What Is Evidence?

What counts as evidence?

In my previous blog post, Rapoport’s Rules Meet the Outsider Test, I mentioned the dispute over what counts as evidence:

When discussing religion with persons of faith, try to be aware of their tactic of framing the argument in terms of positive arguments for their particular faith, rather than in terms of negative arguments against all competing faiths. This was on display in the four-way debate video that John W. Loftus posted about the Virgin Birth. John’s Orthodox Christian interlocutors demanded that John clearly define what he would consider to be sufficient evidence for their religious claims. But they did not mention that they must think that no competing religion has met the same standard of evidence for them. So they must know what “evidence” is, well enough to conclude that no other religion has it. Perhaps they have just never thought this through before.

In this blog post I’ll dig deeper into this dispute about evidence. I include my own manual transcriptions of the dialogue from the video with time markers, but transcribing is hard so refer back to the video for each’s speakers statements in his own words.

Solid teaching, solid truth

I’ll start with a sort of mission statement from the senior opponent to John in the video:

12:26 Fr. Jonathan Ivanoff:

“And right now I’m just very very interested in bringing the knowledge of that [Orthodox] faith to a public that is hungry and thirsty for solid teaching, solid truth.”

This statement about audience demand sounds plausible enough. It stands to reason that if Fr. Ivanoff has a job, he must have found an audience that likes what he has to say. Good for him. A man’s gotta eat. But I have some questions about what he means by “solid teaching, solid truth.” Those are rather bold claims. Presumably Fr. Ivanoff is aware that there are other audiences who are equally hungry for other “solid” teachings, other “truths.” For example, Fr. Ivanoff seems to hail from the Orthodox side of the Great Schism of 1054. The folks on the other side, for the past 950+ years, are Roman Catholics (and by extension, the Protestants who later schismed off from them like so many proliferating species). I’m pretty sure the current Pope would say he has “solid teaching, solid truth” as well. Yet these two equally solid teachings have been in conflict for fully half of the Christian era. Thus I think it’s fair to ask (a) whether Fr. Ivanoff views his own teaching as more “solid” and “truthful” than the Pope’s teachings (I’m guessing he does!), and (b) how he knows this.

I’d also like to know how comfortable Fr. Ivanoff feels about worshipping in a Roman Catholic Church.

If Fr. Ivanoff believes the Pope is wrong about something that matters, enough to break off fellowship, Fr. Ivanoff must have some sort of evidence to support his belief. For example, one point of contention between Catholic and Orthodox Christians is that bizarre filioque thing. I’d like to know how the rules for evidence work on that one, and how the Pope came to have different rules for evidence than Fr. Ivanoff has.

What evidence is not

And this hints at something I’ll elaborate more on below: the word “evidence” means different things to different folks. In the next excerpt, Fr. Ivanoff wants to know how John W. Loftus defines “evidence”:

18:38 Fr. Jonathan Ivanoff:

“Beyond that, when John speaks of relevant evidence, I’d like to hear his definition of what relevant evidence is so we can talk about that and move forward.”

And John replies at 18:53 in the video similarly to the exerpt from his recent article “Is Atheism a Faith?”. I’ll quote from the article as it is cleaner than my transcription:

In response, apologists claim that nonbelievers have no objective criteria for determining what counts as extraordinary evidence for miracles. But I know what doesn’t count as extraordinary evidence, which says it all. Second-, third-, and fourth-hand hearsay testimonial evidence doesn’t count; nor does circumstantial evidence, or anecdotal evidence as reported in documents that are centuries later than the supposed events they recount, documents which were copied by scribes and theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries. I also know that subjective feelings, experiences, and inner voices don’t count as extraordinary evidence, nor do the reports of someone who tells others that his writings are inspired or conveyed by divine revelation through dreams or visions.[13])

In the video, John adds:

That’s - let’s just talk about that - because I claim that’s all you have.

That last sentence is key. A proper way to refute John here would be to show that’s not all they have, but that the Orthodox spokesmen have some additional evidence, something that might pass muster with a rational skeptic like John. Suffice it to say we won’t be getting any shocking new divine revelations here. Instead we’ll get an attempt to shift the burden of explanation onto John, when the Subdeacon tags into the dustup later:

Pressing for a positive definition of evidence

30:43 Subdeacon Daniel Kakish:

…but when you’re asking what is the evidence, I’m asking you what is the evidence that you would accept. Father Jonathan already asked you, but you just went on with another list of what is not evidence, you didn’t answer the question of evidence would be for me. When I see people like you guys mentioned Luke earlier, Luke was a journalist, a physician, he was a Hellenic Jew maybe … or a Greek somehow or just the Greek but it was counterintuitive for him to believe in this, he converted, and we know the story of Saul of Tarsus, another counterintuitive story, why would he change his whole life, so then you have these early figures not to mention everyone who was the eyewitnesses Dr. Price mentions the evidence for the resurrection if the one who born from Mary is proven to be the Son of God which I think there’s a lot of evidence for that then automatically the virgin birth would be true. However, again I want to ask you what evidence would you accept for what uh for the virgin birth?

My transcription might be a bit sloppy, but I think Subdeacon Kakish’ gist is clear: he wants to know, if the evidence for his flavor of Christianity isn’t good enough for John, what evidence would be? And then he segues into what appears to be his own view of the relevant evidence, namely:

1. The “counterintuitive” actions of Luke and Saul of Tarsus who became known as the apostle Paul.
2. The unnamed “eyewitnesses” to the Resurrection of Jesus.
3. The Resurrection itself as a kind of evidence for the Virgin Birth, the main topic under discussion. Left unsaid is any coherent connection between the Resurrection (even if it occurred) and the Virgin Birth. After all, the bible contains stories of other people who were resurrected, including vast numbers of dead saints at Jesus’ Crucifixion, and nobody is arguing for any of them being Virgin-born.

If we go back up and look at what John says isn’t evidence (for him), he’s already undermined all three of Kakish’ lines of evidence, as we only have “Second-, third-, and fourth-hand hearsay testimonial evidence” for them, in the form of scriptures which were arbitrarily selected by committees of self-appointed men some centuries later to be canonized into what we now recognize as the various bibles of the various Christian brands (yes, there is more than one biblical canon). So what Subdeacon Kakish takes to be established fact - that men like Luke and Paul existed and we have reliable evidence that they did “counterintuitive” things, and that there were “eyewitnesses” to the Resurrection, and this somehow counts as evidence for Mary to have divinely conceived the Son of God, and that Joseph learned reliably in a dream that this was the Gospel Truth - John doesn’t find convincing for precisely the reasons he listed.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

Another point Kakish doesn’t mention is the extraordinary nature of his claims. Insofar as modern science has been able to tell, the Virgin Birth and Resurrection stories are impossible. Since the scriptures were written long before the start of modern science, people at the time wouldn’t have understood the impossibility. To them these might have just seemed like more signs and wonders to go along with other seemingly fantastic natural occurrences like volcanoes, earthquakes (and no surprise that Jesus’ Crucifixion is capped off with an earthquake in the Gospel account!), plagues, lightning bolts, and so on. After all, if a mountain can literally explode, why can’t a god impregnate a woman? The prescientific mind cannot imagine the difference. The prescientific mind doesn’t understand the rules that govern the real world - the rules that make exploding volcanoes not only possible but just about inevitable in certain parts of the world (the parts near particular subduction zones or hotspots) while simultaneously making unfertilized births of male offspring all but impossible for humans, along with the resurrection of a substantially decayed human body.

Why volcanoes are not miracles, image from Wikimedia Commons

Extraordinary events like those two have never been reliably attested - that is, with modern trained experts in all the relevant science (and magician’s tricks!) present and recording. And thus we’re going to need evidence which is correspondingly extraordinary. Kakish’s “evidence” in the form of “counterintuitive” behavior by Luke and Saul / Paul is far from extraordinary. People do counterintuitive things every day. See for example the behavior of Tom Cruise after he learned about Scientology. Or all the Mormon converts who died for their beliefs during their wars with Christians and the US government. Or how about the 9/11 terrorists who flew airplanes into buildings, because they believed they would be rewarded with virgins in the afterlife? (It seems more than one religion has odd fixations with human female virgins.) People behaving “counterintuitively” is not evidence for anything but the fact that our intuitions are not a sufficient basis for the science of psychology. Probably every religion has its examples of people behaving “counterintuitively.” See for example Melanesian Cargo Cults. Or the snake-handling Christians of America’s Appalachia. And everything else in Seth Andrews’ by turns amusing and alarming book Sacred Cows: A Lighthearted Look at Belief and Tradition Around the World.

And it’s hardly enough to point to dramatic behavior changes by religious converts. What religion does not have similar stories? Do they count as evidence that every religion’s supernatural claims are equally true?

And even outside religion, people do counterintuitive things every day, and some fraction of people dramatically transform their lives, for better or worse. With or without various faiths, these are things people do.

Subjective evidence

So the disagreement seems to be that John and his Orthodox interlocutors have drastically different notions of evidence. This makes complete sense if we adopt a functional, subjective definition of “evidence”: whatever makes you believe something. By this definition, everybody with a belief has some sort of “evidence” for their belief - at least something they consider to be evidence. As this definition is inherently circular (you believe because you have evidence, and you have evidence because you believe), to say that people disagree over evidence merely restates that they disagree over belief.

The challenge, as we see in the video, is in persuading someone else to accept your own subjective definition of evidence. If the Orthodox spokesmen had done their homework, they would immediately recognize that John’s definition of evidence is closer to the definitions you’d find in the scientific or legal/judicial communities.

Intersubjective evidence

If you want to work as a scientist, or as an attorney, or as an historian for that matter, you’ll have to learn what counts as evidence in those professions. While history might be viewed as kind of a “pure” intellectual pursuit, science and the law tend to be considerably more practical. Pure science has given rise to a lot of applied science and technology, often with billions of dollars and the fate of the entire biosphere on the line. The law, for its part, makes hugely consequential decisions every day. Therefore both fields must have ways to resolve the sorts of endless disagreements that have shattered Chrstianity into tens of thousands of warring brands. And the way that science and the law do this is by coming up with definitions of “evidence” that vast numbers of people from different backgrounds can agree on.

That is, “evidence” in science and the law is not merely subjective, but intersubjective. From Wikipedia:

Intersubjectivity describes the shared understanding that emerges from interpersonal interactions. The term first appeared in social science in the 1970s and later incorporated into psychoanalytic theory by George E. Atwood and Robert Stolorow, the term has since been adopted across various fields.

In most everyday contexts, “evidence” is strongly intersubjective. Few of us have ever struggled to establish the fact of our own existence in the minds of other people. My subjective evidence for my own existence seems acceptable to just about everyone else. All we have to do is show up, and allow other people to use their senses to evaluate the evidence we constantly broadcast. The particulars of my claimed identity might be faked (I could hypothetically be a deep cover operative whose cover story is massively prosaic and boring), but my existence as a human would be very hard to fake with current technology. In the future, robots might be able to imitate humans with increasing levels of fidelity, but that’s a way off for now.

And that’s why John and his Orthodox sparring partners are not demanding evidence for each other’s existence. They have a strong intersubjective agreement about what counts as evidence for the existence of a human being, and they had this agreement long before they met each other.

The reason why it’s easy to prove that I exist, and hard to prove that God exists (or that the Son of God was born of a virgin female, etc.) is because I am real. When it’s hard to prove that something exists, then either that thing is not real, or it is so subtle that it cannot be detected by human senses or scientific instruments. Modern scientific instruments are highly sensitive, able to photograph distant galaxies and nearby molecular structures. X-ray scanners can “see” through clothing to detect hidden weapons and contraband. Medical scanners can produce detailed images of our innards. Radar can track distant aircraft and weather systems. Analytic chemists can identify thousands of different chemical compounds in a sample. Modern statistical methods can detect tiny effect sizes in samples of thousands or millions of people. And so on. For God to remain invisible to modern science is quite an achievement, particularly when the bible claims that God was easy for unaided humans to detect for centuries.

To be fair, modern science can’t detect everything yet. Things like dark matter and dark energy can be inferred by the effects they have on visible matter, but physicists don’t yet know how to detect them directly. But that’s OK - for a long time scientists couldn’t detect the Higgs boson either, until they did. But no religion postulates such things, which weren’t even imaginable until modern science gave people ideas. Religions are all about gods that ordinary pre-scientific peoples could observe or interact with in some way. The God of the bible, for example, is routinely portrayed as crashing about through history, working miracles, slaying people in vast numbers for misbehaving, torturing Job to win a bet with Satan, and generally making himself impossible to ignore. That sort of God has simply disappeared like a puff of smoke with the rise of modern science. So either God went away, or pre-scientific people were lying or mistaken when they attributed natural phenomena to God.

Evidence: you know it when you see it

Potter Stewart was a US Supreme Court justice who immortalized the saying “I know it when I see it.” He originally said this about obscenity, but evidence is another thing that’s easy for people to recognize and hard to define precisely.

Most people rarely think about what evidence actually is. Therefore when Subdeacon Kakish asks John to clearly define what he means by “evidence”, Kakish implies that the discussion is not about ordinary, everyday things. When you go to the grocery store, for example, you don’t accost the workers and demand them to define what they take to be evidence that the jug of milk contains milk and sells for the marked price. To argue about “evidence” in that situation would seem pretty nuts. Therefore, when a debate becomes a debate about what “evidence” is, it’s a sign that someone is skating on thin ice. And I think we know which side that is: the side that claims their religion is right and all other religions are wrong. They must have some sort of evidence for that claim, if we take the broadest definition of “evidence” - whatever causes you to believe something.

Evidence: what the philosophers have said

Lots of philosophers have spilled lots of ink on the question of what evidence is. See for example Evidence from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It begins with a quote:

And when we try to define ‘evidence’ … we find it very difficult.
—R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

That Enclopedia has a separate article on The Legal Concept of Evidence.

The Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy weighs in too, as does the Routledge Encyclopedia, and the English Wikipedia. For Kakish to ask John to give a positive account of what constitutes evidence is a bit like asking someone to briefly explain particle physics, or calculus, or Baroque music. We’re talking about subjects that would take months or years of study to get a good handle on.

Thus I don’t think it’s entirely fair to demand that John give a definition of “evidence” that works for everyone on all subjects. The discussion video would have to get a lot longer for that! But I think Fr. Ivanoff and Subdeacon Kakish might agree that no religion’s supernatural claims meet the evidentiary standards of science or the law. That is, claims about the existence of God, the Virgin Birth and Resurrection of Jesus, have never been and probably will never be established as scientific or legal facts. If either of those two men switch careers to science or the law, they’ll quickly discover that they won’t make headway with their peers by advancing a scientific theory or a legal argument predicated on the claim that a specific God - or any god - exists. Imagine a defense attorney who tried to argue that the client is innocent of all charges because an angel appeared to him in a dream and said so! That attorney would get laughed right out of court, and probably even by Christians who forget that they accept the same quality of “evidence” for the Virgin Birth.

When an argument is insane everywhere outside of the bible, it’s probably insane in the bible too.

But of course both men do “switch careers” whenever they clock out of work and face practical problems in the real world. Then they probably do apply the same standards of evidence that a scientist or an attorney would use. If the lights don’t come on, they probably don’t wait for an angel to appear in a dream and tell them what the problem is. Instead they probably troubleshoot the problem as best they can, and if that doesn’t help they call an electrician, who will bring even better evidence-based reasoning to bear.

Special pleading

The act of applying inconsistent types of reasoning depending on the problem has a name in informal logic: special pleading. The disagreement between John and his interlocutors is that they seem to think special pleading is OK, and John does not. In the pre-scientific world this wouldn’t have been much of a problem; back then, religion was the “only game in town.” But now there’s a new player in town: science. Science spawns technology, its own form of “signs and wonders following”. Readers of the bible will recognize that phrase, as it appears in Mark’s Gospel, the book of Acts, and elsewhere. Signs and wonders were supposedly the evidence that Men of God provided for the truth of their theological claims. But today the signs and wonders of religion no longer hold up to scientific examination. We saw this in the video as neither the Father nor the Subdeacon could wow John with any miracles, like a good old-fashioned biblical prophet of God.

The “signs and wonders” of science

But signs and wonders are no problem at all for science. They are as impossible to ignore today as the God of the bible allegedly once was. The irony seems lost on the good Father and Subdeacon as they use the modern quasi-miracle of YouTube to share their ancient superstition with the world. If I were the dictator of the world, I would demand behavioral consistency from people who deny science, or who reject its methods. If you don’t like the scientist’s rules for evidence, fine: adopt the Amish lifestyle and stop consuming the benefits of science every day.

The power of science, demonstrated in every second of every minute of every day, sets the standard for evidence for me. That’s why, for example, I accept the “evidence” for the Higg’s boson, even though I lack the specific years of study necessary to understand it. I have enough background that I might be closer to getting it than some people, but I’d still have to work long and hard to get the specifics. And replicating the results independently would probably be out of the question, as that would cost billions.

So why do I take the Higgs boson on something akin to “faith”? Mainly because of all the signs and wonders following. The existence of technologies like smartphones and the Internet proves a lot. They prove that a very large fraction of science must be true or all but true, as even a slight error in the enabling science would make it impossible to build working devices. And then there is all the science that enables the supply chain, including the tripled crop yields that manage to feed the workers and customers, and the medical sciences that heal some of their ailments. The truth of science is so interwoven into our modern existence that only an idiot or a lunatic could deny it - at least, not without some overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

So even if the Higgs boson is not exactly a logical consequence of smartphones, it’s not too far removed from it. It would be very hard for the science that gives us smartphones to tolerate a hoax on that scale. There are too many scientific experts incentivized to check each other’s results. Now, it’s possible for various frauds and errors to occur in science, especially in obscure work of little or no importance, that nobody bothers to replicate. But it’s a lot harder to get away with a scientific fraud when billions of dollars are at stake. See for example the Theranos fiasco. That particular fraud had a fairly short shelf life because venture capitalists expect results rather quickly.

Religion, in contrast, can disagree about filioque for 950+ years.

So, let us return to the Subdeacon’s question to John: “I’m asking you what is the evidence that you would accept.” For my money, the “evidence” I would accept for the Virgin Birth and other miracle claims of the bible is the evidence that the whole scientific community would accept. Just because a claim seems far-fetched doesn’t stop scientists from being convinced of it, when the evidence is there. Many findings of science that most educated people take for granted today were revolutionary in the past, such as heliocentrism, evolution, and plate tectonics.

Convince the relevant experts, then get back to me

Therefore, to theists, I give my own refinement of Hitchens’ Razor: Get back to me when you’ve convinced the scientists of your claims. It’s not my job to be the adjudicator of everything. I’m hardly the only or best person to decide that current science is all wrong and Jesus was born of a Virgin. There are people better-equipped than I am, and you haven’t convinced them yet. The world is full of religions making thousands of supernatural claims and counter-claims which none of them can demonstrate as scientific facts. The Father and Subdeacon have done nothing to distinguish themselves from that mob. Until they do, I’m no more inclined to believe them than all the rest. I’m equally unimpressed by the claims of the followers of Sathya Sai Baba. No matter how many of those followers might be doing “counterintuive” things.

Furthermore, if any religion does become the first one in history to prove its claims, I won’t have to make any effort to find out. It would be front-page news on every news outlet in the world. It would likely give rise to whole new fields of science, and spinoff technologies, much like finding a crashed alien spaceship in the desert might do. (Which incidentally is a strong argument against the Area 51 folklore - where are the technological spinoffs?)