CADRE Comments

Carl Sagan I have a page dealing with this concept on Doxa, but it's not very good. This is a better version. I will combine the two eventually. The New Version is on my New Sight: The Religious A priori Carl Sagan made this statement popular in its current form, it was originally used by Hume, Laplace and other early theorists, but atheists have sense taken it as a major slogan for their decision-making paradigm. Marcelo Truzzi tells us: In his famous 1748 essay Of Miracles, the great skeptic David Hume asserted that "A wise man...proportions his belief to the evidence,"and he said of testimony for extraordinary claims that "the evidence, resulting from the testimony, admits of a diminution, greater or less, in proportion as the fact is more unusual." A similar statement was made by Laplace, and many other later writers. I turned it into the now popular phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" (which Carl Sag...

The contents page for this series can be found here. The previous entry, Chapter 57, can be found here. If the reader arriving at the site for Easter Day wants a quick overview of why all the things I've been talking about for +700 pages matter, please see my Easter Sermon from last year 2010 ( "Why It All Matters" -- don't panic, it's only five minutes' reading tops. {g}) This book has been my testimony, for why I believe what I do. Despite its length, and its frequent complexity, it comes down to this: why am I a Christian? The thrust of my argument throughout my book, has pointed toward the conclusion that I should expect God to act in our history in certain ways. I have tried to allow for a potentially wide range of variables in how those actions will someday be (or have already been) carried out. I have even tried not to hang the story entirely on the timeframe in which I think the story actually was carried out. But I do think the story has been carri...

[Introductory note from Jason Pratt: the previous and first entry in this series of posts can be found here. ] Sometimes when the topic of religion (or theology, or philosophy, or metaphysics...) rises in conversation, one person will wave off the discussion with this type of dismissal: 'There isn't much point discussing such things, because such discussions cannot, by their very character, reach true answers.' This person might also declare that anyone can argue validly to anything; or that an infinite number of true answers are possible. This type of person will express himself in several different ways; but his main position is that such discussions cannot be useful. [Footnote: I distinguish, however, between such a person and a person who wants to make some positive use of a claim that an infinite number of exclusively true answers are possible. I will discuss such a positive proposition later.] Sometimes this tactic represents a head-in-the sand approach: the person d...