four), certainly makes assumptions that only a small fraction of people, and perhaps even only a small fraction of theists, believe in, such as my assumption that the world is the best possible. You know that well, Sean, from my provocative seminar at Caltech in November on “Cosmological Ontology and Epistemology” that included this argument at the end.
I mainly think philosophical arguments might be useful for motivating someone to think about theism in a new way and perhaps raise the prior probability someone might assign to theism. I do think that if one assigns theism not too low a prior probability, the historical evidence for the life, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus can lead to a posterior probability for theism (and for Jesus being the Son of God) being quite high. But if one thinks a priori that theism is extremely improbable, then the historical evidence for the Resurrection would be discounted and not lead to a high posterior probability for theism.
I tend to favor a Bayesian approach in which one assigns prior probabilities based on simplicity and then weights these by the likelihoods (the probabilities that different theories assign to our observations) to get, when the product is normalized by dividing by the sum of the products for all theories, the posterior probabilities for the theories. Of course, this is an idealized approach, since we don’t yet have _any_ plausible complete theory for the universe to calculate the conditional probability, given the theory, of any realistic observation.
For me, when I consider evidence from cosmology and physics, I find it remarkable that it seems consistent with all we know that the ultimate theory might be extremely simple and yet lead to sentient experiences such as ours. A Bayesian analysis with Occam’s razor to assign simpler theories higher prior probabilities would favor simpler theories, but the observations we do make preclude the simplest possible theories (such as the theory that nothing concrete exists, or the theory that all logically possible sentient experiences occur with equal probability, which would presumably make ours have zero probability in this theory if there are indeed an infinite number of logically possible sentient experiences). So it seems mysterious why the best theory of the universe (which we don’t have yet) may be extremely simple but yet not maximally simple. I don’t see that naturalism would explain this, though it could well accept it as a brute fact.
One might think that adding the hypothesis that the world (all that exists) includes God would make the theory for the entire world more complex, but it is not obvious that is the case, since it might be that God is even simpler than the universe, so that one would get a simpler explanation starting with God than starting with just the universe. But I agree with your point, Sean, that theism is not very well defined, since for a complete theory of a world that includes God, one would need to specify the nature of God.
For example, I have postulated that God loves mathematical elegance, as well as loving to create sentient beings, so something like this might explain both why the laws of physics, and the quantum state of the universe, and the rules for getting from those to the probabilities of observations, seem much simpler than they might have been, and why there are sentient experiences with a rather high degree of order. However, I admit there is a lot of logically possible variation on what God’s nature could be, so that it seems to me that at least we humans have to take that nature as a brute fact, analogous to the way naturalists would have to take the laws of physics and other aspects of the natural universe as brute facts. I don’t think either theism or naturalism solves this problem, so it seems to me rather a matter of faith which makes more progress toward solving it. That is, theism per se cannot deduce from purely a priori reasoning the full nature of God (e.g., when would He prefer to maintain elegant laws of physics, and when would He prefer to cure someone from cancer in a truly miraculous way that changes the laws of physics), and naturalism per se cannot deduce from purely a priori reasoning the full nature of the universe (e.g., what are the dynamical laws of physics, what are the boundary conditions, what are the rules for getting probabilities, etc.).
In view of these beliefs of mine, I am not convinced that most philosophical arguments for the existence of God are very persuasive. In particular, I am highly skeptical of the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which I shall quote here from one of your slides, Bill:
- If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause
which brought the universe into existence. - The universe began to exist.
- Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the
universe into existence.
I do not believe that the first premise is metaphysically necessary, and I am also not at all sure that our universe had a beginning. (I do believe that the first premise is true in the actual world, since I do believe that God exists as a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence, but I do not see that this premise is true in all logically possible worlds.)
I agree with you, Sean, that we learn our ideas of causation from the lawfulness of nature and from the directionality of the second law of thermodynamics that lead to the commonsense view that causes precede their effects (or occur at the same time, if Bill insists). But then we have learned that the laws of physics are CPT invariant (essentially the same in each direction of time), so in a fundamental sense the future determines the past just as much as the past determines the future. I agree that just from our experience of the one-way causation we observe within the universe, which is just a merely effective description and not fundamental, we cannot logically derive the conclusion that the entire universe has a cause, since the effective unidirectional causation we commonly experience is something just within the universe and need not be extrapolated to a putative cause for the universe as a whole.
However, since to me the totality of data, including the historical evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus, is most simply explained by postulating that there is a God who is the Creator of the universe, I do believe by faith that God is indeed the cause of the universe (and indeed the ultimate Cause and Determiner of everything concrete, that is, everything not logically necessary, other than Himself—and I do believe, like Richard Swinburne, that God is concrete and not logically necessary, the ultimate brute fact). I have a hunch that God created a universe with apparent unidirectional causation in order to give His creatures some dim picture of the true causation that He has in relation to the universe He has created. But I do not see any metaphysical necessity in this.
(I have a similar hunch that God created us with the illusion of libertarian free will as a picture of the true freedom that He has, though it might be that if God does only what is best and if there is a unique best, one could object that even God does not have libertarian free will, but in any case I would believe that it would be better for God to do what is best than to have any putative libertarian free will, for which I see little value. Yet another hunch I have is that it is actually sentient experiences rather than created individual `persons’ that are fundamental, but God created our experiences to include beliefs that we are individual persons to give us a dim image of Him as the one true Person, or Persons in the Trinitarian perspective. However, this would take us too far afield from my points here.)
On the issue of whether our universe had a beginning, besides not believing that this is at all relevant to the issue of whether or not God exists, I agreed almost entirely with Sean’s points rather than yours, Bill, on this issue. We simply do not know whether or not our universe had a beginning, but there are certainly models, such as Sean’s with Jennifer Chen (hep-th/0410270 and gr-qc/0505037), that do not have a beginning. I myself have also favored a bounce model in which there is something like a quantum superposition of semiclassical spacetimes (though I don’t really think quantum theory gives probabilities for histories, just for sentient experiences), in most of which the universe contracts from past infinite time and then has a bounce to expand forever. In as much as these spacetimes are approximately classical throughout, there is a time in each that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity.
In this model, as in Sean’s, the coarse-grained entropy has a minimum at or near the time when the spatial volume is minimized (at the bounce), so that entropy increases in both directions away from the bounce. At times well away from the bounce, there is a strong arrow of time, so that in those regions if one defines the direction of time as the direction in which entropy increases, it is rather as if there are two expanding universes both coming out from the bounce. But it is erroneous to say that the bounce is a true beginning of time, since the structure of spacetime there (at least if there is an approximately classical spacetime there) has timelike curves going from a proper time of minus infinity through the bounce (say at proper time zero) and then to proper time of plus infinity. That is, there are worldlines that go through the bounce and have no beginning there, so it seems rather artificial to say the universe began at the bounce that is in the middle just because it happens to be when the entropy is minimized. I think Sean made this point very well in the debate.
In other words, in this model there is a time coordinate t on the spacetime (say the proper time t of a suitable collection of worldlines, such as timelike geodesics that are orthogonal to the extremal hypersurface of minimal spatial volume at the bounce, where one sets 
) that goes from minus infinity to plus infinity with no beginning (and no end). Well away from the bounce, there is a different thermodynamic time 
(increasing with increasing entropy) that for 
increases with 
but for 
decreases with (so there becomes more positive as becomes more negative). For example, if one said that is only defined for 
, say, one might have something like
the positive square root of one less than the square of . This thermodynamic time only has real values when the absolute value of the coordinate time , that is, 
, is no smaller than 1, and then increases with .
One might say that begins (at 
) at 
(for one universe that has growing as decreases from -1 to minus infinity) and at 
(for another universe that has growing as increases from +1 to plus infinity). But since the spacetime exists for all real , with respect to that time arising from general relativity there is no beginning and no end of this universe.
Bill, I think you also objected to a model like this by saying that it violates the second law (presumably in the sense that the coarse-grained entropy does not increase monotonically with for all real ). But if we exist for 
(or for 
; there would be no change to the overall behavior if were replaced with 
, since the laws are CPT invariant), then we would be in a region where the second law is observed to hold, with coarse-grained entropy increasing with 
(or with 
if ). A viable bounce model would have it so that it would be very difficult or impossible for us directly to observe the bounce region where the second law does not apply, so our observations would be in accord with the second law even though it does not apply for the entire universe. I think I objected to both of your probability estimates for various things regarding fine tuning. Probabilities depend on the theory or model, so without a definite model, one cannot claim that the probability for some feature like fine tuning is small. It was correct to list me among the people believing in fine tuning in the sense that I do believe that there are parameters that naively are far different from what one might expect (such as the cosmological constant), but I agreed with the sentiment of the woman questioner that there are not really probabilities in the absence of a model. Bill, you referred to using some “non-standard” probabilities, as if there is just one standard. But there isn’t. As Sean noted, there are models giving high probabilities for Boltzmann brain observations (which I think count strongly against such models) and other models giving low probabilities for them (which on this regard fits our ordered observations statistically). We don’t yet know the best model for avoiding Boltzmann brain domination (and, Sean, you know that I am skeptical of your recent ingenious model), though just because I am skeptical of this particular model does not imply that I believe that the problem is insoluble or gives evidence against a multiverse; in any case it seems also to be a problem that needs to be dealt with even in just single-universe models.
Sean, at one point your referred to some naive estimate of the very low probability of the flatness of the universe, but then you said that we now know the probability of flatness is very near unity. This is indeed true, as Stephen Hawking and I showed long ago (“How Probable Is Inflation?” Nuclear Physics B298, 789-809, 1988) when we used the canonical measure for classical universes, but one could get other probabilities by using other measures from other models.
In summary, I think the evidence from fine tuning is ambiguous, since the probabilities depend on the models. Whether or not the universe had a beginning also is ambiguous, and furthermore I don’t see that it has any relevance to the question of whether or not God exists, since the first premise of the Kalam cosmological argument is highly dubious metaphysically, depending on contingent intuitions we have developed from living in a universe with relatively simple laws of physics and with a strong thermodynamic arrow of time.
Nevertheless, in view of all the evidence, including both the elegance of the laws of physics, the existence of orderly sentient experiences, and the historical evidence, I do believe that God exists and think the world is actually simpler if it contains God than it would have been without God. So I do not agree with you, Sean, that naturalism is simpler than theism, though I can appreciate how you might view it that way.
Best wishes,
Don
What Kashyap Vasavada may not know is that virtually the same -set- of modelling techniques used in strategy is also used in organization behavior. Those same modelling techniques (\game theory, linear regression, differential equations-based modelling, et cetera) are also used in sociology. And so on.
So, if you understand research methods in general, you can easily jump between areas *in* the *social* *sciences*. This is much harder to do in such fields as mathematics (mathematicians in topology often have no idea what mathematicians in combinatorics are even doing because these are two very different fields of math).
dude, you can edit your comments if you chill out and read over what you wrote. There’s an edit button, but it has to be the same comment. No harm in thinking about what you write before you submit it.
Hahaha… will do. And point taken.
But there is no “edit” button for me. I am working off of an iPad. I am quite sure that my comments (with the suggested edits) have turned out just fine.
So nothing to be done.
For this thread, I have posted this to the Buddhist Debate Group to see if anyone else has that opinion. No one else does. Given that there are over 10,000 members on that Group, your opinion is definitely a minority opinion. By far.
A rule for other commenters: do not post generic comments purporting to refute a whole thread of comments. Refute specific points or do not try to refute at all. It is inappropriate, and improper debating etiquette.
Using Facebook group to substantiate is just another way to work around this sort of debating attack.
Signed,
James Bonilla, with an IQ still well over 150
With metta, let us keep our minds clear. We are now contemplating the Third Noble Truth at the Buddhist Debate Group. Let us resume discussions after said contemplative stilling of the mind. Let us have a five minute timeout, please.
Much metta to all. đ đ
Five minutes up.
The problem is that there *is* no edit button on this blog on my iPad. I, of course, never have this problem on the Buddhist Debate Group Facebook group. Facebook is better and more appropriate technology for debates such as this one since you can easily go back and fix minor typos there.
And sorry for an error of mine that turns out to be totally inconsequential: there are only 9652 members on that group. Still, 1 versus 9652 – Alice, you have just been blown out of the water here. I am super-careful about comments and am very careful with facts. You really want to be careful before you try to argue against me. I have only lost once in a debate over the past 5 years and that was to a person with an IQ of over 190. And I say all this with a great deal of metta, maitri, proffered friendship.
Don Page’s arguments have also been blown out of the water. Just to keep track of what is what.
Dear James Bonilla, in view of your statement a few comments back, “do not post generic comments purporting to refute a whole thread of comments,” I would like to see which of my “arguments have also been blown out of the water.”
Well, I did see some counter-arguments you made earlier this Easter weekend to some specific arguments of mine, which I shall try to answer after finishing some emails.
Dear Don,
Thank you for kindly engaging on this topic.
Roughly, it would say that if one found that the laws of physics are obeyed N times in a row without fail, with this prior one might expect the first failure to occur after order N more observations.
The assertion that a result in physics can be taken to be different from a result in mathematics is what is under contention here.
Let me argue it a different way. You are claiming that N more observations are needed. I don’t believe that to be the case. (We can think of an experiment E involving balls rolling down a plane as a working example and use this example throughout this discussion. So, we have balls rolling down a plane. We aim to test the following: “Do they accelerate as they fall?”) If you have N observations and the possibility of an error with each observation is p (say, 0.1%), then: the net probability of an error in N observations – assuming independence – is P(N) = p^N. This can, in practice, be made very, very small. If P(N) is made to be, say, 1 in 10^30, then the chances of the error are so small even compared to the lifetime of the universe that the probability that there may have been an error is, for all practical purposes, worth ignoring (Noting that the ball takes more than a second to fall down the plane).
With metta for your intent to engage in this topic putting aside considerations of religion and sect . đ đ
Wearing my hat as a mathematician (and so I will deploy mathematical terms in this comment):
The main issue at hand is that the Bible is not even internally consistent. It is hard (no, impossible) for someone like me who values intellectual honesty to claim to believe in the Bible. It is the same as claiming to believe that 1 equals 2. The Bible lacks the property of “internal consistency”.
I would add that while certain instances of “failure of logic” (to be really precise – a failure of the property of internal consistency in Georg Cantor’s naive set theory) have been noted, these do not result in mathematics itself being considered inconsistent. Bertrand Russell’s 1901 discovery of the paradox that bears his name – Russell’s paradox – comes to mind. These issues have been remedied. Recall that “internal consistency” in mathematics refers to a lack of mathematical contradictions within a system.
Now, let me wear my hat as a physicist (and so will deploy language from physics as part of this comment):
You are claiming that a series of N observations is not enough to consider a result in physics to be a true result. Well, not if you set up the experiment correctly. So, how *does* one setup an experiment correctly?
Here is an example – this is straight up Second Law of Thermodynamics stuff.
-+-
L1: A hot object when placed against a cold object will get colder.
Take a hot object made of iron (Fe) with surface area 1 meter squared at a temperature of 100 degrees Celsius. Take a cold object with the same surface area (1 meter squared) and made of the same material (Fe) maintained at 0 degrees Celsius.
It is possible that L1 is violated, but the chances – even without doing any calculations – are very low. That is, it is possible that the hot object will spontaneously get hotter when placed in contact with the cold object. However, the chances of that happening are so low that it can be, for all practical purposes, ignored.
-+-
What you are doing: you are claiming that N more observations may be needed.
What you should be doing: looking at how the experiment itself is set up. One ought to look to the methodology of the experiment itself. If the experiment is set up correctly, it may be possible to have error values that are very, very low. That – the methodology of the experiment – is what enables physicists to make certain types of grand claims (“the chances of an error in this experiment are less than than 1 in 10^30. So even if you had run this experiment every second from the time the Universe was created, you would not have encountered a single failure.”)
The same way that one can reasonably conclude that the angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees, one can also reasonably conclude that many laws of physics are, for all practical purposes, inviolable.
Dear James Bonilla:
I am glad that you know about Buddhism and are a follower of Buddhism. As you know, Buddhism arose in India as an offshoot of Hinduism. There are numerous similarities. In fact many Hindus regard Buddha as an avatar. As I mentioned, a true Hindu has nothing against any religion and would accept that there are thousands of paths leading to God and everybody has right to follow his chosen path. In fact, even within Hinduism, there are several recommended paths to lead a spiritual life. The particular path you choose depends on your background and stage at which you are in advancement towards spiritual life. You do not recommend the same physics book to primary school students and Ph.D. physicists!! As for having discussions with Anand Manikutty, sorry I do not want to waste my time!! There are close to a billion Hindus and there are bound to be different opinions. As I mentioned, I have found reliable important sources which are authorities in Hindu religion. These people have studied hard, understood the scriptures and lead spiritual life. To repeat, once you have found sources like books and lectures of Nobel Laureates to know physics, you do not want to go back to a community college teacher!!
I think, we are not getting anywhere in this dialogue. So we will close it with agreeing to disagree.
I thank you for your interest in Hinduism.
James,
With respect, be weary of bringing too many different points of contention to the table at once. Don’s pretty alone in defending “team theist” in these hostile waters hah (which he has been kind to do), so there’s a limit on how many points can be addressed due to time alone.
—
Don,
Speaking of points, you seem to be very resistant to engaging a couple of things:
1) We know too little about god to say anything meaningful about his simplicity in any metric, and so, if disjointed from miracles, faith in this must be preferential rather than evidential. I know you do believe in miracles and must take that into account, but I’m trying to knock this out as a prior for supporting miracles to avoid circular reasoning.
2) Our evidence for the resurrection is on par with various other supernatural claims (other religions, UFO’s, government conspiracies, bigfoot, etc.). Some of these have tangible physical evidence beyond hearsay, whereas we only have hearsay of the resurrection. Why then believe in the resurrection instead these others? I know the initial conversation was largely devoid of this, but it seems to me you’ve acknowledge how crucial miracles are to your claims. If either side is convinced on this, it seems the cat is in the bag.
James Bonilla wrote April 3, 2015 at 10:36 am that my theistic assumptions include several things, which he listed as H1 (God’s omnipresence), H2 (omnipotence), H3 (all-knowing), H-A1 (Virgin Birth) and H-A2 (Resurrection). I also assumed that God does what is best, and that what is best balances His happiness over elegant laws of physics and creaturely happiness. I do agree that these assumptions are more than “one extra bit of information.” I assigned M bits to them. But I then argued that it is plausible that this is less than the N bits needed to give complete naturalistic theory of the universe. So James’ argument does not refute mine, though I can understand that he might have a different opinion as to whether M is less than N.
Later, at 11:26 am April 3, James Bonilla made a “clearly ridiculous” comparison between inductive results from empirical observations in physics and deductive results from pure mathematics. In empirical sciences such as physics, when one does a Bayesian analysis, one cannot avoid assigning probabilities rather than certainties that one can only get in areas such as pure logic and mathematics.
Today, April 4, 2015 at 4:42 am, James added further comments, starting with the following: “The assertion that a result in physics can be taken to be different from a result in mathematics is what is under contention here.” Indeed. Induction in physics is different from deduction in mathematics.
Later in the same comment, James wrote, “If you have N observations and the possibility of an error with each observation is p (say, 0.1%), then: the net probability of an error in N observations â assuming independence â is P(N) = p^N.” I would have thought that the probability of at least one error is instead 1 – (1-p)^N, which of course increases rather than decreases as N increases.
At 4:52 am today, James also wrote, “The main issue at hand is that the Bible is not even internally consistent.” The Bible does indeed give many different views of the world, of which the details often differ. But the overall picture of a personal God who loves His creatures (with His love often requiring stern discipline) has a high degree of consistency.
In James’ next comment, at 5:05 am, I disagree that in “The same way that one can reasonably conclude that the angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees, one can also reasonably conclude that many laws of physics are, for all practical purposes, inviolable.” In the different way of using Bayes’ theorem with plausible priors, one can indeed plausibly conclude “that many laws of physics are, for all practical purposes, inviolable.” But I would say that “for all practical purposes” does not apply for a special situation in which God, in doing what is best, might deem it better, rather than to uphold the usual laws of physics, instead to Resurrect His Son (which we Christians shall celebrate tomorrow, and which I hope that more of you can join in on the celebration).
In a comment on Don Page’s article “Open letter to Sean Carroll and William Lane Craig”, a certain individual by the name Ben Goren writes to Don:
“I do believe you owe it to yourself to read Richard Carrierâs latest book, On the Historicity of Jesus. It is a peer-reviewed scholarly work that performs a Bayesian analysis of the evidence for Jesus and the events of the Gospel. And, despite it being of top academic quality, itâs also most readable and engaging. I dare say youâll find much cause to reevaluate your priors”
I would add Ben Goren owe it to his readers to caution them to not take a historian seriously when he confuses “probability” with “frequency”, let alone his grasp of Bayesian statistics. See Luke Barnes’ responses to Richard Carrier critique of Fine Tuning.
https://letterstonature.wordpress.com/2013/12/13/probably-not-a-fine-tuned-critique-of-richard-carrier-part-1/
The mind boggles at why non-scientists/ mathematicians venture outside their fields or expertise and make bold conclusions.
Ben, lower the decibel.
TY
Bill Jefferys (April 3, 2015 at 11:41 am), I agree with you that “It is perfectly legitimate (and frequently done) to assign a measure on the prior probability that is non-zero on some selected point hypothesis. … The criterion as to whether this is legitimate is whether the hypothesis that is represented by that point null is believable.” Indeed, if one makes the highly idealized assumption that each time one checks whether the laws of physics hold, the probability is p regardless of the situation and regardless of the past results, then instead of the legitimate example of a prior probability distribution that is uniform for p from 0 to 1 (and hence zero prior probability for any precise value for p), one could have an equally legitimate prior probability distribution that has a nonzero probability for exactly p=1. However, so long as one assigns a nonzero prior for a positive p (or range of p) different from 1, then no matter how many finite N times the laws of physics are observed to be upheld without violation, the posterior probability for p=1 is not unity. It can be large or small, depending on both the likelihoods and the priors.
In the case of the Resurrection, I would more strongly question the assumption that p is independent of the situation. I would think that in most situations God wants to (and does) uphold the usual laws of physics, but in rare situations (especially after His Son was crucified) He wants to (and does) violate the usual laws of physics to resurrect Jesus.
Prof. Page and other readers:
This discussion is fascinating but I doubt if it will go anywhere. I hope you will excuse me for repeating certain things I said before. There is no way to convince people who do not believe in divinity about divinity by the so called âlogical and rationalâ arguments. Even if we go on for 3 trillion comments, we are not going to resolve this issue! In my view, what we call logic is based on our day to day experience in our everyday life which are strictly classical. I challenge anyone who says that quantum mechanics is rational and logical if you compare with our everyday life. Similarly ideas of divinity belong to a realm which is not part of our everyday life. Ordinary logic just will not work! As everyone on this blog knows, we human beings and our brains are so insignificant (made out of matter which is less than some 4% of our universe, not to talk about infinite number of multiverse), that it is inconceivable that any intelligent person would argue that what we can figure out with our brains is all there is in the universe. We have to accept that there could be realms which are beyond our sensory perceptions.
Josh asked about a couple of points:
1) “We know too little about god to say anything meaningful about his simplicity in any metric, and so, if disjointed from miracles, faith in this must be preferential rather than evidential. I know you do believe in miracles and must take that into account, but Iâm trying to knock this out as a prior for supporting miracles to avoid circular reasoning.”
It is difficult to try to assign absolutely prior probabilities, since our Bayesian reasoning is conditioned by the universe we live in. However, I don’t see why an absolutely prior probability should be higher for naturalism than for theism. Then if I do condition upon even just general experience that does not include evidence of miracles, and if one assumes Occam’s razor to assign greater priors to simpler theories, it still seems plausible to me that the simplicity of a theistic explanation is greater than the simplicity of a naturalistic explanation. After going this far without considering the evidence for miracles, I am open to the possibility of miracles, and then to me the historical evidence for the Resurrection has very high likelihood and high posterior probability (lower than the likelihood because the prior probability for a God who would resurrect Jesus seems somewhat lower than the prior just for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God; even Jesus’ disciples who were strong theists were surprised at the evidence they encountered for His Resurrection, but the evidence overcame their initial doubts).
2) Our evidence for the resurrection is on par with various other supernatural claims (other religions, UFOâs, government conspiracies, bigfoot, etc.). Some of these have tangible physical evidence beyond hearsay, whereas we only have hearsay of the resurrection. Why then believe in the resurrection instead these others? I know the initial conversation was largely devoid of this, but it seems to me youâve acknowledge how crucial miracles are to your claims. If either side is convinced on this, it seems the cat is in the bag.
First, Jesus is the only religious leader I know who claimed to be the Son of God and lived a life that supported such a claim. Second, in the time of Jesus that was before the printing press and the web, so that people did not have an easy way of making and rapidly copying physical written records, people were much more skilled at remembering things mentally and passing them on orally. So I do not see that method of passing on the eyewitness accounts of the Resurrection as being much more unreliable than current methods that give only very weak support for claims such as UFOâs, government conspiracies, bigfoot, etc.
Dear Kashyap Vasavada:
> Dear James Bonilla:
> I am glad that you know about Buddhism and are a follower of Buddhism.
Thank you.
> As for having discussions with Anand Manikutty, sorry I do not want to waste
> my time!! There are close to a billion Hindus and there are bound to be
> different opinions.
What is different here is that it is an objective academic study of Hinduism. You are
wasting your time because you refuse to understand before you critique. You need to read the references before you critique said reference. You are also not claiming to have read the references so you are not really refuting anything. You are merely stating your personal opinions on a number of things.
> As I mentioned, I have found reliable important sources
> which are authorities in Hindu religion. These people have studied hard,
> understood the scriptures and lead spiritual life. To repeat, once you have
> found sources like books and lectures of Nobel Laureates to know physics, you
> do not want to go back to a community college teacher!!
Personal choice, apples-to-oranges comparison.
Community college teachers and even high school teachers have published excellent scholarly works before. You seem to have been a professor yourself. If so, then surely, you also were not a professor at the highest ranked college in the land. And it seems like you are reading Hindu scriptures for your own personal benefit. And you are arguing from that point of view. This has nothing to do with *understanding* the religion from an academic point of view.
While I generally concede the points from Don Page and accept his right to a different point of view (and I was not saying that his points themselves were ridiculous but rather that his points lead to a contradiction – indeed, I posted on the Buddhist Debate Group that “I did refute Don Page on a substantive point first. Only then did I went on to say that he had been fully refuted or some such thing.”, and that is the way to do it ).
Overall, your mode of argument is really not in the nature of a real scholarly discussion or debate. All that matters for the academic study of a religion is whether the conclusions are novel and whether the ideas are unique. If people had not acknowledged the potential uniqueness of other people’s ideas, nobody would be reading anything. In that sense, this is all about you. What you have written here is really about your own choices. Furthermore, it is more likely than not that somebody with a very high IQ (such as Anand) and somebody who has contributed to textbooks in the area of strategy would indeed have something new to say about Hinduism. And something truly substantial as opposed to all the swamis and babas out there. In short – dude, this guy has a very high IQ, and he is a honest guy and he is an American and he is probably a better source on Hinduism than :
(a) Baba Ramdev : who seems to have trouble telling the difference between the sorts of things that can cure AIDS and the sorts of things that can’t.
(b) Sathya Sai Baba : who seems to be a specialist in magic and hokery-pokery
(c) Osho : who turned out to have had no problems breaking the law whatsoever.
I don’t know how else to put it.
Ultimately, it is not about just which college someone teaches at. Someone can be a great scholar even if they are a community college teacher. Jesus today might have returned and might be teaching in a community college somewhere.
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The question is ultimately if you want to measure up to the quality of the material on the blog – or even if you want to critique it — you have to get into the business of actually doing that. I don’t want to say – “do you possess the training and the intelligence to understand what is posted out there? This tasks requires a high IQ, obviously”, but besides that, what has peeved me is the way you have engaged on the topic. If you don’t want to read the material, that is fine. But that says nothing about the quality of the material.
Furthermore, it seems like English is not your native language. Your choice of sentences leaves a lot to be desired in terms of – what is called – exposition. All these exclamation marks all over the place makes things impossible for a reasonable discussion.
> I think, we are not getting anywhere in this dialogue. So we will close it
> with agreeing to disagree.
No, I actually did refute your attempts to refute the blog. So, that is some validation already that the naive rejection of the arguments won’t really work.
> I thank you for your interest in Hinduism.
I thank you for your interest in Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and perhaps Shamanism as well. đ
Dear Don Page:
Thank you for kindly clarifying your point of view on this matter.
> So Jamesâ argument does not refute mine, though I can understand that he might
> have a different opinion as to whether M is less than N.
I can understand too that you may have a different opinion than me as to whether M is less than N. I have a better understanding of your perspective after your explanation. In summary, I feel that it behooves me to clarify that I cannot say that I refuted your point of view, but only sought to refute particular points as they applied to physics but this reveals my own way of thinking about things in a (secular, analytical) fashion. (I may have refuted parts A and B of a system, but that was from proceeding from a certain point of view POV1.) Your system of thinking seems both internally consistent and valid.
With metta, I would like to add that, as I hold, ultimately, reasonable people can disagree on intellectual matters such as this one.
> Later in the same comment, James wrote, âIf you have N observations and
> the possibility of an error with each observation is p (say, 0.1%), then: the
> net probability of an error in N observations â assuming independence â is
> P(N) = p^N.â I would have thought that the probability of at least one error is
> instead 1 â (1-p)^N, which of course increases rather than decreases as N increases.
Yes, that is correct. And that is based on the value for the Bernoulli distribution for f(k;p).
I see where you are coming from. You are seeing this in view of the possibility of divine intervention, et cetera.
For me, it is a decreasing function because that is how I have set up the experiment. The experiment seeks to determine simply whether balls accelerate when rolled down planes. Let us set up the hypothesis.
H1: balls accelerate when rolling down planes.
Supposing the error in your instrument used for measuring the speed of balls is e1. Let q be the error in the experiment arising out of this error e1. (To compute q, you might take a look at the statistical distribution of the measured value v given an actual value v’). Again, this is the error in your experiment q computed from the error in your instrument e1. Now, if you run this experiment a large number of times (call this N’), even if there is a case somewhere that the ball was not *shown* to accelerate, you are not able to refute the hypothesis. Because you are only looking for certain P-values for confirmation. And reasonable ones at that. Say, a P-value of less than 0.1%.
To refute this and gain support for the alternate hypothesis, you would have to show the following:
H2: balls decelerate when rolling down planes.
This is the ‘q’ scenario. We will come to the ‘p’ scenario later.
H3: there is a possibility of divine intervention when balls are rolled down planes.
The question is : how have you set up your experiment for H3?
P.S. I am going into a lot of detail because it has come down to a point on design (that is, in terms of the Design of Experiments). The more precise we get, the more we will know what specific scenario we are discussing, and how we are analyzing said scenario.
P.P.S. Note that I don’t allow for the “Magic Hypothesis” in my results. Even without the Magic Hypothesis, we can see that as the number N increases, the chances of the hypothesis being accepted incorrectly decreases. I now seek to try and understand Don Page’s experimental design. This way I can say that his system has both “internal validity” and has “consistency”. I did say that his system is internally valid and consistent, and yes, it is, so far, but we do need to dig a bit deeper to make sure that is indeed the case.
> First, Jesus is the only religious leader I know who claimed to be the Son of God
> and lived a life that supported such a claim. Second, in the time of Jesus that
> was before the printing press and the web, so that people did not have an easy way
> of making and rapidly copying physical written records, people were much
> more skilled at remembering things mentally and passing them on orally. So I do
> not see that method of passing on the eyewitness accounts of the Resurrection
> as being much more unreliable than current methods that give only very
> weak support for claims such as UFOâs, government conspiracies, bigfoot, etc.
… but, Don, what about the fact that people in those times tended to be much more gullible than people are today?
Btw, I think if we continue down the discussion track I have in mind, people will see how *both* points of view are consistent.
James Bonilla writes: âDon, what about the fact that people in those times tended to be much more gullible than people are today?â That quite a claim and surely it hangs on what one means by gullible. Are those thousands who join ISIS, Al-Kaeda, and various modern-day cults enlightened souls? The comment on the reliability of oral preservation of history I can agree with. So why does James doubt that the written accounts of Jesus (from an oral tradition) are necessarily unreliable?
Read Aron Wall: http://www.wall.org/~aron/evidence.htm
and http://www.wall.org/~aron/
Great blog, by the way.
I like Kierkegaard’s idea that God does not exist. He is eternal. He further said that “He” doesn’t think, “He” creates.
What exists comes into being, is sustained for awhile, and then passes away. Only things exist. G_d is not a thing. We are things and as such our measurement of anything at all is based on our being in a body, our being as a thing. The Real itself can’t be measured, has no attributes, yet is mysteriously available universally for all manifestations.
More Kierkegaard. God stands before us with arms outstretched, hands closed. In one hand he offers the ultimate secrets to the Universe. In the other he holds the eternal searching for those. We should choose the eternal seeking and let God keep the greatest Truths, Wisdom, for himself. So says Kierkegaard.
> James Bonilla writes: âDon, what about the fact that people in those times tended to
> be much more gullible than people are today?â That quite a claim and surely it
> hangs on what one means by gullible. Are those thousands who join ISIS,
> Al-Kaeda, and various modern-day cults enlightened souls? The comment on
> the reliability of oral preservation of history I can agree with. So why does James
> doubt that the written accounts of Jesus (from an oral tradition) are
> necessarily unreliable?
Because there is no close questioning of Jesus on his claims.
Take the claim of Jesus having walked on water. What would a close questioning of this claim look like? Let us do traffic cop versus Jesus.
– “Ok, Jesus, sir. What was the speed at which you were walking?”
– “Ok, Jesus, sir. What was the origin?”
– “Ok, Jesus, sir. What was the destination?”
– “Ok, Jesus, sir. What was the specific gravity of water at that place?”
– “Ok, Jesus, sir. Who were the witnesses?”
– “Ok, Jesus, sir. Did they take any photographs?”
Don, on point one I think you may have misunderstood me a bit.
You say:
“However, I donât see why an absolutely prior probability should be higher for naturalism than for theism.”
I’m actually holding back from making the contention that naturalism is a better prior. What I’m arguing is that there’s no evidential justification, disjointed from miracles, that theism should be a prior when arguing on the terms of simplicity. To use the old adage, I’m basically saying that we know so little about theism in terms of simplicity that it’s ‘not even wrong’ (on those terms). That’s not to say that, out of preference, you can’t support it. It is to say that, since the prior is not truly founded on evidence, it should not be used as evidence, and can’t be used to sway further truth claims (especially worldviews). I should caveat that I am not claiming that you are using it as evidence, but I want to make sure you evaluate the resurrection independently, using the same rigors of evidence you would require for any other matter.
It is not that I am against using priors to determine further likelihoods; it is that, if you do so, your prior must be meaningfully established independently unless you mean to evoke circular logic (theism is likely because of miracles which is likely because of theism). You might argue that we can’t do that for naturalism as well, but we most certainly can’t do that for theism. In short, the practical purpose of this is to ask that the resurrection get a fair trial.
Regarding your response on the resurrection, I can’t help but feel this is not happening. Specifically, it seems that the level of self-scrutiny you might apply to your other scientific pursuits is not found here. I hate to quote-mine, but I’d like to do so as I believe you yourself will see that some rigor of response is lacking here:
For instance, you say:
“First, Jesus is the only religious leader I know who claimed to be the Son of God and lived a life that supported such a claim.”
Multiple religious leaders in other faiths did one better and even claimed to be god his/herself or an incarnation. And the hearsay we have about their lives (in terms of both morality and works) in on the same footing as Jesus (again, this is where reading other sacred texts could help one appreciate this). With respect, I feel that if you took an approach of trying to disprove your claim of the resurrection (in the scientific sense) before positing specific supports, easily shot-down notes like this could be avoided so as to reach more meaty places in discussion.
Also you say:
“Second, in the time of Jesus that was before the printing press and the web, so that people did not have an easy way of making and rapidly copying physical written records, people were much more skilled at remembering things mentally and passing them on orally.”
But you do not account for the many faith claims of times at or before Jesus. For instance, does Hinduism get more credence because it gained widespread communication and acceptance in mass before Christianity? One might argue as well that the internet/print serves us better to find truth as it furthers critique, education, and analysis. Moreover, you are ignoring that some modern claims have the benefit of physical evidence (which we do not have for the resurrection).
Finally, you say:
“So I do not see that method of passing on the eyewitness accounts of the Resurrection as being much more unreliable than current methods that give only very weak support for claims such as UFOâs, government conspiracies, bigfoot, etc.”
On what grounds do you assume claims such as “UFO’s, government conspiracies, bigfoot, etc. [and I did mention other faiths]” yield only “weak support?” This seems to have been pulled out of thin air. Even if you are arguing this from the preceding point of the press/web, this would be a non sequitur. It would not follow that these other claims are “weak,” only at best that the resurrection might be different or more verifiable (which I have addressed as not yet being shown).
I think, on analysis, we could all agree that the level of scrutiny regarding the resurrection can be improved here regardless of the discussion’s outcome.
James Bonilla writes: âBecause there is no close questioning of Jesus on his claims.â I donât see how that claim is supported. Did he not read about the incredulity of the apostle Thomas? The one who wanted direct evidence of Jesus resurrection (it is irrelevant whether atheists and non-Christians believe this).
James seems to be applying 21st century culture to Palestine in 63BCE. I can understand Jamesâ dismay at the lack of investigative journalism in those ancient days, compared to nowadays, where for example we see people demanding evidence of President Obamaâs birth certificate â the real thing. But to a Palestinian Jew in those days, doing a 60 Minutes on Jesus would have been unheard of because he was seen openly daily doing good and wondrous works for all to see. And if he could make lepers clean, healed the sick, he had already established a certain credibility long before he walked on the sea. All of this is just to make the point.
Itâs not that people in those days were naĂŻve, for when it comes to basic human nature, nothing has really changed over the many centuries (I noted the skepticism of Thomas). If one lied in those days, the truth got around faster than Twitter. If you were a fraud, youâd have been exposed or chased out of the village or town. And yet I havenât read of any account written within 100 years after Jesusâ death that he was a con artist.
Let me steal a point from an article by eminent physicist Aron Wall, for it all boils down to plausibility. Ref: http://www.wall.org/~aron/evidence.htm. Today one speaks of the assassination of Julius Caesar from the accounts of historians, but not the accounts of the only eyewitnesses, the Roman Senators. Does that undermine the reported historical event?
And by the way, from the comments I have read in this blog post I see writers engaging in ad hominems and the behavior is uncalled for.