On the surface, this is a pretty plausible approach for Daniel to take. Gadamer is arguing at length about the Humanities obsession with “method” and the epistemological implications of such positivism. Yet, if Daniel had just made the simple effort of reading the first seventeen pages of the book, he’d have encountered a very troubling passage relevant to Daniel’s entire mopologetic career:
A little context: “Logique de Port-Royal” is a reference to one of the most widely read books on philosophical logic in Western history and is only eclipsed by the likes of Aristotle and Gottlob Frege. In English we call it the ‘Port Royal Logic’ because the book is attached to the Jansenist movement at the Port Royal Abbey in France. I should mention that the Port Royal Abbey and the Jansenist movement play a central role in Blaise Pascal’s life and Pascal probably made direct contributions to the text of ‘Port Royal Logic’; for someone who invokes the name and works of Pascal as often as Daniel does, you’d think he’d have been blogging about what comes next:Gadamer wrote:At the same time it is self-evident that it is not mathematics but humanistic studies that are important here. For what could the new methodology of the seventeenth century mean for the human sciences? One has only to read the appropriate chapters of the Logique de Port-Royal concerning the rules of reason applied to historical truths to see how little can be achieved in the human sciences by that idea of method. (p.17)
I think it would be compelling reading to see Daniel let up on Gemli and spend some time actually engaging what Gadamer said, because the man is quite confidently asserting that Daniel’s entire ‘Witness’ project and his recent foray in NDE’s is doomed for intellectual failure.Gadamer wrote:Its results are really trivial—for example, the idea that in order to judge an event in its truth one must take account of the accompanying circumstances (circonstances). With this kind of argument the Jansenists sought to provide a methodical way of showing to what extent miracles deserved belief. They countered an untested belief in miracles with the spirit of the new method and sought in this way to legitimate the true miracles of biblical and ecclesiastical tradition. The new science in the service of the old church—that this relationship could not last is only too clear, and one can foresee what had to happen when the Christian presuppositions themselves were questioned. When the methodological ideal of the natural sciences was applied to the credibility of the historical testimonies of scriptural tradition, it inevitably led to completely different results that were catastrophic for Christianity. There is no great distance between the criticism of miracles in the style of the Jansenists and historical criticism of the Bible. Spinoza is a good example of this. I shall show later that a logically consistent application of this method as the only norm for the truth of the human sciences would amount to their self-annihilation. (p.17)
Moving on, I found this comment by “tangata neneva” to be interesting:
There isn’t much I’d complain about here, though I think it is worth mentioning that Confidence Intervals are categorically the wrong type of statistical inferences to be making in the context Daniel is speaking of and nearly diametrically opposed to the kind of Bayes employed by Kyler Rasmussen.tangata neneva wrote:I think the authors may have confused “convincing” (which is a personal willingness to accept) with confidence (which is a formal statistical construct). I am going to assume that what they really mean is that convincingness is an “effect size” and not an assessment of confidence. (In other words, I would say something like I am 95% confident that this line of evidence is 90% convincing or in 100 groups of 100 people each, I can expect on average 90 people in a group will be convinced in 95 of the groups). (Dr Rasmussen, help!)
For integrating multiple lines of evidence, typically (at least in my world), a weighting process for each line of evidence is used to account for all the supporting factors a line of evidence might provide (confidence, study size, precision, predictiveness, proportion of gemli-ness, etc.). This is often done through a meta-analysis where the overall effect (the overall convincingness) is a pooling of all the lines of evidence accounting for all the other influencers. Dr Rasmussen’s analysis of multiple lines of evidence for the Book of Mormon is an awesome example of a classic Bayesian stepwise approach to weighted meta-analysis.
But in general, there approach is on track - a simple approach, and crude, but on track.
Speaking of which:
What kills me is the breathless naïvété here. Since the time of Rene Descartes, some of the most brilliant and powerful minds in European history have sought to prove the existence of God, miracles, angelic beings, and the after life, using the methods of mathematics. None of them achieved any real success and their failures are still studied in minute detail today.Kyler Ray Rasmussen wrote:TN hits the high points here. I agree that they aren't providing a particularly coherent definition of "convincing", but that doesn't mean that one wouldn't be possible. It would take some more detailed thinking and a methodical review of the evidence, but I suspect one could build a reasonable (if imprecise) set of estimates similar to the ones I put together in my blog series. To work, they each would have to estimate the probability of observing that line of evidence, both under the conditions of a (1) a valid afterlife, and (2) an alternative naturalistic hypothesis, with anoxic brain states probably being the best contender.
There is so much material on the subject from just the past 10 years that directly relates to what they are trying to achieve and they don’t mention any of it whatsoever. It is as if they never bothered to research any of this and just pull out their old textbooks on statistics for the social sciences, assuming they are the first people ever to broach the topic.
I know I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but mopologetics is a much lower effort than even Christopher Hitchens and I’m having trouble comprehending how they got to this point.
