Reply #238: You gotta love

[qazplm]

when someone has to keep redefining their hypo as people make critiques about it, eventually you redefine it to such an extent that it becomes laughable.

Fine, the maid dies. The point is that having an adulterous affair is NOT the same as seeing ghosts, or God or anything else supernatural. Therefore it does not require the same level of proof.

If you are going to be purposefully obtuse about the fact that ADULTERY happens half the time and the fact that we at base are talking about the ACT witnessed being provable or not, not the witnessing itself then I am wasting my time. So why you typed that snarky and obtuse bit about witnessing fathers in the act half the time I dont know but perhaps you might want to edit it out on reflection.

The bottom line is, that you tell me that you breathed all day today, I dont need to delve too deeply, you tell me you talked to God today, I am going to take it much more skeptically and ask for much more proof. Anyone who doesnt as you apparently dont, is, well, I cant think of anything nice to say.

If I have a dream, the fact that I have a dream CAN be analyzed clearly by hooking me up to electrodes and seeing the changed brain states that signify dreaming. If I SAY that I had a dream, absent some proof it is SUBJECTIVE because one I could be lying, two I could be mistaken, and three I have no proof that I had a dream.

I had a dream about a milkshake last night. Am I lying or telling the truth? Do you know? You dont, therefore how in the world is it objective?

The objective fact may be that I had a dream or I didnt. Ok, and? That and 75 cents will buy you a USA Today. WHY do we separate between subjective and objective? There is a REASON we do it and a very good one at that.

Your last example is a joke. The only evidence we have is NOT that the one person is a witness to a murder, we have additional evidence that says hey this alleged murdered person has disappeared. Furthermore we may have evidence that the person who is the alleged murderer has no alibi or had an issue with that person. But guess what we do, we create this VERY high standard that ideally says we need proof beyond a reasonable doubt. So that ideally we need more evidence than one person saying I saw this. We need something more. So while the murder MAY have happened, it MAY also have not happened or it MAY have happened in a manner much different than the witness asserts. Especially since studies show that eyewitness testimony is wrong roughly half of the time (by all means look it up, dont take my word for it).

So it happened or it didnt. Yeah so which one was it? Either you saw God or you didnt. Yeah so which one was it. To say it was an objective fact that you saw God or you didnt, that you saw a murder or you didnt or that you had a dream or you didnt, gets us exactly nowhere in any meaningful examination of the truth.

What IS interesting is that we have in the dream case, given a very low standard of proof (why? Because it is a thing that happens to everyone all the time and has a very high probability of being true); in the murder case, given a fairly high standard of proof (why? because it happens relatively rarely, because we dont like taking the word of just one person without other evidence (for the VERY reasons I have outlined in this discussion!), and because it has a lesser likelihood of being true); and in the case of the supernatural, we have an extraordinarily high standard (why? because we arent even sure if it happens AT ALL, and because it has a very high probability of NOT being true).

We make logical distinctions and even in the case of things we know happen (like adultery or murder) we expect more proof or evidence for a whole host of logical and common sense reasons. But you dont seem to want to play that game.