Here.

I think this dismissal of the principle is too quick. There is indeed something more “extraordinary” about the claim that a man rose from the dead than the claim that there are more than 100 universities in Boston. Both claims are, perhaps, surprising, but we require (or, at least, desire) stronger evidence for the former. While “extraordinary” isn’t a technical term, I think it gets at what the issue is.

But this made me think. There is a sense in which any evidence for an extraordinary claim is, as such, extraordinary. In a sense, Pearse is correct that we only have one set of what counts as evidence. There isn’t a special kind of evidence which is only required of extraordinary claims. Perhaps there is just a special amount of evidence required. But consider that we generally expect extraordinary claims to have no evidence, or only clearly spurious evidence. I think one goal of Christian apologetics is to show that the evidence (for, say, the resurrection) is not spurious, however limited in quantity. And if it is not spurious, how extraordinary then is that evidence!

Upon reflection I realize that this is in fact what I require of apparently extraordinary beliefs I don’t hold. I have friends, for example, who accept contrarian views on a number of matters, from the collapse of the world trade centers to intelligent design. It’s not quite right to say that I demand extraordinary evidence. Rather, I just (or should) demand genuine evidence of the usual sort. If there is genuine evidence for a contrarian proposition, no matter how limited in quantity that evidence is, this fact itself is extraordinary and begs for explanation.

[Background: Loftus has been having a tortured exchange with Victor Reppert on whether religious belief is the result of preference (e.g. here, here, here, here, and here.]

Loftus’ starting point/conclusion is characteristically overgeneralized, trivial if taken literally, or false if taken more rhetorically. For example, here’s one that he has been repeating over and over again on his blog:

People believe and defend what they prefer to be true. This is an obvious and non-controversial fact. That’s who we are as human beings. That’s what we human beings do. That’s what psychological studies have repeatedly shown us over and over.

Maybe “people” believe and defend what they prefer to be true insofar as they prefer to have what they take to be accurate beliefs. But that is trivial and probably not what Loftus means. He probably means that they/them/people/the humans believe certain things (or all things?) because they prefer them. Their preference is either the psychological cause or the conscious reason for their beliefs. Judging by Loftus’ citing of, evidently, “Psychology,” we can assume he thinks the preferences of the humans cause them to have certain beliefs, which are conveniently correlated to the beliefs that Loftus currently thinks are false.

So Loftus thinks this “fact” about each human or some humans and each, or some, or most, or the set of, their beliefs, is “obvious and uncontroversial.” Loftus thinks he knows this partly because of worthless and probably tautological evidence like “That’s who we are as human beings,” and the reciprocally superfluous “That’s what we human beings do.” (Mother of God, he’s such a bad writer…). His other evidence is “psychological studies.” It is impressive that Loftus has gained the expertise to conduct a literature survey of psychological research papers in his free time. It might be even more amazing that he has found any psychological research papers at all that make a claim as general as that “people believe and defend what they prefer to be true.” In my knowledgeable survey of all working scientists, done during my two-year blogging sabbatical, I have discovered that psychological and other scientific research actually makes much narrower claims than these. In fact, it is only in science tabloids like Psychology Today or Scientific American that you might get a scientist inferring, perhaps in a casual interview, something this general from studies on narrow particulars. That’s because they have to sell copies of their magazines to popular audiences, who like shallow but sensational content.

So that epitomizes the number one reason why Loftus is so irritating to review, or engage with at all. His most basic claims are frequently outlandish or just exaggerated. Some of them are trivially true but without the implications he deduces from them. Furthermore, his presentation seems like it is conceptually sloppy and poorly organized on purpose. Almost as if his goal isn’t the acquisition and promotion of clear thinking, but something else. Perhaps “overwhelming the believer,” a non-truth-oriented goal Loftus has admitted, and I have cheerily critiqued as involving the sacrifice of basic truisms of intellectual integrity and virtue, here.

In Loftus’ most recent post on how we prefer to believe, he asserts several times, without utility, that he (and “people”) find the “Christian story” very compelling. Loftus writes things like this:

Who needs Christian apologetics with a story like this? Who needs to defend such a story at all? The story itself provides the only evidence people need to believe. Just tell the story. Claim it as a properly basic belief. Tell us the Holy Spirit testifies to this story through an inner witness. After all, it does resonate with us.

While this paragraph might have psychological pull designed to “overwhelm the believer,” consider how confused it is. The function of Christian apologetics is more or less twofold:

(1) To promote the truth of Christian belief and

(2) To defend Christian belief against objections to its truth

Except in rare cases, Christian apologetics has nothing to do with showing that the story is or is not “compelling,” which is something more relevant in the context of evangelism. So in no sense is the telling of the story even a possible replacement for Christian apologetics. In any case, many people don’t accept the story based on its emotional components – in fact, like John Loftus, many people don’t accept the story at all. So it is just irrelevant from both perspectives that the story has some happy things in it. Then Loftus says “Claim it as a properly basic belief,” apparently unaware that this claim is itself a product of Christian apologetics, linked to the sister claim, elaborated by apologists, about the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. Responding to confusions such as these, while it provides some psychological pull in the form of easy intellectual self-satisfaction, is ultimately boring.

Then Loftus lists several pleasing truth-claims believed by many people, some of them Christians. For example, “We want to believe there is divine help when in trouble.” Loftus could have added, “We want to believe that there is no morally significant genetic differences between races or sexes.” Or, “We want to believe that it is possible to curtail the potentially catastrophic effects of global warming.” Or, “We want to believe that knowledge is possible.” The list could go on forever.

The point is, Loftus’ statements here are just worthless. It is so trivially true that many of our beliefs are preferable to their denial that there is nothing significant left to do with this fact. We should, perhaps, be most critical of incoming claims that sound nice to us. But “people,” as surely Pychology, Astrophysics, and Entomology have shown, are quite adept at resisting being duped by happy stories. In fact, it is commonly believed that we can’t make ourselves believe based on preference for happy stories. In fact this is one of the common attacks on one reading Pascal’s Wager, where some see Pascal as saying we should believe for practical, not epistemic, reasons.

It would be interesting to note which happy beliefs are worth accepting, or isolating what intellectual tools sort out happy false from happy true, but that is territory uncharted by Loftus’ excursions into this non-topic.

Then, characteristically, Loftus adds on some non-sequiturs, just listing without comment some of the Christian things he doesn’t believe. Undoubtedly, this is meant to “overwhelm the believer.” For example, he writes without utility, “Nevermind the fact that we haven’t a clue as to how a child could be 100% God and 100% human with nothing left over.” I’m not sure what this adds to discussion other than obfuscation. What does “nothing left over” even mean? Does Loftus understand the orthodox doctrine of the trinity to be a proposition in mathematics? Even if it was, what relation does this have to believing for emotional reasons? Is anyone made happy or comforted by the abstruse idea that Jesus has two 100%’s inside of him?

But there is truly no point in pursuing Loftus’ non-sequiturs, since his goal is not accurate portrayal and engagement with religious concepts, but is to “overwhelm the believer.” It is indeed overwhelming to chase down every flippant, poorly educated non-sequitur. That kind of overwhelming, no one needs.

Loftus then issues a number of mutually exclusive caricatures of supposedly apologetic responses to him (putting your brain on a shelf, finding reasons, appealing to omniscience, all at the same time?). This is another reason why Loftus, the self-proclaimed former insider, is so tedious to engage. He doesn’t even bother constructing straw men, but instead constructs single-sentence caricatures that prove their own silliness. So, to take one example, a respondent would have to go through and explain how, like any type of argument, “appealing to omniscience” is sometimes reasonable and sometimes not reasonable; this is a very tempered but accurate assessment, perhaps not suitable for online theatrics.

Loftus finishes with some happy talk about himself. The most excruciating and histrionic of these is “I have nothing more to offer but knowledge and understanding.”

For a final reason why it is annoying to engage Loftus, consider this line: “But I’m here to tell Christians their faith is a delusion. They reject and attack me for telling them this.”

Sometimes Christians read atheist books, have some corroborating set of experiences, and become atheists. Sometimes atheists do the opposites of those things. Like many of the true statements that correct for Loftus’ sloppiness, these are barely worth saying, perhaps not worth saying at all. In any case, some people disagree with Loftus and express their disagreements because they genuinely think he is incorrect, not for “telling them” they are delusional (who cares if John Loftus calls you delusional?) but in his opinions on certain topics.

Lastly, it is very annoying and tedious engaging Loftus when he imputes motives to his interlocutors without basis or utility. Loftus telling his opponents that they have angry-crazy motives for “attacking” him is about as useful as me saying Loftus promotes the Outsider Test because last night he had a dream about potatoes. I can’t possibly know this. But even if I did know this, it would have no relevance to evaluating the Outsider Test, or Loftus’ arguments. It would be, in function, subterfuge. Loftus has proudly admitted that his tactics are subterfuge, intended to “overwhelm the believer.”

There is at least one hypocritical element of my post. I observe that Loftus is highly disorganized (I should say, even in his published work, ostensibly overseen by editors). Yet, this post is itself somewhat disorganized. While this is partly because in responding to Loftus one has to make one’s own structure, it is also because I am not putting very much care or effort into this post. But I thought that it might be nice, even fun, to have an interim condescending critique of Loftus, while my hundreds of thousands of readers await the continuation of my highly scholarly review of his collection of other people’s aphorisms, Why I Became an Atheist. My review, I might add, is supported and corroborated by the composite literature in all academic subjects.