For Joe and Kyle

I cut and pasted this from Astral Codex Ten, Scott Alexander's site.  Alexander is a San Francisco psychiatrist and every conservative's favorite liberal.  He comes out of the early 2000s online humanist/New Atheist groups and catalogued its descent into simple angry wokeness over a very few years. He is an atheist who quotes GK Chesterton and says that CS Lewis "almost persuaded" him. I thought you would find it fun.

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I linked FWLAB’s criticism of David Hume’s argument against ever believing miracles. Joe James argues that FWLAB, myself, and other critics are misunderstanding Hume’s argument. FWLAB says no he isn’t. They continue the “discussion” in the comments, but both sides kind of embarrass themselves and don’t get anywhere. I am unfortunately still confused - there are many cases where something that never happened before happens for the first time. For example, nobody had ever seen a grizzly-polar bear hybrid until recently, so “the universal testimony of mankind” was that this didn’t happen. But when a reliable person did see it, we had little trouble imagining that we were wrong and it was simply very rare, or a new thing happening now because of climate change. If nobody has ever seen a sea part before, but then many people say they saw Moses part the Red Sea, what is different about this such that “the universal testimony of mankind” suddenly becomes a disqualifier? Hume seems to be trying to make this same distinction in his eight days of darkness example, but there it seems like he is only saying he will accept non-religious anomalies, but rule out religious ones, because religious people often lie. But then what happened to the “universal testimony of mankind” argument? I kind of get the impression that he’s groping towards Bayes’ Theorem, but hard-coding in a belief that the prior probability of lots of religious people lying is higher than the probability of a miracle. If that’s his belief, then fair enough, but I guess I expected the much-vaunted Hume’s Argument Against Miracles to be something more than this.