The 'Cumulative Case' response vs the 'Library Thought Experiment'

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[AdamAlbilya]

Simply awesome.

A series of you presenting the varying thought experiments (/ hard questions for theists) poping up one day in the "Playlists" tab will surely make me believe in an all loving God!

Have encountered many by now but cannot recall what/where were 90% of them...

[FlencerMcflensington]

This is a wonderful thought experiment! Thanks! I think it does a really great job of demonstrating how Bayesian reasoning works. It might be worth it to really emphasize that the conclusion is when you put the book in it's spot of history or fiction and the additional evidence you give are only to shuffle you towards one to varying degrees based on how strong that evidence is. The key point, and Cam points this out (damn he's smart...not just here but every video), is that IP had no justification for jumping from fiction all the way over to the middle based on what he heard. And you both so clearly show how motivated his answers were to your question of 'what would make you shuffle away from fiction and towards history?' When he just regurgitates the cumulative case instead of sticking to the hypothetical boundaries which were so much larger! Yeah I'd like it to be accompanied by a top down medical examination and controlled experiment that was repeated and validated by all available scientific consortiums and to identify *how* your ancestor actually flew.

[Satans_lil_helper]

I laughed at this way more than I should have. Bless his little heart. Well done, Doug.

[scooterboy]

I don't give a fuck what book it is, when a book particularly from a time where superstition was rife says crazy shit then you know it's crazy shit. Simple.

[chet]

In summary, it doesn't matter how many big, delicious turds you squish together in a bowl. You still can't polish 'em.

[BeenDownSoLong...]

Poor fella, stepped right in it again. Like shootin' doves in a barrel.

[todbeard]

He was toast after his first answer.
I would've asked him if Mr. Ed talking to Wilbur is fiction shouldn't Balaam having a conversation with his donkey be in the fiction category as well?....

[markangellotti]

Most of the cumulative case only gets one to think that perhaps some divine force exists. It's like what Christopher Hitchens said: You still have all your work ahead of you to conclude that this divine force cares about which dead person you believe is your lord and savior.

[krampus]

Apologetics aren’t intellectually honest with themselves about the “evidence” they think they have for Jesus/the Bible. If you take the claims on a different context and circumstance, you see them being skeptics and unbelievers. They just have to make excuses as to why their inconsistency is warrant.

[johns]

I need to be stoned to listen to Cam he’s a smart dude for sure

[christophergadsden]

I love the creativity of the thought experiment. The set up is interesting. When you ask the average Joe off the street what their opinion of X is, you're likely to get some bad answers. (Reminds me of the "JayWalking" thing Jay Leno used to do.) So, show a page from a book to someone and ask what the genre is. Why think that the appropriate method here is just "gut reaction?" If we wanted to know, for any book, what the correct genre classification is, shouldn't we be asking an expert? Wouldn't that be the best way to know where the book should go? This is different from other intuitive arguments. Genre of a piece of literature can be determined objectively and scientifically, and it isn't simply done based on whether you think the events happened. The gospels are a very specific kind of ancient biography and have all the genre cues of that genre. So, the intuitions, which I grant are accurate, simply aren't a reliable method for determining genre.

[rageholellison]

What if the 500 witnesses weren't anonymous, but were all well-known contemporary figures with standing, like heads of state and celebrated scientists, and they all said he could fly and offered to hold a live press conference about it on the radio, television and internet and then consented to globally broadcast interviews and polygraphs about it and then write books about it, do a speaking tour and put out a Based On A True Story hollywood blockbuster feature film about it? Would that be good enough? If it was a bunch of professors and scientists and the President of America and the Prime Minister of Canada and the Chancellor of Germany and people like that said the Flying Man could fly? Would you think somebody really did fly? I wouldn't. What's more likely, a scientist being wrong or a human being flying? What's more likely, a politician lying or a human being flying? That'd be leagues better than the 500 anonymous eyewitness gambit in the epistles and it still wouldn't cut the mustard at the library? I never really understood why so many Christians seem to be so impressed by the 500 anonymous people 2000 years ago thing.


Edit: Even if they showed video evidence before their testimony, would that be good enough? If you want to see somebody "fly, " it seems like there's a new superhero movie coming out every 3 months!

[random_nerd_stuff]

When IP said that he would need to know which culture the text came from in order for him to assume the library book is true/nonfiction... I wanted to know: Can he name some of the cultures that he would assume have no real "flying man" ... and name some of the cultures that he believes could be conveying a factual story.

I think his answer would have to be really "interesting".

[epicchrist]

It simply doesn't work Doug. Because as Mike said that we need to check if that book is historical. Secondly, do you know what cumulative case means? It means that not one evidence proves the resurrection but every single evidence together proves the resurrection. You only have one book, in that case, .and as Mike said we don't know when that book was produced. we don't know where. We don't know who produced it. We don't know if the genre is history, biography? or fairy tale? we simply don't know. We don't know the reasons why the author wrote it. It is not the same thing.

[stalemateib]

Well, what we really have here is an interconnected series of debates, as it concerns the topic of religion on the whole. For example, the historicity of Jesus debate is tied into the resurrection of Jesus debate (since one option for the resurrection of Jesus debate is Jesus-mythicism). The resurrection of Jesus debate is itself important to the God debate as a whole on the subtopic of miracles, since the debate over the resurrection of Jesus is (1) at the heart of Christianity, one of the major religions that holds to supernaturalist theism and (2) the resurrection of Jesus is one of the most elaborate and thoroughly analyzed debates on whether or not a miracle has happened. (In other words, it has high value as a case study.) Most other claims of miracles have very little to discuss in comparison to the resurrection of Jesus claim.

[theColdFramer]

and yet all these evangelical believers would still lean the Book of Mormon into the fiction side of the library dispite the idea that Mormon apologists can make a culmative case for their stuff...but why is it the Bible gets to be different?? Oh right, it's called special pleading repackaged into a sandwich and call it the culmative case.