Why Vox Day fails
June 7, 2008 — Deacon DuncanI know it’s not TIA Tuesday, but this popped up recently on Vox Popoli, and it’s a really clear example of why Vox’s attempts at debunking fail so badly. He’d like to prove that he has the inside scoop, the intelligence, and the objectivity to see what other people miss, but what he really ends up showing is that he has failed to understand the material.
As I have mentioned before, anyone who repeats the common atheist talking point that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is demonstrating one of two things. The first option is that they haven’t actually thought about it; they’re simply echoing what they’ve heard before. The second is that they aren’t very intelligent.
There’s also a third option: they’ve realized that truth is consistent with itself, and therefore when you claim that extraordinary things are part of the real world, then we ought to be able to find these extraordinary things in the real world. That, however, does not seem to be an option Vox is willing to consider.
Vox’s post is prompted by the remarks of one Ninja Rabbit on the nature of evidence needed for extraordinary claims.
If your neighbor told you that he watered his plants yesterday, it would be a reasonable claim to believe. But if he told you he fed his pet three headed 50 foot alien, it would probably not be reasonable to believe at this particular point. Your neighbor would have to elaborate and give you evidence that this 50 foot three headed alien exists and is his pet.
Vox’s “rebuttal” tries to escape from the dilemma by changing the scenario so that it supplies exactly what Ninja Rabbit said would be needed:
The reason the analogy is poor is obvious if we consider a more equitable version of it. Ninja Rabbit lives next door so he can see the plants. He knows they exist and are in decent health, so he concludes someone must be watering them. His neighbor claims to be doing so, so he accepts the claim. Now, if he also saw the three-headed 50-foot alien next door on as regular a basis and it appeared to be in good health, his neighbor’s claim to own it and feed it would be no more remarkable than his claim to have watered his plants.
Notice, Vox seems completely oblivious to the fact that it would be highly unusual (aka “extraordinary”) for someone to possess a 50-foot three-headed alien in the first place. If people commonly possessed such pets, or if the neighbor was already known to possess such a pet, then granted, there would be nothing extraordinary about displaying the pet as evidence of the claim. But in that situation, the claim would no longer be extraordinary either. All that proves is that ordinary claims (i.e. claims consistent with what we ordinarily experience) do not require extraordinary evidence (i.e. evidence above and beyond what we ordinarily experience).
What Vox has done, indirectly, is to support the conclusion that extraordinary claims do require extraordinary proof. Ninja Rabbit said the claim would require evidence that the neighbor had an alien pet, and that’s exactly what Vox had to add to the story to make it come out the way he wanted. Vox seems to be a little confused about the results, though: he seems to think that by demonstrating Ninja Rabbit was right, he somehow proved he was wrong. But Vox’s confusion runs even deeper: he seems to feel that “extraordinary evidence” means evidence that is itself supernatural or atypical in some way:
It’s quite amusing to hear self-proclaimed “rationalists” attempt to make use of this quote, since the claim that “extraordinary evidence” is required is fundamentally illogical. Because that which is supernatural must interact with the natural in order to be perceived, most supernatural activity will leave natural footprints which are capable of being evaluated by fully natural means. A poltergeist is supernatural, while a vase smashed by a poltergeist, a video of a vase being smashed by an invisible force, and an audio recording of an observing scientist watching a vase being smashed by an invisible force are all natural things that could be provided as evidence for the supernatural.
A proper scientific study of the supernatural, as proposed by the likes of Daniel Dennett, will look no different and provide evidence that is no more extraordinary than the evidence that is provided for any natural claim. Whether one is studying the utility of prayer, Vitamin C, or surgery in curing cancer, the means and the evidence produced will be the same.
Quite so, and the absence of such evidence is precisely why scientists fail to conclude that poltergeists exist. “Extraordinary evidence” does not mean that we need a fundamentally different type of evidence, it means natural evidence which is consistent with the extraordinary claims being made, such as observable and verifiable smashing of vases without the involvement of any natural agents or forces. Evidence of poltergeists, or levitation, or telepathy or other such things would not be “extraordinary evidence” in the sense of being something other than measurement, observation, correlation, and so on. It would simply be natural evidence consistent with the extraordinary phenomena of poltergeists, levitation, telepathy, and so on.
The relationship of the evidence to the conclusion is, or should be, that that truth is consistent with itself, and therefore before we decide that a particular conclusion is true, we ought to expect (and receive) real-world evidence which is consistent with that conclusion. Where the claim is already consistent with common, ordinary experience, the evidence (which Vox calls “tangential knowledge”) is already supplied, and thus the conclusion is justified without requiring further proof. Where the claim is of something unusual, or even contrary to common experience (such as the resurrection of the dead), the evidence consistent with this claim is lacking, and therefore we need to seek it somewhere else.
This is all fairly simple and straightforward stuff, and really, it’s rather peculiar that Vox would even try to make an issue of it. I suppose it’s because he’s embarrassed about the notable lack of extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claims of the Gospel.
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June 7, 2008 at 10:33 pm
it’s rather peculiar that Vox would even try to make an issue of it. I suppose it’s because he’s embarrassed about the notable lack of extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claims of the Gospel.
Actually, from reading his site, I think it’s because he believes that the world is full of evidence for the supernatural, or full of evidence for the effects and the perception of the supernatural.
It isn’t — the examples he tends to site, from first hand testimony to the existence of the gospels, fall apart with just a little digging. But that doesn’t stop him from stating, and believing, otherwise.
June 8, 2008 at 10:43 am
That could well be, although I suspect that Vox may be astute enough to realize at some level that superstition and hearsay aren’t really adequate as “evidence,” which is why he tends to lash out at people who challenge him on it.
June 9, 2008 at 4:40 am
You are giving him more credit than I.
Vox is a smart guy, which I think is part of his problem. We all hold a lot of wrong ideas for good reasons. From what I can tell from his writing, Vox holds his wrong ideas for “smart” reasons.
Case in point, the book you are reviewing….
June 9, 2008 at 4:17 pm
The problem I tend to see with people who argue the extraordinary claims/ evidence argument is that they fail to appreciate the inferred corollary: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; and a lack of alternative mundane evidence. A claim for a poltergeist based on the unexplained breaking of a vase is very poor indeed, not just for the lack of extraordinary evidence, but for the abundance of mundane explanations, to borrow an example.
What makes the neighbor’s pet alien story extraordinary is not necessarily the lack of extraordinary evidence, but the abundance of evidence that people lie, fantasize or hallucinate. In short, alternative explanations abound, and Vox simply seems unreasonable about accepting this as the reason for evidence that surpasses the mundane.
I know it is glaringly obvious, but it is consistently overlooked by those who want something to be true.
June 9, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Hello, this is the one “Ninja Rabbit” whom Vox’s blog was orginally addressed. After I offered another rebuttal to Vox’s post, he finally conceded that there was no argument to be made if I meant “scientific evidence” when I said “extraordinary evidence,” which I understood to be the context all along. It’s beyond me why he chose to make such a big deal out of a mostly trivial issue. Nonetheless, I hope he no longer uses those (rather silly) arguments.
June 10, 2008 at 2:40 am
I’m willing to drop the “extraordinary” part, if Vox et.al would just provide evidence that supports their claims…
June 10, 2008 at 4:24 am
I think part of where people get confused is what, exactly, “extraordinary” means in that context. In fact, it seems to me that the meaning is different for each of the two uses in the common phrase. The phrase, at its heart, is simply saying that different claims require different amounts of justification. We accept the neighbor’s claim of watering his plants based on his say-so, because we know that plants exist and that people often water them, and he would not have much reason to lie about that.
If he said, “I’m going to go polish my new Porsche,” we might not take that just on his say-so, like we would the plants. While owning a Porsche doesn’t contradict anything in our experience, it is quite rare, and someone might have something to gain by lying about owning such a prestigious car. So we ask to see it, and accept it when he opens the garage door.
If he says “I’m going to feed my 50-foot alien pet,” we would probably be inclined to go a step farther. Owning an alien pet would be not merely uncommon, but utterly unique in our experience. We wouldn’t take his word for it, and we probably wouldn’t settle for just seeing it in the backyard. We’d probably want to walk around it, poke it, maybe even run some tests, because such a thing could be faked, or our neighbor could be insane. We set the evidence bar higher for this claim, owing to its extraordinariness.
And then, if our neighbor said that he could fly to Alpha Centauri and back in under a second, we’d probably require greater evidence still, because such a claim would be not merely unique, but contradictory to what we know about the universe. We have ample evidence that people cannot fly under their own power, and further ample evidence that travel over the speed of light is an impossibility. In order to believe that extraordinary claim, we’d have to have evidence that was either extraordinarily reliable or extraordinarily abundant, because it would have to be significant enough to justify the claim and overturn our prior evidence to the contrary.
And obviously, if we lived in a universe where people flew at translight speeds to work each morning, we might just accept our neighbor’s Alpha Centauri claim on his word alone. If we lived on Io, we might require significant evidence to believe his claim of watering his plants. “Ordinary” is a variable description, based on current commonalities.
Claims require evidence, and the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary (in quality or quantity) the evidence must be to justify it. The reason this comes up so very often in discussions of religion is precisely the same as the Alpha Centauri example: global flooding, mind/body dualism, creation ex nihilo, bodily resurrection, and so on and so forth, are not only claims of existence or occurrence, but claims which flatly contradict the available evidence. In order to justify them, we need evidence that would overturn the current models, and such evidence would have to be either incredibly large in number or scale, or absolutely unimpeachable.
Sorry for the long comment.
June 10, 2008 at 3:43 pm
>In order to justify them, we need evidence that would overturn the current models, and such evidence would have to be either incredibly large in number or scale, or absolutely unimpeachable.
And, as NinjaRabbit pointed out, Vox spent a great deal of time obfuscating that rather salient point.
To prove that you are feeding a pet 50 foot alien would require a very, vary large amount of “simple” evidence. One might be tempted to say the sum total of evidences presented was quite extraordinary.
June 12, 2008 at 4:15 am
The mainstream view of science is that all existence has been explained by mindless processess…the universe itself, life, mind, and objective reason.
This is an extraodinary claim.
It has not been demonstrated.
It is claimed that …someday…science may be able to do so, but the more we learn the more we realize we don’t know. Its not just that their are gaps, but they keep increasing.
But keep the faith!
June 12, 2008 at 4:17 am
Ah, I see you have comment moderations.
Thus, the comments that appear may not be an actual reflection of the trend of the responses.
Bye.
June 12, 2008 at 5:49 am
Emanuel, I don’t believe you’ll find many informed people who believe that science has already explained everything. Perhaps you are alluding to the fact that all the phenomena that we have understood has proven to be consistent with natural laws?
June 12, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Now see, I think Emanuel has demonstrated the difference between the ‘faith’ which science requires, i.e. believing in the consistency of natural laws as a means of interpreting observed phenomena (at least, until some new evidence comes along), and believing, by faith, in ancient stories containing elements which supposedly contradict those laws. Of course, V.D. and others lump these two kinds of ‘faith’ together, and ignore the fact that in matters other than religion, they will always lean on the first kind, and never on the second.
All topped off with the snarky intimation that moderation will be used to skew the comment distribution. The only gap that seems to be increasing is the theistic credibility one. Let’s go ahead and make the ultimate break with reason via faith, shall we? ‘For God so loved the world, that He did everything in His power to make it seem as if He didn’t exist, in order that His faithful live by faith alone.’ How’s that?
June 24, 2008 at 3:44 pm
“Because that which is supernatural must interact with the natural in order to be perceived, most supernatural activity will leave natural footprints which are capable of being evaluated by fully natural means.”
Isn’t that the point of The God Delusion in the first place? I’ve only read four chapters, but it seems pretty clear to me. Dawkins readily acknowledges that there is no way to disprove the existence of a Deist style god who sets up the rules and doesn’t intervene. The problem is, that’s not the kind of god described in the Bible or whatever scripture you care to use. Nice of Vox to admit it.