I’m working on a post about the testimony, but I’m not sure when it’s coming out. In the meantime, I figured I’d post some life and blog updates, since I haven’t done that in a while.

I Moved To Denver; Some Urbanism Thoughts

A month ago, my wife and I moved to Denver. So far, I consider it a much better place to live than the Washington, D.C. area. Sure, D.C. has better transit and walkability, but that’s about it. As someone who lived car free for the last 4 years or so, transit is overrated.

I like Denver’s climate (though I may change my mind in the summer), that my neighborhood is pretty walkable, and that I can get 50% more space in an apartment for about 20% less cost. The people are nicer and the service workers are better. The cost of living is just more affordable. One thing I consider very silly about urbanist social media discourse is that it seems like a place is only a nice place to live if you can live car free, walk everywhere, or take transit. There’s obviously so much more to life than that.

To make matters worse, I think it’s understated how super dense cities are hard to travel around. In D.C., no matter what mode of transportation you take, it takes about 20 minutes at minimum (more often 30 or 40) to go anywhere that isn’t right on your block. In my Denver neighborhood, I can get anywhere I’d want to go within 20 minutes in a car. I’m much more inclined to explore Denver than D.C. because it’s just so much easier to get around.

Anyway, I’m still adjusting to the altitude for my workouts. A 2 mile run gets me out of breath and instills fatigue like it’s a 5 mile run at sea level. AI tells me that it will be few months before I fully adjust. It’s an interesting experience.

My overall impression of D.C., after living there about 5 years, is that I don’t recommend moving there if you’re over the age of 30, not obsessed with politics, and not working in a high value industry. Don’t get me wrong: There’s a lot to like about D.C., but it wears off within about 3 years of living there.

By the end, I was ready to go. All the things that suck about D.C. (too slow to get to anywhere, no good trails unless you have a car or live right next to them far outside the district, mean service workers, limp-wrist liberal white people who think crime is good, and much more) started to wear on me. I felt like it was making me a worse person. I was meaner and less social and meaner to strangers. I don’t remember feeling that way when I lived in South Carolina or Richmond, and I certainly don’t feel this way in Denver.

I don’t regret moving to D.C. (It’s where I met my wife!), it was just time to go. I’m glad I’m in Denver!

NGOs, Layoffs, And Job Hunting

For those of you who didn’t hear, I got laid off from my job as I was relocating to Denver. This was really not-cool from my perspective as I was in sufficiently good standing at work (great standing!) to be approved for fully remote work. Then I was laid off a week later, for unrelated reasons (organizational restructuring).

I’m not going to say anything mean about my former workplace, as I have no complaint about pretty much anyone I worked with.1 I understand the decision to lay me off, even if I hate it. My experience in the NGO sphere was interesting and gave me insights into fundraising and foreign aid, some of which I may share someday. For now, I will just say that many of the things you read about NGOs (good and bad) are overhyped. And that Effective Altruists are not the high rollers in life-saving care that you’d think based on their internet posting. Wine moms are undefeated, and that’s all I’ll say.

Anyway! I’m on the job market. It’s a little annoying. I’ve been applying for jobs for about 2 months, with varying degrees of success. I’ve gotten about a dozen phone interviews, advanced once to a final round, and a handful of second round interviews.

I’m not yet depressed about job hunting yet because I have 7 years of experience and I know something will turn up. But it is annoying that these processes take about a month to complete. Interviews also seem to come in waves. When I hit the road to Denver about 6 weeks ago, I started the trip with 5 active interviews, and ended it with just one after three days. Between starting this post and publishing it, I went from 0 to 3.

It’s hard to feel too anxious about job hunting with this sort of employer interest, but man, it’s annoying to not be done with it. What’s even more annoying is my mood will be very much dependent on how many “active applications” I have at any given time. About 10 days ago I had no prospects, so I panic-applied for about 50 jobs over the course of that week, and picked up about 3 or 4 interviews since. Very little has changed other than a couple meetings and emails, yet I feel much less anxious.

At the moment, I’ve applied for well over 100 jobs. Likely close to 200. This is neither a flex, nor a cry for help. In 2026, this is how you get a job, unfortunately. I don’t blame AI, because I had a similar experience in 2018 when I was new to the job market.

Substack Changes…

Now, let’s get back to some updates for this substack…

A couple days ago, I decided to take substack off my phone. It’s not the first time I did it, and it probably won’t be the last because it’s such a great idea!

I’m a social media sicko. If it’s on my phone, I’ll check it all day. I’m that hooked.

It’s also why I haven’t had Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any groupchat apps on my phone in years. Substack is a little different in that I enjoy it, post thoughtfully, and have had a growing presence on here and posting notes does just as much to grow following as posts do.

Still, taking substack off my phone made me realize how obsessive I was on this platform and I don’t like it. I’m keeping it off my phone so I can be more focused with my attention and cognitive energy.

This doesn’t mean I’m leaving substack. Far from it! It’s my aspiration to grow my substack to over 1000 followers eventually. I’d also like to make a small income on here talking about philosophy. If I’m going to do that, I need to be more focused on producing quality posts. And to do that, I need to write high quality posts, which means I need to get back to reading, writing, and focus. Being laid off knocked me off my psychological feet, but I finally got back up.

One other thing I’ve done to help my focus (that I’m not going to belabor) is block a couple substack power users. I won’t get into details, but these people unintentionally ragebait me, not by saying wrong or even stupid things, but by being rude to me or only engaging with my posts to name call or enable other name callers.

In some ways, these users exploited my humility in that I’m open about not being an expert and not even trying to be a graduate student or professional philosopher. I naively believed these people knew more about, say, epistemology, than I do, only to later find out that they have as little understanding of skepticism as 2008 New Atheists did about philosophy of religion. Which is to say, not much! And what little exposure they do have is filtered through the opinions of non-skeptics or worse, people making fun of skeptics.

For a while, not-blocking these people gave me fuel to post (the decision to be a Hume-oriented substack came from being ragebaited!). But as I reflect, my best work and research is done when I’m focused on reading a primary text, secondary literature, and trying to break it down. Ragebait inhibits my ability to do that.

And that brings me to the final section…

Upcoming Posts

I’m currently working on the post about testimony. It’s my hope that I’ll return to Hume Posting soon after. I intend to write some things on Hume’s “scandal” and his accounts on Free Will/compatibilism. The latter one will probably be short, but who knows.

I’m also finally getting around to reading Hume’s Inquiry. It’s a relatively short book, and also kind of dry (people say Hume is more accessible than other philosophers of his time, but he’s still kind of hard to read for me!), so I’m kicking around the idea of doing an essay or research on each chapter using some of the books I’ve already bought from the likes of Cambridge press.

My posting philosophy has constantly evolved. I used to post 2-3 times a week (really!), but now I don’t feel the need to do that. I’m opting for quality over quantity.

The other sneaky factor here is that I will get a job soon. My last job was great because it had great work-life balance. At the end of the day, and often during the day, I had the energy to think about philosophy. I don’t anticipate my next job being the same way. I’ll probably be working harder, which means less posts. Given that I have other hobbies I like to do on top of philosophy (running, some reading, watching sports, learning the guitar, going to target with my wife because it brings her joy wallet-be-damned, among others), I’m going to lean into Hume posts a little bit more, because it’s a guided study.

I’ve said on notes multiple times that the window for me to get more of an education in philosophy has passed. I have a family that I hope to grow, will need to work full time to support them, have all these other interests, and oh yeah my local philosophy M.A would probably cost somewhere between $50,000-$100,000. Given that, it’s my intention to research Hume as a hobby for the next few years. As a side hustle. For no university credit. For the love of the game!

So, as of April 2026, that’s the state of my life and substack.

I hope you’ll join me as I continue to write!

-Joe, the Hume Hobbyist

I agree more with Dillahunty on the substance, but I don’t like the way he argued for it. Instead, I want to recommend other good posts published on substack about the issue, many of whom I disagree with the overall claim:

Tower of Babble

Boxes and Bayes

A short story…

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25 days ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Tower of Babble

First Principles

Take My Word For It—Claims Do Count As Evidence

Claims count as evidence…

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24 days ago · 10 likes · 5 comments · Lorenzo Elijah, PhD

Wonder and Aporia

Are Claims Evidence?

Veteran counter-apologist Matt Dillahunty has recently been the object of a Discourse™ here on the platform, after Joe Schmidt (edit: Joe Schmid (edit edit: Jebediah Schmid) released a video in which he attempted to school Dillahunty in the epistemology of testimony. Dillahunty has been associated with his slogan…

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24 days ago · 11 likes · 4 comments · Silas Abrahamsen

This post is going to be somewhat nitpicky. I am clearly using the term “claim” differently from the above substackers and Joe Schmid. I want to be clear from the outset that I agree that testimony is evidential, even if substantially weaker than other data points. I find the nuances and disagreements about testimony more interesting, and I’m going to talk about them in a future post (my next post? Bro, my life is weird right now, this post was sitting in my drafts for a week mostly done).

So, in this post, I’m not focusing on testimony, but claims. Again, that may seem like a pedantic hair split, but the reason I’m doing this is because I want to outline psychologically how people assess claims, testimony, evidence, and so on.

I want to disentangle what I call vague Bayesianism (i.e Bayesianism that pretends it accounts for causality and relevance) from good reasoning, because there’s way too many undergraduates and philosophy novices annoying me (and name-calling?) in my note comments saying that the Schmid-ish account of evidence is mere Bayesianism. It isn’t.

What you should take away from this post is that a lot of people use terms like claim, testimony, evidence, and Bayesianism in a messy way to the point that you should not take them seriously (to be clear! I’m not talking about anyone I’m criticizing by name). A proper accounting of these terms will have us updating our beliefs to where we (almost obviously) don’t assess claims (declarative sentences) as evidence.

The more interesting conversation is about the nature of testimony, and I’m going to write about that soon. Let’s dive in.

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Why Claims Can Be Evidence

First, let’s look at things in a vague, a priori Bayesian sense. In that manner, yes claims can be evidence.

Specifically:

“A piece of data E is evidence for a hypothesis H if learning1 E raises the probability for H.”

So, if Jesus was resurrected from the dead, hearing about the testimony of him rising from the dead or someone out in the public uttering “Jesus rose from the dead” are both evidential. In a world where Jesus rose from the dead, you’d expect people testifying for it, and the claim “Jesus rose from the dead” to circulate in an oral culture.

The reason why is that, again, those data points are expected, given the truth of the hypothesis. They improve the probability of the hypothesis.

So yes, in a vague (notice I didn’t say strict) Bayesian sense, the statement “claims are evidence” is correct. But I won’t even go so far to say this is correct in a general sense. Because it’s not. There’s more to assessing evidence than mere Bayesianism! What’s more, there seems to be more evidence against the idea that claims are evidence.

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Why Claims Aren’t Evidence

Bayesian Probability Is One Tool Among Many

Bayesian probability is one reasoning tool in a suite of tools. It’s not sufficient on its own! It helps us organize and update our beliefs given new data, but it doesn’t tell us what evidence is relevant or explanatory (i.e has an adequate account of causality).2

Bayesian probability can’t tell us which evidence should update our beliefs significantly, and how to update our beliefs, given new evidence that we subjectively assess.

I look at Bayesian probability through a Humean lens. It works as a matter of fact, not logical necessity. It could be the case that updating your beliefs using this formula leads to less reliable beliefs or models about the world. Still, it is one tool among many tools. Bayesian inference is not the totality of evaluating evidence, philosophy of science, or (I would imagine) conditional probabilities).

Not everyone who uses Bayesian inference agrees on all the terms and concepts, so it’s really annoying when undergrads who saw one Huemer video harass me for disagreeing with Joe Schmid. BUT ANYWAY!

Do Churches Cause Car Crashes?

This is important because sometimes variables or conditions in a model are indicators of other, more causally relevant variables and conditions. How we assess which variables and conditions are more relevant is often subjective.

My favorite example from this came from my research methods class in grad school:

If we look at various data points when comparing two cities of different sizes, we may find that there are more traffic accidents in the city with more churches. If we put in “number of churches” in a city in some model, that model will be somewhat more accurate at predicting where more crashes are going to happen than just your intuition.

So churches obviously cause more car crashes, right? No! Both the number of churches and the number of car crashes will increase as a function of the population, as well as other factors such as wealth. Though using churches as a variable or data point when trying to predict car crashes isn’t strictly false, it’s an inferior model to models informed by better causal explanations.

Sure, after the fact, one can update models and choose the better variable for something like population increases causing more car accidents. But for many of the points of philosophical disputes, we don’t have the same level of rigorous data to derive precise measurements as we do for car accidents.

Bayesian probability helps us mathematically update our models of the world, given what those models say about causal relationships within the world. But it does not give us a science of causality on its own. For matters of dispute where we don’t have strict measurements (like the existence of God), we’re close to hopeless to resolving disagreements about evidence without an independent philosophy of causality.

You Should Actually Hypothesis Test

What’s more, this vague understanding of evidence seems to forget about the hypothesis testing aspect of Bayesian inference. Namely, absent a theory of causality and competing hypotheses as a point of comparison, this vague Bayesian framework (i.e. “A piece of data E is evidence for a hypothesis H if learning E raises the probability fo H.”) is just confirmation bias where any trivial data point can appear as evidence.

Let’s take the hypothesis “My grandmother painted the sky blue.” The fact that the sky is blue, under the vague Bayesian framework, is evidence that my grandmother painted the sky. The problem with this formulation is that across all hypotheses about why the sky is blue, all of them are going to incorporate the data point that the sky is blue!

If we’re having an argument for why the sky is blue, it would be silly to say that the mere fact that the sky is blue is evidence for your theory. Indeed, it would feel like you have very little convincing evidence that your grandmother painted the sky blue if you pointed to something so trivial.

What’s more, if you started listing random data points and attributed them to supporting your hypotheses without explanation, that would also appear ad hoc and desperate, simulating philosophical rigor rather than demonstrating it.

In this way, when you have a bad or non-existent theory of causality and no alternative hypotheses, using a Bayesian framework just looks like confirmation bias. Any data point can support a theory, or be seen as substantial evidence merely because it’s observed. It’s cold outside. Abraham Lincoln was once president. Grass is green. All of these support my hypothesis!

The line between “evidence” and “all other data” becomes blurred to non-existent. And at that point, we’re not doing philosophy, science, or any sort of rational discernment anymore, but assuming all of our observations are naively what we believe or hope them to be.

We Need Better Terms

To overcome this problem, we have to have a screening mechanism to separate good evidence from mere irrelevant data. We need to have an account for at least three different kinds of data points:

• Data that are compatible with multiple conflicting hypotheses (to answer the hypotheses testing vulnerability). I call this data dormant evidence. Some may call this circumstantial evidence, but I prefer the dormant label because I feel “circumstantial” is more about the circumstances of a specific crime case, not about the relation the data has relative to a hypothesis. Your mileage may vary!

• Data that have no causal implication on a hypothesis (to answer the vulnerability of lacking causality/relevance). I call this data irrelevant data.

• Data that move the needle significantly in terms of proving hypotheses. I call this data good or compelling evidence.

Notice, this screening process does not supplant or contradict Bayesian inference, so much as it complements or enhances it. In the same way that the rules of logic by themselves do not tell us which propositions are correct, Bayesian probability doesn’t tell us what is true or likely to be true by itself. The nature of the evidence, as well as the subjective evaluation of the evidence does that.

Dormant/Circumstantial Evidence

To illustrate what this looks like, let’s look at a crime scenario.

Let’s say that Sarah has been murdered. We have four suspects: Jimmy, Ronald, George, and Bill. Forensic investigation shows that Sarah was killed by a specific kind of gun that all four of the suspects possess.

In a vague Bayesian way, yes, the fact that all four of them own this firearm is evidence that all of them committed the crime. But it’s not good or compelling evidence because there are mutually exclusive candidate hypotheses that accommodate for the data point of having that firearm. In other words, the fact that Jimmy owns the firearm is evidence that Jimmy committed the crime, that Ronald owns the firearm is evidence that Ronald committed the crime, and so on.

When good or compelling evidence is found (motive, forensics, location of the suspects, etc.) the gun ownership data point will become good evidence to support a hypothesis. But until that happens, this evidence point is circumstantial or dormant. That doesn’t mean it’s bad evidence or irrelevant, just that there are multiple causal theories that account for it, and so we should treat this data as anything special.

Irrelevant Data

Irrelevant data is data that is causally irrelevant to a hypothesis. Going back to the church example, the number of churches in a city are causally irrelevant to car crashes.3 There are many places that have lots of car crashes and very few churches. The reason why we have to make a distinction about relevance is because, without a causal theory for why the world works, you can (basically) hack Bayesian calculations with irrelevant data points, just by vaguely gesturing that it’s expected under a hypothesis.

This also goes back to why hypothesis testing (or comparison) is important. If we are just evaluating one hypothesis we can basically mine for any data points, say that they’re expected under a hypothesis, and artificially increase our belief accordingly. Going to the “Grandma painted the sky” hypothesis, such a hypothesis seems really compelling if that’s the only hypothesis you have. But when others come to the fold, the grandma hypothesis seems much less convincing.

Without screening for irrelevant data that’s not causally accounted for or hypothesis testing, we can use “show trial” logic. That is, we can come to conclusions using methods that aren’t oriented to the truth. In the murder example, we can convict Ronald (he probably had it coming, if you’re smart enough to spot the irrelevant pattern for me naming my suspects) by not looking at other suspects or having a rigorous explanation for why data points support a hypothesis: I had tea this morning. The sky is blue. Duke lost. My wife is beautiful. All of these are expected under the “Ronald killed Sarah” hypotheses. He’s guilty.

To repeat: Bayesian probability by itself cannot tell us that this is bad reasoning. It just tells us how to update our beliefs, given our understanding of relevance and causality.

Good/Compelling Evidence

The difference between good/compelling evidence and dormant/circumstantial evidence and irrelevant data, is that (1) it’s data that is causally relevant to explaining a phenomenon and (2) it’s unaccounted for by other competing hypotheses.

If I have video evidence of Jimmy shooting his gun at Sarah, that is good evidence that he at least tried to murder her. It activates dormant evidence (that he owned at least a similar gun as the murder weapon, that he was close to her at the night of the murder, that he dislikes her personally, etc.) as good evidence. This is that dormant data that was compatible with other hypotheses is now more relevant, given the existence of good/compelling evidence.

Together, Sarah being shot dead, the murder weapon being the same gun that Jimmy owns, Jimmy’s gun not having any ammo, and video surveillance of him shooting at Sarah are all data points that vary from dormant to compelling evidence. But the compelling evidence (the video surveillance) is of a different nature and quality than the other dormant evidence because of how clearly (with high probability) it supports the “Jimmy is guilty” hypothesis relative to others.

What Of Claims And Testimony?

So let’s take this framework and apply it to both testimony and claims. What kind of data are they?

A claim is just a declarative sentence. I don’t want to say “a sentence asserting a fact” because that’s redundant. Claims are clearly irrelevant data points. The reason why is because the human imagination can come up with any combination of words for a declarative sentence that has no relationship with reality. There are many instances when mistaken people came up with false declarative sentences as well.

Many declarative sentences lack causal explanation within their structure. Let’s take the claim “Draymond Green is the best philosopher in New York.” Though the nouns in this sentence, as far as we know, are real (Draymond Green, philosopher, New York), there is no causal explanation embedded in the sentence that connects them to reality. This is not evidence. It’s just a sentence I made up.

A claim can be updated to evidence, when it embeds itself in a chain of custody of causality. At that point, it becomes testimony. Testimony is a form of a claim that is embedded within an additional form of evidence, specifically sense perception.

For example, the claim “I read in the New York Times that Draymond Green is the best philosopher in New York” is evidence because it’s a form of testimony. Someone perceived something, reported it, and it was reported to other people through a publication. I can draw a line of perception from me reading the claim to the person who perceived it.

Admittedly, this example is not the best because it conflates subjective assessments with intersubjective perception (it’s harder, if not a category error, to “perceive” someone as the best philosopher than to perceive them as a professional basketball player). In this way, testimony itself can be low quality because of the quality of the data within the testimony or the limitations of the one doing the testimony. “Better” testimony would be to make a claim and support it with additional data other than a single perceptual data point.

For example: “I read in the New York Times that Draymond Green is the best philosopher in New York because of his countless articles published in the best philosophy journals about aesthetics.”

This kind of testimony is of higher quality because it tells you the perceptual chain of custody, was perceived (not just made up), and points to evidence external to the perception that could itself be falsified.

Admittedly, not all testimony will be of this quality, and not all of it needs a falsification criteria. Indeed, many testimonial accounts are just false. My point here is that claims are different from testimony, and that there’s a variety of quality of testimony. In a future post, I’ll talk about testimony in depth, but for now, that’s all we need to know.

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So Are Claims Evidence?

Given the above, I feel justified saying that claims aren’t evidence. They are not evidential because they are just as likely irrelevant data points in relation to a hypothesis as they are dormant or good evidence.

Put in hypothesis testing terms: The existence of claims is compatible with both the hypotheses that they are truth-tracking, and that they are not-truth-tracking. However, the truth-tracking hypothesis does not accommodate for the data that humans have wild imaginations and that many claims (declarative sentences) are merely false.

Thus, if the purpose of using Bayesian reasoning, logic, etc is to shape more accurate reasoning to accomplish goals (i.e. “to make us more rational”) those that treat claims as mere declarative sentences of no evidential quality will achieve that purpose better than those who treat claims as evidence.

This is an a posteriori assessment of claims, testimony, evidence, etc. I assume the vague Bayesian assessment of data, evidence, etc. point it back at Bayesianism, and then update my beliefs accordingly.

This assessment could be wrong, but if it is, it’s not wrong in a priori logic, but in the facts that inform and update my assessment. If you want to prove this wrong, simply show that the existence of a declarative sentence is close to being true merely by being a declarative sentence. It is logically possible to make this argument, but most philosophical thinkers, being shaped by experience, are probably not going to do so.

Though I consider myself a Humean, this argument is still compatible with Bayesianism. A true Bayesian, after all, updates their credence when new evidence arises, and that includes best methods of assessing evidence.

To Wrap Up

For most people outside of a philosophy classroom, claims are obviously not evidence. It may be the case that in a vague, broad Bayesian formulation a priori that claims are evidential, but when we update our beliefs about the world and refine our definition and use of terms, claims are not evidence.

One need only look at how we use these terms where people have “skin in the game,” about the truth of a matter. In courtrooms and criminal investigations, claims (again, not to be confused with testimony) are not evidence. For every claim you make, you have to support it with evidence. Using substantiated claims to form a hypothesis, you persuade a jury that your hypothesis is correct instead of the other party’s.

In the education system, when you’re teaching children to write persuasively, claims are a separate species of sentence than evidence. Usually the first sentence of a paragraph is a claim, with the following sentence considered the evidence and the analysis of that evidence. You’ll fail a high school English class if you treat claims as evidence.

Again, it may be the case that the vague Bayesian account of claims is correct a priori, but the a posteriori factual experience of a society discerning truth says that this assessment is either wrong or inferior to the a posteriori model. Put more succinctly: As a society, we colloquially understand claims and evidence separate from each other for good reason!

I prefer this to online philosophy of religion discourse. It operates differently in this weird zone where hypotheses are vaguely outlined, competing hypotheses are straw manned, and relevance is rarely discussed. Some of us are taken aback at how low the standards of evidence are for theistic and theistic-sympathetic thinkers, and how they arbitrarily pull irrelevant data points to support their hypotheses while vaguely gesturing to how naturalistic explanations don’t account for the data (usually for false reasons they invented).

Anyone who has had to use these truth-tracking tools in the real world (with consequences on the line) for a prolonged amount of time realizes how cheap these tactics are. They’re not really using Bayesian tools correctly within a suite of philosophical tools, but neglecting those other tools, using Bayesian reasoning poorly, all while using the vague language of Bayesianism.

To be fair to those who disagree with me, there’s a serious philosophical disagreement about the nature of testimony, trusting your intuitions, and so on. In my opinion, this is the real disagreement between people like Schmid and people like Dillahunty. I’ll talk about that in a future post.

You cannot prove a negative that is not:

1. Tautological (You can prove a triangle doesn’t have 4 sides)

2. Relying on direct perception/observation (You can prove there isn’t a planet between Earth and Mars)

3. Based on systems of knowledge that produce clear answers (You can prove that Kamala Harris is not the 47th president of the United States, or that China is not in the western hemisphere).

But all of these methods of proving a negative are trivial.

What we care about when it comes to evaluating the truth of theories or conclusions are those that operate under outlier levels of uncertainty: Where the logic is unclear and where we lack direct perception of the relevant data points.

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A Non-Religious Example:

Eventually, we’re going to get to the philosophy of religion, but let’s stick to current events. Can you prove with certainty that Hillary Clinton did not go to Epstein island?

Most people would agree that the fact that we don’t have any evidence that HRC even knew or interacted with Jeffrey Epstein is good grounds to conclude she never went to the island. But that’s not proving a negative, that’s apportioning beliefs to evidence!

If we were to prove the negative that she didn’t go to the island, we would have to account for every movement of her life. Or, when someone claims she was on the island, establish a credible alibi for her that time.

Let’s call the first instance the difficult case, and the second the easy case. The problem with the difficult case is that it is logically possible yet practically infeasible to account for someone’s movements for their entire life, especially an older person who preceded modern surveillance technology.

The problem with the easy case is that it only works for single instances, and accusers are welcome to fabricate new allegations. We may have disproven that HRC was not on the island at time A, but we can allege that she was there at time B,C, and D. We can just make up allegations! They let you do that when you’re famous!

So again, it is logically possible to prove a negative in many circumstances. We can prove negative trivial points, where the information landscape is fully accounted for, like a logical proof or direct perception. But when it comes to controversial points about religion, politics, science, crime, and others, we lack the full information landscape and so we usually cannot prove a negative.

And so, we cannot prove that HRC didn’t go to Epstein island because we lack full access to her entire life’s movements. We also cannot prove that a rogue planet didn’t come through our solar system at specific point in our deep history. We also cannot prove that Napoleon didn’t have breakfast on the day before his 25th birthday. And so on.

Why Do People Say You Can’t Prove A Negative?

There are many reasons people say we can’t prove a negative. I get accused of being Orwellian for defending these people, but there’s clear utility in not normalizing this standard of evidence to justify disbelieving a proposition, hypothesis, or theory.

I call this the “show trial” standard of evidence: Anyone can believe what they want, so long as their theories aren’t explicitly contradicted by specific points of evidence. I call it a show trial because show trials are not guided by what is true. In this way, when we refuse to rule out some hypotheses and theories merely because they are logically possible, we pollute our ability to discern truth, allowing non-truth oriented considerations to guide our conclusions.

If you really hate Hillary Clinton, you can come up with all sorts of reasons to believe she was on Epstein island eating children or whatever. And if we put the burden of proof on her to debunk every logically possible theory of her being there, you’re giving her an impossible standard of defense. She will lose because she can’t prove every negative.

As a filtering mechanism, we should reject unfalsifiable explanations and explanations that hinge on one’s inability to prove a negative in an environment of uncertain information. That way, we can align ourselves to believe and affirm ideas that are evidenced, advancing shared standards of truth and probability.

This norm is as much social as it is intellectual. I personally don’t care if you believe in unfalsifiable theories or if your theories about how the world works hinges on my inability to prove a negative about something. What I care about is when we normalize this “show trial” standard of evidence in public, political, or philosophical discourse. It leads us to discard reason in favor of intellectual and social witch hunts.

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Two Atheisms

But wait, this is a blog about religion!

The apex of the “you can’t prove a negative” slogan is in the philosophy of religion discourse, namely among atheists.

For our purposes, there are two kinds of atheists: Those that believe we cannot prove negatives about non-trivial matters, and those that believe we can.

We’re going to call the first group lacktheists. Many atheists will concede that they can’t prove God doesn’t exist, but because we can’t do that about a lot of things we disbelieve, we’re still justified in atheism. I don’t have time to verify this, but I’m pretty sure this viewpoint was popularized by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, when he argued that the burden of proof for theism is on theists.

We’re going to call the second group the anti-theists. This school of thought was popularized by Victor Stenger in his book God: The Failed Hypothesis. It’s Stenger and the anti-theist position that you can, indeed, prove a negative when it comes to God. For them, God is a scientific hypothesis that can be falsified or negated. To do this, you simply take God’s purported characteristics, model them in a hypothetical universe, and see if that universe is compatible with the one we observe.

For the anti-theist, we can rely on knowledge and inference produced by the scientific method with a similar degree of certainty as our sense perception. Just as I can affirm that there isn’t a pink elephant in the room as I’m typing this, as I do not perceive one, the anti-theist affirms that there is no God in the universe. This, because God is not causally discernable in scientific models, and in fact contradicts observations of the universe.

Putting my cards on the table: I think both of these positions are defensible and compatible with one another. They both bring you to the same place: moral certainty about how you should live your life, conditional on God’s nonexistence. Lacktheists and anti-theists are not going to live their lives radically different from each other, and it’s fair to just classify either as mere atheists.

Why This Slogan Became Popular

A few weeks ago, before something in my personal life derailed my ability to focus on writing, I was trying to write this post in response to a podcast Alex O’Connor and Joe Schmid made where they debunked atheist slogans. What was frustrating about that podcast was the pure contempt and condescension Schmid expressed on this point, basically implying anyone who believes it is an idiot. What he missed was the key social context and nuance of the slogan, which I’ll get into here.

In the 2000s and 2010s, New Atheism was popular, and more people left religion for philosophical reasons. This was disheartening to many Christians, many of whom had this preening, demanding approach when dealing with non-Christians (and still do today). They typically lacked the philosophical education to have a respectful or productive conversation on why people disbelieve Christianity.

Most convinced atheists born in the 1990s or before have had a frustrating interaction with a Christian about their lack of belief. Usually, the Christian would want to have the conversation (in my experience, normie atheists don’t like these conversations unless they’re talking to a fellow non-believer because usually these disagreements end in Christians cutting the atheists out of their lives), and would be thoroughly unprepared.

The atheist would have good arguments about why evolution is true, why they don’t trust religious testimony for miracles, or how religious arguments are unsatisfactory, or any other arguments, and the theist just couldn’t keep up. The Christian final move would always be (something like) leaning back in their seat, folding their arms, spreading an eat-shit grin and saying “Well, you can’t prove God doesn’t exist” and a subsequent comment for why that’s bad (you’re overconfident, your position is unsupportable, etc).

Any atheist who has had these conversations has had this experience. It’s extremely frustrating, and fuels many of the annoying cringe online atheism.1 The Dawkins slogan became popular as a means to shift the conversation. If the theist is going to at least pretend to argue with you, they have to have an argument, use reasoning, and tell us affirmatively why they believe in God or why the atheist counterarguments aren’t effective. Some Christians can do this! But most of them cannot.

The Dawkins-Stenger Dilemma

Anyway, the Schmid/O’Connor conversation was frustrating because it once again fits into the META of philosophy or religion on social media, which I have written about before.

It’s normal to say mean things about atheists and hold them to different standards than Christian Apologists. I’m waiting for the philosophy centrists on YouTube to release a podcast debunking Christian slogans. The reason why they don’t is because it would last a few days, not a few hours!

I’m standing my ground on (not) proving negatives because I think there’s a social agenda that comes with calling people idiots who disagree on this narrow point, making atheists feel as if they must be combative or overconfident to be intellectually consistent.

Though the apologists may score some YouTube monetization points for these kinds of dunks, I don’t think in their heart of hearts they’d prefer atheists to be anti-theistic instead of lacktheistic.2

In my experience, your typical atheist can be a lacktheist or anti-theist pending on how he or she is feeling. If you put a gun to their head, they’d probably say “I’m pretty sure that God (Christian or otherwise) isn’t real and I live my life as if He weren’t, but because I lack the perceptual faculties to falsify God, I can’t disprove God with 100 percent certainty.”

And so, the “normie” atheist is presented with what I call the Dawkins-Stenger Dilemma:

1. Should they stridently declare that God has been falsified and act accordingly, being combative, dismissive and patronizing to religious people because religion is demonstrably false? (The Stenger Approach)

2. Or should they proclaim that they can’t prove a negative, disbelieve in God because they lack evidence, and be more humble and accommodating in interactions with theists? (The Dawkins Approach - I know that’s not how Dawkins himself acts, but it’s all relative!)

This dilemma is not an intellectual dilemma, but a social one. Most atheists I know side with Dawkins over Stenger because they don’t want to be a dick to Christians, and it takes a lot of work to be on Stenger’s level of knowledge and confidence.

When an atheist says “You can’t prove a negative,” he’s often trying to tell you that he’s pretty sure your religious beliefs are wrong, but he recognizes that’s a dick thing to do, so he’s opted to not continue the conversation. He’s also saying that he is fallible and humble and not prepared to rule out your entire worldview, as he could be wrong, and not having the humility to admit fallibility is also a dick thing to do.

To reiterate: I think most atheists agree with both Stenger and Dawkins, it’s just easier to live life with minimal conflict using the Dawkins approach. When I see memes about not proving a negative being silly and that people who say it are dumb, what I really want to respond with is “Oh, so you don’t want atheists to be nice anymore? You want every philosophical conversation to be a show trial now? Fine!”

If atheists stopped taking the Dawkins route, there’d probably be a new atheist reawakening. And it would be worse than the first one, more akin to France’s laïcité, which is more radical than the secularism you see in the Anglo-American world.

Closing Points

As I’ve said before, I am accused of being Orwellian for saying “actually this wrong thing is true,” so I want to close here with clear points about what I have argued:

1. Dunking on atheists about proving negatives is just pedantry. The negatives we can prove are typically trivial. The controversial things we argue about are very hard to negate.

2. We probably don’t want to live in an intellectual world where the standard of discarding a theory or hypothesis is merely falsification.

3. Both lacktheism and anti-theism are intellectually defensible and compatible with one another.

4. For atheists, there is social and psychological value in embracing lacktheism, even if you suspect anti-theism is true.

5. Anti-theism is technically more dogmatic than lacktheism because it holds to a firmer conviction on one philosophical point. Many atheists are reluctant to bite this bullet not because they don’t think it’s true, but because they sincerely believe that holding to dogmas unnecessarily leads to conflict.

6. Christians trying to stigmatize, dunk on, or name call atheists into being anti-theists should probably reconsider this strategy. Some may erroneously believe that stigmatizing lacktheism will push some atheists back to Christianity or theism. In reality, it’s more likely to breed another generation of confrontational antitheists/New Atheists.

So can we prove negatives? Sometimes. But not for the things that matter.

We definitely shouldn’t conduct philosophy via sloganeering, but we should also take care to not conduct philosophy by refuting slogans.

On Christianity & The West

There are historically contingent factors that led to western institutions developing as they did, and Christianity is one of many variables. Christianity changed the west, not just by preaching values, but in creating diffuse centers of power.

From the outset, the church positioned itself against the state, as opposed to other religious traditions (including Greco-Roman cults) that married themselves to the state.1 This was accelerated during the protestant reformation. From there, Europeans waged many bloody wars over religious disagreement, and different values and norms arose as measures to manage and reduce violence. This included what we call human rights today.

The specific values Christians preached were important. If you read a history book, the religious rites of the Greeks and Romans sound more like the rites found in the east today (yes, I’m oversimplifying). Two thousand years ago, there were lots of sacrifices, local gods, and tributes on altars. Now? Not so much.

Further, Christianity’s popularized or invented church life. This form of social relationship united multiple families voluntarily under a priest and a common ethic, and probably did something to western conceptions of familial relationships and ethics over the long term. It likely better integrated separate families together, weakening familial bands as an organizing principle of society, allowing a more individualist ethos to arise.

Finally, the voluntarism of the protestant reformation was important in shaping American political culture. It was influential in the ideology of many puritan colonists and American founding fathers, complimenting other founders who were openly naturalistic and non-Christian.

Long story short, I think there’s a good historical case that Christianity changed western values and institutions over time. It created more diffuse power centers, changed familial and social ethics, and was a first mover of individualist ideology that many political, civil, and economic rights depend on today.

In my opinion, this is good. Life in the west, from our institution to culture and values is better than those held by the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago.

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Is Christianity Essential For The Success of The West?

Still, I think the answer to the question “Do we need Christianity to maintain western civilization?” is obviously and easily no.

In this way, I define western civilization as the cultures and institutions that maintain and reinforce liberal democracy, human rights, and capitalism.

You Don’t Need To Agree With Your Cultural Fathers

The historical contingent circumstances that create the conditions where new beneficial norms and institutions arise are not necessary to sustain them indefinitely. You don’t need to believe exactly the same things as the progenitors of your culture to sustain that culture.

One need not be a Godless atheist to understand this. We intuitively understand this for many practices within Christianity. For example, very few westerners today have been to a ritualistic sacrifice, and the average westerner could not tell you the logic of ritualistic sacrifice. That is: making an offering to a god or gods to maintain favor; sacrificing livestock to have a meal with a god or to signal commitment to that god.

Yet countless high church Christians could explain the logic of communion/the eucharist which relies on the logic of ritualistic sacrifice. Ancient Christians were unique in what their ritualistic sacrifice entailed, while today modern Christians are unique in the west because they’re the only ones who ritualistically sacrifice at all.

Regardless of the metaphysical truth of the eucharist, it’s clear we don’t need to live in a culture that regularly makes sacrifices to Gods on altars to participate, understand, or value the eucharist.

Similarly, there’s a secular logic for many norms and morals in the west.2 People don’t because they don’t want to go to jail. They are honest with each other because people generally prefer to interact with honest people, and it’s more beneficial for everyone over the long term if people are mostly honest with one another. And so on.

Christianity Isn’t Necessary To Sustain Liberal Democracy

There are certainly plenty of non-Christian, non-western cultures that don’t share liberal capitalistic values. For instance, there are plenty of places on earth where it’s hard to build a factory and manufacture goods because the culture doesn’t value showing up on time every day. Many people worry that if we discard Christianity, we’ll regress to these kinds of cultures, and everyone will suffer.

In this way, Dominion advocates could argue that even if we don’t need Christianity to relate to or create norms, incentives, and institutions, there still may be something essential to Christianity that sustains liberal democracy.

Thankfully, we have a very good case study countering this argument: Japan. One can concede that governments run by Christians were historically essential to establish Japan’s liberal democracy, but Japan has sustained liberal democracy for decades without having substantial Christian influence.

Put another way, the Americans haven’t been holding a gun to the head of the Japanese telling them to enable free market capitalism and democracy since the 1940s and 50s. They did not need Christian churches or societies3 to tell the Japanese to go to work, vote in elections, or protect their fellow citizens’ human rights. At this point, if Japan crumbles as a liberal democracy, it won’t be due to not being Christian.

The lesson for westerners then is this: We don’t need Christianity to sustain western culture, even if Christianity was influential in establishing western culture. Just as a Japanese person can acknowledge the important and contingent circumstances that Christian people had on influencing Japanese institutions and also sustain them without Christianity, secular westerners can acknowledge our Christian roots and also sustain our institutions without Christianity.4

On Scrivener

I get bad vibes from Glen Scrivener. Though he’s not like the American Christian Nationalists who emit what the kids today call “Hitler particles,” whenever I hear him talk about Christian influence on history, I get annoyed as he either isn’t smart enough to see the implications of his arguments, or he does and maliciously doesn’t talk about them.

If I were to talk to him in person, I’d bluntly ask him if he thought that non-Christians could be moral on their own, because confidently believing they can’t seems to be the subtext of his entire project.

I imagine his audience are moderate American evangelicals who politely think the non-Christians around them are secretly moral monsters, and the further retreat of Christianity will bring these barbarians to their gates. And so, they vote for Trump, and all that jazz. Anyone who has lived within ear shot of American evangelical culture knows this type of person.

As someone who has been around such people and listened to plenty of Glen Scriveners, I know when someone thinks I’m a moral degenerate and that I should have less rights than them, merely because I’m not a conservative Christian. I will admit that this comes off as insecure and a little hyperbolic, but I genuinely believe that this is the logical implication of people like Scrivener’s ideology, as I’ve written before:

Why Dominion Arguments Are Popular And Annoying

The fact that Christianity and Christian culture influenced western society is trivially true. The main point of dispute over Christianity’s influence is whether or not Christianity is necessary to sustain the goods of western civilization. As I explained above, I don’t think there’s a good argument, but people still try to salvage it.

The reason why people buy books like Holland’s Dominion of Scrivener’s Air We Breathe is because we are an increasingly post-Christian society, Christians don’t like that, and they’re grasping for secular justification for their continued outsized influence in politics and culture.5

In this way, if you published a book saying “Christianity is influential over western civilization” 70 years ago, no one would buy it because it was so obvious. The reason why people buy it now is because scared Christians want to find arguments against the secular left or to justify entrenching declining Christian culture within secular institutions.

These arguments and conversations are always frustrating because no one actually acknowledges the context of why they are taking place. People care about Dominion arguments not because they can’t recognize Christian influence on western culture, but because they can’t contextualize how important it is for the ongoing success of that culture.

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Scrivener’s Bad Defense

The O’Connor-Scrivener conversation is a good demonstration of this dynamic. In their back-and-forth, O’Connor points out that Scrivener’s thesis is ultimately unfalsifiable. Seemingly everything good is somehow motivated by Christianity, even the things that today’s Christians don’t endorse, like abortion and gay rights.

Scrivener defends himself by saying that when we’re dealing with history, we’re not dealing with falsifiability, and so the criticism isn’t valid.

The problem with this is that we’re not talking about history, we’re talking about identifying patterns within history, labeling them, and using them to understand events in the present day and make inferences in the future. Falsification is not irrelevant for this methodology, because if we can’t falsify a methodology (a label), it renders it useless.

Put simply: If every motivation is considered Christian because it was shaped in a culture that was at least recently Christian, then the Christian label is useless.

Are All Economists Smithian?

Let’s use an unrelated historical example as an illustration.

Say we’re arguing if Adam Smith is the greatest economist of all time, as we consider his arguments about the invisible hand to be the greatest of all time. We’re arguing this so we can figure out which economic ideas we should incorporate in policymaking in the future.

It’s trivial that Smith is the one who first popularized and likely invented the invisible hand argument. But does that mean that every economic argument involving supply meeting demand is a “Smithian” argument, even the ones he himself did not make? If you were to disagree and make arguments about comparative advantage or creative disruption or monopoly being more important than the invisible hand, would it be fair of me to say “ah but that’s a Smithian argument,” in response?

No, we would consider this obviously silly.

Smith is considered one of the founders of economic theory, but there were others before and after him. His ideas were influential because they were true or demonstrable useful to understanding how political economy works, not because of something essential about Adam Smith specifically.

It would be wrong to revoke Smith credit for his discoveries, but it would also be folly to say no one, given enough time, would have made similar arguments about supply and demand. It would further be foolish to attribute every theoretical innovation after Smith to him just because he made one substantial innovation.

And this raises the question: At what point does “Smithianism” become merely “economics?”

For our purposes, at what point does the “Christianity” that Scrivener identifies become “politics,” “ethics,” or “culture?” Indeed, much as it’s more useful to categorize the insights of Smith within the field of economics, where other thinkers have come up with unrelated theories or built upon Smith’s insights, so too is it the case with Christianity politics, ethics, and culture.

Scrivener Is Wrong About Falsification And History

At a certain point, it ceases to be useful to understand factual or normative ideas solely by the person or school who came up with them first. When O’Connor and others criticize Scrivener and other Dominionists for the unfalsifability of their terminology, it’s not because they don’t understand how history works, it’s because they’re engaging with the actual substance of the topic at hand: Is Christianity essential to the success of the west?

Regardless of the answer to that question, you need to have a good theory of what Christianity is, and what Christianity isn’t. You need a good theory of history that systemically makes causal explanations - including falsifiable claims and predictions. Scrivener’s theory does not do that.

In fact, he resists falsifiability for the most misguided reasons. Here are his words, slightly edited for text:

“But you’re looking for falsifiability when we’re not talking about science…Falsifiability works brilliantly if you population A, population B, and a control group and let’s run the experiment and let’s look at the results and we’ll A/B/C test it. You cannot do that with the past…there is not A/B/C past. There is only A.”

It’s technically correct that historical theories aren’t falsifiable in the same way as a science experiment, but there is still some degree of falsifiability when forming historical theories and explanations. Historical theories need to be apportioned to the evidence of history, whether it be documents, archeology, etc.

In this way, when we say “historical theories,” we’re talking about at least two things. First, explanations about the beliefs and opinions of individual people in history, inferred from historical evidence. Second, explanations of the actions and behaviors of people and institutions, again, inferred from historical evidence.

Specific theories of history can be falsified by historical evidence. If you said the Holocaust didn’t happen, for instance, we can produce libraries and concentration camps full of documentation falsifying that theory. Similarly, if you said that Thomas Jefferson was a Hasidic Jew, there’s also an abundance of evidence falsifying that.

The Steelman Is A Response To A Strawman

The steelman of what Scrivener is saying is that we cannot establish that historical developments would have still happened had the people who invented them not done so, at least not with the same degree of certainty as scientific theories.

So, for instance, we can’t say for certain that someone would have made the invisible hand argument in the same way Smith did, had Smith not made it. We cannot say if Christianity would have still become a world religion had Paul not written epistles. We cannot say that the allies would have won World War II had Churchill not been Prime Minister of the UK or Roosevelt the President of the United States. And so on.

The problem with this defense is that it’s completely irrelevant. It’s a strawman. O’Conner and other skeptics are not saying that Scrivener’s arguments are unfalsifiable because they rely on (trivially) true accounts of history. Rather, the criticism is that Scrivener’s analyses and inferences drawn from history are unfalsifiable.

…And A Motte-And-Bailey

And so, Scrivener’s defense is a motte-and-bailey, flipping between two arguments:

1. The Historical-Factual Argument - Christianity influenced western history and thus norms and institutions.

2. The Social Argument - Christianity is needed to sustain the success of western institutions in the future.

Whenever we’re arguing about causal theories of history and making inferences about the future, we are having the social argument. Our methodology (labeling), facts, and theories are, at least to a degree, falsifiable. Whenever Scrivener signs up to be on a panel to debate dominionism, he is signing up to have that kind of conversation.

And when you have that conversation, you need historical data. Not just random historical facts, but also causal theories of how people and institutions work. You need to look for counterpoints throughout history, and account for them.6

Scrivener, for whatever reason, is ill equipped for that conversation,7 and so he refuses to have it, retreating to the trivial historical-factual argument that no skeptic would dispute, not Alex O’Connor or myself.

I’m frustrated with Scrivener and don’t take him seriously because he has this grand idea that he spends his career talking about, but it doesn’t stand up to the smallest bit of scrutiny. Indeed, he doesn’t seem to understand basic aspects of forming theories and subjecting them to critical feedback.

Culture Arguments Are Squishy.

In closing, there is good and bad within Christianity. There is good and bad within cultures outside of Christianity. Christianity is not the entirety of western culture. Culture is weird and multifaceted because humans are weird and multifaceted.

The people who make explicitly cultural arguments, that we must promote this kind of culture vs that kind of culture, are almost always grifters because their arguments are always motte-and-baileys and poorly defined.

If you want to protect liberalism, democracy, free speech, and capitalism, you should argue for these ideas directly and explicitly. Heck, if you believe in the necessity of Christian dominion, argue for that position explicitly, appealing to the exact goods that would be brought about by that system. You’re more likely to persuade your audience because your arguments will be clear and direct.

Don’t argue for a specific culture or sub-culture because every culture has good and bad things that no one will embrace entirely. Anyone who tells you differently, and argues like Scrivener is probably just trying to make money off your attention and grievances.

It’s been a little bit longer than normal since I last wrote a post. The reason why is because I got laid off at work.

This, on top of the fact that my family was already moving two time zones away next month, puts a lot of stress on my brain. I don’t really feel like talking about deep philosophy at the moment, so I hope you’ll pardon my writer’s block.

I feel like I did during the opening months of the pandemic: A low-level feeling of stress, anxiety, and shock that makes me more inclined to binge YouTube than create anything. Undoubtedly, this will pass eventually. Writing this post is progress.

Why I Got Laid Off

I feel the need to say this somewhere, to get it off my chest. I was not laid off because of my performance. I was an employee in good standing, likely earning the maximum merit pay increase for performance this year - as I have done every year at my job. I always met my goals. I always did good work. I never turned in anything late, in fact I was known for getting things done early.1

One of the most jarring things of this whole experience was that I was approved to transition to full remote work on a Wednesday (because I was an employee in good standing), flew to Denver on a Thursday, toured an apartment on a Friday, signed a lease on a Saturday, flew back to DC on a Sunday, and was laid off on that Monday. If I was laid off due to performance, I wouldn’t have been approved for remote work in the first place.2

I was laid off indirectly due to USAID cuts last year. It’s hard to overstate how much harm those did to NGOs such as the one I worked for, which have been (basically) in a constant state of reorganization ever since.

Still, it wasn’t all USAID cuts. Reflecting on my five years, I don’t think my contributions were ever properly appreciated by the people making higher up decisions. I don’t even know who those people were, I just know they weren’t the people I directly worked with, because those who did work with me were always impressed by my work.3

It Was Probably Time Anyway

If I’m thinking objectively, I agree with the decision to lay me off, as much as it pains me. For the last year, I kept getting shuffled onto new teams, far away from my original campaign team obligations. I had no business being on the team I was on at the end. My position is technically a digital campaigns lead, yet I’m working in analytics and technology? I love data and analytics as much as the next guy, but I was a glorified secretary for a data team the last six months.

My long-time manager was trying to train me in business intelligence and data, while giving me more experience in project management,4 but on paper it seemed more like a make-work job. So I’m not surprised (or rather, I shouldn’t be as surprised as I originally was) that I was laid off.

I remember telling my boss about six months ago that, given all that was going on at the workplace, if there weren’t big things going on in my personal life (getting married, moving across the country, my wife needing health insurance), I would be looking for another job. That was a good instinct! But it was impractical at the time. What do I tell a Denver recruiter? That I’ll be there in six months? And many DC jobs are going away from full remote.

If I could have clung to this job for a little longer, that would have been great, as I already worked remotely and enjoyed great work-life balance. But it wasn’t meant to be.

What Next?

I hate to be toxically positive, but I think this will be for the best in the long term. I have been unchallenged by my job for at least a year now, and part of the reason I was shuffled to new teams is because my boss and I agreed that my talents were best fit for project management-style work, as that’s basically what I was doing for my campaign work.

This pivot is complicated now because most of the stuff I did at my last job worth mentioning on a resume was campaign-focused. So, I’m looking for Marketing Project Management Jobs (very niche!) with the hopes of pivoting away from communications/marketing in the next 5 years into full-on project management. The best news in all of this is that I’m likely done with advocacy. Seven years was enough.

As for substack…I’m still here! I can’t really give you a posting schedule or set expectations about what my writing will be like in 2026 when I inevitably(!) get a new job. There are many posts I want to write, from moral psychology, to ongoing Hume studies, to responding to Alex O’Conner videos, and so on.

I have set up paid subscriptions, but I am not committing to writing or producing any paid content until I get a job. If you want to become a paid subscriber, feel free, but know you won’t get anything out of it for at least a few months. I was hoping to start podcasting at the end of Q1 of this year, but that’s just not happening.5 Podcasting equipment is much cheaper than it was five years ago, but it’s still not a justified expense until I get a job. It would be irresponsible for me to commit to these things over applying for jobs or otherwise working toward getting a job (learning new skills, networking, finding a part time job).

For the foreseeable future, I’m going to be maxing out on job applications.

On my last job hunt I probably submitted 150 applications over the course of about 3 months (late January to mid April 2021). This got me about 18 phone interviews, a dozen job first round interviews, and about 5 more positions going further, including one offer while I was in the process of two more jobs. This time around, I’m about two weeks into this job hunt, and I’ve submitted over 70 applications, already landing about 4 phone interviews (though 2 of them I’m uninterested in).

My first ever job hunt took ten months, while my last one took three. At this rate, assuming the same success rates as before, it’ll take less time. That’s because I’m a better candidate (5 more years of experience will do that) and I have a more refined process of application (AI tools help). My hit rate on the jobs I apply for should be higher (knock on wood), as should the pace I apply for jobs.

We hope for exponential decay.

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How Am I Holding Up?

I don’t want to overshare the details, but my family needs me to work. Unlike my previous stints of unemployment, failing to secure a job impacts more people than just myself. If you have ever had a family to support, that lights a fire within you that’s hard to explain to someone you haven’t.

For now, I’m not worried about putting food on the table or a roof over my head (though it’s really annoying that I can’t collect unemployment insurance as my employment ends before I move to another state). I’m getting some severance and thankfully signed a lease with a deal that gave me 2 months free rent, and when that rent starts it will be much cheaper than DC. I’ll have access to a car. Right now I have enough liquid funds to figure things out. In the worst case scenario, I could dip into retirement and last well into next year (I don’t think that will be necessary).

The challenge is really just managing my anxiety. Not that my anxiety is exceptionally bad, but it’s naturally a little unsettling to not know what life will look like in 8 months, from finances to debt, etc. There’s a range of possibilities that could happen. If I find a job fast, I could come out ahead financially. If unemployment lasts for longer than six months or so, we’re looking at a really bad situation.

All to say, I have created enough good fortune for myself (you may call it luck), and I know I’m a good enough worker, so I’ll find something. I suspect the optimistic scenario (where I come out slightly ahead) is actually more likely than the pessimistic one (finding nothing for over a year). The most likely scenario is going to be somewhere in between, closer to the optimistic case. I won’t know until I live it.

Closing With Epicurus

But hey! This is a philosophy substack, where’s the philosophy? I’m thinking through the lens of one of my favorite philosophers, Epicurus, and his tetrapharmakos (four-fold remedy):

1. Don’t Fear God

2. Don’t Worry About Death

3. What’s Good is Easy To Get

4. What’s Terrible is Easy To Endure

I’ve written about Epicurus before, as he’s one of my favorite philosophers.

For our purposes, I only care about 2-4. I’ll briefly summarize some connecting themes between them. Namely:

1. It’s not wise to be fearful or anxious about things that haven’t happened yet, or that you are not going to actually suffer from, like death. (Number 2)

2. There are many different kinds of pleasure. Our inability to be happy or find pleasure is often a result of chasing the wrong kinds of pleasure, those pleasures that are by nature difficult to obtain or that cause us pain after enjoying them. (Number 3)

3. Our bodies and brains have an upper limit for the amount of pain we can endure continuously. Truly terrible things will either kill you or cause you to pass out, immediately making them less terrible because you’re not conscious to experience them. (Number 4)

“Don’t Worry About…”

Living through this anxious time of life, I must prepare for the worst, but it’s absolutely silly to dwell on the worst case scenario as if it’s the most likely scenario or even a likely scenario.

Indeed, barring tragedy, the worst possible scenario would play out in mid-2027. A lot changes in 18 months, and it would be silly to think I couldn’t find some kind of employment by then. The fact that I have over a year before things get really bad means I have a lot of time. And even if I didn’t, I still have an extended family I could lean on for more support.

Every second I succumb to the anguish or anxiety of the worst case scenario is a second of time I’m wasting my life. It’s a second I could use to either improve my situation or merely enjoy the goods of my life (my health, my family, a good meal, a good TV show). That moment of the worst case scenario has not come yet and it may not come at all (dare I say it likely won’t?), so why ruin the current moment or (not) work to make it less probable?

Epicurus understood this about fearing death. Death is a silly thing to be afraid of because, from your subjective perspective, you’re never dead! If all you have is subjective experience, and that experience will one day end, it’s silly to diminish the quality of your experience by worrying about the badness of the end of that experience.

I think the same is true of all life’s worst case scenarios. Many of them will come to pass, outside of our control. But many of the situations we lose the most sleep about are (somewhat) within our control. The key is not to give into anguish but to do something about it, even if “doing something” is merely not thinking about it. The badness of inevitable things are amplified by compulsively thinking about them, so there’s no fault in actively trying to not think about them.

“What’s Good Is Easy To Get”

I will have to curtail some of my spending on things I enjoy until I find a new job, like eating out or getting drinks (honestly, my biggest financial vice). That’s not great, but there will still be many things available to me that I can enjoy for free. Indeed, I may enjoy some unanticipated pleasure by not indulging the more costly ones.

Maybe I’ll play more guitar and get better at it. Maybe I’ll run more. Maybe I’ll write more. Maybe I’ll have better spending habits afterwards. Who knows.

“What’s Terrible Is Easy To Endure”

The restrictions and the low-level anguish and anxiety sucks. But it’s not killing me. I am still here. There is nothing about me that is changing other than the nature of external stimulus signaling to my brain that my financial future and job security is, with high confidence, good. Obviously, those stimuli are different now and my body is reacting accordingly, but how I frame that reaction is within my control, and using philosophy is an excellent tool.

If the worst case scenario were to happen, I would be sad, but I would still have my health, my talents, my interests, and I would know things about myself that would help me endure future hardships. That is all the more reason to not react negatively. I would lose things, yes, but I will still have many good things available to me.

Sure, there are even worse scenarios that could happen, but their probability was not reliant on my employment. It would be unreasonable to think them more probable now, to think about them more, or to factor in their probability with planning my life. I wasn’t doing that 3 weeks ago, why would I now?

Putting It All In Perspective

In all, people say that philosophy, especially secular philosophy, is inferior to religion at granting assurance to the anxious. They’re wrong because they haven’t read Epicurus, and they don’t have a good sense of probability and human psychology. Our brains have a tendency to adjust to new normals; our happiness and personality often remains relatively stable throughout life. Change happens, and we inevitably adapt to it. Epicurus’s tetrapharmakos is an excellent way of understanding this.

I keep coming back to the idea that death is more probable than most of the things we worry about in life. Death is a certainty, while most other misfortunes we worry about are not. It’s a little odd that those things worry us more than death on any given day.

And so, it’s my approach to treat these forecasted hardships as less probable than death. It’s technically true!

The remedy for both kinds of hardships is to not think about the suffering, but to take as much into your control, to put off that that suffering for later. For death, that means eating relatively healthy and getting exercise and taking yourself out of risky situations. For perennial unemployment, that means applying for jobs, building skills, and networking.

What you’ll come to notice is that your ability to enjoy life is completely separate from these efforts. The answer to the question of “how do I have a good day today” is mostly unrelated to “how do I put off death or not think about death.”

I don’t read books or write substacks to prolong my life, but because I enjoy doing those things. Obviously, prolonged unemployment would prevent me from doing those things, as would death, but the day is 24 hours long, and I have plenty of time to do all of the above.

None of this is to say we shouldn’t appreciate the weight, finality or badness of dying or other hardships. Rather, the seriousness of those things should frame our sense of gratitude. Death and other problems have always lingered over our psychological lives, it’s only when those lives are seriously disrupted by tragedy that the reminders of death seep in.

But when we properly understand that death is probably both the worst thing that can happen to us and the most likely thing, it’s hard to feel justified in the anxiety of other bad things, that are not as bad and not as certain. If anything, we should feel empowered to solve or at least avoid those bad things because we have a degree of power to do so, at least relative to death.

At this point, I’ve probably blended some stoicism and existentialism in with my epicureanism, and that’s fine. What’s important is that we all have the means within us to be happy, to not be anxious, and to solve our most pressing problems.6

For those of you going through a rough and anxious time, I hope this post helped you. I understand that anxiety often creeps in, even when the best philosophy informs us it’s irrational (it happens to me all the time). Such is the way of the human brain. But if you keep going, you’ll find it will eventually recede. At the very least, you’ll find pockets of happiness in your day, when you otherwise.

Just remember: Don’t worry about death, what’s good is easy to get, and what’s terrible is easy to endure. You’ve got this!

Having said that, the difference between us is that he has millions of social media followers, while I have (far) fewer than a thousand. Part of the reason he is so successful is because he will give more charity to arguments than they deserve. He will throw some good non-theistic arguments under the bus for the sake of having a good conversation with a Christian.

There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but the problem is that, given his platform, many people will repeat or agree with his arguments, even if they are bad.1

He did this a few years ago with one of Christopher Hitchens’s arguments against God.

I don’t think this is a good rebuttal by O’Connor, and in this post I’ll explain why.

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O’Connor’s Argument

Tyranny Vs. Benevolence

O’Connor asserts that the dictatorship argument is wrong because it’s a metaphor, and if we can prove that the metaphor is disanalogous, we can defeat the argument.

Specifically, he believes that what makes dictators bad is not that they are dictators, but that they are tyrants. Though God himself may technically be a dictator, that doesn’t mean he is a tyrant. In this way, O’Connor asserts not all dictators are tyrants, and therefore a dictatorial God could plausibly not be a tyrant.

Tyrants are bad for two primary reasons: They have the capacity to be wrong about facts (and often are), and they are not benevolent (or outright malevolent). This, in contrast with God, as a perfect being, who is all-knowing and omnibenevolent.

Freedom

Hitchens and other anti-theists believe that freedom and liberty are incompatible with worshipping a celestial dictator. The existence of Hell makes this incompatibility more salient. If people are truly sent to Hell for not abiding God’s commands or merely not believing in him, God is a tyrant unworthy of worship.

O’Connor answers this argument by pointing out that, just because there’s a God, doesn’t mean you’re forced to act in a particular way. Though the existence of Hell (and the reality of eternal conscious torment for not believing in God or following God’s commandments) would plausibly make God a tyrant, there are many theists who don’t believe in Hell as it’s traditionally defined.

For instance, many theists believe in annihilationism, that there isn’t everlasting suffering for those who don’t believe in God. Others don’t see Hell as a place of torture, but as separation from God. Others see Hell as the natural result of sin.

The Counter-Narrative:

O’Connor, in tandem with Bishop Robert Baron, then reframes understanding God’s absolute sovereignty. God is an omniscient guide to the best possible outcome for yourself. Sometimes, restricting someone’s freedom makes them more free.

A smoker, for instance, may see prohibition on smoking as a limitation of their freedom, but in reality, smoking makes them sick and less free. To the Theist/Christian, telling a sinner not to sin is like telling a smoker not to smoke.

In this way, God’s limitations on freedom shouldn’t be understood as “Do this, or else,” but rather “Do this, so that the world becomes clearer to you, so that you may become more free.”

Let’s call this the counter-narrative: Humans have distorted perception of the world, and this makes them unfree and unhappy. God commands Christians to act and believe in specific ways to allow them to see the world undistorted and be more happy. Hell is simply the consequence of living a life and making decisions from that distorted perception.

Concessions and Disagreements

I agree that:

• A dictator that was omnibenevolent and omniscient would be better than one who wasn’t.

• It’s logically possible for a dictator to not be a tyrant.

• Worshipping a God is not inherently incompatible with human freedom.

• Some restrictions on freedom make humans more safe and free relative to no restrictions.

• Human misery is often a product of human error.

• Accepting an idea or worldview (such as theism or Christianity) on faith could lead to one believing more true things and less false things. It could also make one happier.

O’Connor’s rebuttal to the celestial dictator hinges on a few points:

1. That not all dictators are tyrants

2. That Hell as eternal conscious torment is not real, or that the belief in Hell is not a fundamental part of the Christian religion

3. That the restrictions of the Christian religion predictably make everyone more happy, or give them a clearer perspective of the world.

I hope to show all of these points fail.

Yes, Dictators Are Tyrants

Where’s the Nice Dictator?

As I conceded above, it is logically possible for a dictator to not be a tyrant. The problem is that, historically, benevolent dictators are seemingly nonexistent.

When a single individual has the monopoly of force of a country or region, all power (economic, political, militarily) goes through them. They usually don’t like to give up that power, while others want to take it, and so the dictator will do tyrannical things to keep their power. The consequence is that dictatorships are simultaneously violent and unstable.

Sometimes that means the dictator suppresses a minority group, other times he robs or extracts rents from innovative and profitable industries, and at other times still, he brutally puts down pesky peaceful protests. Sometimes, he does silly things that appear as self-sabotage, like not developing his country’s road network.

All of this is to say that there’s no such thing as a peaceful, benevolent, or non-tyrannical dictator.

Empirical Possibility And Language

If we have no example of a non-tyrannical dictator, we cannot say it’s empirically possible to have a non-tyrannical dictator, much as we cannot say it’s empirically possible for a flying unicorn to exist. In this way, language is constrained by the real things it refers to in the world, and possibility should be grounded in what is actually observed to happen.

If I say “all metals have a melting point” and you say “vibranium is a metal without a melting point” and there’s nothing in the world that the word “vibranium” refers to, you haven’t said anything true about the world. Further, absent the existence of vibranium, we aren’t justified in thinking adamantium (which is defined as vibranium but better!) is also a real metal.

When we’re talking about vibranium and adamantium, which are defined as metals that are not experienced in the real world and don’t share properties that metals we observe have, we aren’t talking about metals anymore. We’re creating new words and pretending we’re talking about the real world. So too is the case with dictators who aren’t tyrants.

What does this have to do with God? Isn’t it the point that God is omnibenevolent and omniscient and wholly not like us? Well yes, but I would point out how metaphors such as this break down because of an inconsistent use of language.

You can’t say a metaphor fails without empirical evidence proving its failure. If I make an argument that “x is like metal because it has a melting point” it’s not a proper response to say “x is not like a metal because it has a melting point, as the (non-evidenced) metal vibranium does not have a melting point.” That’s not how disproving metaphors work.

No One Disagrees That God Has Dictatorial Powers

Baron and O’Connor do not reframe the charge of God as dictator as false, which implies that they agree God has all the negative powers Hitchens assumes He has. I would imagine that they conceive of God more as a king than dictator, as the king would probably behave differently than a dictator (respecting the dignity of citizens, for instance).

When Hitchens calls God a dictator and Christians call God a king, they are arguing over language that refers to something similar: a single individual who controls the power of state (or in this case, reality). We’ll call this person a “sovereign.”

Denying God is a dictator and that his sovereignty is more like a king doesn’t solve the problem, as kings have acted like dictators throughout history. To the extent that kings have respected the rights of their citizenry, it wasn’t out of benevolence, but because countervailing political forces held them accountable, whether it be nobility or democratic governance. Kings and heads of state today respect the rights and dignities of their citizens because they as heads of state lack absolute power.

This is the subtle assumption of Christopher Hitchens’s anti-theism, and an assumption many axiological anti-theists would agree with: A happy life worth living is one where you are in control of your life, not subject to the whims of an all powerful sovereign leader.

To create the conditions of autonomy, we need free, autonomous people “generating” countervailing power centers throughout society. Hitchens and anti-theists oppose the idea of God because the existence of an omnipotent sovereign necessarily robs humans of these powers, and thus the ability to project power and to protect their freedoms and self-determination.

Disagreeing over whether the sovereign is a king or a dictator or an omnibenevolent, omniscient intelligence misses the point. For the Hitchensonian anti-theist, the existence of an absolute sovereign would necessarily entail the denial of personal autonomy, self-determination, and other goods as a consequence of individuals lacking countervailing power.

O’Connor fails to prove the metaphor wrong because he misunderstands the metaphor. God isn’t dis-preferred because he lacks information and isn’t benevolent, but because such an arrangement necessarily corrodes individual rights, power, self-determination, and dignity. A blunt way of saying this is that I don’t want there to be a dictator ruling me, even if the dictator agrees with me on everything.

To disprove Hitchens, the Christian has to prove that God’s existence somehow doesn’t undermine these various goods. As O’Connor and Baron didn’t do that with this video, and so the metaphor still stands,as does Hitchens’s argument.

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Hell Is Fundamental To Mainstream Christian Theology

Just Look At The Stats And History

This is a point I wish were not true, but it nevertheless is. The belief that Hell is a place of eternal conscious torment is the mainstream position throughout most of Christian history. It’s certainly mainstream in American Christianity. Here’s a survey of some data:

• About 80 percent of American Christians belief in Hell, including 91 percent of Evangelicals and 75 percent of Catholics

• More than half of Americans think that people in Hell experience physical or psychological suffering.

• About 44 percent of Christians, including 71 percent of Evangelicals, believe that those who do not believe in God cannot go to Heaven.

• About one-third of American Christians, and 50 percent of Evangelicals believe their faith is the only path to eternal life in Heaven.

• According to Lifeway Research, about 56 percent of Americans believed that “hell is a real place where certain people will be punished forever,” and about one quarter of Americans believed that “even the smallest sin deserved eternal damnation.”2

And here are some Church doctrines, in different denominations.

• The Westminster Confessions of Faith, one of the most influential documents in Reformed and Presbyterian churches says in its 32nd chapter that: “the souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness.” The Westminister Larger catechism also teaches that “most grievous torments in soul and body, without intermission, in hellfire forever.”

• As recent as 2010, the Southern Baptist Convention affirmed “belief in the biblical teaching on eternal, conscious punishment of the unregenerate in hell”

• According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Immediately after death the souls of those who die in a state of mortal sin descend into hell, where they suffer the punishments of hell, “eternal fire.” The chief punishment of hell is eternal separation from God, in whom alone man can possess the life and happiness for which he was created and for which he longs.”3

Now, it’s true that many Christians actively disbelieve in Hell and that there are theologians and philosophers who write persuasively against Hell. I’m not here to say these people aren’t Christians, that that their arguments aren’t compelling,4 or that they’re even wrong in their interpretation.

Rather, the weight of tradition is something to take seriously here. Disbelieving in Hell as a Christian is kind of like affirming homosexuality or the permissibility of abortion. There’s so much tradition against it, that this tradition becomes its own Problem of Evil if the doctrine is wrong: Why would God allow this to become a mainstream belief if it weren’t true?

This is the one point that many philosophers of religion contradict mainstream Christians and their institutions. There’s nothing wrong with that by itself; it would be good for religion if we had less fire and brimstone, and people converted to a faith for its positive benefits, not out of fear. But I can’t stand it when people whitewash mainstream Christian theology and what most Christians believe.

Stop claiming that serious Christians don’t believe things they demonstratively do believe!

Why The Argument Against Hell Is Compelling

When an atheist or anti-theist uses the doctrine of Hell as a reason to disbelieve in Christianity, they are not saying all Christians believe in Hell, or that everyone who believes in Christianity because of Hell is a bad person. They are not even saying that Christians must believe in Hell.

Rather, they are saying that there is compelling evidence that the doctrine of Hell is inseparable from Christianity. Indeed, many Christians themselves argue this.

Many of atheists disbelieved in Hell and then lost their faith because they no longer saw the point of being Christian. Or, they experienced the Problem of Evil that comes from disbelieving Hell: Why did God make this doctrine so widely accepted throughout Christianity history? Why did he do this when the doctrine increases the stakes of disagreement, causing many Christians to resort to violence over seemingly minute doctrinal disagreement?

Atheists Are Villainized Merely For Pointing This Out

A (somewhat facetiously) way of framing the issue is that a solid majority or plurality of traditional Christians and Churches worship the God of a Celestial North Korea. They have an army of pastors, priests, bishops, and theologians who will defend this viewpoint and are serious and sophisticated in their faith. Meanwhile, atheists and anti-theists agree that Hell is an important part of Christian theology, but maintain that it’s a good reason to disbelieve in Christianity.

In response to this, a contingent of universalists ignore the traditionalists, and focus their derision on the atheists/anti-theists as the bad guys. They mock and condescend the anti-theists for supposedly not engaging with sophisticated or serious Christians, as if the more abundant traditionalists don’t exist!

I think one of the main differences between the anti-theists and universalists is that the latter isn’t troubled by the problem of evil that comes from Hell being a false doctrine. For the anti-theist, it’s a huge problem, and that’s why they are insistent on bringing it up. But the universalists either don’t see this is a problem or would rather not think about this problem, and so they stomp their feet and bully the non-believers.

All of this is quite odd, and non-conducive to good discourse. Regardless, I’ve not heard a good answer to the Problem of Evil that arises if Eternal Conscious Torment Hell is not real.

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Christianity Creates Confusion, Unhappiness And Limits Freedom (At least for some people)

O’Connor and Baron’s final rebuttal sounds wooey. The truth will set you free, man.

In all seriousness though, some of the most compelling arguments for any philosophy is that it will have you:

1. Believe more true things,

2. Believe fewer false things,

3. Feel better or happier.

The counternarrative borrows from all three arguments: By accepting Christianity, you’ll see the world more clearly (believe more true/fewer false things) and feel better/happier.

But there are a few problems with this.

Dogma Makes It Harder To Believe More True Things and Fewer False things

The first problem with this is that Christianity is a doctrinal religion with dogmas and orthodox teachings. I’ve written before about why that’s a problem:

Many of those teachings cannot be revised, no matter what disconfirming information is discovered. Thus, Christians and their institutions will deny scientifically established facts and spread countervailing misinformation among other Christians, creating a sense of confusion at best, and denying the truth at worst.

The cumulative effect is skepticism toward science and a stagnation of scientific progress. We see this in polling data:

• 44 percent of Christians believe science does more harm than good, and only 46 percent say it does more good than harm. These statistics are by the more pessimistic about science among religious groups.

• About 37 percent of Americans, including 52 percent of Protestants and 31 percent of Catholics believe God created humans in the present form, which is scientifically wrong.

• There’s reason to think that stronger Christian belief leads to more science denial, at least in certain subjects. For instance, according to a 2012 survey of 1,000 protestant pastors conducted by Lifeway, 50 percent of pastors agreed that the earth is 6,000 years old, 74 percent strongly agreed that Adam and Eve were real people, and 72 percent disagreed that “God used evolution to create people.”

Please note, my point here is not that Christianity is incompatible with science, but that many Christians have stalled scientific progress. Though every religion may have biases against certain fields of inquiry, if Christianity was a superior truth-tracking religion, it wouldn’t have such a bad record of denying scientific truths.

In this way, we can’t say for sure that Christianity will have you seeing the world clearer because a critical mass of Christians do not see the world clearly.

An apologist may say that the problem here is humanity, not Christianity, but this is an unsatisfactory answer. Christianity being no better than any other ideology is not a point in favor of Christianity, but a point against it. If Christianity were untrue, we’d expect its influence on truth-seeking to be roughly the same as other ideologies.

Does Christianity Make You Happier?

The second problem is that Christian theology makes some people less happy.

The lowest hanging fruit demonstrating this is traditional Christian teachings on sexuality. Whether it’s asserting that homosexuality is unnatural and bad or teachings against divorce, there are abundant examples of Christian theology making people less happy. When I assert this, my argument isn’t that Christianity suppresses happiness because it has sexual or gendered norms, but because many of those sexual and gendered norms are unsubstantiated by evidence and cause harm.

This question is nuanced in the Christian tradition, and I don’t want to gloss that over. Christian teachings on divorce have varied throughout history, but what’s important is that most denominations discourage it in most circumstances due to teachings of marriage as a covenant and Jesus’s own words on divorce.

But this is complicated by the fact that legalized divorce has been an unequivocal good for women and children. According to research by Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson, states that adopted no-fault divorce laws in the 1970s and 1980s found decreased rates of suicide, domestic violence, and spousal homicide for women. To be clear, the dynamics here are complicated, and I’m certain that all Christian denominations universally condemn spousal abuse, homicide, etc. The key point is that there is a social/policy solution to those problems, and Christian denominations are reflexively against it, for doctrinal reasons.

When it comes to homosexuality, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being gay, whether you define that as having sexual partners of the same sex, being in committed relationships with people of the same sex, or otherwise being attracted to members of the same sex. Certainly, there are homosexual behaviors that are bad, but I’m not listing any because what makes those behaviors bad isn’t homosexuality, but other considerations; it’s bad when heterosexual people do those behaviors too.

What’s more, the harms and negative sociological externalities associated with homosexuality are always factors that are secondary to how gay people are treated, not from the fact that gay people are gay.5

For a wise person following the evidence, this is obviously the case, but not for many committed Christians. As they must primarily affirm doctrine and dogma, they cannot allow themselves to see the counterevidence.

Christian Institutions Have Restricted Freedom

Finally, there have been many instances throughout history where Christian institutions have restricted freedom.

Though some may argue whether Christians were better or worse on slavery issues than other societies, the reality is that many of Christian institutions supported slavery well into the 19th century.

Beyond their support of slavery in the 19th century in the United States, southern Christian institutions also supported segregation and opposed integration well into the 20th century. In 2026, we look back at the people who acted violently toward civil rights protestors as cartoon villains. In some ways they were (segregationists are confirmed bad!), but this analysis overlooks the moral motivations of segregationists. They believed that black people were morally inferior to whites and allowing the races to intermix would degrade the virtue of white people. They saw themselves as safeguarding “white civilization,” and these views were often endorsed from the pulpit.

For the specific point, I don’t really care that much about minor details because I concede that many Christians have supported liberatory causes throughout history. If it’s the case that Christians have supported both liberatory and repressive policies and political movements throughout history, then the causal variable for whether someone supports liberatory policies is not Christianity!

This Counter-Narrative Is Watered Down Pyrrhonianism.

The more substantive criticism of the counter-narrative is that it’s unoriginal yet inferior to the idea that inspired it. It was Pyrrho of Elis, more than 300 years before Christ’s crucifixion, who taught that suspending judgment on beliefs was the key to ataraxia (serene calmness).

Pyrrho and his philosophy are obviously much different than Christianity and other ancient schools; Pyrrhonism is a skeptical school, while Christianity believes truth claims about the world. Still, the idea that we have cognitive faculties that distort our perception of the world, and that misperception leads to unhappiness is a flavor of Pyrrhonianism. It’s unoriginal to Christianity.

To make matters worse, Christianity’s cure to the problem of dogma is inferior to Pyrrhonianism because it doubles down on the problems of dogma that Pyrrho was trying to solve in the first place. It creates more dogmas and doctrines that adherents must believe, regardless of the psychological costs or what the evidence supports.

To be clear, I agree with David’s Hume’s criticism of skepticism and Pyrrhonianism; it’s likely unfeasible that one can live life fully as a skeptic without beliefs. So, if we agree with the Pyrrhonian and the Christian that cognitive distortions lead us to be misinformed about the world and unhappy, the solution is not to give up on having beliefs in the first place or to accept unjustified dogmas uncritically. Rather, we should form beliefs apportioned to the evidence.

In this way, even if we agree with Christians that our cognitive distortions misinform us of reality and make us unhappy and unfree, Christianity appears as a less credible explanation of how the world works because it requires us to alter how we use reliable tools of cognition, such as language and empirical reasoning. Because of this, the counternarrative is not a good answer to Hitchens’s argument.

God Just May Be A Tyrant

Wrapping up, I don’t believe O’Connor and Baron’s response to Hitchens is a good one.

We don’t have good evidence of the empirical possibility of non-tyrannical dictators, and relying on this evidence of mere logical possibility seems like a word game. Hell as eternal conscious torment is so substantiated as a Christian teaching that its falsehood creates a Problem of Evil. Christianity doesn’t promote truth, demote falsehood, or create happiness more than any other ideology. Philosophers going back to Pyrrho agreed having a false perception of the world led to unhappiness, but Christian solutions to this problem create more problems and raise more questions. Among them: For what reason should we assume Christian dogma is better evidenced or different from any other dogma?

So is God, if real, a tyrant? To lean into the Pyrrhonian bit: I don’t know.

But if God has dictatorial powers (which necessarily disempowers individual people and removes their autonomy), uses Hell for coercive purposes, all while his ideology promotes a distorted view of reality (with His followers asserting this is the Best Possible News, like a bunch of Orwell characters), He probably is.

The chapter is short, thankfully, however it’s wrong on so many points that it’s not a useful resource to engage Hume’s argument. If you read it, you will be actively misled.

I’m not going to rebut everything Lewis has to say about miracles or Hume; my intent is to cast enough doubt that Lewis understands Hume; I want to convince you to look elsewhere for thoughtful counterarguments to Hume.

Hume’s Laws of Nature Are Not The Same As the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature

Lewis conflates Hume’s principle of the uniformity of nature with his formulation of natural laws.

“According to Hume, probability rests on what may be called the majority vote of our past experiences. The more often a thing has been known to happen, the more probable it is that it should happen again; and the less often the less probable. Now the regularity of Nature’s course, says Hume, is supported by something better than the majority vote of past experiences: it is supported by their unanimous vote, or, as Hume says, by ‘firm and unalterable experience’.”

This is wrong. Hume’s probability rests on the principle of the uniformity of nature, not the “majority vote” of natural laws. Here’s how these two ideas are different:

The principle of the uniformity of nature is the assumption that nature is uniform. For Hume, whenever we investigate the world, we must assume it acts in a uniform manner. We assume the uniformity of nature out of custom and habit, and because scientific investigation would be impossible without it.

From Part 1 of his essay Of Liberty and Necessity, found in his first Enquiry:

“It seems evident, that, if all the scenes of nature were continually shifted in such a manner, that no two events bore any resemblance to each other, but every object was entirely new, without any similitude to whatever had been seen before, we should never, in that case, have attained the least idea of necessity, or of a connexion among these objects. We might say, upon such a supposition, that one object or event has followed another; not that one was produced by the other. The relation of cause and effect must be utterly unknown to mankind. Inference and reasoning concerning the operations of nature would, from that moment, be at an end; and the memory and senses remain the only canals, by which the knowledge of any real existence could possibly have access to the mind. Our idea, therefore, of necessity and causation arises entirely from the uniformity, observable in the operations of nature; where similar objects are constantly conjoined together, and the mind is determined by custom to infer the one from the appearance of the other. These two circumstances form the whole of that necessity, which we ascribe to matter. Beyond the constant conjunction of similar objects, and the consequent inference from one to the other, we have no notion of any necessity, or connexion.”

When Hume and other skeptics assume the principle of the uniformity of nature, it’s not a conclusion that they inferred from evidence, nor is it an assumption of truth. As Bill Vanderburgh explains, the principle is “merely a regulative ideal for investigation of the world, rather than a supposed truth about the world.”

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Natural laws are different. They are probabilistic proofs that are so well supported that they function as laws. They can be overturned, but to do so, we need sufficient conflicting probabilities that downgrade it to a mere convincing probability.

Here Hume explains proofs and probabilities in Of Miracles:

“A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence. In such conclusions as are founded on an infallible experience, he expects the event with the last degree of assurance, and regards his past experience as a full proof of the future existence of that event. In other cases, he proceeds with more caution: He weighs the opposite experiments: He considers which side is supported by the greater number of experiments: To that side he inclines, with doubt and hesitation; and when at last he fixes his judgment, the evidence exceeds not what we properly call probability. All probability, then, supposes an opposition of experiments and observations, where the one side is found to overbalance the other, and to produce a degree of evidence, proportioned to the superiority. A hundred instances or experiments on one side, and fifty on another, afford a doubtful expectation of any event; though a hundred uniform experiments, with only one that is contradictory, reasonably beget a pretty strong degree of assurance. In all cases, we must balance the opposite experiments, where they are opposite, and deduct the smaller number from the greater, in order to know the exact force of the superior evidence.”

And later:

“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined…There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event, otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as an uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle; nor can such a proof be destroyed, or the miracle rendered credible, but by an opposite proof, which is superior.”

So Lewis is off to a bad start.

He thinks Hume infers the uniformity of nature, when Hume simply presumes it. For Hume, the reason why we assume the uniformity of nature is because it’s a habit or custom, it’s psychologically inevitable (just as it’s psychologically inevitable to draw inferences), and we can’t draw inferences without it. Keep this in mind for the end!

Expressed visually:

Hume’s Theory:

From the Principle of Uniformity → Formulation of Probability → Probabilistic Natural Laws

Lewis’s Misunderstanding of Hume

Hume’s Formulation of Probability (“The Unanimous Vote”) → The Principle of Uniformity → Natural Laws That Resemble Edicts

The charitable interpretation of Lewis’s confusion is that the nuances of Hume’s position on laws of nature and the principle of uniformity were not obvious on a cursory reading of his works. Maybe Lewis just missed it. What’s more, the Scotsman was misunderstood by his contemporaries, and he wrote when probability theory was in its infant stage, so philosophers for the last few hundred years have read him in the light of more mature probabilistic theories, thus misreading him.

So, to this point, I’m willing to cut Lewis some slack in misreading or misunderstanding Hume, but as we will see, I think it’s more likely the case that he simply didn’t try to understand Hume.

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Circularity, Balancing Probability, And Wisdom

Lewis puts the (false) circularity argument on display.

“There is, in fact, ‘uniform experience’ against Miracle; otherwise, says Hume, it would not be a Miracle. A miracle is therefore the most improbable of all events. It is always more probable that the witnesses were lying or mistaken than that a miracle occurred. Now of course we must agree with Hume that if there is absolutely ‘uniform experience’ against miracles, if in other words they have never happened, why then they never have. Unfortunately we know the experience against them to be uniform only if we know that all the reports of them are false. And we can know all the reports to be false only if we know already that miracles have never occurred. In fact, we are arguing in a circle.”

I’ll once again tap the sign on this argument, but I will also add some nuance.

The reason why the laws of nature are held to higher respect than miracle claims isn’t just the inherent improbability of miracles or the rigidness of the laws of nature, but that when balancing two probabilities, the laws of nature are always more convincing than testimony. But that’s not the only reason Hume considers miracles and their testimony false.

Falsehood And Balancing Probability

Hume’s language of falsehood is admittedly confusing and blunt for modern philosophy language, but much more nuanced than Lewis understands.

Let’s say hypothetically, you told me that you sprouted wings to commute to work. Should I believe you? Should I investigate your claim? Would it be wise, upon hearing such claims and similar claims, that a wise person should believe or investigate them? Merely on the grounds of testimony?

Of course not!

When Hume says that miracle testimony and miracles claims are false, it’s an inference. If you have the experience of investigating miracle claims, as many skeptics do,3 you’ll find an overwhelming majority false, if not all of them. From that experience, you’re justified in assuming future miracle testimony is false and compromised, even if you haven’t examined all testimony directly.

Again, that may seem rash on first glance, but remember, it’s not just one datapoint that we dismiss the testimony as false. Rather, it’s the weight of the combined proof of high quality laws of nature and the proof or high probability of bad miracle testimony against the low probability of good miracle testimony.

Probability Weight Illustrated:

The Proof of The Laws of Nature + The Proof of Bad Miracle Testimony > The Probability of a “Good” Miracle Testimony4

Wisdom

That’s not to say we can never revise our understanding of natural laws based on the sheer volume of contravening testimonial evidence (but more importantly, additional non-testimonial evidence), or that we can’t suspend belief in natural laws to critically examine them, but that miracle testimony (as a matter of fact) is not of the quality that justifies doing so.

There are countless implicit laws of nature that frame our experience. It would be capricious of us, on the grounds of low-quality evidence such as religious testimony, to question some of them and not others. Wise people just don’t do this.

So when Hume calls miracles and miracle testimony false, it’s not because he’s going after every miracle testimony case-by-case like James Randi. Rather, he is morally certain that it is false, given the weight of the evidence in both directions (in favor of the uniformity of nature, against the truth of religious miracle testimony). I think most people who hear miracle testimony from religious traditions that aren’t their own internalize this methodology.

There’s an aphorism that one should keep an open mind, but not so open that their brain falls out. That is the essence of Hume’s account of wisdom. We all have limited time and cognitive resources, and to question fundamental assumptions of how we understand the world on such measly evidence is a waste of time. Wise people don’t do that. Because of how improbable miracles and incredible miracle testimony are, wise people simply consider such accounts false.5

Is Hume’s language of falsehood as even handed and open as contemporary scientific or philosophy peer reviewed articles? No. But it’s not closed minded or presuppositional: it makes sense if you understand Hume’s vocabulary of probability.

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Lewis Confuses His Misunderstanding With Hume’s Inconsistency

Lewis continues to misunderstand Hume’s conception of natural laws and the principle of the uniformity of nature:

The whole idea of Probability (as Hume understands it) depends on the principle of the Uniformity of Nature. Unless Nature always goes on in the same way, the fact that a thing had happened ten million times would not make it a whit more probable that it would happen again. And how do we know the Uniformity of Nature? A moment’s thought shows that we do not know it by experience. We observe many regularities in Nature. But of course all the observations that men have made or will make while the race lasts cover only a minute fraction of the events that actually go on. Our observations would therefore be of no use unless we felt sure that Nature when we are not watching her behaves in the same way as when we are: in other words, unless we believed in the Uniformity of Nature. Experience therefore cannot prove uniformity, because uniformity has to be assumed before experience proves anything.

And mere length of experience does not help matters. It is no good saying, ‘Each fresh experience confirms our belief in uniformity and therefore we reasonably expect that it will always be confirmed’; for that argument works only on the assumption that the future will resemble the past—which is simply the assumption of Uniformity under a new name. Can we say that Uniformity is at any rate very probable? Unfortunately not. We have just seen that all probabilities depend on it. Unless Nature is uniform, nothing is either probable or improbable. And clearly the assumption which you have to make before there is any such thing as probability cannot itself be probable. The odd thing is that no man knew this better than Hume. His Essay on Miracles is quite inconsistent with the more radical, and honourable, scepticism of his main work.

I’m not going to beat the dead horse about how Lewis confuses laws of nature and principles of uniformity again, but I will point out that Lewis demonstrates, again, a deep confusion about Hume’s project.

His misunderstanding is one of the common misunderstandings of Hume. Many presume that because Hume thinks there’s no logical justification for a cognitive tool, that using that tool isn’t justified at all. Because there’s no logical foundation for induction, we can’t use induction. Because we can’t get an “ought” from an “is” in ethics, we cannot make sense of morality, or there’s no sense in creating or understanding moral rules, etc. And so on.

What Hume is really trying to say is that matters of fact are important to understand and make decisions about the world, more than his contemporary rationalists believed.

Hume is a skeptic in that he likely agreed with many radical skeptical conclusions, that we can’t be completely certain about many foundational truths. But Hume also thought that it was unfeasible to live one’s life this way. His philosophical project of mitigated skepticism was as much about tempering the zeal of those with unjustified certainties as it was to give assurance to radical skeptics that one could be morally certain that, say, that the sun would rise tomorrow. To learn more, read his essay on skepticism.

But Lewis instead misrepresents Hume as a rudderless radical skeptic. I’m not quite sure what Lewis even means when he says Of Miracles is less skeptical than his main work, because I don’t see how you can read his main work and conclude he’s a radical skeptic. The fact that Lewis thinks this when Hume has an essay criticizing radical skepticism demonstrates a lazy, basic misunderstanding of Hume.

Getting Hume Completely Wrong

But there are more errors!

The question, ‘Do miracles occur?’ and the question, ‘Is the course of Nature absolutely uniform?’ are the same question asked in two different ways. Hume, by sleight of hand, treats them as two different questions. He first answers ‘Yes,’ to the question whether Nature is absolutely uniform: and then uses this ‘Yes’ as a ground for answering, ‘No,’ to the question, ‘Do miracles occur?’ The single real question which he set out to answer is never discussed at all. He gets the answer to one form of the question by assuming the answer to another form of the same question. Probabilities of the kind that Hume is concerned with hold inside the framework of an assumed Uniformity of Nature.

When asked if miracles occur, contrary to Lewis, Hume would probably say “I don’t know, but it would be unwise to believe they do.” If asked whether nature was absolutely uniform, he would probably say “I don’t know, but I can’t help but believe it, and science wouldn’t be possible without assuming it.”

Again, Hume is a skeptic! Skeptics are open about not knowing things! He is more concerned about the question of whether it’s wise to believe that a miracle happened than if a miracle really happened.

For example, it could be the case that numerous bunnies are resurrected every year in the forest, but no one is around to see them, and there’s otherwise no evidence of this occurring. Even though this event would be miraculous and true, it would be unwise to believe it, because there wouldn’t be good evidence, as it’s unwise to believe in things without evidence!

The fact that Lewis thinks Hume is answering the question “do miracles occur” and not “would it be wise to believe miracles occur” is another fundamental misreading of Hume. Once again, Of Miracles is a work of epistemology, not ontology or metaphysics. If you think Hume is making an ontological or metaphysical argument and not an epistemological one, you are deeply confused.

Lewis The Rambling Smooth Talker

When first writing this post, I almost omitted this passage, because I viewed it as Lewis opining about miracles in a way unrelated to Hume. Upon a re-read, I thought it demonstrated how close Lewis was to understanding Hume. I also thought that it could be interpreted that I’m omitting Lewis’s words that undercut my conclusion that he doesn’t know Hume. After all, he’s talking about how Hume’s probability relies on the uniformity of nature, right?

“Probabilities of the kind that Hume is concerned with hold inside the framework of an assumed Uniformity of Nature. When the question of miracles is raised we are asking about the validity or perfection of the frame itself. No study of probabilities inside a given frame can ever tell us how probable it is that the frame itself can be violated. Granted a school timetable with French on Tuesday morning at ten o’clock, it is really probable that Jones, who always skimps his French preparation, will be in trouble next Tuesday, and that he was in trouble on any previous Tuesday. But what does this tell us about the probability of the timetable’s being altered? To find that out you must eavesdrop in the masters’ common-room. It is no use studying the timetable.

If we stick to Hume’s method, far from getting what he hoped (namely, the conclusion that all miracles are infinitely improbable) we get a complete deadlock. The only kind of probability he allows holds exclusively within the frame of uniformity. When uniformity is itself in question (and it is in question the moment we ask whether miracles occur) this kind of probability is suspended. And Hume knows no other. By his method, therefore, we cannot say that uniformity is either probable or improbable; and equally we cannot say that miracles are either probable or improbable. We have impounded both uniformity and miracles in a sort of limbo where probability and improbability can never come. This result is equally disastrous for the scientist and the theologian; but along Hume’s lines there is nothing whatever to be done about it.”

Upon reading more closely, my second impression was wrong, and this passage is a total mess.

First, probabilities of all kinds hold inside a framework of assumed uniformity of nature, not just Hume’s. As Hume and others explain, we need a degree of background uniformity to observe change and identify causality. What’s more, to infer that observed causality and change into the future (i.e. to formulate a probability), we need to assume the laws of nature are uniform, that the world will operate the same in the future as it does the past. This is true of any formulation of probability. Think of one that doesn’t, I’ll wait.

Second, I don’t think it’s true that “No study of probabilities inside a given frame can ever tell us how probable it is that the frame itself can be violated.” Models (“frames”) of probability have margins of error and bands of uncertainty. Typically, when statisticians say that their model is 80% certain of an outcome, 20% of the time it will be wrong. Hume’s formulation is similar, but in the case of probabilities of laws of natures, they have not been observed to act otherwise. Lewis quickly transitions into a vague illustration about Jones getting in trouble, and he doesn’t elaborate on this point or the illustration. This comes off as very shifty, as not only is the factual claim wrong, but the metaphor is ambiguous as well (and I honestly don’t have the time and patience to decode it, especially if Lewis is too lazy to do so himself).

Third, the second paragraph really can’t make sense unless you completely rewrite Hume’s argument to be about definitions, confuse laws of nature with uniformity, or understand natural laws to be unbreakable edicts and not well-supported observations.

Contra Lewis, when a novel phenomena happens, lowering our confidence in a natural law, uniformity of nature is not questioned, but the law of nature itself. As the uniformity of nature is not questioned, Hume’s “kind of probability” is not suspended.

Finally, reading between the lines, it seems that Lewis is complaining that there is no metaphysics or ontology in Hume’s analysis, that probabilities are formulated by what is observed and calculated, free of influence of what is metaphysically or ontologically possible.

For Hume, this is a feature, not a bug. It’s trivially true that someone who believes miracles or a religion are possible can rationally believe a miracle is possible. What Hume is interested in is whether someone who has no prior religious commitments should believe in them, making as few metaphysical or ontological assumptions as possible. One of those assumptions happens to be the uniformity of nature, others are his formulation of probability.

I can understand why this is frustrating to miracle and religious believers (I may write about this topic in a future post). But the way you prove that a wise person with minimal metaphysical or ontological assumptions and no prior religious commitments can rationally believe in a religious miracle is to make the argument without appealing to religious commitments or metaphysical or ontological assumptions. To this day, I don’t think it’s been done.

The Audacity!

Okay, now it’s time for some meanness (it’s okay, C.S. Lewis is not alive and if he’s correct about miracles and God, he’s probably in heaven and so I won’t hurt his feelings).

Let us for the moment cease to ask what right we have to believe in the Uniformity of Nature and ask why in fact men do believe in it. I think the belief has three causes, two of which are irrational. In the first place we are creatures of habit. We expect new situations to resemble old ones. It is a tendency which we share with animals; one can see it working, often to very comic results, in our dogs and cats. In the second place, when we plan our actions, we have to leave out of account the theoretical possibility that Nature might not behave as usual tomorrow, because we can do nothing about it. It is not worth bothering about because no action can be taken to meet it. And what we habitually put out of our minds we soon forget. The picture of uniformity thus comes to dominate our minds without rival and we believe it. Both these causes are irrational and would be just as effective in building up a false belief as in building up a true one.

This fucking guy! The stones on this man! To say Hume is wrong about the uniformity of nature and then to speculate why we assume the uniformity of nature…by giving the same reasoning Hume did almost 200 years prior! And to not at least credit Hume! The audacity!

The placement of this passage (after criticizing Hume’s argument) suggests that, at best, Lewis knew it was Hume’s reasoning, but for some reason, he didn’t believe his readers needed to know that (Did I say that was good? That’s actually bad!). Or worse, he truly didn’t know this was Hume’s reasoning and believed that he was saying something novel.

Considering Lewis was a nice, wise guy, and it’s standard procedure to cite arguments that aren’t yours, or to acknowledge when someone you’re criticizing makes a good point, I’m inclined to think Lewis has no idea that this is a Humean argument. And for that reason, I have a hard time thinking Lewis has even an intermediate understanding of Hume.

Why I View C.S. Lewis Somewhat Negatively Now

I’ll admit that this post probably came off as polemical or nitpicking, but to understand why I’m taking Lewis down a peg, we have to look at the overall influence on how we talk about miracles, decades later. Lewis got Hume wrong in ways that professional philosophers likely understand, but that Christians and apologists do not.

Lewis erroneously asserted that Hume was inconsistent and more skeptical than he actually was. He misunderstood basic facts about Hume and his arguments, by confusing laws of nature with the principle of the uniformity of nature. He made some bizarre claims about Hume’s formulation of probability that’s actually true of all probability. And he also said downright false things about probability models.

Now, we all make mistakes, and sometimes we write posts and articles that are bad or wrong. But C.S. Lewis was a famous Christian apologist who wrote these arguments in a book, and has been praised for it for decades. If one can fall up as a philosopher, this is how.

Today, I would wager more people have read C.S. Lewis than David Hume in the Christian West. As a result, I think more people misunderstand Hume’s argument than understand it, while also having the smug arrogance towards anyone who shoots down that arrogance.6

Put more bluntly, when you do bad philosophy and you’re famous,7 you have a duty to do the scholarship correctly. If you don’t, it’s likely you’ll mislead generations of people. I think Lewis did that with Hume, and that’s why I am polemical towards Lewis and anyone who mindlessly repeats his criticisms. If you make a mistake this bad and misinform as many people as Lewis did, you deserve some harsh words.

Narnia is one of my favorite fantasy series though!

C.S. Lewis is probably the one who popularized this argument. I will take shots at Lewis in a future post.1 Here, I hope to demonstrate here that this is a bad argument against Hume because it misunderstands him on a (very) basic level.

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A Priori vs A Posteriori

Hume elaborates in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (the book within Of Miracles is published) that a matter of fact (a posteriori) was different from a relation of ideas (a priori). Relations of ideas were true by definition (like logical proofs), while matters of fact were subject to falsification (that the sun rose this morning and will rise tomorrow).

Hume’s argument on miracles is not a priori, about definitions. Rather, it’s an a posteriori argument and assessment of miracles and miracle testimony, given patterns about them.

In Of Miracles, Hume himself says that he’s speaking of matters of fact four times. Just to name two of them, he says that experience is “our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact,” and when he describes ranges of assurance “from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence,” he is talking about matters of fact.2

Since When Does Hume Rely Just On Definitions?

Now, a couple quotes without full context may not seem convincing to someone who hasn’t done a tremendous amount of research. That’s fine! As we’ll see in this post, however, any honest look at the structure of his essay reveals that it’s obviously not a priori.

But before going to that degree of detail, I must make a small observation. We could debate whether Hume is, strictly speaking, a logician (I’m not sure?), but he’s certainly not a philosopher of language. He does not make arguments based on the definition of words. Most of his work is informed by his understanding of matters of fact. Indeed, a recurring theme his philosophy is the inadequacy of logic by itself to explain human reasoning (induction) and behavior (the is/ought gap).

I think viewing Hume’s argument or his maxim as a language trick reveals a lack of basic understanding of the kind of philosophy Hume practiced. That by itself should be a red flag for anyone assessing whether the person raising this objection to Hume is familiar with his argument.

Look At the Structure

Even still, the structure and length of Hume’s essay Of Miracles casts doubt on the “definition” and “circularity” rebuttal. If the argument were that simple, why did Hume go on for thousands more words? The answer is that it’s obviously not that simple!

Robert Fogelin put forward the most succinct summary of the structure of Hume’s argument:

Stated broadly, the task of part 1 is to establish the appropriate standards for evaluating testimony in behalf of a miracle of any kind; the task of part 2 is to show that reports of religious miracles have not in the past met these standards. Taking experience as his guide, Hume further concludes that there is no likelihood that they will ever do so. (Fogelin 9-10)3

In this way, the foundation of Hume’s argument is factual. There is no question begging or defining miracles out of existence. Whether or not the argument is compelling to you depends on:

1. How you evaluate facts about probability,

2. Facts about the probability of miracles (i.e that they are unlikely),

3. And how you evaluate facts about miracle testimony.

As far as I can tell, most people agree with the premise that miracles are unlikely and thus the evidence to establish one is high. We also agree that human testimony is fallible. Where Hume gets controversial is how he formulates his probability and simultaneously concludes/infers that all miracle testimony is bad or that miracles are thus impossible given-what-we-know. These are interesting nuances I have written about at the link below.

Constructive Skepticism

How To Understand David Hume's Argument On Miracles

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6 months ago · 24 likes · 15 comments · Joe James

Perhaps you disagree with Hume’s legalistic formulation of probability or his language of impossibility. Perhaps you think his use of words like “impossible” or “proof” or “demonstration” are anachronistic and confusing. That’s fine!

But that’s not the same thing as Hume begging the question or defining miracles out of existence!

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You Can Prove Hume Wrong

In this way, Hume’s argument isn’t circular because you can change matters of fact that inform it. If matters of fact that inform his conclusion change, they can render his conclusion false.

Most interestingly, it’s somewhat easy to point out the facts that need to be proven wrong:

• If it’s the case that Hume’s standard of establishing a miracle is factually wrong, the argument technically fails. (This is the main way philosophers engage with Hume’s argument, as far as I can tell)

• If it is the case that religious miracles in the past have been attested by consistently credible by witnesses, the argument also fails. (Religious people like to argue this; it’s worth mentioning that, for Hume, it’s not enough to demonstrate a handful of credible witnesses for the miracles you personally like, but a great mass of all miracle witnesses)

• There are other implicit factual assumptions made in this argument (like the reliability of memory and experience) that can also be proven false. (Skeptics may do this, but they don’t really care to rebut Hume’s argument; also Hume may agree with them, but as a mitigated skeptic would say we have no choice but to assume some of these implicit assumptions to function)

The problem is that many of those arguments are hard to make! It’s hard to have a discussion about Bayesianism vs pre-Pascalian probability.4 That takes work, and weeks if not months if not years of study. It’s much easier to spend an afternoon or week falsely asserting his argument is circular or a word game.

And so, many people don’t rise to the occasion of arguing against Hume on the factual matters, they instead retreat to defeating a straw man.

As for me, so long as it is the case that “questionably credible witnesses observing singular events and attesting to an event that violated the laws of nature” is less compelling to the neutral observer than “the uniformly observed and inferred laws of nature remained intact and witnesses were mistaken,” I will side with Hume.

It’s no coincidence that these people gravitate to my notes on Hume and miracles: He is the most maligned philosopher by theists in philosophy of religion. Now, being a maligned philosopher is a badge of honor for many philosophers, just ask Peter Singer. The issue here is that people malign Hume while they don’t understand him and make basic errors about his arguments. I think Hume would prefer earning infamy for true statements about him, not false ones.

I Can Be Mean Sometimes (Though I Don’t Like It)

I can be a jerk in these interactions. I was even once called out by Scott Alexander for “embarrassing” myself. Call me biased, but I think this was a little too harsh.

If you know me in person, or have been repeatedly on the opposite side of a debate with me, you’ll know I don’t like being a jerk. I try to be agreeable, conciliatory, and overall not a jerk, even if I disagree with someone. Heck, I can name multiple people that I have strong disagreements with on here about issues ranging from the truth of Christianity to the nature of moral realism. We often crack jokes with each other! It’s fine!

The reason I am a jerk to some detractors is because they know far less than they claim they do, repeat cliche arguments that I have already addressed, and generally act smug and condescending.

I’ve written thousands of words and dozens of pages on Hume, while these people seemingly have only read the summary of C.S. Lewis’s criticism of Hume or watched one of the many YouTube videos that have only read the summary of C.S. Lewis’s criticism of Hume.

So when I have these interactions, often with people who don’t follow me, don’t write many substack articles, have less than 10 followers, and are in general quite irritable and repetitive, I am faced with a choice:

1. I could have a long conversation in which I put forth more effort than they do, that takes hours of my time, provokes frustration that makes me look bad or meaner than I prefer to conduct myself.

2. OR I could shame my interlocutor into actually reading what I have already written, that I spent a couple dozen hours writing and thinking about.

Now, you may say “Joe you don’t have to be rude to people who don’t read your stuff, that’s kind of self-centered isn’t it?” Maybe, but I think if you’re going to engage in a conversation of a nuanced topic, you should either know what you’re talking about exhibit humility. This is not what my interlocutors do!

In the situations where I haven’t been rude and subsequently crashed out, the conversation inevitably reverted to “choosing” option one. I’ll post a link to my long argument, and they will pretend like they have read it, but within a few comments, it’s clear that they haven’t.

It’s like this scene from Inglourious Basterds, but instead of “hand gestures suggesting Germanness” it’s “comments suggesting you have not actually read what I wrote.”

And so, I choose to be a little bit of a jerk! It’s a more efficient use of time!

This Series Is A Solution

But as I already mentioned, I don’t like being mean, so I have decided to start this series. I’m going to address specific misconceptions people have about Hume. Instead of being a jerk toward a zealot entering my replies, I’ll just post these articles in an quasi-automated way. I’m tapping the sign, like that Simpsons meme.

To reiterate, I am not a Hume expert, just a hobbyist. I am not a Peter Millican, Don Garrett, Simon Blackburn, or Bill Vanderburgh.

But! I have read many of these thinkers and am doing my own long-term self-guided study of Hume, where I periodically write posts about what scholarship I find says about him, that amount to book reports (eventually, we’ll get away from miracles, but not yet). In this way, I’m not pretending to be an expert on Hume studies, but as someone who knows the basics well enough to write about them.

So, you can expect my first post very soon. When you come back to this post, I’ll try to edit it to update with new posts in the series.

See you soon!

Most people I interact with on substack are either philosophy students or trained philosophers. They are people more trained in philosophy than I am, or on course to be more trained than I am one day. Their interests in philosophy are more professional.

And so on the measure of being a hobbyist, I score quite high by default!

Anyway, with this dynamic, on many days I think to myself “Man, it would be great if I could go back to school to study philosophy again, if only to earn an MA.” But this is likely a fantasy. It’s not on the level of a fantasy of a random white collar worker thinking he can get in shape and become a professional athlete, but it is a similar type of fantasy. Here’s why.

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I Already Went To Grad School

I have a Master’s Degree. I forget about it all the time.

Immediately after I earned my bachelor’s degree, I went to graduate school for marketing and mass communications. I did this because I didn’t apply for internships or part time jobs during undergrad, had no experience, and no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I thought a Master’s degree would help (and I was probably wrong).

I won’t go into detail about my grad school experience, other than saying it was relatively easy. My GPA was a solid .5 points higher in graduate school than undergraduate. As an undergrad, I often would drink two monster rehab drinks to write a major essay the night before it was due (psycho behavior in retrospect). I often stayed up until 3 to get it done (how I graduated above a 3.25 GPA is a mystery to me). When I was in grad school, for my first essay I took the same monster-fueled approach…and was done by 9PM.

Graduate school was fine. Most of my classes were in the evening and I could have worked full time, but I imagine it would have been harder and less fun (it was basically a fifth year of college for me).

Today, I 100% don’t want to leave my job, take a likely pay cut, and go back to that environment. I like making money, and being able to check out of thinking about work when work hours are done. Heck, I wouldn’t be able to write this substack had it not been for good work-life balance.

The Financial Logic of Grad School Is Awful

If you’re an undergraduate reading this, I don’t recommend going to graduate school unless you are completely certain you want to study the subject you are studying. That means being prepared to go into academia or being at peace with the possibility of accumulating a lot of debt to not be a part of academia.

If you’re worried about your employability, you’re better off cold calling businesses and asking if you can do a non-paid internship with them, build experience, and apply for jobs while doing that cold calling/working said non-paid internship. Seriously.

It would obviously feel sucky to do that while living with your parents, but guess what? Your early-to-mid twenties are full of underemployment, and you’re probably going to be in a precarious living situation for a couple years anyway. For your medium-term financial well-being, internships and menial jobs are better than grad school.

What’s more, the income bump you get from having a graduate degree isn’t nothing, but you’re not going to see it in your job searching until years later.

I was recruited for my current job (which feels crazy in retrospect) after about two years working another job. I think my Master’s probably helped, but it probably didn’t help getting that original, first job (which was the whole point of getting it!).

I think later on in my career, when I’m searching for different jobs, my Master’s degree will be a mark in my favor, but I don’t think it’s that big of a deal at the moment.1

Many social media influencers say bachelor degrees are scams, and they’re lying to you or coping with the fact that they don’t have one. But weirdly enough, I think many of the wrong criticisms about bachelor degrees are correct about master’s degrees!

This post is a little more informal, so I’m not going to go deep into sourcing, so “trust me bro” on these facts and statistics.2

• Something like 50% of all graduate degrees are for education and business, which are degrees subsidized by employers (MBAs) or necessary for career advancement (education). Keep in mind, these degrees are pursued after one has a job or career.

• I remember reading somewhere a few years ago that master’s degrees are cash cows for institutions in that they make significantly more revenue from master’s degrees than bachelor’s degrees, because there’s less financial aid for master’s degrees.

• Combine that with the fact that you may be taking out $10,000-20,000ish a year for graduate school, and you’re in a hole.3

• If you have undergraduate debt, you may have mid-five-figures student debt (or more), with minimal differentiation of other job candidates, at least in the short to medium term.

• This is the key point: the financial benefits of student loan debt will not be apparent until you’re supposed to have that debt close to paid off (at least 5-7 years, maybe closer to 10).

Long story short, if you’re going to graduate school, you better love it, have a job lined up associated with it, or have someone else pay for it! Otherwise, you’re setting yourself back for monthly payments worth hundreds of dollars more per month, with no financial benefits during that time.

If someone explained this to me when I was a directionless college junior, I would have made different plans. One of the awful things about America’s student loan system is that most students don’t know what it’s like to have a recurring payment worth $200 a month, let alone $400 or more. If you have more than the $30,000 in loans, you’re assured to pay at least $250 per month in loan payments for a 10 year repayment plan. If you go to graduate school, it will be much higher. It’s arguably predatory.

Thankfully, I’m on a trajectory to get my student loans forgiven in the next few years from public service loan forgiveness. Given that I’ve already done graduate school and incurred some of the aforementioned costs (not just the financial costs of the education, but quitting my job, surrendering my free time, etc), I do not have much interest in repeating that process I’m probably not any sort of genius in philosophy, so attempting to return to school would certainly incur more debt.

It’s kind of like going on a long trip, being 70% of the way there, and someone asking if you want to go back in the opposite direction to start over. No thank you!

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Grad School Is Oriented For Academia Or Certification

The other thing about graduate school is that people don’t typically do it for fun or for hobbies. Sure, some (rich and imprudent) people do, but I don’t consider myself among their ranks.

Generally, people go to graduate school to get some sort of certification to differentiate themselves on the job market or to advance knowledge in academia.

In philosophy, there’s not that many programs that are *just* for Master’s degrees. You go to graduate school in philosophy to get a PhD in philosophy, become a philosopher of some sort, and find a teaching gig somewhere.

To make matters more complicated, philosophy graduate programs are less ubiquitous than MBAs or education master’s in the United States. There may be multiple universities in any given state, but very few of them have a philosophy PhD program, and maybe not the kind of PhD I would be interested in.

It’s possible if not likely that, to pursue a PhD I’d have to uproot my life to attend an institution far away. That makes perfect sense for a young student committed to learning or someone who is confident that the academic world is for them, but it’s not a system conducive to people like me. I’m married and hoping to have a family soon.

I Don’t Want To Be An Academic

Back when I was an undergraduate, the main reason I didn’t pursue academia outside of a master’s degree was because I didn’t want to be an academic.

My dad warned me against going into academia. He went to graduate school for History in the late 80s, thinking he wanted to be a PhD. He got his Master’s, but his advisor basically told him that he was screwed because of how bad the job market was. This was the late 1980s, and now it seems the market is worse!

Uncommon Wisdom

The philosophy job market is bullshit

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6 months ago · 79 likes · 55 comments · Jimmy Alfonso Licon

But even then, I think my dad’s experience underplays how rough the academic life is in America. The value proposition is much worse than I considered 10 years ago. If you’re an academic without tenure, you’re constantly applying for jobs, often uplifting your life to move across the country for the jobs you are fortunate enough to get offered.

When I was a recent college graduate, I had strong roots with my family and friends, and so that wouldn’t have appealed to me at all. Since then, I’ve become less rooted, and I’ve learned I like having the freedom to move. About 5 years ago I moved to a bigger city to pursue better economic and relationship opportunities.4 I would have had a much harder time justifying those risks as an academic.

Now that I have gone this non-academic route, have a steady job with decent income, academia seems less and less enticing. You have to give up so many other freedoms, take many risks, and delay a lot of gratification to be a successful academic. Though tenure seems like a sweet deal, I have no idea how realistic it is for someone to expect to get tenure.

With all the other costs, academia is just not a good deal for someone like me.

On a more positive sidenote, these dynamics are why I respect PhDs and academics, even if I disagree with them. And when someone mistakenly thinks I’m some kind of philosopher (something that has happened a couple times on this platform!) I stop them right there.

I have not done the work. As much as I like philosophy as a hobby, I yield to people who have done the work. They’ve sacrificed a lot to get where they are, and I’m not going to steal any valor (that still doesn’t mean they are automatically correct though).

Being a Hobbyist Is The Best of Both Worlds

Whenever someone is contemplating radical lifestyle changes, like moving cities, going to school, getting a new job, etc., we often have this tendency of thinking about all the fun things we’d be doing with the specific lifestyle change. We don’t think of all the things that would be the same or worse.

For academia, the main appeal to me would be to research and teach. I’m sure I’d love that! The problem is that, when earning a degree, I’d probably have to take a few silly classes I don’t have interest in taking and research things I wouldn’t care about (I hate general education requirements). What’s more, the classes I’d teach wouldn’t necessarily be classes I’d want to teach.

There are specific subjects in philosophy I find interesting and that interest fuels my curiosity and writing. Some would call that interest “passion,” and I wouldn’t contradict them. But as a general life lesson, I have learned that it’s not smart to make big life or financial decisions based just on passion. Because in chasing that passion, I may not see the tedious experiences that may otherwise be the graduate school experience.

Another way of framing this is why pay thousands of dollars to learn philosophy when you can just read philosophers’ books yourselves? Obviously, it’s not a substitute for earning a degree, but it can be more fun.

Some day, I’d love to teach philosophy in some capacity, but I think it’s better to explore alternative options to academia. It’s possible these alternative options don’t exist, and I’ll never find them, and that’s fine. For now, I have a hobbyist mindset, and so I’ll just continue writing this blog.

Also…Family!

This is compounded by the fact that I’m in my first year of marriage and my wife and I want to have kids. It doesn’t make sense to pursue something as serious as another graduate degree, incurring all of these various costs when I’m needed in the most important part of my life.

But Never Say Never!

Having said all of that, I wouldn’t say I’ll never go back to grad school in philosophy.

Specific circumstances could arise that make it a plausible path. For instance, if this substack grew to have tens of thousands of subscribers, netting low 6-figures in revenue, it would make sense. But man, that just feels like an implausible scenario; a wishcast, if you will. In fact, whenever I think of plausible scenarios, they feel implausible; I can’t help but think they’re all wishful thinking.

If the only cost or difficulty that came from getting a PhD/Master’s in philosophy was the time and effort it took to get it, I don’t think there’s any question that I would try. But everything else surrounding academia makes it too costly and not worth the effort for me. But hey, that may not last forever!

In the meantime, I’ll just enjoy writing here as a hobby. I hope you’ll join me and subscribe!

The flu knocked me on my ass, and even though I’m feeling much better due to pharmaceutical interventions, I’m likely going to be on my ass for a couple more days.

Between that and the upcoming holiday (I’m getting Christmas through the first Sunday of the year off work), I’ve decided to spend the next couple of weeks:

• Trying to restore my prior running fitness (a low bar, considering how not-spectacular of a runner I am, but I have only run 3 miles in 3 weeks when I try to run at least 9 per week)

• Watching some college football bowl games and playoffs (Go Dawgs!)

• Reading some books I’ve been trying to finish

• Arguing (still) with some of you On Here because I can’t help myself

• Spending my undivided attention on my wife and chinchilla

• Sitting a couple dogs with my wife

• Practicing guitar

• And generally just enjoying time off without having to watch the clock or without the need to do anything.

As you’ll notice, none of these include “writing a long post on substack.” So this will be my last post of 2025.

General Thoughts On Substack And My Writing

At heart, I am a posting addict. I started posting on online forums, Twitter, and Tumblr in high school at a time when I was socially isolated. It was cathartic and habit-inducing. I noticed about 5 years ago that I really like to just yap on the internet for fun and that’s also kind of atypical of the people I hang out with in real life.

I’ve always been the kind of person who could write a text wall at the drop of the hat, because writing was my way of getting all of my thoughts out of my brain.

At a certain point, this had diminishing returns for my mental health; just posting all the time in this manner amounted to ruminating in public, which isn’t good. I deleted Tumblr well over a decade ago (because it was cringe), and deleted Twitter before Elon acquired it (before it was cool). I had created and deleted multiple blogs over the years because no one read them, and it felt odd to spend so much energy and emotion on them only for them not to be read. Substack feels different because people actually read me, even if there’s “only” a few dozen or hundred of you.

Substack has been great for me. I like this platform because it matches me with readers who will at least read my writing. In the past when I’ve tried blogging, it felt like I was shouting into the void. In a weird way, it felt worse than having a bad opinion; it’s one thing to spend all this time writing something that ends up being wrong (like my senior philosophy thesis as an undergraduate), but when something is good and only like five people read it, it feels almost pathetic. Why waste the time?

Anyway, I like substack because I can crank out a few posts a month and it’ll be read a couple hundred times. Many of my posts have over 500 reads, and one has been read over 1000 times.

I would love to one day be a full time writer, but I’m not deluding myself: I’m nowhere close to that level and I may never reach that level of popularity. I have always looked at writing as a hobby, and having people read what I write feels good, even if I’m small potatoes.

Some Superlatives

Best Interaction

Bill Vanderburgh finding my posts about Hume on miracles

One of the cooler things about Substack is that some philosophers and academics actually use it.

Earlier this year when I wrote my Hume posts, found my first post and (funnily enough!) recommended to me his book, which I had already read and wrote a post about. Predictably, I referred him to the post I made covering the book and he said I did a good job.

It’s good to hear validation for something I worked hard on, so I also know it probably felt good to him as well, as he no doubt worked probably 100 times harder than I did on the actual book.

Best Reply Guy

Reply guys have a bad reputation, but that need not be the case! Reply Guys are simply the kind of people who post on the internet in response to original content. Their comments are derivative; if other people did not post, they would not post. Part of the reason I write a substack is to fight my own Reply Guy inclinations.

Here I want to commend the best Reply Guy on Philosophy substack. Plasma’s replies very very very very very very often can be their own posts. They even have footnotes!

With the end of year coming up, I felt like Plasma needed a shout out for his feedback. There’s no question in my mind Plasma Bloggin deserves Reply Guy of the year. If you’re on this corner of substack, you know he deserved it too. Give him a follow!

Best Newcomer:

This award is a little goofy for me to award someone else because I myself have only posted on substack for about a year. Still, Arthur T only starting posting since October, and I think that’s late enough for me to consider him a newcomer. Arthur always posts about interesting subjects concerning religion and the history of Christianity from a skeptical perspective. He’s humble about his (lack of) philosophy education, but he reasons sharply and communicates clearly, making up for whatever deficits he may have in those subjects.

I think we are kindred spirits, both having an interest in the history of Christianity, scripture, and so on from a skeptical point of view. Give him a follow!

Users I’m Totally Not Jealous Of For Starting After Me And Having More Followers Now

- Kyle hasn’t posted in the last few months, but he’s a smart guy. He’s definitely in the EA/utilitarian school of thought, but he seems to be one of the few I’ve interacted with who just seems to be a profoundly normal person. I don’t mean that as a shot at EAs, but Kyle has a good sense of humor and likes sports, which makes him an outlier in my experience of most utilitarian bloggers. Give him a follow, when he comes back and posts more, you won’t regret it.

- Dylan has written posts about various topics from poker to chess to fitness to probability theory. He popped up on my radar because I thought he put forward some valid criticisms of everyone’s favorite utilitarian canine and one of his confederates, to which they responded poorly, to which he responded poorly, yet the canine and confederate pretended like their poor responses wouldn’t provoke a poor response. Sigh. Regardless, Dylan writes good stuff, give him a follow.

Special Shout Outs:

Katelynn gave good copyediting feedback on my Hume posts. She also painted an adorable picture of my Chinchilla, Margaux.

- Ian is a smart dude who posts about science and philosophy. We agree on quite a bit, and I admire how thorough he is with his research.

- I disagree with BSB on moral realism, but I appreciate the way he dialogues on the issue because it helps me communicate my own position (which I admittedly need to improve on). He has many good takes.

- Paul is a scholar in the UK and writes about various Enlightenment thinkers that I also write about (except, you know, he’s an actual expert on them). I appreciate that he gives me positive feedback when I’m moving in the right direction on one of the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment (Hume, Smith, etc). He also is very kind in offering access to some of his peer reviewed articles. I try my best to not oversell an argument unless I’m certain someone smarter than me has made it (which is why I use lots of quotes!), and it feels good that someone who does know what they’re talking about affirms my assessment of a thinker.

- This is one of the few political/economic writers I’ll shout out here (see my previous comments about not getting too explicitly political). Rutar posts are empirically informed, extremely interesting, and most importantly, confirm my center-left priors (okay maybe not all of them).

- Remember how the writers of Avengers Infinity War took the Incredible Hulk out of the story for plot reasons? Likely because he’s an overpowered character and having him in the story would make it way too easy for the Avengers? Well, Bryan Frances is the metaphorical equivalent for skeptic-ish philosophers on substack. The plot reasons for why he’s not around a lot is that he has a life. Sometimes on substack we’ll be arguing about the most inane and stupid bullshit and Dr. Frances will just stick his head in and dismantles an argument in what seems to be effortless work (which is actually just a product of him doing philosophy longer than I have been able to read).

- Stan is a cool guy and finds innovative ways to communicate or simplify complicated philosophical problems. He’s also good at cutting through bad philosophical rhetoric and communicating why it’s bad philosophical rhetoric.

- Jordan is another political blogger I’ll recommend. One of his many virtues is that he, like Tibor Rutar, confirms my priors. But also he writes good takes. Those who support his kind of politics should give him a follow. He’s from the southeast as well, which is another feather in his cap.

- I was tempted to not shout out “the cool kids” of philosophy substack (you know how they are) but I have to tip my hat to Silas. He’s a smart, curious, good humored guy. He “only” has about 600-700ish followers, yet he writes with clarity, frequency, and quality that surpasses writers with far higher readership. I’m not brown-nosing because he has more followers than me, but I think he has a top 5 philosophy substack.

- One of the most unique Christian voices on substack. One of the more annoying things about being a non-believer who is well versed in American Christian Culture and the history of Christianity is that so much online Christian commentary is just so…predictable? But not Matt’s. Of course, he’s British, so as an American I naturally think he has interesting things to say, just because of his accent (I presume he has an accent, right?).

I have numerous other positive interactions On Here. There’s a lot of philosophy undergraduates on here that post frequently, and I want to give them a shout out. Keep writing, keep posting, keep thinking!

What I’m Doing in 2026:

1. My wife and I are moving across the country in a few months (that’ll be expensive)

2. I need to make a little bit more money. I’m optimistic positive things could happen at my work, but given the economy and other factors surrounding my industry, I’m not as confident as I’d like to be, so I’m taking some things in my own hands with side hustles.

3. Given the amount of time I spend writing/on substack, it doesn’t make sense for me to completely close off the possibility of making money on substack. I’m thinking about turning on pledges, just to gauge how much interest there is in paying for my content. I don’t think I’ll ever paywall my writing, but I am thinking about starting a monthly or bi-weekly paywalled podcast1 about things written on philosophy substack. The podcasts would all be paywalled outside of a preview, but the written posts would still be free. That’s just an idea!

4. I am also thinking about using my substack to promote other services I’m equipped to provide. These include writing tutoring, copyediting, or consulting using my day jobs skills (email marketing/advocacy, data analysis, etc). If you are interested in using these services from me, send me a DM or comment, and we can chat. My day job has restrictions on when I can do side hustles (as in, I obviously can’t do them during the work day!), and all of this is more of a concept of an idea than anything.

5. I’m thinking about making an e-book of all my posts from this year. Funny enough, this was the plan all along, before I started posting regularly. I’ll give you more information in the coming months, but if you’ve liked my substack, I’d really appreciate you buying a copy. If I do end up monetizing and growing, the business model would be posts are free, podcasts are paywalled, but a yearly or bi-yearly e-book would be published (at a reasonable price) as a sort of recap from the previous year. At this moment I don’t anticipate making more than $100 at best on this (but likely much less).

Don’t interpret any possible pay-walling to make the current experience worse. If anything, I’m going to use it to make it better. I probably spent $200 on research for my David Hume posts. If I could roughly that income on a monthly basis, I could more easily write posts of similar quality. What’s more, pay walling additional content like podcasts would bring in extra income that would enable other posts of similar quality.

Anyway! 2025 was a good year for me, especially on substack. I thank everyone for the readership, and look forward to writing for you in 2026.

Have a Happy New Year!

Long story short, I think I’m getting better at this whole writing thing.

Next week, I’ll post an end of year wrap up. Merry Christmas!

Many people respond to such notes and comments saying something along the lines of “You still have to engage their arguments!” “Just because their implication means (bad thing) doesn’t mean it’s untrue!”

I find these comments patronizing because they underestimate my knowledge of the basic arguments for theism, and why I disbelieve them.

To oversimplify, I don’t think that:

1. We can draw inferences about the causation underlying the universe based on our everyday experience of causation (Why I doubt the cosmological argument),

2. We can define God into existence or what’s true in all possible worlds based on our perception of this world (Why I doubt the ontological argument)

3. Objective moral values are real (Why I doubt the moral argument),

4. We can formulate any good probabilistic calculus about what’s “expected” of the universe, because we only have one sample (Why I doubt the teleological/design argument).2

To be clear, these oversimplifications aren’t meant to be an end to conversation, but for our purposes, it’s also not the beginning; please do not hit up the comments of this post arguing these points.My point is merely that I have studied philosophy long enough that I know these arguments at least at an intermediate level. I reject them for reasons philosophers commonly reject them. Like all arguments, every premise can be contested, and you don’t have to be a Pyrrhonian skeptic to poke holes in these arguments to render them unconvincing.

So as we get into the details of this post, please know, I am aware that I am not engaging these apologetic arguments head on! I can do that elsewhere. This is intentionally something separate.

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Listen To Arguments, Even If Skeptically

Recently, wrote a great post on Bare Theism. You should read it!

In the post, Arthur (basically) says: Isn’t it odd that there are so few Bare Theists? Doesn’t that give credence to the hypothesis that Christian Philosophy and Philosophy of Religion is at least a little bit of motivated reasoning?

Arthur’s post got me thinking about the non-argumentative reasons I don’t trust Christian philosophers and apologists. When I say that, I don’t mean that they’re bad or unintelligent people, just that they have an obvious agenda or a bias that has little to do with the actual arguments.

To be clear: I think many Christian philosophers produce good work, and just because they have biases that lead them to unconvincing conclusions doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read them. Indeed, every philosopher or smart person has biases. The key to learning from smart people, even when you disagree, isn’t to accept what they say uncritically, but to listen to as many as you can critically.

Indeed, if you listen to people you disagree with charitably, granting them their assumptions for the sake of argument, you may not be persuaded to the conclusion they are arguing, but you could learn things about other subjects related to the topic. Without getting into details, I’ve learned a lot about my personal ethics by engaging with Christians whom I disagreed with. In parsing out those disagreements, I learn more about my own beliefs, where I did agree with them, often learning something from them, if only tangential to the original argument.

Christian Apologists Are Uniquely Misleading

The problem with Christian Apologists and Philosophers (I’m going to call them “apologists” for short) is worse than merely disagreeing with reasoning or an argument. Rather, apologists often say things that are outright wrong or misleading. When I say this, I’m informed by two assumptions:

1. That academic or scientific consensus gives non-experts moral certainty that a theory or understood fact is true.3

2. Fact must inform our philosophical theories. If we do not apportion our theories to the facts, we aren’t doing good philosophy because we aren’t accounting for all of the available data.

The problem we run into is what the philosopher Paul Draper calls the fallacy of understated evidence.

According to Draper, in the context of arguments for theism and against naturalism, proponents of a theistic argument are guilty of this fallacy if they “successfully identify some general fact F about a topic X that is antecedently more likely on theism than on naturalism, but ignore other more specific facts about X, facts that, given F, are more likely on naturalism than on theism.

Put another way, some facts on the surface may support a position, but with more context, contradict it. Per Draper, this is a common fallacy theists commit.

Some philosophers of religion will dispute Draper’s argument. That’s fine! But I think it’s plausible because we can find more undisputed cases of Apologists being uniquely bad about understanding factual information. Indeed, they have a cavalier relationship with scientific and otherwise verifiable truth. Specifically:

1. Apologists regularly use data points from sources that explicitly disagree with them.

2. The most popular Apologists vocally support political candidates that spread falsehoods.

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CopyPasta Apologetics

Earlier this year, I panned Ross Douthat’s book Believe. He said nothing new about philosophy, religion, secularism, or atheism. At the same time he demonstrated a lack of curiosity that can best be described as not engaging with anyone in depth who disagreed with him on the existence of God. In that piece, I labeled this tactic what I call “CopyPasta Apologetics:”

CopyPasta Apologetics is a tactic where you cut and paste arguments or points from experts without any consideration of whether or not they agree with you or if they’re qualified to comment intelligently on the issue. Or, you just cite an argument without much or any citation or elaboration. The reason why CopyPasta Apologetics is bad is because it oversimplifies something very complicated to the point of misrepresenting it.

The reason I think Douthat never paid attention to atheist arguments is because his oldest citation is a 22 years old (2003) work by Fred Hoyle. Hoyle was an atheist, but Douthat doesn’t tell you that. He then explains the Copenhagen Theory in a few short sentences without any citation. He continues, citing a scholar of Classical Greek literature to make a point about physics and consciousness.

Let’s use an example of low consequence to illustrate the point. Let’s say I’m the biggest fan of the Georgia Bulldogs football team in the world. You’re a fan of the Alabama Crimson Tide, and you ask me my opinion about who is the best SEC football team in the 2020s. I say “Though Alabama and Nick Saban dominated the late 2000s and 2010s, I think it’s clearly the case that Georgia is the best SEC team of the 2020s by virtue of winning 3 SEC titles in 5 years, and being in five straight SEC championships. Go Dawgs. Sic em. Woof Woof Woof Woof.”

If you’re arguing against my position to someone else, saying “Even Joe says that Alabama and Nick Saban dominated the late 2000s and 2010s,” and therefore Alabama is the best team in the SEC in the 2020s, we would obviously see this as a misuse of quotation. It’s not the full context of my argument, it misrepresents the significance of the data, and it implies I hold a position opposite of my real one. People who aren’t well informed by facts of the matter will be fooled by this argument style, but it’s obviously false to those who are well informed.

Using the example of college sports teams illustrates this point because most people understand sports. Meanwhile, it’s harder to demonstrate when an apologist is using this tactic because most people don’t understand science as well.

Example: Frank Turek’s First Ever Opening Statement

An archetypal example of CopyPasta Apologetics is Frank Turek’s first ever opening statement in a formal debate, with Christopher Hitchens, about 14 years ago:

You don’t need to watch the full debate, just Turek’s opening statement, starting at about 6 minutes. He runs the gauntlet, quoting numerous atheist scientists, from Richard Dawkins to Stephen Hawking, to make his argument for theism.

If you’re new to philosophy of religion and sympathetic to theism, perhaps his statement is convincing. If you’re not, it’s extremely suspicious. For instance, it’s odd to cite the complexity of a cell, as explained by atheist Richard Dawkins, in support of theism. If that data point was compelling, why isn’t Dawkins an atheist?

Example: William Lane Craig on the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem

Some may say that I’m using the worst example of an apologist to make a point. Frank Turek is notorious for being the snake oil salesman of apologists. He says wrong things, silly things, and mean things, all to get attention and grow his ministry. He’s not the “steelman” of apologetics.

Fair enough!

The problem is that I can find many examples of other “serious” apologists doing the same thing. Perhaps the most famous Christian Philosopher in the world is William Lane Craig and he has some very funky ideas about physics.

Most notably, he keeps citing the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem and getting it wrong in ways that the authors of those theorems (repeatedly) contradict. I am not equipped to explain this disagreement in detail, but thankfully Physicist Sean Carroll is. He debated Craig over a decade ago and wrote up a recap, which you can find here.

Here are some of the highlights

The second premise of the Kalam argument is that the universe began to exist. Which may even be true! But we certainly don’t know, or even have strong reasons to think one way or the other. Craig thinks we do have a strong reason, the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem. So I explained what every physicist who has thought about the issue understands: that the real world is governed by quantum mechanics, and the BGV theorem assumes a classical spacetime, so it says nothing definitive about what actually happens in the universe; it is only a guideline to when our classical description breaks down.

And

On my part, I knew that WLC liked to glide from the BGV theorem (which says that classical spacetime description fails in the past) to the stronger statement that the universe probably had a beginning, even though the latter is not implied by the former. And his favorite weapon is to use quotes from Alex Vilenkin, one of the authors of the BGV theorem. So I talked to Alan Guth, and he was gracious enough to agree to let me take pictures of him holding up signs with his perspective: namely, that the universe probably didn’t have a beginning, and is very likely eternal. Now, why would an author of the BGV theorem say such a thing? For exactly the reasons I was giving all along: the theorem says nothing definitive about the real universe, it is only a constraint on the classical regime. What matters are models, not theorems, and different scientists will quite naturally have different opinions about which types of models are most likely to prove fruitful once we understand things better. In Vilenkin’s opinion, the best models (in terms of being well-defined and accounting for the data) are ones with a beginning. In Guth’s opinion, the best models are ones that are eternal. And they are welcome to disagree, because we don’t know the answer! Not knowing the answer is perfectly fine. What’s not fine is pretending that we do know the answer, and using that pretend-knowledge to draw premature theological conclusions. (Chatter on Twitter reveals theists scrambling to find previous examples of Guth saying the universe probably had a beginning. As far as I can tell Alan was there talking about inflation beginning, not the universe, which is completely different. But it doesn’t matter; good scientists, it turns out, will actually change their minds in response to thinking about things.)

I highly recommend this video as well because it demonstrates how Craig has lost the plot. And Vilenkin’s position is even less sympathetic to Craigs than it was a decade ago!

To summarize the video, Craig constantly quotes scientists whose cosmological models rely on an eternally old universe to argue that the universe has a beginning and thus a cause. This is not limited to Guth, but also Vilenkin and Aguirre. Guth believes that the universe is likely eternal in the past, and Vilenkin believes that the inflation of the universe is likely finite in the past (not the universe itself). The BGV doesn’t prove the universe has a beginning. In all, no one really knows for sure, so we shouldn’t cite this science in these arguments!

Because of this whole ordeal, I don’t trust Craig’s formulation of complex science. Maybe Craig is much smarter than me at physics. That’s actually probably likely!4

But we should be immediately skeptical of someone’s understanding of a scientific theory if the people who formulated it have to continuously chime in to say that person is communicating or understanding its implications wrong. It’s concerning that Craig keeps doing this and no apologist of consequence is calling him out on it. If he’s getting this wrong and not correcting himself, what else is he getting wrong and not correcting himself?

It’s Not Just Science

This is where we get a little controversial because we’re talking about politics. I don’t like talking about politics on posts. Sure, I have political opinions, like anyone else. I think they’re well thought out. But I try to separate the philosophy I write about from current events, political advocacy, and the news cycle. The reason why isn’t because I have any delusions that philosophy isn’t political in many ways, but because bringing up politics makes people 100x dumber than they otherwise would be.

Anyway, the other reason I’m deeply skeptical of apologists is because of how cozy they are with MAGA republicans. Specifically, Michael Licona and Frank Turek have a long history of apologetics for the current president. Here’s a video (by a Christian) criticizing one of Turek’s tweets.5

It’s extremely silly to say that Trump’s charges were false. Indeed, one of the problems of the crimes he may have committed is that the justice department does not prosecute sitting presidents. To make matters worse, he has sabotaged any effort by the justice department to investigate wrongdoing.

Here’s a video of Turek talking about open borders and border walls.

This was from 2018, back when politics was much weirder, but it is interesting to see how boilerplate MAGA his arguments are. There’s no steelmanning the other perspective, no considerations for the shortcomings of a border wall, or what a border wall will actually accomplish.

How does a wall prevent illegal immigration, when most illegal immigrants get into the country by overstaying visas? The wall answer is just taken as self-evidently true, without examination or a cost benefit calculation. This is not the thought process of a serious thinker.

Or take this short from Michael Licona:

Some of this reasoning sounds mundane and patriotic, but the implications of it are clearly wrong-headed. For instance, what evidence do we have that the Democrats, at the federal level, would put the needs of illegal immigrants over citizens? When he says he’s voting for the one candidate who tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power over fabricated and false information about election integrity, it doesn’t make sense.

Draw The Line At MAGA

Sure, smart and weird people often have weird or silly political beliefs. It happens. But when it comes to the contemporary political environment and caring about the truth, supporting the MAGA movement is a giant red flag.

No doubt, there are good reasons for Christians to support Republicans, as the GOP aligns with their social views. There are also good arguments in favor of free market capitalism, relative to other economic policies, which the Republican Party is more likely to support than the Democrats.

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The problem here is that MAGA Republicans support a man who assaults the truth and goes against political norms. In this regard, I’m just going to re-post Bentham’s Bulldog’s essay on the matter.

Bentham's Newsletter

The Trumpian Inversion of Reality

Imagine a modified version of the 1992 election between Bush and Clinton. In this version, the Democrats’ main case for Clinton was that he, unlike Bush, was a virtuous and chaste family man. They also believed that Bush was a major isolationist, unlike Clinton, who would keep the country safe with a suitably muscular foreign policy…

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6 months ago · 118 likes · 30 comments · Bentham's Bulldog

The MAGA movement is qualitatively different from other political parties and movements sympathetic to conservative Christianity. I can understand voting Republican, regardless of who is at the top of the ticket, because you oppose the Democratic party. But there’s a difference between that and outright supporting Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, as Licona and Turek do.

A good acid test of this is whether or not you believe the 2020 was rigged or stolen. It wasn’t! There was literally no evidence. To the degree one could say there was evidence, it was based on conspiracy theories, falsehoods and lies. All lawsuits challenging the outcome failed because there was no evidence or legal theory of the case Yet apologists like Licona imply that it was.

If these philosophers use such poor reasoning for easily-verifiable events, how can we trust them to have good judgment when evaluating complicated philosophical arguments?6

If you’re a philosopher who values truth, evidence-informed reasoning, democratic values, free speech, functioning institutions run by experts, virtue in public life, and opposes bad things like corruption, it’s hard to see you could support Donald Trump. Any diligent assessment of the Trumpian arguments fail under basic scrutiny. And yet, these are intellectually permissible in apologist circles!

But The New Atheists!

Finally, I anticipate some people will object to my suspicion and dismissal of apologists and counter: What about the New Atheists? After all, Richard Dawkins wrote some pretty bad arguments against theism in his book the God Delusion.

There are many problems with this retort, not least of which is that half of the “four horsemen” of New Atheist publishing are dead. The remaining two are, quite frankly, bad at philosophy.7

I’ve written before about how atheism - even popular atheism - is more than the “Four horsemen.” If you want to criticize popular atheists for being bad thinkers, you won’t get a counterargument from me, if the alleged thinking is, in fact, bad.

The problem I’m trying to highlight isn’t about people making bad arguments (everyone does it on occasion, even me), but how bad, misleading arguments are seemingly normalized on the apologist side.

Contrast the degree of public disagreement between atheists among atheists and theists among theists. I don’t think any of Craig’s colleagues in the Christian philosophy circles call him out for his misunderstandings of the BVG theorem. At the very least, no one with a sufficiently large platform has done so.

Meanwhile, it’s a meme on atheist social media to dunk on Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens when they get something wrong. One could argue it’s normal to actively dislike the supposed Four Horseman of New Atheism.

This Is Not A Problem For All Christians

I want to be completely clear here when I say that the criticisms I have of apologists are not applicable to all Christians. Many Christians accept the conclusions of scientific consensus, don’t support anti-intellectual populist movements, and are careful to understand scientific arguments when they use them, not creating the false impression that a non-believer’s argument or data is in agreement with their own argument.

In fact, there are many Christians who do apologetics and public theology that runs counter to the figures I criticize. I accept their Christianity as more credible.

Still, I find Christianity less credible overall because these vices are so common among the most zealous, popular, and “intellectually serious” Christians.

To make matters worse, Christianity’s culture of orthodoxy and public condemnations of heresy encourage conformity. In Christian circles, there’s strong social influence to agree with these people, or be condemned as “Not a Christian.”

In this way, this is a species of problem of evil for me: If God is real and Christianity is the truth, why are the most famous people making the case for Christianity so obviously wrong on so many things, demonstrating awful judgment about science and pushing for the least truth-seeking and virtuous politics?

To believe in Christianity, why must I ignore the evidence for evolution and how unapologetically bad apologists are at portraying physics?8 Why must I fool myself into thinking these MAGA cheerleaders are only hilariously bad motivating thinkers in politics and not philosophy?

Jesus said we’d know false teachers by their fruits. Even if I found these apologists’ arguments for God plausible, the fact that I smell something rotten would still make me suspicious.

I would link to more articles that were good, but there are just so many, and I have delayed posting and lost all of them.1

My thoughts on continental philosophy are pretty simple: I don’t really like it. As it’s presented to the public, it’s poorly argued, poorly defended, and it’s often not clear what practical use it has outside of academia.

For the sake of relative precision and clarity, I will be using the label “ConPhil” to refer to continental philosophy/philosophers that I’m being critical of.

What’s more, I agree that we shouldn’t dismiss every thinker in this tradition, because many of them (past and present) don’t replicate the style mistakes I describe and produce good work. So when I’m being critical of ConPhil, I’m not being critical of all ConPhil or your favorite obscure ConPhil philosopher who isn’t as influential as Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Butler, or Zizek2

I have three arguments:

1. ConPhil is incomprehensible to read. Though poor grammar and style does not invalidate an argument or point of view, it does call it into question. Philosophers in related fields have read ConPhil and similarly question its value. Grammar and style is an acid test for ConPhil; if it can’t be explained simply, it’s likely low quality.

2. The defenses of ConPhil are bad. These thinkers rarely defend their ideas from criticism, and when they do, the defenses are worse than the original arguments, vulnerable to obvious rebuttals.

3. Given that ConPhil is incomprehensible and its justifications for incomprehensibility are bad, it’s not worth engaging.3

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Part 1: Rules of Thumb For Good Written Communication

One of the biggest cons of ConPhil is that its ideas are just too sophisticated for clear communication. Defenders will gesture (but not argue clearly) at philosophical reasons for why this is the case. Calling it a “con” may sound like hyperbolic rhetoric, but it’s silly to suggest that complex ideas evade clear communication.4

ConPhil defenders may assert that the reason ConPhil thinkers don’t explain their ideas in simple terms is because doing so would fundamentally change those ideas and misinform the public about what their ideas are. The problem with this defense is that scientists and philosophers simplify complicated subjects to a popular audience all the time, and when they do so, they give the disclaimer that they are oversimplifying.

It’s extremely improbable that the works of Derrida, Foucault, or Lacan are more complicated than general relativity or quantum physics. After all, the idiom is “It’s not rocket science,” not “It’s not literary theory.”

To get into the specifics about why the writing is bad, you don’t have to know much about complicated philosophy, but just how basic grammar and style works.5 Any writer who wants to convey something complicated will abide by these rules:

1. Write in the active voice,

2. Avoid unexplained or uncommon nominalizations6 or concepts.

3. Don’t make your sentences maximally short, but be sensitive to your sentences being too long.

4. The same principle for #3 applies for paragraphs.

5. Try to write causally (i.e A leads to B, which leads to C)

6. Bullet points and headings are effective formatting tools to break up your point into digestible pieces. Within the text, “sign posting” is also effective.7

7. Avoid using adverbs unless their inclusion is fundamental to the sentence and fundamentally changes the sentence. The same can be said for adjectives, but adjectives aren’t as bad as adverbs.

To reiterate: This is not a comprehensive list and it’s not a universally applicable list; sometimes a communicator must deliberately break these rules to make their point. But as a matter of predictable consequences, if a writer or communicator repeatedly does not abide by these rules, and indeed intentionally subverts them, their ideas will be incomprehensible relative to someone who does abide by them.

It’s Relatively Easy to Decode Most Difficult Writers

ConPhil defenders may point out that, throughout history, many philosophers have written poorly, partially because they wrote in a time when language was less formalized as it is today, and so they did not understand best practices.

In that regard, someone like Hume, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Mill, Hegel, Newton, and others may seem incomprehensible to modern readers. What’s more, scholars often write about complicated ideas, like physics or even analytic philosophy, in a non-digestible style.

Does this mean that all of these writers are bad or not worth reading? Absolutely not!

There are a few key differences;

1. Unlike the philosophers of 200 years ago, the ConPhil thinkers are more contemporary. Judith Butler is alive, writing, and teaching today, while David Hume died in 1776. Yet oddly enough, the average philosophy student has more accessibility into the thought, reasoning, and arguments of Hume than Butler because both Hume and his contemporary commenters write/wrote clearly.8

2. One can go to a reputable bookstore anywhere and find bookshelves of writers making complex ideas accessible for others. This is true for ancient, enlightenment, and analytic philosophy as well as complex science. Meanwhile there’s a noticeable scarcity of secondary literature about ConPhil marketed to a mass audience!

3. More presciently, if you go through primary ConPhil texts with these basic grammar and style rules in mind, you find that it’s reliant on being incomprehensible. If not every sentence or paragraph is written poorly, then every chapter and every key argument has extended passages that are written poorly.

Though not every scholar, philosopher, or intellectual wrote using the aforementioned style rules when crafting their texts, scholars and popularizers today can apply them to classic texts and make them more accessible.

For instance, a paradigmatic thinker like Charles Darwin may have written in a style that’s hard for moderately educated people in the 21st century to understand, but there are biologists like Richard Dawkins who possess the knowledge and communication skills to write books that explain his ideas clearly.

This isn’t true for much of ConPhil. There is no Richard Dawkins for the Charles Darwin of literary theory, Michele Foucault.9

The main takeaways here are three-fold:

1. Good style and grammar enhance education communication.

2. Complex ideas can be communicated clearly if the idea is explicable and if the person doing the communication understands the ideas.

3. The absence of popular ConPhil communicators calls to question the explicability of ConPhil, as well as its impact.

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A Case Study: Nussbaum vs Butler.

The idea that bad ConPhil relies on bad writing is not new. Back in 1999 (before I could read!) Martha Nussbaum tore into post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler in the New Republic article titled The Parody of a Professor.

In that article, Nussbaum uses her philosophical expertise to point out problems with Butler’s philosophy, intentions, and style. I’m just going to quote her at length, because the points stand for themselves (emphases are mine):

In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler’s work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.

A further problem lies in Butler’s casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of “interpellation,” you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of course, much academic writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of certain doctrines and positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American philosophical traditions, academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that the figures they mention are complicated, and the object of many different interpretations. They therefore typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite interpretation among the contested ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as they have, and why their own interpretation is better than others.

We find none of this in Butler. Divergent interpretations are simply not considered--even where, as in the cases of Foucault and Freud, she is advancing highly contestable interpretations that would not be accepted by many scholars. Thus one is led to the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained in the usual way, by positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an esoteric academic position. The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also obvious that Butler’s work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with actual injustices. Such an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler’s prose, by its air of in-group knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations.

To whom, then, is Butler speaking? It would seem that she is addressing a group of young feminist theorists in the academy who are neither students of philosophy, caring about what Althusser and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders, needing to be informed about the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This implied audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of Butler’s text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.

Nussbaum continues and how this style gives “the impression of a mind so profoundly cogitative that it will not pronounce on anything lightly: so one waits, in awe of its depth, for it finally to do so.”

And that:

In this way obscurity creates an aura of importance. It also serves another related purpose. It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding. When the bullied readers of Butler’s books muster the daring to think thus, they will see that the ideas in these books are thin. When Butler’s notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don’t go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.

And finally:

“Instead, she prefers a verbosity that causes the reader to expend so much effort in deciphering her prose that little energy is left for assessing the truth of the claims.”

Nussbaum’s Parody is an important piece of public philosophy because she uses her expertise to affirm what non-experts may suspect but lack the education and credibility to argue: That Butler’s style is vague, appealing to complicated and contradictory thinkers without elaborating on them. Butler does not consider differing interpretations of these thinkers, puts forward contested claims about them without an argument, thus making her style substantively different from other forms of complicated writing. Butler’s claims can’t be argued among experts because they’re not really arguments. At the same time, this style is too impenetrable for a popular audience, raising the question about the intended audience of her writing.

From this, Nussbaum proposes that Butler’s “argument” creates the simulation of a philosophical argument given by a deep thinker (note: those are my words, not Nussbaum’s). By being indecipherable and vague, Butler’s writing bullies non-professional readers into thinking Butler is saying something smart because they cannot understand it.

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Writing Style As A Test

One common counter-argument to critics of Butler and other ConPhils is that the critics are too lazy or not smart enough to understand what Butler is saying, but Nussbaum is a clear falsification of that argument. That serious philosophers find ConPhil scholarship poor is sufficient to not take it seriously.

Still, those of us who lack a philosophy graduate degree need an evaluative tool to assess ConPhil.10

I propose a simple test to evaluate ConPhil: Is the grammar and style any good? Specifically, is the author of the text:

1. Overusing unexplained nominalizations and references?

2. Writing needlessly long sentences full of those nominalizations and references?

3. Putting in adverbs and adjectives in their sentences that either muddle the sentence’s clarity or adding unnecessary content?

4. Extending paragraphs for multiple pages, making it difficult to remember what the original thought was?

5. Failing to point out what their argument will conclude before they make it?

If the answer to most of these questions is “yes,” then you can just ignore them and wait until someone expresses those ideas in ways that are conducive to clarity. It’s entirely possible this thinker has something important and interesting to say, but as the reader or student, it is not your job to make their ideas clear and relevant, but theirs.

I’ve used this test to assess ConPhil thinkers for a few years, and no one has come close to passing them. This suggests to me that ConPhil ideas aren’t important enough to clarify. It’s bad enough that ConPhil constantly fails this test, but to make matters worse, few of their scholars seem to care.11

Part 2: Their Arguments Are Bad

It’s entirely possible I’m overstating the case in Part 1. Maybe Martha Nussbaum, other philosophers, and I are wrong. What’s great about this argument is that it can be proven wrong! But unfortunately, defenders of ConPhil do not even try to do this. When they do, they give really bad arguments. Let’s talk about some of them.

A Digression On Clarity Fetish

Before I go into this section, I want to give a shout out to the philosopher and substacker for his article posted earlier this week on this subject:

Big iff True

Stop making excuses for unclear writing

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivol…

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5 months ago · 310 likes · 209 comments · Daniel Muñoz

When drafting this post, I didn’t know how I would go about criticizing the online philosophers I saw defending ConPhil because they are certainly more educated in philosophy than I am.

I try to put forward a humble voice for my beliefs and calling out an expert for a bad argument feels off to me, even if I’m correct. What’s more, I don’t like to fight with people on the internet. I really appreciate Daniel’s post because it said things I wanted to say, sometimes better than I could, but also it validated my non-PhD-BS detector. Thank you Daniel!

For those of you who didn’t read the post (shame on you!), the philosopher Ellie Anderson put forward a defense of lack of clarity:

While continental philosophy is regularly accused of being unclear, this is often because the ideas propounded precisely rebel against the metaphysical assumptions that clear expression brings with it. As Adorno notes, Hegel disavows hypotactical writing in favor of parataxis: here, the structure of sentences undermines the hierarchy of clauses, as well as subjects and predicates.[2] Instead, meaning emerges through the relation of clauses and sentences to one another. Adorno, too, employs paratactical writing in an effort to resist ‘identity thinking’ and the fetish of clarity.[3]

She also has a YouTube Video elaborating on this point.

I didn’t like this defense at all, nor did a couple of my substack followers. Daniel touched on many of the points I was going to focus on, so instead, I want to focus on the weirdness of the structure of the quote. Namely, the framing of this defense is loaded at best, and incoherent at worst.

This sentence is at least one of factually wrong, grammatically incorrect, or incoherent:

“While continental philosophy is regularly accused of being unclear, this is often because the ideas propounded precisely rebel against the metaphysical assumptions that clear expression brings with it.”

First, the clause after “because” (the ideas propounded precisely rebel…) is written weirdly. Who is propounding the ideas? Continental Philosophers, I presume? This weird word choice erases continental philosophers from the sentence. You know, the people actually writing unclearly? This creates weird and nonsensical implications. How do words, which lack sentience and physical embodiment, rebel?

Second, the inclusion of the word “precisely” in that clause is likely wrong, or at least confusing. Are the ideas put forward in a precise manner? I don’t think that’s what she’s saying; if philosophers “propounded ideas precisely” we would not be having this conversation! So that leads to another nonsensical reading, that the manner of the rebellion is precise? How can a rebellion be precise?

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To reiterate: I am not trying to be pedantic here. The rules of style are often guidelines, and the rules of grammar can be bent, but only to a point. ConPhils break these guidelines/rules so much that they don’t realize how their sentences necessarily lead to either nonsensical or question-begging conclusions.

Anderson put forward this explanation, presumably thinking the explanation was evident in the words. But upon critical examination, it raised more questions than answers. This is one of my problems with ConPhil: When you’re inculcated into the tradition, your standards for clarity drop, as does your ability to examine claims. You allow bad or nonsensical arguments to pass uncritically because the argument sounds smart and you expect to not find clarity.

Worse is the framing of Anderson’s argument. As pointed out, Anderson’s argument is like the meme where one “wins the argument” by drawing themself as the chad, and the opponent as the wojack.

Though it may not be her intention, it’s hard not to read Anderson’s comments about having a “fetish for clarity” as a weird form of name calling. Even though “fetish” has a technical definition in psychoanalysis, it still reads like rebutting someone’s argument by calling them a pervert. On top of this, it’s pretty obvious that the people desiring clarity don’t want it as an end in itself, but as a means to the end of understanding. The horror!

Contrast that with the way the word “rebel” is ham-fistedly inserted into this sentence. At its most charitable, it suggests something edgy, cool, and noble about the (unmentioned) continental philosopher; that continentals are the rebels mannnn. But a more careful reading suggests error and nonsense - that words themselves have the agency to rebel.

In this way, under a Nussbaumian lens, Anderson’s defense is bad for similar reasons as Butler’s comments on various scholars: it’s poorly written, yet sounds vaguely smart, but when you take a critical eye to what is actually said, it raises more questions (and frustrations) than it answers.

Three Species of Defense:

With that out of the way, let’s get into three forms of ConPhil defenses against criticisms of poor form and philosophy.

1. Nu-huh!

2. It’s Performance Art.

3. Just Read More Theory Bro!

The “Nu-huh!” Defense

The “Nu-huh!” Defense is not exclusive to ConPhil. You see it in all sorts of philosophy, specifically by people too lazy to express someone else’s argument. This form simply asserts “this is wrong” or “this has been rebutted” without further elaboration.

I was curious to see if anyone had ever actually rebutted Nussbaum’s criticism, and I honestly couldn’t find anything. I don’t think anyone has successfully rebutted Nussbaum’s criticisms of Butler.12 Meanwhile, what I have found is canned responses against Nussbaum that ConPhil defenders make against all critics of continental philosophy, asserting that they’re all analytic/logical positivist philosophers and thus all vulnerable to the same argument.

Specifically, they’ll say that Nussbaum “does philosophy differently” than Butler because she presumes as a correspondence theory with language. But any serious reading of Nussbaum will show that these rebuttals are immaterial. As Munoz explained, you don’t need to be a logical positivist or hold a correspondence theory of truth to agree with Nussbaum’s criticisms.

Still, lazy ConPhil defenders will see these responses, say Nussbaum has been rebutted, and continue writing incoherently. All the while, Nussbaum’s original criticisms of Butler go unaddressed: how Butler’s bad style simulates sophistication, the factual manner of whether or not her ideas are original, or whether or not “the way Butler does philosophy” is actually good.

This is unsatisfactory. It’s not even the simulation of debate, so much as it is its denial to engage in one.

The Performance Art Defense

This is my favorite defense because it’s the easiest to point out.

This defense asserts that ConPhils aren’t doing the same kind of philosophy as everyone else and critics just aren’t smart enough to pick up on what that philosophy is.

I call this argument the Performance Art Defense because defenders are (basically) saying that ConPhil philosophy isn’t philosophy as we understand it, but a species of performance art. This would be bad enough, but to make matters worse, the defenders don’t explain what this performance art means!

When you’re trying to do something serious and someone turns it into performance art, that’s annoying. When the person doing the performance art can’t even explain what the performance art is, it’s infuriating. It’s also mean! If you’re turning a serious thing into a parody and the parody is neither funny nor coherent. At that point, it’s not parody, it’s vandalism. We’re worse off than where we started.

Anderson’s retelling of Adorno’s defense was a form of the performance art defense, but there are more I’ve heard over the years. These include, but are not limited to:

• The phallocentric explanation: This says that writing in a manner that’s direct and builds to a “climax” point is masculine because that’s how male sexuality works. And so these thinkers are actually being feminist…or something!

• The literature/poetry explanation: This says ConPhils are writing in a style that’s much like a novelist or poet, even though a cursory glance of their writing doesn’t read as a novel or poem.

• The phenomenological explanation: This one says that the ConPhil is trying to change your perspective…somehow.

Now, the specific flavors of the Performance Art Defense don’t matter, so much as you recognize that people have creative ways of describing why something isn’t clear without themselves explaining the meaning of the text.

Let me repeat that.

The formula of this defense is pointing out that ConPhils are operating differently than other philosophers without explaining what that means or using that interpretive insight to clarify the point of specific writings.

To make matters worse, the defenses don’t usually have evidence in the text to back it up! Or the explanations themselves are themselves absurd or self-undermining.

For instance, how low of a view of femininity do you have that you think it’s unfeminine to say something clearly, building through a cumulative case toward a conclusion? Why is it so normal to say these philosophers are writing like novelists when so few of them actually are?13

ConPhils have trained generations of left-leaning philosophy students to defend their position with a soundbite (“It’s not like other philosophy!”) without actually equipping them with the tools to properly explain the defense.

It’s silly and a little sad. It’s okay if something is performance art, or just art. It’s okay to “Do Philosophy” outside of the constraints of a syllogism or formal argument. You can learn about philosophy from TV, literature, and film (You can learn political philosophy from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Game of Thrones, Battlestar Galactica). This philosophy is not expressed in a formal argument, but in the sense and atmosphere created by language and film.

But this is different from ConPhil. Going back to clear language and explanation, we can explain the philosophies of these works of literature and film using clear language, while the ConPhils refuse elaboration and explanation.

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Just Read More Theory Bro

The last cliche defense of ConPhil is to say that critics are stupid, the ideas do make sense, and that critics are just too lazy to understand it. I call this the “Just Read More Theory Bro” defense because it’s a meme for the online left that the solution to all problems is to read more theory.14

The “Just Read More Theory Bro” defense is similar to “The Performance Art” defense because defenders do not actually elaborate on the explanation. Outside of ConPhil, we’d easily identify this as bad instruction.

If someone has a question about a subject that I’m educated on and I don’t know the specific answer, I wouldn’t just tell people “read more.” Rather, I’d give my best explanation, a recommendation to a specific text that may help them understand it better, and further context about that text.

In this way, when you tell someone to read a text, it’s to understand a main idea from that text, not just to mindlessly read indecipherable texts for its own sake. As defenders just assert that critics need to read more theory without guidance, it suggests they don’t know what the point of the text is.

What’s more, the paradigmatic ConPhil philosophers are obviously indecipherable,15 and at times, defender concede this point in ways that scholars from other fields would not concede about their own paradigmatic thinkers.

For instance, I’ve seen some smart public facing philosophers on substack say something to the effect of “it’s not ConPhil’s fault that you’re too lazy to read beyond Lacan, Foucault, Butler, etc.,” and that other thinkers redeem the field, and that it’s an unfair to draw a negative inference about the field because the paradigmatic thinkers are incomprehensible.

This is an odd response for the same reason it would be odd for a biologist to say, “It’s not the biology field’s fault that you’re too lazy to read beyond Darwin. These other obscure biologists make biology worth studying.”

A biologist may concede Darwin is hard to read, but instead of calling you lazing, mocking your frustration and skepticism, they would likely recommend to you countless Darwinist communicators. What’s more, they would not imply that Darwin is wrong or not worth reading. They probably wouldn’t recommend other biologists as better affirmations of the field’s value. They’d simply help you understand Darwinism better.

Even if they would agree that it’s not essential to read or understand Darwin’s original words, they would affirm the value of his ideas, and point you in the direction of someone who can communicate them better. This is not the norm for ConPhil defenders.

The fact that the ideas of these thinkers can’t be expressed consistently and clearly, and that defenders can’t point to specific texts and passages to elucidate specific philosophical ideas as guided instruction suggests fewer people understand these texts than can defend them.

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Part 3: It’s Not Worth Your Time

It’s not a wise use of time to read bad philosophy. All philosophy needs a fair hearing, but reading incomprehensible texts, that others can’t explain to you, and that has at best limited real world application is an inferior use of time relative to reading comprehensible texts, that others can explain, and does have real world application. I

If you continue down a fruitless path, despite all the negative feedback telling you to turn around, you are not behaving as a wise person, but more like an eventual victim of a con man or cult.

Calling something a cult or con certainly comes off as mean. I want to be clear here that I don’t think anyone here is a bad faith actor, being unethical, or deceptive.

Rather, I think ConPhil ideas have the same appeal as conspiracy theories. They’re “forbidden knowledge” that makes the one who “understands” them feel special, endowed with special status.

I experienced this allure firsthand. My first exposure to Foucault and other thinkers was when I was in high school on Tumblr. Their appeal wasn’t about their intellectual content, but about their vibe and coolness, and being able to dunk on cringe mainstream people (who voted for Democrats and had conventional philosophical ideas that were explicable), attracting a high volume of social media engagement.

I don’t want people to fall into the same trap I did, where I thought there was more going on intellectually in these circles than there actually was.16

My advice: Don’t waste your time. Most people who defend ConPhil do not understand it and those who allegedly understand it cannot be bothered to explain it clearly. It’s most likely nonsense, and the reason why people pretend to understand it is because it makes them feel smart.

I hedge all of these arguments with the disclaimers that I could be wrong, and I’m not an expert. But this overstates my uncertainty. Having reflected on my experience with ConPhil defenders and Hume’s argument against miracles,17 I view the credibility of ConPhil only a little bit higher than testimony for religious miracles.

As a matter fact (In Humean terms), I have not seen a single substantive defense of ConPhil that doesn’t collapse under the lightest of scrutiny. That could change, but my confidence is so low, that I simply don’t expect it to ever happen. Sure, some of these thinkers have interesting things to say, but you could commit to maybe a single philosophy class (not an entire course, but a class period) running through them. They just aren’t worth your time.

Until someone comes along and commits themselves to popularizing and communicating these ideas in a manner that isn’t vulnerable to the weaknesses I’ve outlined in this post, I have no reason to think ConPhil thinkers have anything worth saying. It would be great to be proven wrong.

But I refuse to spend more time defending and inquiring about people and ideas who can’t or won’t explain or defend themselves.

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In my last post, I talked about how the internet gets Hume wrong. In this post, I’m going to teach you how to get Hume right. What is Hume trying to argue in Of Miracles? This is a question that many people have gotten wrong, going back to even Hume’s time.

You’re not going to find the answer just by reading the essay. Many of his points are implied, but not specifically stated (it was a chapter in a larger work, after all), and he also uses words differently than we do today.

To write this post I leaned heavily on two sources, but I have read others and am confident that what’s argued here will be in line with the consensus of Hume scholars. Sources will be cited by page number (which may be slightly inaccurate due to kindle formatting), but instead of writing Vanderburgh and Fogelin’s whole names within citations, I will use V and F.

As a statement of humility, this is not a peer reviewed article. I am not a Hume expert, though I consider myself a student of the Scotsman. As my interpretation is not a testament to the miraculous, I hope you’ll see me as a credible witness. And if a more credible witness testifies against me, consider it a proof.1

The key points of this post, which can be found in each section with a major heading, are that:

1. Hume was not a Bayesian;

2. Hume understood probability and evaluated evidence more like a lawyer in a courtroom than a statistician in a lecture hall;

3. Hume used probabilistic terminology differently than we do today;

4. Hume was a mitigated skeptic;

5. His mitigated skepticism led him to understand probability in such a way that made him generally disbelieve all miracle claims;

6. To understand Of Miracles you must understand both parts one and two of his argument together, not as two separate arguments;

7. Because of the problematic nature of miracles and the Humean account of wisdom (apportioning beliefs based on evidence, being informed of the fact that religious motives degrades the quality of testimony), the wise person should be perhaps instinctively dismissive of miracle claims;

8. I think he’s basically right.

Before we dive in, I would appreciate your subscription, as this post took a lot of time and effort to research and write. Thank you!

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Hume Was Not A (Proto) Bayesian

Hume’s probability calculation is not the same kind of mathematical probability we are accustomed to today, and it is certainly not a Bayesian one.

Bayes’s probability work was not widely known in 1748, when Hume published the first edition of the Enquiry, where the original essay Of Miracles appeared. Though, per some historical evidence, Hume read and admired Richard Price’s paper applying Bayesian methods to the evidence of miracles in 1767, Hume did not address these Bayesian arguments in his revised editions of the Enquiry in 1768 or 1777. Vanderburgh concludes:

This suggests that Hume ultimately did not view Bayes’s work as relevant to the argument against miracles…Given Hume’s familiarity with Pascalian probability, and his acquaintance through Price with Bayesian ideas, his non-numerical treatment of the evidential probability of miracles even in the latest editions of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding must be seen as a deliberate philosophical position, not as a result of negligence or ignorance. (Vanderburgh 120)

Hume differed from the Bayesians in that “belief is determined by the purely psychological characteristic “force and vivacity” (V28).” Comparing pieces of evidence is a matter for judgment, not calculation (V29). In this way, for Hume, evidence is not measured, it is weighed.

One of the reasons this is the case is because, in Hume’s epistemology, mathematical calculations are relations of ideas, which are themselves things that can be known with absolute certainty, while empirical matters of fact cannot be known with certainty. Hume would have seen it as a category mistake to believe matters of fact in mathematical degrees (V30).

Though Hume’s reading of probability may be different from what we think of probability today, it’s worth mentioning that, per Vanderburgh, Hume’s method was the most dominant approach to probability throughout western history (V4). So as tempting as it is to view his reasoning as if he’s a frequent reader of Nate Silver or Matthew Adelstein, we must instead evaluate Hume on his own terms.

Hume’s Legal Language

Hume evaluated evidence like a classically-trained lawyer. Given Hume’s background as a law student, his experience as a librarian, and other historical evidence, it’s unlikely Hume would not be familiar with Roman and medieval legal texts.

What’s more, Of Miracles is filled to the brim with references to legal concepts. Some of these are less obvious, given the relationship they have with today’s adversarial method of philosophy and argumentation. These include:

• Gathering and critiquing evidence,

• Presenting a case,

• Considering the counter-case,

• Answering the counter-case,

But some are more obvious, such as Hume discussing:

• The concept of “full proof” (a medieval law concept meaning proof sufficient for conviction in a capital case),

• Internal and external evidence (more medieval legal concepts),

• Principles and concepts related to the weighing of evidence (such as that a weaker evidence can never destroy a stronger),

• That more unusual claims require more evidence,

• The contrariety of evidence on either side,

• Competing witnesses,

• And factors affecting witness credibility,

On top of that (all of this is from Vanderburgh’s book if you couldn’t tell, you should read it!):

He explicitly uses analogies of courts and judges deciding a case—he even mentions a legal example of a judge comparing the competing testimonies of two pairs of witnesses and deciding that the evidence on each side cancels each other out, leaving no basis for conviction (EHU 10.24)....There is even a suggestion in Hume (EHU 10.32) of something we today associate with legal statutes of limitations: it is difficult enough for courts to reasonably establish recent facts, and nearly impossible with regard to facts in the distant past. (V87)

All of this to say, in reading Of Miracles and attempting to understand Hume’s argument, you must not read it as a contemporary statistician or analytic philosopher, but as a judge evaluating evidence in the courtroom. For Hume, probability isn’t something calculated, but something judged.

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Important Terminology

Hume did not use probabilistic language in the same mathematical way that we’re used to as 21st century philosophy enthusiasts, and there are wide-spanning implications. Specifically, Hume used words like proof, probability, demonstration, certainty, zero probability, impossibility, and others different from the way we do today.

Zero Probability And Full Proof

Today, we think of probability in what Vanderburgh calls Pascalian terms: The fact that a proposition has “zero” probability” means that the proposition is a logical impossibility, while a proposition that has 100 percent probability is a certainty. Hume would not express probability in this way.

Instead, he would use language in what some scholars would call a Baconian way, but what Vanderburgh argues is better understood as Pre-Pascalian. That is, “the fact that a proposition has no probability means that there is no positive evidence in favor of accepting it” (V77).

What’s more:

When a proposition has maximum probability for a Pascalian, this means it is a logical truth (its falsity is logically impossible); for a non-Pascalian, “full proof” regarding an empirical fact is less than perfect certainty, even though full proof is the highest degree of probability attainable for empirical propositions (V77).

Thus, Hume affirms admissible propositions or evidence much like a judge affirms admissible evidence. Saying a proposition has “no probability” is not the same as saying it is impossible, nor is saying one amounting to a “full proof” is saying that it is certain.

Rather, a proposition having “no probability” is one with insufficient evidence to be used or weighed against other evidence, while one having “full proof” amounts to the best quality evidence that can be weighed against other evidence.

Moral Certainty and Moral Evidence

In this way, for Hume, the highest degree of certainty we could achieve for empirical proofs is moral certainty or moral evidence. This is “a degree of assurance sufficient for action and belief but short of certainty” (V30). However, we “never achieve absolute certainty regarding matters of fact simply because of the kind of knowledge in question” because matters of fact are not relations of ideas (V96).

To repeat, for the Humean:

• Relations of ideas are propositions we can be certain of because they are by definition true (such as a triangle having three sides). These are often called a priori propositions.

• Matters of fact are propositions we cannot be certain of. We know them from experience, not from definitions or pure logic. These are often called a posteriori propositions.

Remember: Hume would believe it’s a category error to talk about probability in mathematical ways.

More importantly: when he uses the language of probability, proof, and possibility in Of Miracles, he’s using the terms in an a posteriori or matter of fact way.

Demonstration, Probability, And Proof.

For Hume, demonstrations were certain propositions because they described relations of ideas. Confusingly enough, today we would refer to a demonstration as a proof, but that’s not what Hume means by the term.

For Hume, a proof is a matter of fact. A proof is the accumulation of probabilities in favor of a generalization that we can safely assume is the case. In this regard, a proof is “the zenith of evidence and belief with regard to an empirical matter of fact” (V96).

Probabilities can become proofs, but they cannot become demonstrations, nor can proofs become demonstrations. In this regard, Hume’s moral certainty amounts to a proof (V96). From that proof, we “end up with well-grounded expectations about past uniformities continuing into the future” (V96).

Impossibility

Thus, when Hume is talking about a matter of fact being impossible, it’s important to not conflate him talking about logical or demonstrative or a priori impossibility.

More explicitly, and in line with my last post, Hume does not believe that these things we call miracles cannot happen out of principle. In his Enquiry, he says: “The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a contradiction.”

Take the proposition (to use Vanderburgh’s example) “A human can raw bench press 1,500 pounds.”

It’s not logically impossible, just impossible-given-what-we-know. That is, the world record for raw (unassisted) bench press in 2025 was 782 pounds, the progress of the record is decelerated in spite of training improvements2, and human physiology and the laws of physics (the breaking strength of bones) make it utterly unbelievable that human could complete a 1,500 pound raw bench press.3

Again, that’s not because it’s logically impossible, but given the facts we know about related matters, it’s impossible in Humean terms.

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Understanding Mitigated Skepticism:

To understand how all of these concepts come together for Hume and miracles, we must understand three more Humean concepts: The problem of induction, causality, and mitigated skepticism.

First, Hume famously pioneered the problem of induction. According to this problem, the uniformity of nature is not a logical necessity (a demonstration), but a matter of fact (proof). In this way, there is nothing in reason that says that the world will be the same tomorrow as it is today. In human experience, the sun has risen every morning for as long as humans can remember and attest, but tomorrow could be the first day that it doesn’t happen.

Secondly, Hume understood causality to not be something we observe. This is more complicated, and there is disagreement among Hume scholars about what specifically he believed.4 In short, Hume believed that causality wasn’t observable, as we only really observe conjunctive events, not conjunctive events plus this magical thing that reveals itself as “causality.”

For example, when a billiard ball hits another billiard ball, we don’t see this “thing” called “causality” happen, we just see one object move, make contact with another object, and then they both subsequently act in a certain way.

Due to this observational limitation, we can imagine the billiard balls doing things we have no experience observing them do, such as colliding at a slow speed, and then conjunctively flying vertically in the air at the speed of sound. What’s more, because we do not observe causality, just viewing the conjunctive events will not give us an understanding of what event caused what event (especially if we only do it once).

For many people, this is pretty bad! How can we make sense of the world at all, if there’s no logical basis for induction and if we don’t actually observe causality?!

Though Hume unearthed these problems, he believed there were practical solutions that would work for most people in their daily lives. In this regard, Hume was a mitigated skeptic. This means that, though Hume may have rejected the idea that we could have deep “knowledge” or perception of how the world works (just as we couldn’t know or perceive causation or rationally establish induction), he thought that we could still make some sense of the world using other tools of our cognition, namely probability.

From Mitigated Skepticism To Proofs of Natural Laws

As a mitigated skeptic, Hume assumes The Principle of the Uniformity of Nature, which simply says “future cases will resemble past cases” (43). According to Vanderburgh, the principle of the uniformity of nature, is “the principle on which all inductive reasoning depends,” but also “merely a regulative ideal for investigation of the world, rather than a claim regarding a supposed truth about the world” (43). From this principle and induction:

The depth and breadth of the exceptionless regularity of past experience gives the strongest kind of warrant possible to the belief that the law will continue to hold in the same way in the future. It is not that the evidence demonstrates with certainty that the law is true, it is just that no empirical claim can possibly have stronger evidence than what we have with regard to those things we call laws of nature. (50)

Let’s illustrate this with the billiard ball example. To the extent that we can make any causal inference at all about what follows from two billiard balls making contact with each other, it will be based on previous experience. Though it is logically possible that their interaction could have them spontaneously combust or transform into butterflies or blast Bohemian Rhapsody at 120 decibels, we have no experience of them doing those things.

The more experience you have watching billiard balls interact, the more data you have in support of the probability that they will act in specific ways in the future (namely: move in geometric ways on the billiard table). In the absence of these balls acting in alternative ways, the less evidence you have that they will act in alternative ways. In this sense, you have no probability that the balls will act in alternative ways.5

Thus, based on your previous experience of the movements and interactions of billiard balls, you can form probabilities about how they will act in different circumstances. The more data and experiences you collect, the more accurate your probabilities. As your probabilities accumulate and remain uncontested, they eventually become moral proofs or laws of nature.

To recap: Though there is no reasonable foundation (i.e inherent in logic) for the reliability of induction or the uniformity of nature, for Hume, if we merely assume the principle of the uniformity of nature, we can formulate probabilities about how the world works. Over time, certain probabilities reach the status of moral proofs or laws of nature.

The Problem of Miracles Pre-Testimony

And this is where miracles and testimonies for miracles become problematic. As a matter of fact, a miracle is a one-time event.6 Though the miracle apologist is correct in saying we cannot call a miracle as such if there isn’t this background law or proof to discern it, from Hume’s perspective, that does not save it from being rendered impossible.

Miracles Are A Sample Of One

To use mathematical phrasing, for Hume, you need more than one data point to be confident that a law of nature has been violated or that an established proof is not, indeed, a proof. Yet by both common definition and as matter of fact, miracles are only one data point.

Per Vanderburgh: “Singular events such as miracles of the sort with which Hume is concerned could never supply the evidence needed to put aside the regularity” (V52).

Another way of expressing this is asking two rhetorical questions:

1. How do you know that you observed a miracle, and not just a poorly understood natural event?

2. How do you know that the thing you attribute as the cause of the purported miracle was indeed the cause?

Though he does not touch upon this directly or explicitly in Of Miracles, to the extent Hume believes that we can establish an understanding about the relationship between conjunctive events, we need more than one set of conjunctive events to reliably draw a probable inference.

This means that miracles, generally understood as singular events (either by definition or as matter of fact), have a probability problem. Namely, to draw a reliable inference from an observed events, humans need more than one sample of that event; something that miracles don’t typically provide.

Supernatural Causes Are Hard To Prove

To illustrate it in a more humorous way, if you transplanted a pre-industrial human to the present, explained to him what a video was, and showed him a video of a car blowing up after its ignition is turned, he may assume that car ignitions cause cars to explode, and subsequently violently stop you from going to work, in an attempt to save your life. In this way, to have any inferential idea about how an observed event functions, we need more than one data point, which miracles do not provide.

The ambiguity doesn’t just stop with one not knowing what exactly happened with conjunctive events, but also in one being able to attribute the cause of the conjunctive events in the first place. Put more concretely, it’s easier to demonstrate that the sun turned dark than it is to demonstrate that the sun turned dark and that Odium caused the sun to turn dark.

Back to our pre-industrial human. Let’s assume we show him automobiles that don’t blow up for a day. He thinks they’re cool! What inference can he draw about them, knowing very little about them,7 when one randomly explodes on day two? Very little, if he knows nothing about combustion. For this man, a supernatural explanation is just as plausible as a natural one.

When we understand a causal phenomenon sufficiently, the pre-industrial man attributing a car explosion to a supernatural event seems obviously wrongheaded. Yet still, miracle apologists think we should attribute unknown, weird causal events to the supernatural, and it’s not clear how the situation is much different.

Yes, Miracles Should Be Replicated (Seriously!)

In this way, even if you see a one-time event that Hume would call marvelous, it’s not quite rational, given the human limits of observing causation, to call it miraculous (i.e. having supernatural or religious causal origins).

Just as you need more than one data point to discern what causally happened in your observation, you similarly need more than one data point to assess the cause of that event as well, to determine if it was a magic trick, an illusion, a marvel, or a miracle. Put in other terms:

So, for Hume, the warrant of the causal inference is founded on the long course of uniform experience. This suggests that on the first occurrence of an event of any event-type (even something that later turns out to be an instance of a perfect regularity) we are not warranted in inferring the future occurrence of a similar consequence from a similar antecedent. This in turn suggests that no (other) matter of fact can properly be inferred from a truly singular event. By itself this provides grounds for doubts about miracles…If the conditions under which the event took place are reproduced and a similar event comes about, that is the beginning of evidence for a new law of nature or revision of an old one. As the evidence of this kind builds up to a high enough level (in which case it becomes increasingly unlikely that there was and continues to be misperception, mistransmission, or deception involved in the testimony and increasingly likely that the event type really occurs), there are then grounds for a rational belief that the original event (although it was singular when it first occurred) really did occur. Degree of belief is for Hume a function of evidence: It will change as the evidence changes. (V55-56)

Miracle apologists often say that skeptics wouldn’t believe a miracle if they saw one, and thus the skeptics are just dogmatically anti-miracle. This is not true. Rather, skeptics such as Hume recognize the necessity of needing multiple, repeated observations before drawing any probabilistic causal inference for any observed novel phenomena, not just miracles.

In this regard, the Humean skeptic doesn’t have a bias against religion or miracles, but understands how the science and psychology of causality works.

Experience tells us that when marvelous observed events are repeated, studied, and tested, a natural explanation will better fit the data, by virtue of being more austere in its assumptions. Though marvels and miracles may happen, experience leads us to doubt their reports, given both their poor track record and that human minds begin to decode marvelous events when they can be observed multiple times.

Conversely, the Humean can be confident that a natural causal explanation can be unearthed with enough observation and experimentation. The scientific method has a strong track record.8

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Part Two Is Important For The Argument’s Structure

In line with my previous post, according to Robert J. Fogelin’s A Defense of Hume On Miracles, it’s better not to break down Of Miracles into two separate arguments because the two sections fit together into a coherent whole:

Stated broadly, the task of part 1 is to establish the appropriate standards for evaluating testimony in behalf of a miracle of any kind; the task of part 2 is to show that reports of religious miracles have not in the past met these standards. Taking experience as his guide, Hume further concludes that there is no likelihood that they will ever do so. (F9-10)9

In this way, Part 2 is important to the essay because Hume is arguing as a matter of fact that no testimony has met the standards of being a miracle. It’s an essential step to his conclusion, which (as stated in my previous post) was about the rationality of miracle testimony in establishing religion.

Just as the specific wording about testimony is important to understand Hume’s argument on miracles, so too is his wording on the foundation of religion. Namely, Hume states the maxim “that no human testimony can have such force to prove a miracle, and make it a just foundation for any such system of religion.”

Fogelin asserts:

The phrasing here is important. As stated, it does not completely rule out the possibility of testimony establishing the occurrence of a miracle, for Hume’s maxim is limited in its scope to miracles intended to serve as the foundation for a system of religion. (F24)10

This post mainly deals with the first part of Hume’s argument, and not the conclusion, which I feel I argued sufficiently in my last post. But, still, keep the overall structure in mind! Part 2 and the conclusion are just as important as part 1. Hume has more to say than just “miracles are typically unlikely!”

Religious Testimony For Miracles Is Low Quality

Without full context, some commenters view some of Hume’s dismissals of testimony as arbitrary. Namely, that he wouldn’t believe a religious testimony about a queen resurrecting, but he would believe credible a non-religious account attesting to a period of darkness that lasts days, seems inconsistent.

But if you read his whole essay, Hume’s skepticism toward the queen scenario is anything but arbitrary. Rather, it’s informed by the fact that religious motivations often make testimony more unreliable:

As violations of truth are more common in the testimony concerning religious miracles, than in that concerning any other matters of fact; they must diminish very much the authority of the former testimony, and make us form a general resolution, never to lend any attention to it, with whatever specious pretence it may be covered (Enquiry 10.38)

Or, as Fogelin summarizes:

In short, for Hume, it is an empirical fact, amply illustrated by history, that testimony concerning religious miracles is notoriously unreliable. On the basis of this general fact about the quality of such testimony, the wise reasoner has ample grounds for rejecting it. (F29)

For Hume, if you can imagine a situation where testimony could rise to the level of credibility to establish a religious miracle, he claims it has not actually happened in the course of history.

Hume’s Maxim and Dismissing Improbable Events

Let’s think of some examples of testimony of improbable events. Say I tell you that:

• A load of tile fell off a semi on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and spilled onto the road in a configuration that replicated Leonardo’s Last Supper, except that the figure of Jesus looked astonishingly like Elvis.11

• I have lived an interesting life. I went to middle school with Jadeveon Clowney. I ran into Jill Biden at my local Barnes & Noble when she was First Lady. I once rear-ended Josh Turner in Atlanta traffic. Lance Armstrong once injured me on a multi-use trail in Texas. While visiting the Pacific Northwest, I once was at a coffee shop in Seattle at the same time as Jeff Bezos. While partying in DC, I did psychedelics with Matthew Yglesias. My wife just let me make out with [super hot celebrity, take your pick].

Should you, as a wise person, believe either of these claims? Should you feel compelled to investigate them? The Humean says no!12

On the example of some random schmuck bumping elbows with famous people all the time, Folegin says: “The sheer improbability that all (or most) of these things happened is sufficient for discounting his testimony, whatever his reasons for presenting it.” (F12)13

We understand this when it comes to events that are merely very improbable, but why not share the same standards for the miracle claim? Why are we more defensive of the spectacular?

Hume’s Moral Probability and Wisdom

Hume’s maxim in Of Miracles is understood as no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish.

In this way, the extreme improbability of miraculous events is the reason why we should be skeptical from the outset, not the source of the miracles (testimony).

Per Vanderburgh:

What makes [Hume’s Maxim] rational, and hence not really paradoxical, is a point about epistemic reliability. Miracles either occur or they do not. If miracles do not occur, testimony about miracles will always be false. If miracles do occur, testimony about the occurrence of a miracle will still (given what we know about humanity) almost always be false (by misperception, deception, or mistransmission) and only very rarely true. Considering the set of all cases of testimony, then, it will universally or almost universally be better to believe (the belief will always or almost always be true) that testimony to violations of laws of nature is false. If we follow Hume’s maxim we will be in error only very rarely, if at all. (V 65)

The probabilistic calculus of the maxim has built-in constraints to advance various principles beyond just measurable precision and certainty, but also actionability, minimizing error rate, and wisdom. In this regard, the probability is not calculable like Bayesian probability, but more like legal probability, which has principles such as “proof beyond reasonable doubt,” “presumption of innocence,” and so on, that advances values beyond just confidence.

Wisdom is perhaps the most important constraint. For Hume, a wise thinker does not believe wholesale every idea that becomes enlivened in her brain, nor does she believe everything she is told, especially if it’s extremely improbable. A careful, deliberate, informed, and probabilistic thinker will understand that this epistemic behavior would be less effective than proportioning her belief to the evidence she has experienced and is familiar. It’s from that experience that she judges not to believe a miracle testimony. Per Morris:

I don’t need to investigate [the Last supper claim] further, even though the alleged event violates no natural laws…The fact that the truth is out there doesn’t mean that we have to be out there investigating everything we’re told. Part of being wise is knowing when not to waste your time. (V58)

Tying It All Together

When evaluating miracles, Hume implores a non-mathematical, non-Pascalian understanding of probability that is more like one you find in a court room than in a science lab. He is a skeptic about induction and causality; he is not a Pyrrhonian skeptic, but a mitigated skeptic, which (in the most simplified way) means he believes we can have practical “knowledge” about the world around us, even if we can’t have “deeper knowledge” about how the world works.

From this, Hume assumes the principle of the uniformity of nature, and from that he argues for the reliability of probability at drawing inferences for the future, including establishing moral proofs and laws of nature. From the outset of this system, miracles are considered very improbable, not out of definition, but out of the facts of their case weighed against the proofs of the laws of nature, per Hume’s non-Pascalian probability.

But Hume’s argument against miracles does not end there, as for him, the evidence for miracles doesn’t even amount to a probability. This is the case for two reasons:

1. To make any sense of any novel observation, we need more than one occurrence of the event to formulate a probability. As miracles detail events that only happened once, they cannot amount to a probability, and therefore cannot even weigh against the proofs of the laws of nature.14

2. All religious miracle testimony falls radically short of credibility because of how religious motivation corrupts witness credibility, the additional attribution of causation to divine agents, and the limited data available to draw an inference.15 This corrupting influence makes religious miracle testimony inferior to witness attestation of the merely novel and extraordinary.

For Hume, this means miracles are a posteriori impossible, not because they are logically impossible, but because they lack the necessary evidence to weigh their probability against the “morally certain” laws of nature. Therefore, miracle testimony does not even amount to a Humean probability, let alone a proof, and so there’s no contest between the two.

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Final Thoughts

Just as a raw 1,500 pound bench press is considered impossible, as we have various proofs against it and no evidence for it, so too are miracles impossible. For Hume, this is a matter of fact, not a logical necessity. This assertion may be demonstrated as false, but the effort of disproving it would be a waste of time for wise people.

Although we could chase down and debate the credibility of every specific miracle and testimony, a wise person does not do this: We have enough data showing the failure to establish religious miracles and the failures of their species of supporting testimony, itself amounting to more than just a probability. In this regard, the accumulated probability for the failure of miracle arguments is arguably a proof in itself.16

Until witness testimony for religious miracles radically improves, and thus more miracles can be credibly established, amounting to a probability and eventually a competing proof against the proof of the laws of nature, skeptics will continue to be confident in their dismissal of miracles as impossible.

If you’ve read this far and enjoyed this post, please consider clicking the button above, or right here to buy me a coffee. My content is free, but I spent well over $100 researching this post, so a little “tip” would be appreciated.

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Everyone on Substack is talking about miracles and my favorite philosopher, David Hume, is catching unworthy criticism.

This post is the attempt by a mere philosophy BA, a decade out of school, to clarify what Hume believes and defend him from this wrongheaded criticism. I am not an expert on Hume, though I would love to be.1

For this and future posts on Hume, I’m participating in what I call a Hume binge. I’m reading as many books on Hume as I can get my hands on, written by experts. This exercise is fun for me, not just because I’m feeling validated in my memory of what Hume’s arguments were, but also because I realize that, as a student, I was so wrong about Hume.2

Out of the spirit of transparency, here are the books I’ve read:

• Who the Hell is David Hume by Mark Robson

• Hume: A Very Short Introduction by James A. Harris

• How to Read Hume By Simon Blackburn

I’m currently reading Hume by Don Garrett, while Hume (Arguments by philosophers) by Gary Stroud, The Infidel and The Professor by Dennis Rasmussen, Routledge philosophy guidebook to Hume, and Peter Millican’s Reading Hume on Human Understanding are all in the mail.

I also have an Amazon wishlist of Hume books I want to read on Hume, which you can find here.3

If you’ll notice, I’m saving the original works for last, and the reason why is simple: Hume writes in an old style that is hard to discern. In my opinion, the main reason people get Hume wrong is because they either only read someone critical of Hume or just excerpts of him without this expert guidance, and so they’re led astray.

My motivation for writing these posts is a response to feeling (unintentionally) gaslit by the internet about David Hume. I feel too many people are repeating falsehoods about his beliefs and arguments, and many of them should know better. So, I’m going to go back, be thorough, and have fun with this. I’m reading as much Hume as I can, so where I can argue about his beliefs.4

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Don’t Just Take My Word For It!

In this post, I’m going to be talking about how people get Hume wrong. Hume does not argue that miracles metaphysically can’t happen, nor does he make many of the arguments his critics allege. As far as I can tell, it is the consensus among Hume scholars that his argument Of Miracles is not an argument that miracles cannot happen.

But you don’t have to take my word for it, here are just a handful of quotes from the scholars I’ve read:

Naturally Hume is in no position to insist a priori that any consistently described event is impossible. If there is no contradiction in the supposition that an event occurred, then for all reason can tell us in advance, it might occur. According to him, the question of whether events of any particular kind actually do occur is always one for experience to settle. Hence the issue has to be fought not on the question of whether miracles are possible, but whether we can be assured that they have happened.

-Blackburn (page 70, Kindle Edition)

The issue here was not the abstract metaphysical question of whether or not miracles are possible. The general scepticism about metaphysics which Hume developed in the Treatise made it impossible for him to answer that question either way.

-Harris (page 85ish, Kindle edition)

Or, more bluntly (after Harris summarizes the synopsis of Hume’s argument)

It is worth emphasizing that this was not meant by Hume as a way of proving that miracles never happen. Instead it was meant to show that reasonable people, when faced with a report of a miracle, will always find the report incredible. For all their experience of the world will be against it-and (so Hume has shown in the Treatise) they have nothing other than experience on which to decide what to believe.

-Harris (page 86ish)

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What Hume Really Says About Miracles

Of Miracles is about how testimony by itself cannot rationally justify belief in miracles, and thus we cannot rationally accept foundational religious miracles because the only evidence we have for those miracles is testimony.

Notice how much more humble of a claim Hume is making about miracles. He’s not saying that miracles can’t happen or don’t happen (a metaphysical or ontological claim), but that if they did happen, testimony by itself would not be sufficient to establish their credibility (an epistemological claim).

The First Portion Is Important

A significant portion of the first few sections of Of Miracles discusses the relationship between testimony and experience, how experience is our primary way of evaluating events, and how we trust testimony because in our experience it generally correlates with experience.

To apply these principles to a particular instance; we may observe, that there is no species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even necessary to human life, than that which is derived from the testimony of men, and the reports of eye-witnesses and spectators. This species of reasoning, perhaps, one may deny to be founded on the relation of cause and effect. I shall not dispute about a word. It will be sufficient to observe, that our assurance in any argument of this kind is derived from no other principle than our observation of the veracity of human testimony, and of the usual conformity of facts to the reports of witnesses. It being a general maxim, that no objects have any discoverable connexion together, and that all the inferences, which we can draw from one to another, are founded merely on our experience of their constant and regular conjunction; it is evident, that we ought not to make an exception to this maxim in favour of human testimony, whose connexion with any event seems, in itself, as little necessary as any other. Were not the memory tenacious to a certain degree; had not men commonly an inclination to truth and a principle of probity; were they not sensible to shame, when detected in a falsehood: Were not these, I say, discovered by experience to be qualities, inherent in human nature, we should never repose the least confidence in human testimony. A man delirious, or noted for falsehood and villany, has no manner of authority with us.”

Of Miracles 10.5, SBN 111-2

For example, we trust when people report seeing rain because, in our experience, rain is real, and people claiming to see rain typically describe the situation accurately. We trust testimony because we experience the thing being attested. The problem for Hume is that we cannot do the same for testimony about miracles, because of the unlikelihood of miracles.

Most people who misread Hume start quoting him after or at the end of his discussion on the relationship between testimony and experience. They don’t recognize how:

1. This section is just the beginning of the argument,

2. The relevance of the preceding section in framing the relationship between testimony and experience

3. How the context of the entire piece narrows Hume’s claims about miracles to be about the sufficiency of testimony.

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The General Argument

Continuing on, per Harris’s summary of Hume, there are about five reasons to not find miracle testimony sufficient.

First, is the general claim that miracle reports go against common experience (Easy enough! That’s kind of what we’re arguing!).

Second, even if we were able to counter this uniform experience with uniform experience of the reliability of a witness, that wouldn’t overwrite common experience. Rather, in that situation, the reasonable person wouldn’t know what to believe because the evidence would be of equal weight, and so they would just suspend judgment.

Third, no historical miracle testimony, according to Hume, rises to that level of accountability.

Fourth, there seems to be an inverse correlation with education and miracle claims. Namely, to the extent educated people make and believe miracle claims, they’re usually purported by a long dead ancestor, while less educated people are more likely to make miracle claims today.5

Fifth and finally, if we use testimony by itself as evidence for a religious miracle or faith, we run into the inconvenient reality that many religious faiths attest to miracles that support contradictory conclusions.

Per Harris:

Hume’s conclusion is that it is a mistake to imagine that the Gospels might provide historical evidence of the actuality of Christ’s miracles, and hence of the truth of Christ’s redemptive message. “Our most holy religion,” Hume declares, “is founded on Faith, not reason.” Christian belief is itself a miracle, a subversion of reason such as could only be effected by God himself…He surely knew that “Of Miracles” would be taken by most readers as suggseting that the whole of Christianity was a superstitious delusion…”

(Harris 87)

Plausible Vs. Implausible Improbable Accounts

It’s also worth mentioning that Hume, later in his essay, draws the distinction between a miraculous event that he would consider plausible and a purported miraculous event that started a religion that he would dismiss out hand.

I beg the limitations here made may be remarked, when I say, that a miracle can never be proved, so as to be the foundation of a system of religion. For I own, that otherwise, there may possibly be miracles, or violations of the usual course of nature, of such a kind as to admit of proof from human testimony; though, perhaps, it will be impossible to find any such in all the records of history. Thus, suppose, all authors, in all languages, agree, that, from the first of January 1600, there was a total darkness over the whole earth for eight days: Suppose that the tradition of this extraordinary event is still strong and lively among the people: That all travellers, who return from foreign countries, bring us accounts of the same tradition, without the least variation or contradiction: It is evident, that our present philosophers, instead of doubting the fact, ought to receive it as certain, and ought to search for the causes whence it might be derived. The decay, corruption, and dissolution of nature, is an event rendered probable by so many analogies, that any phænomenon, which seems to have a tendency towards that catastrophe, comes within the reach of human testimony, if that testimony be very extensive and uniform.

But suppose, that all the historians who treat of England, should agree, that, on the first of January 1600, Queen Elizabeth died; that both before and after her death she was seen by her physicians and the whole court, as is usual with persons of her rank; that her successor was acknowledged and proclaimed by the parliament; and that, after being interred a month, she again appeared, resumed the throne, and governed England for three years: I must confess that I should be surprized at the concurrence of so many odd circumstances, but should not have the least inclination to believe so miraculous an event. I should not doubt of her pretended death, and of those other public circumstances that followed it: I should only assert it to have been pretended, and that it neither was, nor possibly could be real. You would in vain object to me the difficulty, and almost impossibility of deceiving the world in an affair of such consequence; the wisdom and solid judgment of that renowned queen; with the little or no advantage which she could reap from so poor an artifice: All this might astonish me; but I would still reply, that the knavery and folly of men are such common phænomena, that I should rather believe the most extraordinary events to arise from their concurrence, than admit of so signal a violation of the laws of nature.

But should this miracle be ascribed to any new system of religion; men, in all ages, have been so much imposed on by ridiculous stories of that kind, that this very circumstance would be a full proof of a cheat, and sufficient, with all men of sense, not only to make them reject the fact, but even reject it without farther examination. Though the Being to whom the miracle is ascribed, be, in this case, Almighty, it does not, upon that account, become a whit more probable; since it is impossible for us to know the attributes or actions of such a Being, otherwise than from the experience which we have of his productions, in the usual course of nature. This still reduces us to past observation, and obliges us to compare the instances of the violation of truth in the testimony of men, with those of the violation of the laws of nature by miracles, in order to judge which of them is most likely and probable. As the violations of truth are more common in the testimony concerning religious miracles, than in that concerning any other matter of fact; this must diminish very much the authority of the former testimony, and make us form a general resolution, never to lend any attention to it, with whatever specious pretence it may be covered.

-Of Miracles

If you’re misreading Hume, you think he’s singling out religion for an irrational reason, but in the context of the piece, it’s not irrational. The account of the sun darkening for days, and being purported by diverse testimony across cultures without religious significance is excellent evidence that something weird happened. Hume believes such evidence should lead philosophers to investigate what happened. This is in contrast to the idea that the Queen of England rose from the dead to govern, and this miracle started a religion.

Hume believes you can dismiss this out of hand because all of the reasons religious miracle claims incentivize people to lie, exaggerate, sensationalize, and otherwise promote falsehood. If you’re nitpicking Hume and not reading him in full, you’ll think he’s making up reasons to not believe the religious claims on the spot. But if you read Of Miracles in full, you’ll see the middle section goes on and on and on about how the incentives of religious belief lead people to deceive themselves and others.

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What Critics Get Wrong

Hume’s Of Miracles Is About Epistemology, Not Metaphysics/Ontology. Critics fail because they assume Hume is making an ontological or metaphysical claim about the validity of miracles, but instead an epistemological argument.

He’s not saying that miracles don’t happen, just that if they did, we would not be justified to believe them just on testimony, which happens to be the evidence we have for the natural miracles of religion.

Hume Has A Misinformation Problem

It’s one thing to be misunderstood by your critics, but with Hume, there’s a weird thing going on with social media and philosophy where it’s more normal to see people get him wrong than get him correct. Even people who make their living doing philosophy in some capacity butcher basic components of his argument.

For one example, here’s William Lane Craig, trying to come up with a simple argument to rebut Hume. Perhaps you could be charitable and say in his attempt to simplify his argument he misstated the argument, but I don’t think so. He uses an analogy to a crime scene where we recalculate the probability of a husband being a murderer, not based on testimony but based on…new non-testimonial evidence like DNA!

For another example, here’s the Apologetics YouTuber Testify. In the below video, he changes Hume’s claims about testimony to be about claims about evidence in general to overturn a miracle (at about 1:40). He then goes on to make the routine mistakes we’ve already outlined, and some more we’ll get to in a moment.

I hope the above summary that I’ve given about Hume’s arguments is sufficient to prove why this is silly. I’m not joking when I say that when you go into YouTube and search “Hume on miracles” these are first page results. It’s misinformation, and it’s bad for philosophy education. This post is intended to counterbalance it.

FLWAB Repeats These Mistakes

With all of that context out of the way, I want it clear that people getting Hume wrong is not a mark of unintelligence or dishonesty, so much as it’s just going with the flow or META of philosophy posting in 2025. It’s a meme at this point.

What’s more, people think they can go into centuries-old text without the aid of experts and understand its meaning, but that’s usually not the case, especially with Hume. He’s a hard read!

Most recently on Substack published two articles critical of Hume. The first I will address here, and the second one will be addressed in my next post. The first article was so well written, that it got a response from , which you can find here.

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I will admit, if Hume truly argued against miracles in the way FLWAB describes, this would be a compelling case against Hume. But it isn’t because it’s not the argument that Hume made, nor is it the argument that any Humean scholar would attribute to Hume.

I’m not going to go point by point on FLWAB, simply because this post is already long, while his post is relatively short.

First off, he quotes Hume at length to supposedly restate his argument. The quote is below, the bolding is FLWAB, the emphasis is mine (while uploading this onto Substack, I realized underlining doesn’t transfer over!) :

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined. Why is it more than probable that all men must die, that lead cannot of itself remain suspended in the air, that fire consumes wood and is extinguished by water, unless it is that these events are found agreeable to the laws of nature and there is required a violation of these laws or, in other words, a miracle to prevent them? Nothing is esteemed a miracle if it ever happen in the common course of nature. It is no miracle that a man, seemingly in good health, should die all of a sudden, because such a kind of death, though more unusual than any other, has yet been frequently observed to happen. But it is a miracle that a dead man should come to life, because that has never been observed in any age or country. There must, therefore, be a uniform experience against every miraculous event; otherwise the event would not merit that appellation. And as a uniform experience amounts to a proof, there is here a direct and full proof, from the nature of the fact, against the existence of any miracle, nor can such a proof be destroyed or the miracle rendered credible but by an opposite proof which is superior.

The plain consequence is (and it is a general maxim worthy of our attention): that no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony is of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force which remains after deducting the inferior.

Now, had you not read that context I gave you, about how Hume’s comments are about the insufficiency of testimony to establish a miracle, you may mistakenly revise in your head the bolded/italicized word “testimony” to mean “evidence.” But that is explicitly, literally, and definitely not what Hume is saying!

Operative words in sentences, change the entire meaning of a sentence. Guess What! For this essay, the word “testimony” is the operative word of the entire essay. Because Hume writes like an 18th century writer and is often hard to follow, people’s brains omit the word testimony when reading him, and so they misread him.6

All Hume is saying in this passage is the mundane fact that, to the extent that we trust testimony, it’s because it falls in line with our experience, and that testimony will always be at an evidential disadvantage to data we perceive directly. I outlined the summary of that argument above, so I’m not going to rehash it here.7

FLWAB’s argument really takes a negative turn when he tries to summarize Hume’s argument by way of a syllogism. Namely, the passage he is quoting/simplifying, is not Hume’s entire argument. The entire essay is the argument. As I already summarized above, this passage misses Hume’s key discussion about the relationship between trusting testimony and experience, and it stops before getting into the accumulated case of why testimony by itself isn’t sufficient to attest a miracle.

The argument really takes a negative turn when FLWAB says:

As [Hume] puts it, “It is experience only which gives authority to human testimony and it is the same experience which assures us of the laws of nature.” Yet clearly, this isn’t the case: any miracle claim is evidence against the experience being universal. If anybody has the experience of a dead body coming back to life, then it is not the case that there is uniform and firm experience that dead bodies do not come back to life. If a miracle claim exists at all, then the experience of miracles not occurring is not universal, and clearly there are a lot of miracle claims out there!

This is an equivocation and moving of the goal posts (Testify does something similar in his video). The issue is not whether the accumulated experience of individual peoples’ experiences of miracles is evidence of miracles, but if you, as a rational person balancing all of the evidence, should accept that testimony alone is sufficient evidence to accept a miracle claim.

To use a metaphor, the fact that lots of people report being abducted by UFOs is ontological/metaphysical evidence that these things may happen. But the individual testimony of your best friend saying he was abducted by aliens is not by itself sufficient evidence that it happened or that alien abductions happen.

In this metaphor, FLWAB is trying to argue the former, while Hume is arguing the latter. Both can be right! But the arguments aren’t really addressing the same thing.

And honestly, that’s all you need to know about FLWAB’s post. I initially tried to speed run rebuttals to the rest of his points, but he makes the same mistakes other Hume critics make: misunderstanding the full context of Of Miracles, confusing Hume’s epistemological claims with metaphysical or ontological ones, and subsequently moving the goal posts.

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What Was Innovative About Of Miracles

Based on my studies of Of Miracles and its surrounding discourse, people get it completely wrong why the essay was innovative.

Namely, Of Miracles isn’t trying to say that we can never believe miracles happen ever in the future, but that we don’t have good evidence for the miracles that happened in the distant past. Because the evidence we have for those miracles today are just testimony!

And if we can’t feel confident about the evidence of those miracles, we can’t be confident in the rational foundation of religion, as reasonable observers won’t be convinced by the evidence.8

That doesn’t mean the miracles didn’t happen, that religion is false, or that God isn’t real. Indeed, reasonable people can be unconvinced of something that is ultimately true.9

But in Of Miracles, Hume isn’t arguing these points; He’s just arguing that there isn’t a rational foundation for believing in the establishment of miraculous religion, given the insufficiency of testimony.

The second innovation of Hume’s argument is that, funnily enough, everyone kind of agrees with him that testimony by itself isn’t enough to prove a miracle!

For example, everyone currently making arguments about Fatima on substack are…not relying just on testimony! We’re staring at the sun like maniacs! Evaluating its place in the sky over Portugal in 1917! Looking at old ass black and white photos for evidence of moisture!

As I was writing this post, I got this great comment on a note by

Hume actually already won this debate about miracles over 250 years ago, we take for granted his argument, and we don’t give him credit! So I’ll give credit to my GOAT here: For at least providing a philosophy 101 reference, David Hume, collect your flowers! Internet commenters who get him wrong, show up to detention!

Unfortunately, one of the most recent editions of this double standard is claiming “A core area of disagreement between atheism and theism: Is theism ridiculous.”

Bentham's Newsletter

A Core Area of Disagreement Between Theists and Atheists: Is Theism Ridiculous?

There are many disagreements between theists and atheists. They differ, of course, in their assessments of whether various arguments for God’s existence are successful. But in my view, the biggest difference between the two is in terms of their broader approach to the question. Specifically, the most significant area of disagreement concerns whether …

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7 months ago · 40 likes · 105 comments · Bentham's Bulldog

This is tiresome for a few reasons:

First, BB perpetuates negative atheist stereotypes, with a neckbearded wojack being the feature image of the post. Look: I don’t want to be oversensitive, but as a non-believer, I think we should treat the invocation of this imagery as unhinged, much as normal people treat those who portray the average religious people as Bible-thumping, gay bashing, science-denying, theocratic maniacs as unhinged.1

Second, and most importantly, he doesn’t cite any actual atheist who says religion is ridiculous. There’s no polling, no quote, no data at all. I’m not going to pretend there aren’t atheists who believe that religion or theism is ridiculous, but if you’re going to make a bold claim, that ridiculousness is a core disagreement for people in this debate, you should probably cite data.

I watch a sufficient amount of atheist YouTube and read enough atheist substack2 that this is resoundingly not my impression of a core disagreement between theists and atheists.

Sure, there are plenty of atheists who are outraged by religious logic and how it’s used to justify bad norms and policies. There are plenty who find religious ideas and philosophy unsatisfactory and incoherent. And yes, there are even some who crash out in frustration, and just call it ridiculous, among other mean things.

But that last group is a minority. If you engage with the people who create content that’s above the effort level typically found in the comment section, (which are themselves unrepresentative because most people don’t comment on videos and blogs), you’ll find respect and civility displayed toward religion, even if there’s also disagreement.

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The Low Hanging Fruit

My initial facetious note-length reply to BB’s post is that he’s making up a phenomenon to explain another phenomenon he also made up, but that isn’t quite fair.

Sure, he doesn’t cite any data to show this is a core disagreement, but we’ve all seen atheists in comment sections who were just arrogant, mean, and trollish. That’s data of a kind, but it’s bad data. The average Christian in America is probably worse than the average atheist at understanding what the other believes.

The median atheist in America was either born Christian/religious, was raised by someone who was born Christian/religious, or has someone very close to them who is Christian/religious. They likely left religion after years of being a believer. Meanwhile, the average Christian in America was born Christian and has probably note encountered public non-believers until recently. To make matters worse, many Christians are intentionally not friends with atheists because they are atheists. They think they’re untrustworthy and immoral.3

What’s funny about BB’s argument about smart people disagreeing with you being evidence that you shouldn’t be too confident that you’re right, is that it’s just as true (if not more true!) for non-belief as it is for belief. There are just as many (of not more!) really smart people who don’t believe in God as those who don’t.

Yet BB is not directing his lecture at the 60% of the American population that’s Christian, but the 5% that’s atheist. What exactly are we doing here?

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Stereotypes Are Bad

Perhaps BB wants to rebut the cringe reddit atheist he was in high school, he wants to explicate that demon. That’s fine! But generalizing atheists in this way is just purveying negative stereotypes.

One will often see religious apologists wave off the vicious excesses of less-intellectually-curious Christians as “not serious” Christians.4 Okay, let’s grant that. Why can’t we say the same thing about anonymous atheist commenters? Because when we fail to make that distinction, and perpetuate stereotypes in articles like BB’s, you put people like me on the defensive.

Though every group is stereotyped, we consider perpetuating stereotypes bad. But somehow, in popular philosophy of religion discourse, it’s normal to treat all atheists like angry reddit commenters. It’s a weird and obvious dynamic, noticed by any non-believer commenting on these issues!

Normal People Are Prohibited From Atheism

BB finishes his post giving boilerplate reasons for why he believes God is more plausible than atheism. These arguments are not meant to be comprehensive, as one who has followed BB will know he has argued at length about them, so I won’t put them under a microscope.

Still, I reject the implication he makes that one has to read all or even 10% or 1% of the theodicy literature to reject theodicies. Specifically, he says:

Very clever people, over the years, have thought of many theodicies, some of almost unfathomable complexity. You—who presumably haven’t read even 1% of what is written on the subject—should not be 99.999% confident that they all fail. You should, in other words, think there is some not unreasonable possibility that God, if he exists, has a good reason for allowing evil.

First of all, BB undersells how many theodicies are! When I took a philosophy of religion class back in the early 2010s, my (theist) professor said that in the aftermath of World War II, you could fill a library with the books written on the problem of evil. I’m not sure if he was just being rhetorical, but I bet you could spend an entire professional career reading all of them.

On a basic level, I think the atheist is going to approach the volume of problem of evil papers differently from BB. Is the fact that we have thousands of papers on the problem of evil indicate that philosophers are just the guy in the striking gold meme…

…or is just that we have a poorly formulated question that won’t have a satisfactory solution?

I personally like ’s thoughts on the Problem of Evil in its academic context, some of it joking, some of it not:

Increasing Wisdom

Funny Vid on Problem of Evil

About the Author…

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a year ago · 6 likes · Bryan Frances

I am not smart enough to formulate the conclusive argument for or against theism, to end all religious debates for all time. But at the same time, why is the onus on me, some dude with an email job?

This is again, a double standard. The early 2010s New Atheist in me wants to just call it the Courtier’s Reply, even though it’s probably not. Regardless, it’s unfair that the only thing you have to do to be socially and intellectually accepted as a Christian (see: Bentham and apologists will ignore you, not call you intellectually lazy, and not put up mean stereotyped imagery of you) is accept Jesus into your heart as your savior, while to be socially and intellectually accepted as an atheist you need a PhD in philosophy and read everything ever published on the Problem of Evil.

I love philosophy and reading as much as the next guy. I'm more read on philosophy than the average person. But I intentionally didn't become a philosophy academic because I knew that there was no end to these debates. To the extent that any belief can ever be “justified” (however you may mean that), one doesn't have to reach academic levels of education in the subject, or obsessive levels of hobbyism, to be educated and confident enough to form an opinion.

Unlike something like quantum physics or pharmaceutical research, belief in God is something that effects everyone. The implications of the truth or falsity of God’s existence may touch every aspects of one’s life. Saying or implying an atheist must do all this work, while remaining silent on the pervasive thoughtlessness of many (if not most) theists is an elitist double standard.

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A Skeptic Argument For Ridiculousness

Before I close, I want to outline a skeptical argument to take religious arguments seriously, especially if you find them ridiculous. BB is right, ridiculousness is not good grounds to reject Christianity, but not for the reasons he thinks. Once again Bryan Frances (who I’ll remind you is a skeptic) knocked it out of the park:

Increasing Wisdom

Possibility of God Existing & Venus Being Made of Cheese

About the Author…

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8 months ago · 9 likes · Bryan Frances

If you’re a true skeptic, the apparent ridiculousness of theistic beliefs should not in itself be evidence against theism, because reality as we observe it and can (somewhat) empirically verify it is ridiculous.

The fact that there are atoms is weird! The fact that our species evolved from mammals that swung on trees is weird!

You can look at any established scientific fact and call it ridiculous, because the only reason we don’t think these facts are ridiculous is because they fit in a framework we are familiar with. Specific facts are familiar, we’re desensitized to them, and then they don’t seem crazy. The ridiculousness fades. Ergo, we are a bad judge or ridiculousness!

Further, when we zoom out and talk about things outside of our direct experience and perception, all of those things look ridiculous and weird because we have no frame of reference. Quantum physics? Weird. Pulsars? Absurd? My favorite FCS football team scoring 50 points in a game in the 2020s? Ridiculous.5

It would be weird both if there is and if there isn’t a God. The only thing that would make sense of God’s non/existence is the surrounding context of that fact or explanation, and as an existential condition, that context will always be outside of empirical verification.

At the end of the day, everyone is a poor judge on what is true and what is ridiculous. The whole point of philosophy and science is to make sense of this ridiculousness, as best we can. People who reject ideas because they are ridiculous6 are themselves rejecting to think, and for that reason we should not take their opinions seriously.

Still, the people who are problematic here are not mostly skeptics or atheists. I’m tired of these stereotypes being normalized because it makes my life more annoying.7

Constructive Skepticism

Christians Have Good Reason To Reject Modern Spectacular Miracles

I teased you via notes about a post on *xp*ct*d V*lu*, but I don’t find adding more at this time will progress the conversation. What I want to talk about is the other discourse that has enflamed substack that I have otherwise been silent on: Miracles…

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7 months ago · 15 likes · 2 comments · Joe James

But then Scott Alexander posted his lengthy thoughts, resurrecting the discourse.

Astral Codex Ten

The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

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7 months ago · 503 likes · 598 comments · Scott Alexander

At one point, Alexander says this, and it sticks out to me:

I will admit my bias: I hope the visions of Fatima were untrue, and therefore I must also hope the Miracle of the Sun was a fake. But I’ll also admit this: at times when doing this research, I was genuinely scared and confused. If at this point you’re also scared and confused, then I’ve done my job as a writer and successfully presented the key insight of Rationalism: “It ain’t a true crisis of faith unless it could go either way”.

(bold/italics are mine)

Upon reading this, I realized that my brain operates differently from Alexander.

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On Hypothesis Testing And Its Shortcomings

In the philosophy of science (or at least how it’s expressed online), thinkers rely heavily on hypothesis testing. My best attempt at expressing hypothesis testing as it’s used on substack is:

“If you have hypothesis A and hypothesis B, and the data better (even if imperfectly) fits hypothesis B, hypothesis B is more likely to be true.”

There are bayesian justifications of this kind of formulation.

For example, if we’re trying to evaluate if someone stole my wallet or I just lost by wallet, we formulate different hypotheses, and think of data we would gather to support either one. In the stolen wallet hypothesis, one data point we’d look for is evidence of forcible entry. If I live in a small apartment and my wallet is missing, but also the door is broken, all of my things are scattered about, and valuable items are missing, it’s more likely that someone stole my wallet than I simply lost it.

There are at least two shortcomings with hypothesis testing. These problems don’t render hypothesis testing useless, but instead demonstrate its limitations:

1. A hypothesis being a more likely match with data does not mean it is correct, just that it is more likely correct than alternatives. In a bayesian sense, you may be obligated to accept a hypothesis because it best fits the data, but you also have the option to be agnostic, saying that there’s not good enough evidence to accept any available hypothesis as plausible.

2. Hypothesis testing (and its logic) is optimal when you’re running an experiment (controlling for variables, measuring everything, etc.), but it becomes less useful when evaluating mysterious circumstances that happened in the past, where we have little data and less direct experiences with the events that have occurred (sun miracles, virgin births, universes beginning, etc.)

Point number one seems easy enough. If you’re operating in an environment with uncertain information and you’re trying to act optimally rational, it makes sense to accept the best hypotheses, even if they’re imperfect (assuming inaction or agnosticism isn’t an option). But at the same time, when we’re evaluating truth claims on religion and science, we are not operating in that environment. We have the option to be agnostic.

Point number two may seem problematic on first blush, but it need not be. Just because hypothesis testing is less helpful when evaluating mysterious, rare, and past occurrences, doesn’t mean that it’s useless for those circumstances, just that we should be aware of its limitations and higher uncertainty.

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Humean Caution

In Alexander’s telling, the data briefly appeared to fit the “miraculous” hypotheses more than the naturalistic ones.1 Under a hypothesis testing framework, if it’s more likely that Fatima was a miracle or evaded current naturalistic explanations, then it’s more likely that Christianity, specifically Catholicism, is true. That’s unsettling if you’ve lived your life as a non-Christian!

I want to be very clear here that Scott Alexander knows (and has forgotten) more science and philosophy of science than I do. Still, I’m genuinely puzzled why the temporary shortcomings of naturalistic explanations for Fatima gave him a crisis of faith. Similarly, I have seen people on substack use hypothesis testing to a fault, especially in circumstances where we just don’t have enough data or knowledge to evaluate an explanation. I think SA’s crisis of faith followed a similar fault.

To avoid that fault in the future, I recommend what I call Humean Caution.

Humean Caution is simply the predisposition to disbelieve supernatural explanations because humans have a hard time discerning even naturalistic explanations. Further, if you look closely at miracles as proof of religious claim, you’ll see that they make much bolder claims than their evidence implies, even assuming the supposed miracle is miraculous. To understand what that means, we have to understand the philosophy of David Hume.

Induction, Observation, And Miracles

The problem of induction is one of Hume’s most famous philosophical problems. The shortest way of communicating it is that humans may observe events happening in sequence, but we don’t actually observe causation.

When a billiard ball hits another billiard ball and they both move, we infer that the first ball making contact with the second ball caused the second ball to move. In reality, the movements could have just as easily been spontaneous. Both explanations would look indistinguishable to the human eye. We affirm the causality hypothesis because it feels right and creates the best explanation for predictable results. Yet still, induction is fallible and any induction could be falsified at any time.

In the context of hypothesis testing, humean caution warns against accepting wholesale explanations of weird, rare phenomenon. That means rejecting hypotheses that themselves aren’t substantiated. To express this, I’ll refer to atheist edgelord Christopher Hitchens and the purported miracle of the virgin birth of Jesus.

Put in a more succinct way, even if we could go back and time and track the Virgin Mary and confirm that she never consorted with a man before becoming pregnant with Jesus, that by itself does not mean that Jesus was the son of God!

Under a hypothesis testing framework, I grant that it is much more likely to be the case that Jesus is the son of God conditional on Mary being a virgin, but it does not mean that Mary being a virgin proves Jesus is the son of God. The evidence we hypothetically observed (that He was born of a virgin) does not prove the outcome (that Jesus is the son of God).

Indeed, many of these supernatural claims entail causal relationships that no human being has observed. How would one demonstrate that Jesus was God causally? How could we show that a sun miracle was caused by God or Mary and not some other powerful entity like aliens? The response to this rhetorical question is usually that we judge God or Mary to be more likely to act in these ways. But again: More likely is not the same as true or certain!

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The language of miracles and religion plays fast and loose with the human bias for inference, how we infer causation and agency everywhere. Put more specifically, miracle language collapses the distinction between “I did this special thing” and “Everything I say about myself is true.”

In this way, a man rising from the dead does not itself prove him to be God, as there could be any number of alternative explanations.2 The religious often assume a miraculous event automatically proves a maximal explanation of a religious hypothesis (that the event happened, that it was performed by the religious figure, and the the religious figure is all of the things she says she is), when the actual data proves minimal (that the event happened).

The Humean Response

In the context of Fatima and other miracles, the Humean retort is so what? Something weird happened in Portugal over 100 years ago, does that mean I have to join the Catholic Church, or take the Pope’s opinion about current events and politics more seriously, or a host of other propositions? No!

It can be the case that something miraculous happened at Fatima and all of that other claims associated with the Catholic hypothesis are still false. Obviously, under a hypothesis-testing framework the Catholic hypothesis is less likely to be false, but the weirdness of Fatima does not outweigh all the other variables that we would consider when evaluating the truth or falsity of Christianity or Roman Catholicism.

Does Humean Caution Render Me Stubborn?

I understand if a believer reads this and finds it frustrating. It sounds as if I’m saying no miracle could convince me of a religion’s truth, and that there’s no evidence that could lead me to accept a miracle. Upon reflection, I don’t think that’s a straw man of my position. I know that makes me sound stubborn or irrational, but let me explain:

First, I think agnosticism on matters of fact is permissible for at least two circumstances: On events that one does not directly perceive and for facts that have no measurable consequence on one’s life. I like knowing and understanding things as much as the next guy, but the number of facts I don’t know out there (will always!) far eclipse the ones I do, I can’t know it all, and so I have to make a strategic decision to not form opinions all the time.3

Though the question of God’s existence certainly has consequences for my life, the question of Fatima does not.

To the extent you can ever get me to say I don’t have a naturalistic explanation for a purported miracle, I’m going to err on “I don’t know,” before “it was a miracle!” The causal variables where one could evaluate miracles (supernatural powers) are always going to be out of my perception for evaluation. Though I can evaluate and eliminate known natural explanations, I can’t evaluate a supernatural one, even if I believe them. I don’t see how I could accept a supernatural hypothesis without direct evidence for it and also not accept a natural hypothesis without direct evidence for it. I’m just holding the supernatural explanation to an equal standard.

Second, the reason why miracle discourse is hot on substack is because the non-believers who take it seriously are engaging believers on even playing field. Other skeptics are saying the equivalent of: “I don’t believe miracles can happen, but let’s assume they can, and evaluate the evidence, because I can ‘beat’ you on both footings.”4 I personally don’t have the energy or patience for this!

But even if I did, I am more interested in examining these formulation questions, that are swept under the rug when we skip directly to hypothesis testing: What does a miracle actually look like, how would we know that it was God that did this, and so on and so on.

Another way of putting this is that I can’t evaluate a hypothesis if the hypothesis doesn’t make sense to me. And many theistic arguments and hypothesis don’t make sense to me! When I say that, I don’t mean that in the edgy internet atheist “I can’t take that opinion seriously” kind of way (that Bentham dunked on as I was writing this). Rather, I mean, “when I apply scrutiny to the language being used here, I find it inapplicable or unsubstantiated.”5

Third, I don’t think miracles would be good evidence for God, even if I did believe in God. I basically wrote about this in my last post, so I won’t linger too long. Miracles are always going to be bad pieces of evidence for God’s existence because they are so rare and sketchy. If I were God, I wouldn’t want people to believe in me over miracles, and to the extent I would, I would make those miracles unambiguous and theologically important, as we see in scripture. Put in hypothesis-testing terms, in my God-is-real hypothesis, spectacular contemporary miracles would not be real, so I couldn’t affirm God’s existence and a miracle at the same time.

Fourth and finally, none of this means I’m stubborn or unreasonable. People believe or don’t believe in God for various reasons, some of them self-reinforcing. There are millions of Christians who believe in Christianity and have never heard of Fatima or other direct experiences of miracles outside of the Bible. Some religious people get into their faith through apologetics, others through service, others through pilgrimage, and others still through other means. I have my personal criteria for conversion, but I’m not sharing it here, because that’s none of your business.

In the meantime, I’ll practice Humean Caution whenever people make extravagant miracle claims. In my experience, these claims are usually bunk; when they aren’t, they say much less about God, and more about His proponents’ unfamiliarity with Hume.6

I’m not going to approach it in the same ways other writers have, by examining evidence, evaluating claims, comparing probabilities, and all that other stuff. No, that’s boring.

Instead, I want to incorporate my signature Constructive Skepticism (TM) with my less-well-known intellectual side hustle: Biblical Studies.

My assertion here is that contemporary spectacular miracles (which I will define), don’t appear to be demonstrations of power, don’t communicate novel theological ideas, and contradict the purpose of divine hiddenness. They seem to be out of continuity with biblical and Christian accounts of miracles, Christian conceptions of God, and so they should be discarded.

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Miracles As Demonstrations Of Power

Miracles in the Bible have specific purposes. Namely, they primarily function as demonstrations of power, as expected by ancient peoples.

Ancient peoples believed that Gods and otherwise spiritual entities were everywhere. YHWH (or God) was not the only one who could perform miracle. But the best way to demonstrate the superiority of any God was to have contesting miracles and have one “win.”

A good example of this is in the Exodus story, and you’ve probably heard of it. When visiting Pharaoh to set the Israelites free1, God turned Moses’s staff into a snake. Unphased, Pharaoh’s priests/magicians in turn performed the same miracle. Returning serve, Moses’s snake fought and ate both of Pharaoh’s snake.2

The lesson? The God of Israel is mightier than the Gods of Egypt!

As far as I can tell (and this is just my read of experts as I am not one), ancient Jews were just like other peoples in that they believed in the existence of multiple Gods and celestial beings but they only worshipped one. Hence, the first commandment: “You shall have no other Gods before me.” In this regard, Jews were henotheistic.3

It’s probably true that ancient Christians were also henotheistic, and the proponents of miracles today may be too. Instead of focusing on the credence Christians and other believers put onto non-Christian miracles, I want to instead focus on the demonstrations of power, as people expect it.

Namely, neither the modern equivalent of Egyptian priests or Moses are turning staffs to snakes, fighting, with an ultimate winner. I’m not even sure what that would look like!

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Perhaps one could say that the modern competing Gods are those of the major religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, etc.) and secular materialism. Perhaps every miracle is inherently a triumph of the God of Abraham over the God of modernity. Perhaps.

The problem is that in Pharaoh’s court, you couldn’t dispute that Moses’s staff turned into a snake and ate both of Pharaoh’s. As evident by substack discourse, this is not the case with modern miracles. If anything, this makes God more diminished than he was 2000 years ago. Given that it’s understood that God is omnipotent, being diminished compromises his character, and so even a Christian should be less inclined to believe in them.

Put simply, when God performed a miracle in Biblical times, it was spectacular, indisputable, and its implications were unambiguous, even among skeptical eyewitness. That’s not true for modern miracles! Even if you view purported modern miracles as spectacular and indisputable, their implications are very ambiguous.

Miracles Communicated A Theological Message

Miracles in the Bible were not exclusively or even mostly about showing up a rival tribal deity, they often did other important things, like communicate a theological truth as well. For instance, when Jesus heals someone in the gospels, it communicates something about the grace of God, as well as how one’s faith in Christ will lead you to be healed.4

But specific miracles in the Bible often convey deeper theological themes. The Israelites crossing the Red Sea/Reed Sea is a good example of this. Pete Enns, in his book Exodus for Normal People describes:

The crossing of the Sea of Reeds is a mini replay of creation. In Genesis, the earth was “formed out of” (“came out from under”) water. In Exodus, the hostile waters are split, allowing the dry land to appear and giving life to the Israelites. Then, in a replay of the flood story, the waters come crashing back down again on the unrighteous Egyptians. In both stories, water is tamed to yield life—and released to bring death. Throughout the Bible, water brings either death or life, depending on which side you’re on. The Creator God who ordered the cosmos at the dawn of time is now, in the same manner, saving God’s people from the enemy…salvation is like creation happening again on a smaller scale.5

Put low credence on the following specific claim; I read it somewhere but can’t find the citation, but it’s so cool I wanted to include it. I may be wrong, but trust me bro:

The Israelites crossing the red sea itself was a miracle that also completed a covenantal ritual. In Genesis 15, when God reveals his promise to Abraham, the subtext of verses 12-21, but specifically verse 17, is a portion of a covenantal ritual:

“When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces”

In such a ritual, both parties pass through burnt offerings, but the kicker here is that Abraham fell asleep before he could do his part of the ritual, but God did not. God started the ritual (by appearing as a blazing torch passing between pieces sacrificed animals), but Abraham didn’t finish it!

But when the Israelites cross the Red/Reed sea (passing through parted water!), they completed the ritual and affirmed their part in the covenant. By virtue of being delivered from Egypt, the Israelites joined the covenant.

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Again, I’m not sure how true that interpretation is, but it’s really cool and I wanted to share it.

The Bible is full of this layered symbolism, much of it lost to today’s common reader because the Bible was constantly in conversation with other religions and cultures. But the miracles that happened (if they happened!) communicated theological points in a spectacular manner that everyone could understand their significance.

Another example of this is in the book of Matthew 27:52-53, when,

“The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.”

Regardless of the truth of this miracle, it’s conveying a theological point for the future: Namely that the dead will rise again after Jesus. Jesus is the first to be resurrected, and so too will others.

In all, Biblical miracles communicated theological points, usually novel ones that built on previous theologies. Compare this with purported contemporary miracles. They aren’t used to say anything new about God or theology, but to affirm old theological points.

To pick on the Catholics for a moment, the numerous Catholic miracles don’t radically alter or reform Catholic theology, so much as they affirm already believed teachings and dogma. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but as a student of the Bible and a cradle Protestant, it’s reasonable to view such miracles as out of continuity with biblical miracles.

Contemporary Spectacular Miracles Are Problematic

Thus far, I’ve used the term “miracles” broadly, but I want to draw a distinction here. Namely, I think there are two kinds of miracles: spectacular and personal.

• Spectacular miracles are the kind of miracles substack is debating: supernatural violations of our understanding of nature.

• Personal miracles are a matter of interpretation: weird, improbable occurrences that can be explained by luck or coincidence, but have personal significance for the one benefiting from it.

I draw the distinction between personal and spectacular miracles, because all of the miracles described in scripture are spectacular, while I suspect most people believe they have experienced a personal miracle.

Given what we’ve talked about thus far, that miracles were unambiguous and indisputable demonstrations of God’s superior power to other Gods, and that they communicated a theological message that influenced Christian teaching, I don’t believe Christians should expect spectacular miracles.6

If spectacular miracles happened, it would demonstrate:

• God seeing superior value in revealing himself as opposed to staying hidden,

• God’s need to demonstrate His superior power to other gods,

• God’s need to communicate additional theological truths beyond the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus

The problem is that, based on my understanding of Christian theology, philosophy, and history, I don’t think this is in line with the Christian God’s character.

Divine Hiddenness

If spectacular miracles did happen, they would violate many of the goods Christian philosophers and theologians purport, specifically those that respond to Divine Hiddenness. Richard Swinburne names some in the course of this video:

It doesn’t make sense that God hides himself to allow us to practice moral autonomy and goodness that we otherwise wouldn’t with God’s constant presence, and at the same time, reminds us of his constant presence with clear and incontrovertibly evidence through spectacular miracles.

That’s not to say that no species of miracles, like personal miracles, ever happen, but incontrovertible spectacular miracles contradict and violate the goods of divine hiddenness.

Does God Need To Demonstrate Superior Power To Other Gods?

Now, God revealing himself and performing miracles in biblical times is permissible because at the time miracles were supposedly pervasive. It was objectively a superstitious time, and God performing miracles wasn’t seen as extraordinary as it is today.

What’s more, if God is a Christian God, there are particular things He needed to reveal about himself or reality that could not be discovered without revelation. Call it the gospel. It makes sense that He would perform miracles to both draw attention to the gospel and His church at a time when the world is maximally receptive to miracles.

If its His intention to create the goods that come from divine hiddenness, it also makes sense that the revelation of the gospel through spectacular miracles would be limited, and after a time, He would retreat to hiddenness, while also invisibly sustaining the Christian church through the Holy Spirit.

Another way of putting this is that miracles were necessary early on to establish the faith of the Christian church, tradition, and scripture, but as time progressed, the only thing that was necessary to sustain those things was grace, the Holy Spirit, and Christian faithfulness.7

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So does God need to demonstrate superior power to other Gods today? Does God need to be put to the test? The obvious, scriptural answer of this is no.8 The reason why, I presume, is because God is sovereign and above everything else. We don’t see the equivalent of cosmic rap battles anymore because Christianity forbids it. But even if this weren’t the case, I don’t see non-Christian Gods squaring off in miraculous battles, so why would God?

Skeptics would assert that the reason why we don’t see these cosmic battles anymore is because they probably didn’t ever happen, but the Christian need not concede that much. Non-Christian Gods don’t commit powerful and convincing miracles today, so why should the Christian God? He already performed the necessary miracles to save the world.

Was Jesus Not Enough?

If you believe that modern miracles are in continuity with biblical miracles, perhaps you don’t believe that God needs to be put to the test with other deities, but you maybe you see it as necessary for the second Biblical reason: conveying a theological truth. Some Christians (seem to) assert that evidence of supernaturalism is necessary to sustain the faith of Christians, but I think this speaks too lowly of the Christian God.

If the Gospel is perfect, God is omnipotent, the Holy Spirit is working in the world today, and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was sufficient for salvation, why would God need to perform miracles today? He’s already done quite enough and arguably these are all themselves miracles!

Put another way, the ongoing influence (and success!) of the Bible, the Christian tradition, and the Christian churches relative to other religions is the ultimate demonstration of power on society, more than a miraculous rap battle ever could be.

If you’re a Christian, you believe God is all-powerful and all-knowing. The idea that he would need to continue to intervene in history in spectacular ways to maintain people’s faith implies a degree of impotence and incompetence. His teachings and past miracles just aren’t good enough to save the world; he’s strong enough to stop the sun in the sky, but not enough to put forward a persuasive message? That doesn’t appear to be the Christian God to me.

But What About Personal Miracles?

In ancient times, miracles were demonstrations of power to persuade ancient people to follow one deity over another; for Christians, they also conveyed novel theological information. In modern times, the Christian God does not need to demonstrate power, because other spiritual beings are so impotent, while Christian influence is powerful. What’s more, if you believe in the power of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ, you also believe that miracles to communicate novel theology is not necessary.

The good news is, if you’re a Christian, it’s okay and perhaps even required to believe in personal miracles. As a Christian, you’re supposed to believe there is agency behind the randomness of the world, and that God is the source of that agency, that He loves you, looks out for you, and has a plan for you. Of course you should interpret some experiences of good luck as a little miracle!

If you accept personal miracles, you have the benefits of knowing God loves you without the costs of spectacular miracles that implicitly compromise the Christian God’s character. Though you sacrifice the persuasive power that comes with having hard evidence, in my opinion, “hard evidence that will convince non-believers” is not the point of Christian faith. But that’s a post for another time.

Messy Forgiveness

The viral clip of Erika Kirk’s forgiving Tyler Robinson2 of her husband’s murder rubbed me the wrong way. I told my fiancee3 that if I was brutally murdered in front of millions of people, and she forgave the murderer at a memorial service in front of thousands within a fortnight, I would come back and haunt her.

Far be it from me to tell a grieving widow how she should grieve, but my experience with public facing Christianity made me uneasy with the spectacle of her forgiveness. I agree that we need to forgive people more as a society, and provide the space for that forgiveness, but I believe we also need more time, space, and privacy to feel authentic negative emotion.

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I’ve thankfully not been in the position where someone I know closely has been murdered, but I know that I would probably be distraught with various powerful and negative emotions for a while. If I was murdered, I would want my loved ones to forgive my murderer eventually but not immediately (but also mad respect to them if they never did!), if only because it helps them heal.

Forgiveness should come toward the end of the healing process, not toward the beginning. When it comes early, regardless of the infraction, it runs the risk of incentivizing bad behavior or failing to hold to account bad behavior. Obviously, accountability in a case like this is somewhat irrelevant because the state is involved and will be holding the murderer accountable, but my point is that when bad things happen to us or the people we love, retributive and otherwise negative emotions are overwhelming.

It’s valid and healthy to not forgive someone who has severely wronged you because it indicates the depth of your loss and the pain you feel. Forgiveness, however, is often necessary to heal. The overwhelmingly negative emotions can become a road block to healing, and forgiveness is the tool we use to override those emotions. Put another way: whenever I forgive people, it’s usually not for their sake, but my own.

In this way, I don’t think accelerated forgiveness is healthy because you may be suppressing valid negative emotions for the sake of maintain relationships. If you put the forgiveness cart in front of the healing horse, you will not heal!

So, when Erika Kirk forgives her husband’s murderer, there is something powerful there.4 I just worry that it’s rushed and the cost of her own healing.

What’s more, I think spectacular public gestures like this can be harmful. Christianity suffers from an inherently religious problem, where instructions become somewhat idolatrous. Namely, Jesus, a prophet, or some other holy man instructed their followers to do one thing for a reason for a purpose that was contextual to their time, but not explicitly stated in the text. Over time, adherents do the practice because they were told to do it, not for the contextual reason. This eventually leads to a weird idolatry problem, where the practice itself is seen as fundamental to the religion, but the social function is lost. Someone on substack recently referred to Jewish and Christian prohibitions on idolatry as just codifying Goodhart’s Law, and I couldn’t say it better.5

Forgiveness in Christianity is a good example of this idolatrous dynamic. There is a social reason for forgiveness, and the mere fact that God can forgive anything in an instant is a testament of God’s greatness. But it’s also a sign of psychological perfection that is impossible for human beings.

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When churches strive for that perfection, they end up hurting people. Call it Toxic Christian Forgiveness: If you read various court filings of churches that covered up systemic abuse, especially sexual abuse, victims are often pressured to forgive abusers and shamed if they don’t or if they continue making a fuss.

Kirk’s forgiveness is hers to express and distribute, I just hope that she didn’t feel pushed to do something she was not ready to do. Some people never forgive people who hurt them, and that’s okay. I worry that she did, but I’m more worried that her example will be used to further the harms of Toxic Christian Forgiveness.

Again and finally: the problem is not forgiveness, but the pace of forgiveness, and prioritizing forgiveness over healing and accountability.

Is Philosophy Boring?

I have found on substack that a lot of philosophy is just…boring?

Don’t get me wrong: Philosophy is important, especially the boring parts, but I get the impression that the practice of philosophy is for the idiosyncratic and obssesive.

Philosophy is certainly useful. “Conceptual engineering,” the exploration of what words mean, their use case, etc., is important. But lots of philosophy seems to go farther than just exploring what words mean!

Namely, when I think of a philosopher or someone with strong philosophical opinions, they seem to say “I believe this subset of words mean this one thing, while those people over there think it means something else. They’re wrong and may also be threats to society. Anyway, I’m restructuring my life as a result of the implications of these specific words. Also, do you want to see my bug collection?6”

In all this, what makes philosophy kind of boring to me at the moment is that I don’t think words and beliefs function independently of the whole of one’s life experiences.

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The fixation on restructuring one’s beliefs and life based on the implications of atomistic conceptual engineering seems wrong and obsessive. What makes it so is that it takes a small segment of one’s life (arguably, how one defines words) and demands one to radically reorient one’s life. Your definition of pain, morality, consistency, etc informs how you live your entire life, instead of (my preferred way of doing philosophy) how you live your life influencing your definitions.

I don’t typically engage with the deeper kinds of philosophical conversation, not only because I’m unqualified, but also because I don’t care and don’t think the consequences of these conversations are significant to care. I don’t care about free will, consciousness, or advanced decision theory.

None of this is to say that philosophy is bad or useless or that the implication of words is meaningless or that the proper understanding of words can’t or shouldn’t lead to significant life changes. I just don’t think much of the philosophy I observe is all that useful and that discovering the “correct” answers won’t change my life that much.

Infinite Value is Useless

So, everyone is arguing about Pascal’s Wager. Pascal’s Wager is one of the more annoying arguments for religious belief because most people misunderstand it. It’s a different argument than what most people are used to. Namely, it’s not an explicit argument about the Truth of God’s existence or non-existence, but a value proposition about what you should believe, given the payoffs or consequences of a worldview being true.

Before I give my thoughts, I just want to promote some of the articles that have been written on this. I promise you my thoughts are not nearly as complicated!

First of all, The Flagship Blog of Substack (love him or hate him) wrote a piece, which you can find here:

Bentham's Newsletter

Pascal's Wager Is A Good Argument

Pascal’s wager…

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8 months ago · 59 likes · 185 comments · Bentham's Bulldog

Another poster, wrote a piece critical of it which you can find here:

Chaotic Neutral

Tyranny of the Mean

Background…

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8 months ago · 68 likes · 14 comments · Dylan

There are more pieces floating about (Bentham posted his 22 days ago, he’s a discourse Whale, it’s great!), but I will also promote aka Kyle Brown Dwarf’s7 post you can find here:

Kyle Star

I'm an Atheist, and I Believe Pascal's Wager is a Good Argument

Pondering Pascal’s Wager makes me think that either rational agents are insane or we are insane. I am an atheist who fully buys that Pascal’s Wager is a good argument for believing in God; perhaps a great one…

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7 months ago · 11 likes · 15 comments · Kyle Star

Long story short, Bentham and Star (Dwarf) think the wager is a good argument, while Dylan and others think it’s a bad one. From what I can tell, there’s a little bit of anger and conversational impasse, but I imagine that will be resolved soon, based on what I’m seeing on notes.

Anyway! Here is my position on Pascal’s Wager. I agree with Dylan that infinite value basically royally screws up any decision calculus one does. If you think something has a one in a googol chance of being true, but the payoff is infinitely positive, it makes sense to accept that thing as true, or reorient your life toward that thing, or however the heck you conceptualize it.

The problem I have Pascal’s Wager is similar to what Dylan says, but it goes deeper. Infinite Positive Value, Negative Value, Pain, or Pleasure are absurd concepts that make no sense!

When I was younger I read two good books on death, Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler and Death by Shelly Kagan. My main takeaway from those books is that death - but specifically scarcity of time and life - is a powerful influence underpinning our psychology. Life just does not make sense if we have infinite time and life! When we talk about pain or pleasure, we understand this intuitively: unless you have a chronic illness, in any given moment you’re probably not feeling pain or pleasure.

In my experience, discussions about expected value (EV), cognitive biases/intuitions, and “correct” values are often biased by the fact that many people who have these discussions misunderstand the science behind them. Many of the experience demonstrating human irrationality are in situations where there are two (or so) answers and the exchange value of the decisions are agreed upon. Five dollars is greater than three dollars, etc. Or these situations entail specific certain measurements of fictional utils that are completed understood or agreed upon.8

But in economics, the whole point of market pricing is that some people value some things more than others, while other people may have different preferences altogether. So, the fact that you’re willing to pay $10 for KFC double-down and I’m willing to pay $20 (because I’m a psycho), the price is probably going to be set somewhere between there, as is optimal or more profitable to Colonel Sanders. But how much the double-down “costs” or “is worth” doesn’t make sense because there isn’t an objective character to its worth that isn’t also mediated by the preferences of the people involved. The fact that it may cost $5 has little to do with the actual contents of the chicken and cheese monstrosity, but how much someone is willing to buy or sell it.

That detour into economics may seem unrelated to the wager, but the point is that for any value to be infinite, the currency of infinity must be agreed upon. For a Christian, infinite pleasure may be Praising God Forever and Ever Amen, but for an atheist, that may seem like infinite pain.

In this way, I say that infinite value/pain/pleasure makes no sense because:

1. We don’t actually experience infinite anything in this life

2. Experiencing the possibility infinite value/pain/pleasure would change us on a fundamental to where we’re a different person.

3. I’m not sure if we could come up with a “common currency” of infinite value (good or bad). It just seems like an empty word without referential content.

4. To the extent that we can make sense of value/pain/pleasure, it’s to the extent that we can appeal to objective brain states like being tortured or high as a kite, but even then those in our experience do not have infinite qualities. Your nervous system will hit a wall after certain point, and there will be diminishing feelings of sensation either way. It’s not infinite! And if it was, well, see #2.

To the extent that the wager can be persuasive, it’s to those who are sympathetic to Christian conceptions of value in the first place, and those who have not been critical of what value actually is in an empirical sense. A Christian account of infinite value is plausible because Christians have a pre-defined definition of what is valuable, but it’s not shared with everyone. People have different values from Christians, and for the wager to be persuasive, it demands people redefine their values (something that is really hard!) to conform to the wager’s values.

I don’t find it persuasive because I can’t do that. And I’m also bad at math.