Q1: The word evidence can be used two ways: to refer to what a person presents as weighing for a conclusion even if in fact it doesn’t (“God’s Word in the Bible is evidence the earth is only six thousand years old”); or to refer to what actually does weigh for a conclusion. I assume you are asking me about the latter. In that case, evidence for any conclusion h is any observation or set of observations whose existence is less probable if h is false than if h is true (given previously established data, b); and the weight or strength of evidence is in direct proportion to the difference between those two probabilities. See Rule 6 in We Are All Bayesians Now. Note, even in the first sense of “evidence,” the person incorrectly identifying a thing as “evidence for” their conclusion, believes it does so because of the second definition, even if they are not consciously aware of that. If they didn’t believe that, they would not call it evidence.

Regarding SAG, yes, those are different “kinds” of evidence insofar as they are generated by different things or carry different weights; though I have since become a Bayesian as well (see explanation in the Revision Notes in my Typos List for Sense and Goodness without God).

Q2: I have a big problem with labels, because of the readiness with which they evoke Baggage Fallacies. On the latter, see my related comment elsewhere regarding “labeling” my metaethical theory in SAG. So, in short, I am an evidentialist on some definitions, and not an evidentialist on other definitions. So it all depends on what you mean by “evidentialism.” I wouldn’t worry so much about what a thing is called rather than what it actually is. So if you need to understand or question a thing, study what it is; not what it is called.

That said, I pretty much agree with everything said of and pro evidentialism in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. For my possible exceptions or variations from the stance taken there (though still IMO in defense of evidentialism, depending on how you define that term), you may benefit from reading my articles The Gettier Problem and Epistemological End Game.

Hi, Dr. Carrier. 2 quick clarifications please:

Q1. What is your definition of evidence? And regarding your truth-finding methods you discuss in SAGWG (II.3), are those what you consider to be different forms of evidence?

Q2. What is your take on evidentialism? Do you subscribe to it? If so, what form? What is your definition of it?

As always, looking forward to your reply.

I link to my whole article on Burden of Proof in the article you are now commenting on.

I also have a whole section on my disagreement with his position on agnosticism in the article you are now commenting on.

(I hate the term burden of proof, btw. I much prefer burden of evidence as it more properly states what is required.)

From reading his preface it seems likely he has all the evidence he needs to fulfil the burden for the atheist side, so why not just own it?

I also think he misrepresents the agnostic view in this courtroom analogy. He claims that an agnostic believes that neither side has a burden of proof, but most agnostics I’ve spoken to would argue that it’s that both theists and athiests have a burden of proof and neither has managed to meet it sufficiently.

I think that agnostics have a BoP as well, the need to show why they think neither side has sufficient evidence.

Many thanks.

In addition to what Benjamin said, see my discussion of the same question in my Postflaviana article.

The easiest method is to just ask yourself: was it published by a university press? If “yes,” it’s peer reviewed. I am not aware of any university press that isn’t. You could perhaps be skeptical when the university itself is well nigh bogus (if it’s a fundamentalist propaganda mill, for example), but those are rare, and easy to spot (just five minutes of researching a university online can tell you if it’s legit or not). Otherwise, peer reviewed books will usually have been read, critiqued, and approved (after any required revisions) by at least two independent outside reviewers who are established experts in the subject field. (And often anonymous; the process is usually double-blind, with only the editor knowing all parties.)

It gets more difficult only when the answer to that question is “No,” because “No” does not mean the converse (that it was not peer reviewed). Plenty of publishers not directly affiliated with universities are peer reviewed. Some are so prestigious just five minutes of research online, again, will establish it’s a legit academic press (e.g. Routledge, Brill). It can be harder when it’s a smaller press. But you can get a clear idea from, as Benjamin noted, how often the press is taken seriously in academic journal reviews of its books. You can also simply ask (email the editor); though some will lie, usually they will do so only when there are other obvious markers you can find online that the press is a propaganda mill and not a real academic press.

And there are some cases that are 50/50, where a press will sometimes peer review a book or not. In those cases, the only way to know is if someone who would know, says. I mandated in my contract with Prometheus that they peer review my book Proving History with a professor of mathematics and a professor of biblical studies. They don’t usually do that. But they did in that case. So I can say that book was peer reviewed. But that’s not typical.

Other exceptional cases are when the book is just a republished university doctoral dissertation, which by definition will have been more peer reviewed than any other book (as a whole defense committee will have shredded it and verified required revisions made), no matter what publisher made it generally available after.

And so on.

Of course those excuses all entail broken and self-contradictory worldviews.

For example, they would never accept 1. regarding any other thing they are asked or need to believe for their own well being (“you should not be given evidence or ever require evidence to believe anything” is a self-destructive principle no one endorses in any real world case; and they would deem anyone who hid evidence from them that they needed for their own survival as immoral).

Likewise, if 2. were true, then they cannot claim to know God is good or exists at all, because they just said God cannot be understood and would do nothing predictable from any premise about him. Which means their belief in God’s existence and goodness is irrational and incapable of ever being justified. In reality, they make these predictions about people all the time: that’s how they can tell the difference between good people and bad, smart people and dumb, wise people and foolish, the just and the corrupt; how they tell the difference between intelligently designed and consciously intended outcomes and random accidents; and so on. They can only ever make these distinctions by knowing what having either attributes entails the person will do, and then observing which behaviors they exhibit. Yet they want to abandon the only tool they have to determine these things precisely when it is literally the most important time they need to determine these things.

That 3. meanwhile illustrates why no one believes in God because of evidence; evidential arguments, reasons, those are all post hoc rationalizations. That’s why they don’t need any coherent definition of God. They are protecting their false beliefs in immortality and righteousness and protectedness (to avoid coping with the reality that they are mortal, their loved ones are gone, and they have only their own and our fallible resources to protect and advise them); all of which they would have to abandon if they admit there is no god. So they will redefine god any way they need to avoid the destructive cognitive dissonance that will kick away their imaginary crutches in life. Redefining god to avoid every doubt would not be anything they resorted to if their belief were instead based on evidence. Just compare it to someone “redefining love” while their spouse continually hurts, abuses or cheats them so as to never admit that their spouse, actually, doesn’t love them in any meaningful sense at all and they should get the hell out of there; and then it becomes clear how self-harming and self-destructive 3. is as a principle in any aspect of life. Likewise someone “redefining ‘good for me'” to avoid facing the fact that their drug addiction is destroying them and those they love. Or “redefining justice” to avoid doing anything about corruption and injustice. And so on.

That’s why I link to the Google Play version. I suspect the supply is actually unlimited (I think it’s “print on demand” like most books are now), but the pandemic is stalling production.

I need an atheistic view that is less hostile and less automatically dismissive of the beliefs of others. I also need to deal with my own sense of being in communion with a mysterious universe.

Then you would be more interested in my course on building naturalism as a worldview, developing your own positive philosophy of life.

So I don’t find it practical, in everyday life, to work from a definition of god that concludes “which simply does not exist.”

Note that Murray’s text also covers what you just suggest—it’s called Error Theory. You may be interested in reading his sections on that (as well as on the liberal theologies that embrace some form of it). Also indirectly applicable is my article What’s the Harm, the section on liberal theism. And indeed you aren’t alone: there are actual pastors and theologians who want to do the same thing as you (Murray discusses them; see also my discussion of “The Future of God Seminar” at Westar a couple years ago (that’s the last section of that linked article).

A key word here is imagination. Imagination unfairly gets lumped in with the category of “not real.”

It’s not unfair when it’s actually what’s happening. People generally don’t think God is a metaphor. They are activated by their God concept to do all the bad and harmful things they do because they believe it’s real, not because they believe it’s imaginary. Again, see my article What’s the Harm for more on that problem. Murray also covers it. So does Hector Avalos with respect to toxic Scripture being treated as authoritative for the same reason, in The End of Biblical Studies.

Therefore we don’t understand what “gods as a shared human construct within culture and imagination” – within consciousness — means either.

Actually we do. Consciousness is a modeling system. And Gods are false models of what’s in the world we move through and inhabit and what controls or dictates its outcomes (e.g. apocalypticism, miracles, afterlife, judgment, the purpose and intention of things in nature). True models (as in models that reliably correlate with what really does govern the universe and dictate outcomes) lack “gods” except in the false model sense. Just as they lack “ghosts” and “demons” and “angels” and “psychic powers” except in the false model sense.

Under this definition, your phrase is untrue: He makes “the universe look exactly like a universe with no God in it?”

That’s the incorrect definition to apply to that sentence. That sentence is about people who believe the God is real and actually did that. Which people constitute the vast majority of actual theists in the world, who are actually being activated by that false belief to harm or ruin other lives and undermine societal progress and their own philosophical progress in self-understanding.

Obviously someone who doesn’t think God is real but only imaginary isn’t the person I’m talking about there. This much rarer type of person already agrees that no God created anything, and no God is going to come and rescue us and carry us into heaven to live forever, and that the contents of the world were not created or designed for us.

You might rightly believe the most primitive gods are hallucinations…

No, delusions. More properly speaking, cognitive illusions. The leading science on this is covered in Dennett and Guthrie and Vyse. Murray presents a summary. By contrast the number of people who actually hallucinate contact with gods and spirits is relatively few; although they tend to drive religious innovation (becoming the leaders of breakaway cults, some of which grow into institutionalized religions).

If you all at once removed all of the artifacts of god from say the city of Paris, the results would be overwhelming – half of the Louvre, Notre Dame cathedral, gone.

This is to confuse two unrelated things: no one thinks statues of Hermes and Zeus represent real deities who influence the world and will help us live forever. So “images of the gods” aren’t the problem. The gods people believe are real are the problem. Jesus could be relegated to the same status as all other gods: ancient fictions that inspired still-prized art and architecture. The problem is that he hasn’t been. That’s what causes all the evils and harms in the world that stem from religion. That’s the disease we need to cure society of.

Thank you, Benjamin.