Challenge for atheists/ atheist position

[Quintessence]

I am not arguing over the the definition of the word evidence.
I am merely pointing out to certain members that they are just flat out wrong when they dismiss evidence claiming it is not evidence.

An admirable cause that will doubtless go unheeded by many. After all, it is far easier to restrain what evidence means to narrow parameters. It means one can dismiss a substantial amount of things presented with little intellectual effort. Heuristics at their finest!

 

[McBell]

An admirable cause that will doubtless go unheeded by many. After all, it is far easier to restrain what evidence means to narrow parameters. It means one can dismiss a substantial amount of things presented with little intellectual effort. Heuristics at their finest!

It boggles the mind how such a simple concept is so difficult for some people to understand.

 

[Curious George]

It boggles the mind how such a simple concept is so difficult for some people to understand.

Well I guarantee that I can pee further than you....so I don't know why you are talking about difficult.

 

[McBell]

Well I guarantee that I can pee further than you....so I don't know why you are talking about difficult.

Does your father walk to work or does he pack his lunch?

 

[Curious George]

Does your father walk to work or does he pack his lunch?

*edit* could have been offensive.

I hope you followed the allusion.

 

[Curious George]

I guarantee I'm more educated than you, so how about you don't insult my intelligence OK?
.

Ok, how educated are you?

 

[McBell]

Ok, how educated are you?

Ever wonder why some people think their self proclaimed superior intellect must mean they cannot possibly be wrong?

 

[Curious George]

Ever wonder why some people think their self proclaimed superior intellect must mean they cannot possibly be wrong?

If I say yes, does that mean I am not smart enough to know?

 

[McBell]

If I say yes, does that mean I am not smart enough to know?

Oh, I suspect there are as many answers to the question as there are people guilty of it.

 

[Quintessence]

It boggles the mind how such a simple concept is so difficult for some people to understand.

I'm sure they're capable, it's just that fighting heuristics can be difficult. And to be fair, all human minds make use of heuristics, or cognitive shorthands. If we were to think deeply and critically all the time, that would delay action or behavior. Which, I think we can easily imagine, can be a serious problem in various situations. While we like to tell ourselves otherwise, we've basically got minds like any other animal that understand that thinking too much and not acting means death, dismemberment, or not getting food for the day. The folks with narrow criteria for evidence just want to run to the salad bar of the buffet and ignore the soup offerings because they've already decided they hate soup.

 

[Cap'n MacDougal]

I'm sure they're capable, it's just that fighting heuristics can be difficult. And to be fair, all human minds make use of heuristics, or cognitive shorthands. If we were to think deeply and critically all the time, that would delay action or behavior. Which, I think we can easily imagine, can be a serious problem in various situations. While we like to tell ourselves otherwise, we've basically got minds like any other animal that understand that thinking too much and not acting means death, dismemberment, or not getting food for the day. The folks with narrow criteria for evidence just want to run to the salad bar of the buffet and ignore the soup offerings because they've already decided they hate soup.

Good point. I read a book several years ago titled: "Thinking, Fast and Slow" which addressed the subject. The brain will act prudently in certain situations, limiting other functions. E.g. performing 4,562.98 • 9,874.04 in your head while attempting to turn left across a very busy intersection. Or, the Invisible Gorilla experiment.
Continuing in the food metaphor, I was travelling with an engineer from work, and we had stopped to eat lunch at Whole Foods. He piled General Tso's chicken on his plate, and was clearly enjoying the experience. This individual is a self-described "meat and potatoes" guy, with a somewhat odd distaste for vegetables. Potaotes excluded, of course. After a few minutes, I informed him that he was eating an entirely vegan meal, and that his chicken was, in fact, craftily prepared tempeh. He pushed his plate away, refused to take another bite, and began to explain the really "didn't like it THAT much, he was just hungry."

 

[Monk Of Reason]

The way I see it, evidence is meaningless without an objective line of credibility. Can someone consider something evidence even though it was told to them by the voices in their head? Sure. Doesn't make it valid or useful. It just degrades the whole debate.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Therefore?

Is it not obvious? I assumed it was obvious.

Without meaning evidence isn't evidence. Its bullcrap. Evidence has to have standards that it passes. Personal bias knows no bounds. Subjective evidence means jack ****. Objective evidence such as facts are much stronger.

 

[Quintessence]

The way I see it, evidence is meaningless without an objective line of credibility. Can someone consider something evidence even though it was told to them by the voices in their head? Sure. Doesn't make it valid or useful. It just degrades the whole debate.

This seems tantamount to suggesting our personal experiences are meaningless because only we had the experience. Such is simply not the case. When it comes to studying human behavior and looking at how humans live their day-to-day lives, our direct personal experiences are an order of magnitude more important than whatever the so-called "objective fact" of a situation is. Humans behave based on what they believe to be the case, whether it is "objective" and "true" by some standard or not.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

This seems tantamount to suggesting our personal experiences are meaningless because only we had the experience. Such is simply not the case. When it comes to studying human behavior and looking at how humans live their day-to-day lives, our direct personal experiences are an order of magnitude more important than whatever the so-called "objective fact" of a situation is. Humans behave based on what they believe to be the case, whether it is "objective" and "true" by some standard or not.

Hell yeah thats what I'm saying. In a debate if you had a personal subjective experience that you cannot replicate, support or in some way shape or form record then it isn't evidence to me. I don't think they are useless or unimportant in our daily lives and how we generally function. I think that there are things we can only ever learn through subjective experience. I don't think one will ever truly understand loss without living it. I think that is why white America will never understand what it is like to be black in America. These kind of lessons only come subjectively. They are for personal growth.

However in a debate they don't mean anything. What you CAN do with subjective experiences is record a large number of them across several individuals in a methodological way and then present the findings. That is sociology at its best. Psychology as well. We talk and experiment with people and record their subjective experiences in an objective way that we can quantify and utilize.

 

[Cap'n MacDougal]

Evidentiary standards are weighted in proportion to the claim being presented. Mundane claims require mundane evidence, fantastic claims require greater evidence.
Personal experience generally falls into the mundane category, even when expressed in fantastic terms. I.e. "I ate the best pizza in the world yesterday!" It is understood that I have not eaten all pizza in the world, I'm not making a fantastic claim.
If I add some form of supernature such as God to the claim, I've moved closer to fantastic. "God brought me the best pizza in the world yesterday!"
Not all religious claims are fantastic. "My life is better since I found...(insert deity.)" If that claim is modified to include ontological "truths" and instructions, the evidentiary requirements (obviously) change.
A primary issue with fantastic experiential religious claims is that the purported communications and/or experiences are often easily mimicked by things such as drugs, neurodegenerative disease, chemical imbalance, etc. While that does not entail that the claims are false, it allows for significant skepticism when analyzing the causal ancestry of any given event.

 

[Desert Snake]

Is it not obvious? I assumed it was obvious.

Without meaning evidence isn't evidence. Its bullcrap. Evidence has to have standards that it passes. Personal bias knows no bounds. Subjective evidence means jack ****. Objective evidence such as facts are much stronger.

Your comment is unclear, so of course it isn't obvious what you mean. Are you saying that you don't believe any of your own experiences?

 

[Desert Snake]

Evidentiary standards are weighted in proportion to the claim being presented. Mundane claims require mundane evidence, fantastic claims require greater evidence.
Personal experience generally falls into the mundane category, even when expressed in fantastic terms. I.e. "I ate the best pizza in the world yesterday!" It is understood that I have not eaten all pizza in the world, I'm not making a fantastic claim.
If I add some form of supernature such as God to the claim, I've moved closer to fantastic. "God brought me the best pizza in the world yesterday!"
Not all religious claims are fantastic. "My life is better since I found...(insert deity.)" If that claim is modified to include ontological "truths" and instructions, the evidentiary requirements (obviously) change.
A primary issue with fantastic experiential religious claims is that the purported communications and/or experiences are often easily mimicked by things such as drugs, neurodegenerative disease, chemical imbalance, etc. While that does not entail that the claims are false, it allows for significant skepticism when analyzing the causal ancestry of any given event.

Therefore?

 

[Quintessence]

Hell yeah thats what I'm saying. In a debate if you had a personal subjective experience that you cannot replicate, support or in some way shape or form record then it isn't evidence to me. I don't think they are useless or unimportant in our daily lives and how we generally function. I think that there are things we can only ever learn through subjective experience. I don't think one will ever truly understand loss without living it. I think that is why white America will never understand what it is like to be black in America. These kind of lessons only come subjectively. They are for personal growth.

Thanks for clarifying.

However in a debate they don't mean anything.

This doesn't seem to be the case upon observing public discourse and various conversations on various topics. We use personal anecdotes all the time in debates. Why do you say the don't mean anything in debates?

What you CAN do with subjective experiences is record a large number of them across several individuals in a methodological way and then present the findings. That is sociology at its best. Psychology as well. We talk and experiment with people and record their subjective experiences in an objective way that we can quantify and utilize.

Are you perhaps saying that personal experiences doesn't mean anything in debate because you are assuming that the person means for their personal experience to somehow generalize across the entire world? That's an assumption that should not be made. Often, it seems that people simply want to be heard and understood and they're not making statements intended to be taken as some sort of universal truth. There are cases where what you are suggesting here is appropriate, but there are other times such data are unnecessary (or impossible to obtain) depending on what is really being said by the speaker. Religious experiences are more like arts. Quantifying the arts misses their intent. Each unique painting tells a beautiful story, and converting everything to numbers and data points eclipses that. In part because of this, I find challenges to "prove" religion to be absurd. Particularly for my own, which has never been about making matter-of-fact proclamations in the first place. Possibly neither here nor there, though.

 

[Cap'n MacDougal]

Therefore?

What's that therefore there for?