The False Super/Natural Dichotomy

I don’t like the supernatural/natural dichotomy because I have no idea how a supernatural cause (or effect) differs from a natural one. I’m agnostic on the supernatural, but I’m inclined to disbelieve in the supernatural because every argument I see in favor of it is pretty bad.

I don’t have any bias against the supernatural in principle. I could imagine an example of observing and being confident of something “supernatural” through a Humean methodology. The problem with doing this is that such an event would cease to be considered mysterious or supernatural because of the observed regularity.

Contrast that with our actual experience of the purported supernatural. The results are always mixed, inconsistent, and never replicate a consistent result. That may sound like an overstatement, but if you look into the efforts to demonstrate paranormal things like ghosts, demons, psychics and so on, it’s really not. Whenever anything resembling a peer reviewed study is produced, the effects aren’t statistically significant and the results fail to replicate.

For this reason, skeptics reject the supernatural; it isn’t out of circular logic or an a priori commitment against supernatural origin, but because such phenomena fail to be tested or studied.

We need a solid body of evidence to draw reliable inferences or formulation probabilities about anything, and don’t have that for purported supernatural causes. And so, when skeptics say they don’t have enough evidence for God or the supernatural or what have you, this is what they mean: The evidence we have is of such a poor quality that the best we can do is suspend judgment.

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Hypothesis Testing In Philosophy of Religion Is A Farce

By my estimate, the best arguments for miraculous and supernatural explanations are due to the tools of process of elimination and induction to the best explanation. That is, when we exhaust naturalistic explanations, the supernatural ones win.

This is obviously bad reasoning. I’m talking about “introductory to philosophy” level bad reasoning. I am aware that this sounds mean and polemical, and I don’t mean to insult people who disagree with me, many of which have PhDs. But hear me out.

This bad reasoning derives from the misapplication of hypothesis testing, which has grown in popular philosophy of religion discourse like cancer (okay that one was definitely polemical, but as I’m criticizing a method and not people, I will stand by it).

I’m not going to go into the full explanation of hypothesis testing here because there are others who do that better elsewhere. For our purposes, what you need to know is that the application of hypothesis testing in philosophy of religion is mistaken because philosophy is not a science. Philosophy does not run experiments or collect data.

For science, hypothesis testing relies heavily on practices of testing theories and replication. Scientists pondering whether a hypothesis fits the data they observe are trying to retrodict that data (that is, predict it backwards) in an effort to refine their theories to better make future predictions. In this way, it’s not enough that a scientific theory fits existing data, it must predict future data.

And so, philosophy of religion that relies heavily on hypothesis testing is psuedo-scientific. It doesn’t uncover new facts about the universe or make predictions about the future, or at least predictions that we can test. Instead, it merely tries to fit all already-observed data to sound compelling. In statistics, that’s called overfitting, and its costs are high. Among them, overfit theories are bad at reliably predicting future data.

Hypothesis testing methodologies exist in fields outside of science, like criminal investigations, but those too are disanalogous to philosophy of religion.

Criminal investigations involve events that we have abundant experience with. Not only do we have abundant data of people committing crimes in various ways, but evidence in criminal investigations often depends on patterns of human behavior and physical evidence that we are quite familiar with. Unlike philosophy of religion’s speculative causal relationships, criminal investigations deal with highly probable, strongly evidenced causal relationships.

Polycausality is Good, Actually

Almost a decade ago, I had to take a research methods class in graduate school. It was the most fun class I took in grad school because it enhanced my personal philosophy.

Among the many things I learned was that what’s called monocausality (that is, one thing causing an entire phenomenon) is extremely rare, especially in social science. Often we are dealing with multiple causal factors that together compound and account for various outcomes.

Let’s say we’re trying to predict someone’s political beliefs based on a variety of variables we have access to, from age to religion and so on. Through long term rigorous analysis, we can draw correlations between certain variables to the point where they are predictive. So, for example, an older, white, male evangelical Christian living in Alabama is very likely to vote for a Republican. Not all evangelicals who fit that demographic profile will vote Republican, but it’s a probable inference because each of those variables are independently predictive.

And so, we would say that there is polycausality at work on this person’s voting behavior, as there are multiple causal factors that increase the likelihood and probability of them voting republican. As helpful as this message is, those causal factors will likely not accumulate to being 100% predictive. Our theory needs a margin of error, or else we run the risk of overfitting.

More interesting is how we account for outlier cases, which all miracles are. By definition, our best scientific theories won’t predict a miracle with 100% specificity, for the same reason our theories can’t predict all outliers with specificity.

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Indeed, there’s probably at least one older, white, male evangelical Christian in Alabama who is a social, well off what our modeling says he should be. Our best theories would say it’s unlikely that this person is real, but also that it’s not impossible. To the extent we can understand how this outlier case came to be, we’re going to have to find details specific to that outlier case. Such methods will always come off as speculative and improbable (ad hoc as people say), but so is the existence of outlier cases in the first place.

Supernaturalists often throw jabs at non-supernaturalists, saying their explanations are ad hoc or amount to conspiracy theories. But this misunderstands the probability calculi of these situations. If you have a tremendously improbable outcome that isn’t impossible, the best explanations will appear extremely unlikely because our most generalizable theories can’t accommodate all of the data perfectly while retaining predictability.

For example, if I were to tell you that a high school football team scrimmaged the University of Alabama and won, the explanation of “because they were better” is very simple but also not very helpful. That outcome itself is extremely improbable to the point of near impossibility, and so the component causal variables will be improbable. Those improbable variables could be that they played the scrimmage at all, that it was a scrimmage between first year walk-on players for Bama against multiple five star prospects on the high school team (say it was IMG Academy). It could be that the scrimmage went into 8 overtimes. And so on.

It would be nice if we could explain every crazy, unlikely thing that happens with a simple theory, but as we’ve seen, that would sacrifice predictability. We should thus expect seemingly ad hoc, improbable explanations for improbable outcomes, at least sometimes. Supernaturalists who tell you otherwise are not practicing good statistical thinking.

It’s Not Enough To Just Eliminate Rival Hypotheses

Not only are supernaturalists deceptive with their hypothesis testing rhetoric and dismissal of polycausality, they also employ tactics no one would think reasonable in any other context. That is, they believe that it’s enough to prove their hypothesis by merely eliminating rival hypotheses.

This is silly because in all other contexts, when you’re trying to push a theory of causality of something, it’s not enough to eliminate a rival hypothesis, you have to construct your own. It’s not enough to say “Your theories don’t account for all of the data and therefore I win by default.” No!

If we’re trying to determine who took a cookie from the cookie jar, the elimination of Jack as a suspect may increase the likelihood of Jill being the culprit, but it doesn’t mean Jill is guilty by default. If you’re going to prove she’s guilty, you must have a causal explanation supported by data.

And this returns to where metaphors of criminal investigation fail to be analogous to other causal explanations. That is, the typical suspects in a crime are a set number of people that investigators can eliminate, and almost deductively prove who committed a crime. If Jack and Jill’s single mother comes home to their rural house with no neighbors to find the cookie jar empty, and Jack can be confidently eliminated as a suspect, Jill is very likely guilty.

But when we’re talking about mysterious polycausal events, our candidate explanations are almost never so narrow. Many of those explanations may be outside of our perception or comprehension. And so, unlike criminal investigations or investigations with only a handful of likely hypotheses that can be seemingly deductively eliminated, mysterious events will not have that same level of certainty around candidate hypotheses. Sometimes we’ll have no good candidate hypotheses. In those cases, suspension of belief is warranted.

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Three More Problems With Miraculous or Supernatural Explanations

Up to this point, I’ve been critical of miraculous and supernatural explanations because of methodological mistakes people make in coming to them (bad hypothesis testing, misunderstanding the importance of polycausality and outliers, and “win by default” logic). In this section, I want to examine the flaws in these explanations that are specific to the explanations.

First, these explanations fail to meet sufficient explanatory standards. If I were to say “Matt punched Joe in the face” that sentence embeds all sorts of explanatory content. We could continue to rewrite that sentence, usually into multiple sentences, expanding the explanatory content to be more detailed. We could say “Matt balled up his fist, took a step forward, lifted his arm, balled his fist, and made contact with Joe’s face.” In theory, we could break down each component part of this sentence into component causal parts, down to the molecular or quantum level. Obviously, we don’t do this because the sentence “Matt punched Joe in the face” captures all the relevant information we want to know.

This is much different from miracle claims. When we say “Ryan miraculously healed Judy” there is no additional causal explanation, no way of expanding on that sentence. This is very weird and unique to supernatural or miraculous claims; the appearance is just taken at a given, with no further investigation.

I doubt we would accept this low standard of explanation for other important, consequential questions. Why make an exception for miracles?

Second, we don’t have enough data on supernatural causes to be confident about their causal nature. Remember how I said, for the Humean, there’s really no difference between supernatural and natural events and causes, other than that supernatural events and causes seem to lack consistent evidence? Well, if we have such poor evidence for these events, in that we can’t be certain which causes are supernatural or not, we can’t really be confident in any inference or probability we form about the nature of supernatural events.

Keep in mind the story of the healing prophet: We can be confident that his powers are real, but we can’t be confident of their causal origin. Some may immediately jump to supernatural origins, but what evidence do we have of supernatural origins to feel confident in that conclusion? It could just as well be advanced science or the work of non-Godly beings. Supernaturalists don’t like this reluctance to accept divine origins, but the point here is not that I would believe a specific alternative spooky explanation, but that I can’t confidently accept an explanation that doesn’t have sufficient evidence.

Third, what data we do have seemingly disconfirms their causal power. When people try to create a science or probability of the supernatural, it destroys them as explanations. Take the healing waters of Lourdes for instance. In about 150 years of purported visits, the Catholic church considers about 7,000 people miraculously healed. That sounds like a lot of people, until you realize at least 100,000 people come to Lourdes seeking healing every year (but possibly more). If the causal theory is that Lourdes’ waters or devotion at Lourdes causes people to be healed, why is it that so few people are actually healed?

Let’s assume that the 100,000 number is accurate going back a century. That means that 10,000,000 people visited Lourdes looking for healing, and only 7,000 were healed. That’s 7 in 10,000 people were healed, or .07% healing rate. How can we say that the waters of Lourdes heals people when the number is that low?

For such high visitation, you could consider those healings random statistical noise. If we did a clinical trial of a drug and it only healed .07% more people than a control group, we would not consider that effect statistically significant. We most certainly would not say that it treats the illness. Why make an exception for Lourdes?

Final Thoughts

Supernatural and miraculous explanations should be rejected because they are the result of bad methodology and a form of special pleading.

The people who propose these explanations advocate for fallacious reasoning, including pseudo-scientific hypothesis testing, rejecting polycausality, and “win by default” logic. Supernatural and miraculous explanations themselves fail to meet an adequate standard of explanation, are insufficiently supported relative to naturalistic explanations, and the data that is collected on them disconfirms their causality.

We would not accept such meager explanatory standards in any other field of explanation.This is not because of the purported spiritual causal origins of supernatural explanations, but because of their poor quality and reasoning.

Until someone can demonstrate to me that these objections are wrongheaded, I will continue to say that calling something a miracle or supernatural is not an explanation.

Okay, all jokes aside, as there’s so many miracle claims making the rounds on substack, I decided to look into the most compelling mystery I had heard about in the last few months: The “miraculous” healing of Sister Bernadette Moriau.

Before getting into this, however, I want to make some things clear:

1. A naturalistic explanation to this event does not falsify theism, Christianity, or Catholicism

2. Miracles could very well be real, even if this event is not a miracle.

3. I’m not trying to be a “debunker” in the sense that I can conclusively say this event wasn’t supernatural. My task is not even to prove that a specific naturalistic explanation is more likely than not, but that it’s more likely than a miracle. That is, the specific explanation doesn’t have to be likely, it just has to be more likely than a miracle. Admittedly, a low bar!1

4. The reality of this situation is that a woman who was sick and in pain for 40 years prayed for healing and to be free from pain, and eventually she was healed and free from pain. Does it really matter if the cause was supernatural or not? I feel the need to write like this not to devalue the heart-warming story of Sister Moriau, but so that opportunists do not use her story to (basically) exploit people. I think there is something existentially comforting if you’re a religious or spiritual person, hoping or praying for something important, and somehow getting that thing. Those stories shape our lives, and though a buzzkill may bring up the problem of evil, in my experience I don’t think that’s an effective argument. It may be logical, but it’s not speaking to what makes these experiences compelling. But that’s a post for another time.

5. I am not a doctor. I asked AI to help me find case studies and statistics and to explain different ailments, what they mean, and entail, etc. You should take my specific claims about the ailments and the actual medicine with a grain of salt. I feel a little icky writing this post because I am not a doctor. I don’t want people to trust what I say, but look into what I say. That’s where the value of this post will come in, but in breaking down the components of this case, examining the details, and seeing what science says about the probability of those specific details.

6. I’m okay if people stop reading after reading #5. But keep in mind that the people who are prancing around with these miracle claims are also themselves not doctors. All I would say is, if you’re going to hold my lack of credentials against me, I support you in that endeavor, just be consistent with holding those who disagree with me to the same standard.

7. I will also say that my skepticism in this case is not predicated on the case I will outline. As a Humean, I’m confident that the explanation is not supernatural or miraculous for at least two reasons:

   1. Three million people visit Lourdes every year. It’s unclear in that statistic if all of them seek healing in Lourdes’ waters, but it’s safe to say more than 99% of the people seeking healing do not receive it. In science, when we’re trying to pin down a causal factor and running an experiment, the fact that an effect is correlated with a cause 1% of the time doesn’t imply any sort of meaningful causality. If we ran a drug trial of some sort and only 1% of the people taking the drug got better, it wouldn’t be considered a useful drug.

   2. I do not believe that the absence of current explanations leads to a miracle being the most likely explanation. A miracle is a non-explanation. As I’ve written before, supernatural claims contain less causal content than naturalistic ones. What’s more, I’m not confident we can formulate a model of when God heals someone. Even if we assume these cases happen, they are so different from each other and represent a minority of cases where believers pray for healing, that we can’t draw reliable inferences.

8. Do not challenge me to debate this miracle. I will not debate people on general miracle claims because I have found believers (unfortunately) are too credulous about miracle claims to the point where they actively spread misinformation on the facts of the matter. And so, a live debate would be counterproductive, as it would more likely misinform people.

9. The publicly available documentation (that we can easily access) for this is scarce. Many of my inferences can be invalidated with that documentation. I’m fully open about that. But when I say there isn’t any evidence for something, please understand that I’m not saying it definitively doesn’t exist, but that it’s just not available. In fact, so much of what the internet knows about this case comes back to this document, which is a report, not the data itself.

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The Story, As We Are Told

For this section, I used AI to help me summarize the general overview of how the facts are generally given. You can find the general “pitch” just by googling “Bernadette Moriau.” Here’s a link to a story 60 minutes ran on her in the 2020s.

I’m going to put this AI assisted summary in quotes, that way you know where my words are and where the AI is.

I’m also going to use AI (Gemini) throughout this post. I’m being completely honest here! I’m not an expert, and I want to differentiate the scientific claims (which I’m not qualified to evaluate) from methodological ones (which I want to scrutinize)

Let’s dive in:

Okay, so that is the story we are told, let’s get into some details.

About The Disease

Here’s how AI explains her condition:

The bolding here is mine. This is obviously a dire diagnosis for Moriau, but notice that there is a 5-10% probability of meaningful functional recovery. That’s low, but not impossible. I will sound like a broken record throughout this post when I say this, but 5-10% probability is also more likely than a miracle.

What’s more, it’s also worth mentioning that she had surgeries on her back throughout her life that may have mitigated the risk of permanent fibrosis. I asked AI if there was any evidence or documentation that suggested she had permanent fibrosis, to which the answer was no and:

Another way of putting this is that her nerves weren’t dying, they were being compressed, and that compression was causing pain and hurting her ability to walk, stand upright, and so on.

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What Paralyzed Sister Moriau?

I bring up the point that we don’t have any publicly available evidence of her having permanent fibrosis because that’s a key factor in whether or not Moriau could, in the event of some sort of recovery of her Cauda Equina syndrome, likely make a full recovery in terms of walking normally. The answer, as far as I could tell via this AI research, is yes.

The reason why is because her nerves weren’t dead, but compressed. A good indicator that those nerves weren’t dead is that she was in a lot of pain. As a humorous digression: When thinking about this section, I couldn’t help but think of this scene from Talladega Nights:

So to this point, the evidence we have available is that Moriau was becoming paralyzed as a result of her Cauda Equina (CE) syndrome. The causality looked something like this:

CE Syndrome -> Nerves compressing causing extreme pain -> inability to walk.

In the event that the CE syndrome could be healed, the nerves would cease compression, and so long as the nerves weren’t dead, they could rehabilitate in time, giving her the ability to walk. In this way, Moriau’s paralysis wasn’t due to dead nerves or a psychosomatic explanation, but because she was in pain. In this way, she was less like a paraplegic and more like someone with a severe lower body injury (knee, ankle, foot, leg) that can’t walk due to pain and weakness. In this way, a recovery could be possible, but the only way to do that would be to somehow recover from her CE. How would that happen?

A Recovery Scenario

I had a good back and forth with Gemini about possible ways her CE could have recovered, and I was surprised at how common it actually is!

According to Gemini:

And that

An important detail of the above linked peer review study is that (and this is a direct quote)

“The rate of spontaneous regression was found to be 96% for disc sequestration, 70% for disc extrusion, 41% for disc protrusion, and 13% for disc bulging. The rate of complete resolution of disc herniation was 43% for sequestrated discs and 15% for extruded discs.”

Keep in mind that one of the common causes of CE is a herniated disc.2 So, there’s a high chance (though not a certain chance) that her CE, if caused by a herniated disc, would have eventually regressed by itself, which then could have led to a full recovery. But why would such a recovery happen so close to an experience at Lourdes?

Okay, this is where we lean heavily on AI and speculative theories. I want to reiterate that I’m not presenting a definitive case, and we really should rely on someone with medical, neuroscientific, and perhaps endocrinologist to weigh in here. I think it’s possible that visiting Lourdes and having a spiritual event could have been a trigger for expedited recovery for fully natural reasons. Per Gemini:

So, in short, it is possible that Moriau could have made a full recovery from her condition, including regaining the ability to walk normally again, after a time (weeks or months) of physical therapy and recovery (this, again, per AI). All of the biological machinery was there, she just needed a mechanism to have her CE go into remission. Visiting Lourdes could have been a tipping point in two ways.

First, having a profound spiritual experience (no matter its content) could have initiated the SIA process that kickstarted her remission.

Second, she was at her wits‘ end in terms of treating her condition that had got worse over the course of 40 years. The fact that her condition was so bad could have paradoxically meant it was likely to recover soon anyway. But that it was so bad also made it more likely that she would seek soon non-medicinal healing options. One could say it’s a weird coincidence that she got better after visiting Lourdes, but it wouldn’t be unexpected to have a spontaneous remission with her condition at roughly the same time you’d also expect her to explore non-medicinal options such as Lourdes.

What Makes This A Miracle

Let’s summarize the recovery scenario as SIA + Nerve Decompression + Muscle Reset. As we’ll see, it’s not the full explanation of her healing, but a big part of it.

Indeed, I don’t actually think this general hypothesis is controversial. The reason why is because we don’t have evidence of fibrosis or nerve death and spontaneous regression of the cause of CE is not uncommon. And so, in principle, that Moriau could make a full recovery (visually dramatic as that may be) is not a miracle.

Instead, what makes Moriau’s experience miraculous is the pace of the recovery. Indeed, that’s one of the things that one of the doctors interviewed says in the 60 minutes interview, linked above.

What’s more, one other aspect of this “miracle” that seems miraculous is how Sister Moriau, who was on a maximum dose of morphine before recovery, says she went cold turkey afterward. For those of you who don’t know, going cold turkey off of an opioid is really dangerous! For some opioids, the withdrawals could kill you.

In accounts of her recovery, the cold turkey story sticks out, and I think any anti-miraculous account should accommodate for that data, so I will below.

The Timeline

Here’s a timeline of events, summarized by AI

July 3–7, 2008: Sister Moriau traveled on her pilgrimage to Lourdes, accompanied by her regular general practitioner, Dr. Christophe Fumery. Her condition remained entirely disabled and reliant on a wheelchair, mechanical braces, a neurostimulator, and maximum-dose morphine.

July 11, 2008: The reported physical release occurred privately in her room at her convent in Bresles, France.

July 12, 2008: She woke up free of pain and went for a 5-kilometer walk with her sister-in-law.

July 15, 2008 (First Official Medical Visit): Exactly four days after the event, she was examined by her general practitioner, Dr. Christophe Fumery. Operating out of his local clinic, he logged the sudden, full normalization of her deep tendon reflexes and verified her unassisted gait.

September 10, 2008 (First Specialist Visit): Two months later, her long-time consulting rheumatologist, Dr. Christophe Alliaume, evaluated her state. He clinically confirmed her freedom from pain and overall mobility, but recorded a vital nuance in his chart: a “slight muscular deficiency requiring continued, regular physiotherapy.”

And from there, as far as I can tell, there wasn’t further testing or evaluation until 2009. Keep that in mind.

One other datapoint that is recited is that the other Moriau’s sisters marveled at her miraculous healing the evening of the 11th.

Putting On Our Skeptic Hat:

Documentation We Don’t Have

At this point, I have laid out the facts as best I know them, and contributed some additional context, as well as speculating possible explanations for the data we see. But there are some irregularities.

For instance, when it comes to the specifics of what exactly happened to Moriau in July, the only evidence we have is her testimony long after the fact. We don’t have any contemporaneous evidence that was written, say the week of the 11th. As far as I know, there’s no picture of her leg at that time, nor any record of other nuns in the convent corroborating the story at that time. We have people attesting to such things long after the fact, but not contemporary to the events. This will be important.

The other thing we do not possess is pretty much any visual of what Moriau’s legs looked like upon visiting Dr. Fumery on July 15th. We just have his documentation. It’s not nothing, but it’s not on the level of the testing that was done on and after 2009.

The other thing we do not have is any sort of reporting that confirms with high confidence that Moriau went cold turkey off of the morphine. The doctor that helped her manage her pain, Dr. Frank Becigneul, did say that she stopped coming to the treatment facility after her Lourdes trip, but this is kind of vague.

For example, if I say “I stopped doing drugs after college,” sure that may mean I stopped doing drugs after graduation; but it could also mean I stopped doing drugs soon after college, but that was the time I anchor my memory around stopping drugs. It could be that I graduated in May and stopped in mid-June.

I bring all this up to bring to attention that I haven’t seen documentation that demonstrates Moriau quit morphine cold turkey other than her testimony. There’s no blood work or toxicology report that says she didn’t have morphine in her system on, say, July 21st and Dr. Fumery would not have run such a test.

Some Overlooked Facts

This sounds like pedantic hair-splitting. So what if there’s no blood work showing Sister Moriau went cold turkey? Isn’t it sufficient that Dr. Becigneul said she was off of morphine after her visit to Lourdes? Why isn’t Dr. Fumery’s assessment rock solid evidence 4 days after the fact?

Here are some important facts that complicate this story.

1. Dr. Fumery was a true believer in the miracles of Lourdes. Per AI, he personally participated in the Lourdes pilgrimages for 40 years. He first began traveling to the shrine as a young boy with his parents, volunteering as a traditional stretcher-bearer (brancardier) before continuing his involvement as an adult physician. He served as the medical director for the Hospitalité de l’Oise, the formal Catholic diocesan volunteer association responsible for organizing, transporting, and medically managing trips for the sick and disabled to Lourdes. He was the one to suggest to Moriau to go to Lourdes and seek healing. He also took the leading role in compiling and packaging the initial 10-pound clinical dossier that was submitted to the Lourdes Medical Bureau to trigger her formal 10-year miracle evaluation.

2. Moriau was a nurse before her ailments.

3. Dr. Alliaume recorded that her ailment was not fully healed, instead requiring more therapy.

Isn’t it odd that a true-believing Dr. Fumery records Moriau basically fully healed, and then two months later, it doesn’t appear to be the case to a relatively more skeptical specialist in Dr. Alliaume? (Keep in mind Fumery is a general practitioner and Alliaume is the specialist). What’s more, according to Gemini (so again, I would love to hear a specialist in this field weigh in), a noticeably strong recovery like one of Moriau could be expected within a few weeks or months of therapy. It’s about 9 weeks between the day of her purported miracle and her appointment with Alliaume. It’s possible that the recovery Alliaume observed (clear signs of great improvement, with some additional therapy needed) would also be seen in a mundane naturalistic condition, where there was spontaneous remission + nerve decompression + muscle reset.

Remember: The validity of this miracle relies on the pace of Moriau’s recovery, which itself relies on three key points of information being reliable:

1. The reliability of Moriau’s memory of the whole affair

2. Corroborating testimony proximate to the event by her sisters at the convent

3. The reliability of Lourdes-believing Dr. Fumery’s assessment

You can probably see where this is going, but before I get there, let’s try to model the situation with a few hypothetical situations.

Making the Scenarios Explicit To Demonstrate Weird Behavior

Let’s say you’ve experienced a miraculous healing of some sort. You regularly see a specialist, on top of your general practitioner. Isn’t it odd to wait more than two months to confirm the nature of your miraculous healing with the specialist? I’ll admit, I don’t know how French healthcare works (long queues or lack thereof and all that), but I feel like one would be chomping at the bit to show a specialist “Holy cow, get a load of this!” I know I would, especially, if I was pretty sure I had experienced a miracle as Sister Moriau did. I would want them to see it not because I didn’t believe in the miracle, but to assure myself I wasn’t crazy or to proclaim the good news.

Another scenario: If one of your closest friends thought she was miraculously healed of a deformity in her leg and that it spontaneously healed, and it was obviously the case, wouldn’t you think to take a picture? Again, not for the skeptics, but in celebration. This was 2008. People had cell phones, to say nothing of digital cameras. The lack of contemporaneous documentation here suggests a lack of confidence.

Another: your elderly sister in-law who has been chronically ill and unable to walk for years just returned from a trip. You are in town to visit her. She says she was miraculously healed yesterday and she wants to go for a 5 kilometer walk. Do you, in your right mind, let her? I probably wouldn’t! I wouldn’t be planning on going on a walk at all with her, and if we did, it would be very much minimized to prevent her from hurting herself. I don’t see someone enabling an elderly family member to do that after they’re rehabilitating on a lower body injury, let alone what Moriau went through.

Another: After 40 years of having a crippling illness, you have heard a voice and you are now miraculously healed. You are also a trained nurse. Your malady led you to take morphine for the last few years, and you’ve been taking the highest dose. The problem is that the voice didn’t say anything about your morphine dependence. Would it be wise to go cold turkey, even though you know you’re fine? I’m skeptical a trained nurse would even consider not taking the morphine. I’m not saying it’s impossible that she would, just that would be very foolish, even if it was a miracle. God healed your back and leg, but he didn’t say anything about the taper.

Another: You’re a deeply religious man and medical professional. For decades you’ve been participating in religious ceremonies at a local site that purportedly has healing properties. You believe in those healing properties. One of your patients has been suffering from a painful condition for decades. She’s at the end of her rope. You recommend she goes to that site to find healing. It’s a last gasp effort. You see her weeks later for a regular checkup. She tells you it’s a miracle! She went and was healed! Praise the Lord you knew your faith would pay off. Surely you’re not primed to overstate the extent of the recovery you observe. Right?

Finally: Let’s say humans are a species that has the capacity to fly. You, poor unfortunate soul, have lost that ability due to a crippling and painful condition. But one day, you are miraculously healed and you can fly again. How much do you fly? I would fly quite a bit, even if it hurt a little bit, the fact that I can fly and it doesn’t hurt as much motivates me to fly more. And then suddenly, it stops hurting as much or at all. The reason why is because the nerves that helped my flying condition function were never dead, just compressed. Now that they are free, and fly regularly (which I’m enthusiastic to do, I’m rehabilitating myself) In a few months, I can fly normally and without pain. I’ve made a full recovery.

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An Alternative Hypothesis

Okay, so here’s my alternative hypothesis for what happened:

1. I believe the SIA + Nerve Decompression + Muscle Reset hypothesis is correct

2. I believe that Dr. Fumery is an unreliable account not because he’s a bad medical professional but because he very likely wanted to see and believe that Moriau was healed, and it was likely that she was at least on the road to recovery because of point 1.

3. Dr. Fumery is the only medical professional to look at Moriau in the 2 months between her alleged miracle and seeing Dr. Alliaume. The validity of the pace of the recovery hangs on that. That’s it!

4. Evidence to suggest this is the case is that Dr. Alliaume observed that she was not fully healed, which is unexpected if this was a miracle, but definitely expected if Moriau was rehabilitating her leg after 2 months of enthusiastic physical activity.

5. Pretty much every test past 2008 is irrelevant. These tests wouldn’t be like trying to prove “Leg, No Leg, Leg” but “hair, no hair, hair.” What made the recovery miraculous was not the recovery, but the pace of the recovery. Running tests to see that she was healed and that she in fact had CE does not tell us anything about that, and the fact that that was where most of the scrutiny was put on tells you a big methodological flaw in the investigation. Given the background information about CE I’ve shared, Moriau recovering her ability to walk properly is more akin to regrowing hair than a limb.3 It’s less unbelievable to say someone grew a mullet in 2 years than 2 days; the research seemed to be more concerned if she had a mullet at all.

6. I don’t really trust accounts of what her sisters say happened because quite frankly we don’t have written accounts of what they thought was happening at the time. People subconsciously revise and retell their memories based on suggestion, culture, and other things. It could be the case that her sisters at the time thought she was miraculously healed because she was walking at all, but noticed her leg was still somewhat messed up, limping, etc. Then, slowly over time, her limp and leg heal and the miracle they remember changes from giving her the ability to walk again free of pain to being completely healed. It’s possible this account is wrong, and that she truly was fully healed by July 12th. The problem is we don’t know because we don’t have accounts contemporary to July 11th/12th

7. I think the same thing of Moriau’s testimony as I do the sisters. She, like anyone else, will revise memories (subconsciously and unintentionally) to fit grander narratives. Everyone does it, this doesn’t make her a liar, dishonest, delusional, or a bad person.4 With that in mind, this makes better sense of her behavior:

   1. It doesn’t make sense that she would intentionally go cold turkey on the morphine, even if she wasn’t feeling pain. As a trained medical professional herself, she probably knew better

   2. I’m not sure what chain of custody the sister has for her claim of walking with her on July 12th, I just think it is a little unbelievable that they would plan a walk the morning after a healing miracle and go 5 kilometers. It just doesn’t match the behavior you’d expect from someone looking after a family member with a health condition, even if they’re recovering from it.

   3. It’s just so odd to me that these faithful Catholic Lourdes believers took two months to find additional verification for the healing. I don’t think it’s suspicious that believers don’t feel the need to prove their religious experiences/miracles, but I think if the healing was so clear and instantaneous you would be pretty damn excited and wanting to show everyone! Why wait 2 months?

8. My theory is that Moriau had this religious experience and kick started the process we see in point one above. She experienced a clear and marked reduction in pain in her leg which caused her to want to walk and exert herself physically. This initiated a virtuous cycle where she basically self-rehabilitated her leg over the course of two months. All that time, she’s telling everyone she’s experienced a miracle, and for all they know it is one. It’s a miracle that she’s walking at all by their standards, the fact that it’s not fully healed is inconsequential, and over time her recovery becomes more obvious and complete, collapsing the memory of her less obvious early recovery. Dr. Fumery does indeed look at her leg on the 15th, but overlooks imperfections in her recovery because he’s already primed to believe it was a miracle (as Moriau says it is and as he is a Lourdes believer).

9. How her leg actually looks in mid-July is lost to history because no one (in 2008!) thought to take a picture, and the only medical professional had a bias. (Insert Hume’s maxim)

10. The other thing that a naturalistic explanation has to account for is how Moriau went cold turkey on morphine. A morphine taper can take up to 10 or 20 weeks, but in some cases as short as two weeks. There are at least two possible explanations:

    1. She never went cold turkey, and she’s revising her memories here. Her pain went down significantly after the spontaneous remission and so, unlike every day for the previous few years or decades, she didn’t *want* morphine. And so, by her standards, she wasn’t addicted and didn’t want it, and she only took as much to taper. Indeed, this argument is “her definition of cold turkey is different from ours.” This doesn’t imply deception, delusion, etc. Again, if you presume how she and others conceptualized the miracle changed over time, this fits in perfectly.

       1. Keep in mind, she was a trained nurse and there are some indications that she had a lot of control over her treatment (in her memoir she mentions how she allows herself to increase the dose for the travel). Due to France’s narcotics laws, it’s very likely she had a full month’s dose early in the month as she was traveling to Lourdes, because that medication needed to be unopened while traveling. At the same time, we don’t know how much morphine she had and when, so all of this is speculative.

    2. The other explanation is that she didn’t, but that the endorphins produced by her religious experience (and perhaps even the joy of being able to walk again enhancing that experience) compensated for the withdrawal. Per AI:

       1. The overwhelming emotional and psychological threshold of her pilgrimage experience could have triggered a maximum-intensity Stress-Induced Analgesia (SIA) response. That is: Her brain stem and hypothalamus immediately flooded her nervous system with an unprecedented wave of endogenous opioids (specifically beta-endorphins and enkephalins). Because these natural, internal molecules are structurally designed to bind to the exact same μ-opioid receptors in the brain and spinal cord as synthetic morphine, they acted as a powerful biochemical buffer. By keeping those receptors fully saturated with her body’s own natural chemistry, her brain never experienced the “chemical vacuum” that causes withdrawal. This internal overcompensation artificially shielded her from the classic autonomic crash—preventing the vomiting, intense tremors, tachycardia, and severe rebound pain normally guaranteed by an abrupt narcotic cessation.

11. I will admit that the morphine datapoint is the most puzzling. But at the same time, I don’t think it’s an insoluble puzzle. At the very least, we can’t conclusively rule out naturalistic explanations because we don’t know how much morphine she had, we don’t know when she stopped collecting her supply, and none of the doctors she saw in 2008 conducted any testing to suggest she wasn’t tapering in some way. The only real evidence we have that she tapered is her own testimony saying she went cold turkey. If you’re inclined to believe that, fine, but I’m a fan of Hume’s maxim, that she’s somehow mistaken being more likely than a miracle.

Admittedly, there may be errors in the above. I’m not 100% confident in things I’ve written above. Go research them yourself! My point here is that there’s plenty of space for a naturalistic explanation. Even if some of those explanations are improbable, we must ask ourselves: Is it more improbable than a miracle? Does it lack explanatory power relative to invoking a mysterious miracle? I would say no to both questions!

Bonus: But What About The CMIL?

But wait! You may say, what about the International Medical Committee of Lourdes (CMIL)? They’re a board full of doctors and professionals who know more than you. They voted 26-1 to certify Moriau’s healing as spontaneous, surely that means something?

It does! As I said, you shouldn’t treat my argument as a conclusive debunking of this miracle, but a starting point to believe there’s grounds for reasonable doubt. Trust an expert over me. Having said that, I would trust a skeptical expert over CMIL. As far as I can tell, the CMIL’s investigations do not account for psychological vulnerabilities like hindsight bias and what Gemini calls “collective memory smoothing” (a great way to describe what I’m referring to). They interviewed those closest to Moriau between 2009 and 2010, plenty of time for her to make a full recovery from her injuries. They also compiled hundreds of pages of her medical records before and after her healing, to say nothing of countless tests in the 2010s, but they did very little to compile evidence or counter-evidence of the key window of healing in mid-July 2008, to say nothing of what Sister Moriau was up to in the 9 weeks prior to her appointment with Alliaume.

The entire argument for the spontaneous healing quite literally rests on this short window, and we have very little attesting to anything outside of Moriau’s memory and Dr. Fumery’s evaluation. This is not great evidence!

And this is not the first time that Lourdes-adjacent medical bodies have participated in questionable methodologies to affirm a miracle. For that, I refer you to Kevin Nontradicath’s great video below or the writings of James Randi on Serge Perrin and Vittorio Micheli (I think Nontradicath mentions Micheli in the video)

Key Questions To Answer To Solve The Mystery

Okay, so I’ve thrown a lot at you in this post (that I spontaneously decided to investigate and write over this past weekend because nerd sniping is great). I’ll admit, I’m not completely certain on a lot of these points because I’m not a doctor.

To close, I’m just going to list a bunch of questions that are important to establishing Moriau’s healing as spontaneous and therefore miraculous. Though I may not know the answer to these questions, the internet can figure them out.

1. Was there any evidence Moriau had fibrosis or that the nerves in her back/connecting to her foot were dead? This is important to determine if a recovery was possible or not. If her nerves were dead, she couldn’t recover

2. Is it impossible or common for CE to spontaneously go into remission? If so, and Moriau’s nerves weren’t dead, she could conceivably make a full recovery.

3. Assuming her nerves weren’t dead and the possibility of CE remission, how long would it take for her to recover the ability to walk normally? If it could be done in a few weeks or months, the lack of medical documentation between July and September is suspect, and all testing post-2008 is irrelevant.

4. Are there any contemporaneous accounts of her healing by her sisters that isn’t her or their recall months or years later? I haven’t seen anything like this.

5. Do we have anything medical attesting to her “spontaneous recovery” beyond Dr. Fumery’s written account?

6. Do we have any photos of her recovered leg from July 2008, specifically mid-July?

7. Assuming Moriau had a full refill of morphine at the beginning of July 2008 in order to travel and be in compliance with the law, and she allegedly went cold turkey, where did the rest of the morphine go?

8. What precise documentation do we have about her last refill of morphine, her last visit to pain clinics, etc?

There are probably more questions you can ask, but unless we find more documentable evidence backing up the witness testimony, especially those contemporaneous to July 2008, I’m inclined to think there’s a natural explanation.

Namely, people confuse Hume’s Maxim with Hume’s Argument in Of Miracles. For the sake of clarity in this post, I will just be referring to the argument as the argument.

The primary thing you need to understand is that the maxim and the argument are two separate (though related) things. Let’s define both.

The Maxim is this:

“That 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; 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.”

Meanwhile, Hume’s argument is this (it’s not a syllogism, but the structure of his argument):

1. Hume’s maxim

2. The fact that religious testimony for miracles is unreliable

3. (Given 1 and 2)The conclusion that it’s irrational or unwise to believe in contemporary miracles based merely on testimony.

4. The fact that testimony is all we have for revealed religion

5. (Given 3 and 4) To remain consistent, wise people should not believe in revealed religion.

This mistake people make is looking at the text of Of Miracles to refute Hume’s maxim (point #1), when that’s not the point of the essay. Rather, Hume is guiding you to the conclusion (#5), not starting the conclusion and then backing it up (#1).

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Hume Is Not A Naturalist

To start off, let’s review Hume’s formulation of probability. I’m just kidding, I’m not going to do that here. I’ve done it enough times! If you want to review, you can find it here.

To understand why Hume formulates probability in the way that he does, we have to correct some misconceptions.

For one, Hume is not a Bayesian. He precedes the widespread adoption of Bayesianism. He read a little bit of the earliest publication on Bayesian probabilities, but didn’t update his arguments in response.

Second and most importantly, Hume is technically not a naturalist. This may come as a shock to the countless philosophers and scientists who believe otherwise, but Hume never identifies as a naturalist, and he never uses the term “supernatural” to contrast his views with. And so, whenever you see someone use fancy Bayesian phrases like “the naturalist hypothesis” or what have you, as it relates to Hume, they are projecting an anachronism onto his argument, and misreading the text.

Instead of a naturalist, Hume is a mitigated skeptic, coming from a place where he doubts the sufficiency of reason alone to make sense of the world, specifically through his famous problem of induction.

For Hume, we are not justified in inferring that the sun will rise tomorrow. Still, given some assumptions (uniformity of nature, reliability of the senses and memory, and others), we can formulate a probability from which we can be confident that the sun will rise tomorrow. That is, we have seen the sun rise every day and have not seen it not rise, and so we can have moral certainty (sufficient certainty to act) that it will rise again tomorrow. In Hume’s language of probability, the sun rising every morning is a well-attested natural law.

The mechanisms by which we collect this data are our senses. We can expand our set of sensory data by collaborating with other people and using various tools of observation and recording, thus expanding our understanding of probability and natural laws.

So long as we understand how these tools function, their shortcomings, and how they relate to our senses, we can add to our model of probability (the tally of probability in favor of one event over another) accordingly. We can also use these tools to critically examine or cast doubt on flawed tools and methodologies.

For instance, if I have direct experience of hot and cold temperatures and an understanding of the laws of chemistry, I can point out when something is committing a measurement error. If a thermometer says that ice water that I also feel with my hands is actually boiling, the thermometer is wrong. Similarly, if the water is bubbling and the thermometer says it’s boiling, yet it feels icy cold to the touch, that probably means my sense of touch is somehow malfunctioning (maybe I’m having a stroke or developing a neurological condition).

In this way, we are constantly weighing mutually exclusive probabilities and discarding the less likely ones, especially when the prevailing probability is a consistent observation with no contravening observation (a natural law).

So calling Hume a naturalist is a little misleading. He was too skeptical to be a naturalist! Rather, Hume was more of a “regularist” or a “uniformist” as a result of his skepticism, assuming the regularity of nature to inform probabilities, using that feedback to formulate and improve probabilities, and acting accordingly. He was agnostic about the metaphysical or ontological nature of causality, as he didn’t believe we observed causality, and so we couldn’t say anything about it with confidence. Yet still, he recognized the human need to somehow make sense of the world. His model makes minimal assumptions in order to balance this need and to placate his skepticism.

What’s lost in this is that the “supernatural” (Gods, demons, psychics, etc.) could be observed and understood in this framework. There’s nothing about these supernatural entities that inherently resists regularity. There could be all sorts of supernatural occurrences happening regularly, reliably attested, with a concrete causal explanation behind them. And yet, there never is.These “supernatural” things never act consistently to where we can formulate probabilities of how they operate. And so, what discredits them is not their purported supernatural causal origins, but their lack of regularity, needed to formulate a confident probability.

Hume doesn’t explain all of this in detail but when he says the below quote, he’s touching on this point:

“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”

Or per this cartoon that referred to me:

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Miracle

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The Bridge Between The Maxim And The Argument

When you follow his methodology, without presupposing any metaphysics one way or another, Hume is just correct.

That is, when weighing the mutually exclusive probabilities of the laws of nature being violated against eye witnesses being somehow in error, the likelihood of error is always much higher, and thus it’s wiser to assume error.

Miracle proponents and theists will thus object with something along the lines of “What about other abundant miracle claims? Doesn’t this dataset undermine Hume’s argument and increase our prior or background knowledge in support of the idea that miracles happen?”

And this is where the confusion and conflation about the argument and maxim comes in! When opponents of Hume raise this objection, they indicate that they are confusing Hume’s maxim with Hume’s argument!

Namely, the maxim is a tool that casts doubt on individual miracle claims, not the entire species of miracle claims. Though one is well within reason to generalize the maxim to all miracle claims, Hume does not do that in his argument. Instead, he bridges the maxim to the conclusion of his argument (that is, not believing in religious faith based merely on eyewitness testimony) by demonstrating how bad miraculous testimony is.

Specifically, miracle testimony is uniformly bad as believers have ample reason and motive to lie or deceive themselves by virtue of wanting to believe, being blinded by zeal, or any other explanation. That, on top of the fact that miracles are themselves individual instances, resistant to replication, and that independent non-testimonial evidence is either nonexistent or of poor quality, makes Hume conclude that miracle testimony doesn’t even amount to a probability.

And so, Hume’s opponents get confused by the argument and maxim by thinking that the point of the argument is to support the maxim. In reality, he’s doing the opposite: he is using the maxim (as one factual component among many) to support his argument.1

What’s more, they think in the second part of the essay, where Hume undermines miraculous testimony, he’s emphasizing or doubling down on the probability calculus of the maxim. In reality, the maxim in the first part of the essay expresses the standard of evidence for miracle advocates, while the second part illustrates how miraculous testimony comes nowhere near that standard, and is in fact inferior to normal witness testimony. Here’s a helpful chart of the disagreement:

Why This Is Important

Hume’s opponents are thus confused about the structure and implications of the argument. The whole point of tying his maxim to his analysis on miraculous testimony is to demonstrate why we shouldn’t take the abundant purported evidence for miracles seriously in our primary assessment of the baseline probability of miracles.

If you’re just looking at the Maxim as something it’s not (that is, presupposing miracles don’t happen or excluding the supernatural or dismissing miracle testimony), and not also understanding the structure of the argument, you’ll also be confused. As far as I can tell, this mistake is extremely common among some very smart Christians and philosophers because misreading Hume is so normalized.

It’s important then to understand Hume’s argument and his maxim, and how they relate to one another. Because if you get them confused, you may erroneously think he’s begging the question when he’s not, and subsequently argue against a straw man.

Unfortunately, Schmid confirmed a lot of my suspicions about him in his most recent video on his arguments for miracles. Namely, I think he’s absorbed many arguments against theism/in favor of atheism/skepticism via meme and not from the actual proponents of the arguments.

This may seem like I’m punching above my weight; no doubt Joe Schmid knows more about philosophy of religion arguments than I do. But still, I would wager that I’ve done more research on Hume’s argument than Schmid has.

What’s more, the best skeptical arguments don’t come from philosophy of religion, but philosophy of science. Having observed the online philosophy debate space for a while now, it’s obvious to me that nontheistic philosophers2 don’t use these arguments against miracles or the supernatural in their debates. Now, I don’t think that’s because these philosophers are unaware of these arguments, but because philosophy of religion has different methodologies, and they just don’t come up.3 Thus watching philosophy of religion debates ends up being this weird, bizarro world where the most potent skeptical arguments against theism are, weirdly nowhere in sight, with the proper terms of debate completely confused.

This culminates in no one talking about David Hume’s argument on miracles (which by itself isn’t bad), and when it is brought up, it’s completely misunderstood to the point of misinformation (that is really bad!). Combine that with clickbaiting YouTube algorithms, and a critical mass of the top videos on Hume are misinformation by virtue of Christian Apologists completely misunderstanding the argument.

Joe Schmid fell victim to his misinformation. This post exists to correct the record, even though Schmid’s video will no doubt reach more people by an order of magnitude.

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This Post Title Is Not Bait

Before I begin, I want to reiterate that the title of this post is not clickbait. Joe Schmid is objectively wrong about David Hume’s miracle argument. The error he makes is in misunderstanding the text of the argument, and thus the reasoning of the argument. The sources he cites and relies upon in the Hume section of his video also rely on similar misunderstandings and misinterpretations. Put another way: Hume may be right or he may be wrong, but Schmid’s rebuttal is completely irrelevant because he does not address the actual argument.

To reiterate: this is not a matter of opinion. The interpretation I’m going to explain is the consensus of Hume scholars ranging from Bill Vanderburgh, Roger Fogelin, and others. Pretty much no one who studies Hume for a living agrees with Schmid’s interpretation of Hume.

To use a metaphor, this is like arguing over the plain text of the Bible because of its theological implications. Theologians may disagree on the theological implications of a text, but they generally come to consensus on the reading of the plain text. Schmid and Hume opponents don’t even understand the plain text.

I’m Not Going Over Hume’s Argument In Full Here

Normally, I like to tableset with an overview of what Hume’s argument on miracles actually says and actually means. However! I have already done this so many times that it’s getting repetitive. In fact, I wrote a post earlier this week where I basically put the argument in a bulleted format. You can find that post here:

You can also find my two general explanations of Hume’s argument below, as well as a list of other posts clearing up misconceptions about Hume. If you’re curious where I’m sourcing my commentary on this post, it’s those posts, which themselves cite primary and secondary sources.

This may seem convoluted, but at this point, I’ve repeated myself so many times that I’m not wasting my or anyone else’s time by repeating the entire argument again.

The Many Errors of Joe Schmid

(If you couldn’t tell, I’m responding to the section of this video that starts at 14:56 or so)

Error #1: “What Uniform Experience?”

Schmid’s first problem is misunderstanding Hume’s methodology and how that methodology influences formulations of probability, the evidence we accept as permissible, and other things.

Schmid asserts that Hume assumes from the get go that there’s nothing to the various miracle reports throughout history. As I’ve written before, this is not true.

The part of Hume’s argument Schmid objects to is the part in section one referred to as Hume’s maxim, which says:

“That 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; 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.”

To understand why Hume doesn’t spend that much time defending this maxim, we have to look at the overall structure of his essay and how philosophical writing in the 18th century differed from today

First, If I were to summarize the text of Hume essay, it would be this:

1. The standard of evidence for overturning the laws of nature is high

2. Because of its high probability of error, eyewitness testimony does not meet that standard

3. Because of the corrupting nature of religious belief on testimony in particular, religious testimony especially doesn’t meet that standard.

4. Given that the only evidence we have for revealed religion today is testimony, a wise person who looks at the probabilities and the quality of evidence, should not believe in religious miracles on testimony and thus not revealed religion.

Second, Hume’s essay Of Miracles is not like a modern work of scholarship where there’s peer reviewed citation ad nauseum in the footnotes. This was a chapter in a book that doesn’t collectively build to a climax or conclusion, but it is more like an anthology of essays where details of his reasoning in one place are elaborated upon elsewhere. I mean, after all, Of Miracles was not included in the original edition.

In this way, Hume doesn’t elaborate on his maxim that much because he elaborates on his theory of probability in other places, and the maxim is not the conclusion of the essay! Rather, the point and conclusion of the essay is about rejecting revealed religion.

Again, this may seem like pedantry, but it’s relevant to understand Hume’s formulation of probability and Schmid’s confusion. I explain this formulation in various places, one of which you can find here:

For Hume, assuming a uniform experience is foundational to forming probabilities. As he says:

“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.”

In the context of his argument on miracles and his general philosophy, he excludes assuming miraculous things happen because that’s the point of the investigation in the first place! He’s not saying a priori that the miracles don’t happen, but making as few assumptions as possible to formulate a basic probability to help determine if miracles happen.

A common theme throughout this piece, criticisms of Hume, and arguments about miracles in the first place, is that miracle advocates will say something along the lines of Well if you assume miracles can happen or God is real, the evidence for their existence supports this probability.

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For Hume and skeptics such as myself this is trivial and circular. Of course miracles can happen if you assume they happen!

A common theme of Hume’s work is trying to see if we can connect natural philosophy or theology with revealed (religious) theology. To get to that point, you have to exclude religious assumptions and have a bare bones naturalistic framework, and that’s what Hume does.4

So when theists complain that Hume presupposes naturalism while not making the effort to accurately understand and rebut his actual arguments, they’re basically conceding that Hume is right. It’s a little silly to say Hume is dogmatically excluding the supernatural when he’s assuming an austere naturalistic framework in order to examine if we can go from that naturalistic framework to revealed religion.

To clarify one more time to avoid the appearance of contradiction: Hume is not being circular or defining the supernatural out of existence or assuming a priori that the supernatural is impossible. No, he’s taking an austere naturalistic framework that makes minimal (arguably no) ontological assumptions (as he would assume a wise neutral observer evaluating religious miracles would) and seeing if it’s probable and rational to believe in miracles.

I could actually be forgiving of Schmid and others for their misreadings here, but unfortunately his readings get much worse.

Also, I’m skipping the section of Noah McKay’s clip because it’s just really bad and I actually know something about this. But it’s not relevant to this post as much.5

Error #2: Hume’s Argument Doesn’t Lead To Absurdities, You Just Revised It To Make Him Look Bad

No need to go in depth in this section. Schmid just straight up misapplies Hume’s maxim. He says:

“Specifically, if the argument worked, then it would imply that awesome, miraculous evidence should never convince us of a miracle” (17:50ish)

I’m sorry, but where in the hell does Hume say that? Let’s repeat Hume’s maxim, for those of you with poor memory:

“That 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; 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.”

Where does Hume say that we should reject all awesome miraculous evidence? Or all evidence period? He’s just talking about testimony!

Hume doesn’t explain it as directly as I do, but testimony in general is inferior to other forms of evidence because we have to make inferences about its accuracy and intention on top of the attested data. For Hume, religious testimony is inferior to even regular testimony when it comes to miracles because of the long documented negative influence religion has on testifying for miracles.

How does the maxim lead to the categorical rejection of all evidence for miracles? Schmid does not say, he just asserts it. He then comes up with all of these absurd scenarios of people observing miracles or having data supporting miracles that isn’t testimony and saying the skeptic/Humean would reject them.

It’s abundantly clear that this is a straw man. Schmid is echoing another common Christian/miracle advocate tactic to straight up revise Hume’s words to make them sound sillier, absurd, and erroneous. It’s dishonest and it’s below the expectations we should have for a philosopher of Schmid’s quality.

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Error #3: Begging The Question

After his strawman of Hume’s maxim, Schmid begs the question as I describe for Error #1. I won’t repeat that here.

Error #4: A Misleading Probability Comparison

While making his question-begging argument, he makes the point that supernatural claims can be more probable than naturalistic ones, such as whacky conspiracy theories. This is exactly why we have Hume’s maxim in the first place! Because even if you believe in miracles, they’re probably rarer than people making mistakes or lying. Heck, they’re even more rare than conspiracies! So again, this argument only works if you smuggle in the assumption of supernaturalism in the first place, which is an error.

Schmid continues with a weird digression in his third argument that also makes a combination of these errors, and I’ll just group that in here because I don’t have more to say that isn’t redundant.

Error #5: Misunderstanding Hume’s Probability

Quoting from his paper on screen (man, maybe I should have been doing that all this time?), Schmid says:

”…the fact that nature generally operates uniformly according to laws of nature is, contra Hume, not good evidence against the existence of miracles, since the hypothesis that miracles occur actually predicts this.”

First of all, Hume does not say or imply in any manner that “nature generally operating uniformly according to laws of nature is good evidence against the existence of miracles,” nor does his philosophy imply anything of the sort.

For Hume, the fact that nature is uniform is the backbone for how we formulate probability. We cannot formulate (actionable) probability without the uniformity of nature. It is from that uniform experience, that we can observe uniform conjunctive events without deviation that we can formulate natural laws.

Neither the uniformity of nature nor the highly attested confidence in our natural laws predicts that miracles don’t happen. In fact, there is no prediction at all!

To reiterate what I’ve written previously, Hume’s argument is an a posteriori argument. It’s an argument based on matters of fact, not a priori logic. There are parts of his argument, that, if the empirical/observed facts of the matter were different, his argument would not work.

It could be the case that we lived in a universe where all we had were probabilistic laws that were not so uniform as the laws of nature we see today. But as a matter of fact, we don’t. We live in a universe with laws that are so abundantly and uniformly attested to, with no credible contravening observations. This testament is so abundant that on the rare occurrence someone says they saw a deviation, the probability of eye witnesses’ error is beyond exponentially more likely! You are acting rationally by denying the witness!

In this way, Hume’s argument does make predictions, but they’re predictions about human behavior, not on the nature of miracles. Again, his argument is epistemic, not ontological!

Hume doesn’t predict that miracles don’t happen. Rather, he predicts all testimony for miracles is bad and less likely to be true than the uniformity of nature (a prediction in my experience, checks out).

The rest of his fourth argument is continued question begging and ontological speculation that Hume doesn’t care about or talk about, so I’ll move along.

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Error #6 Oh My God, Shut The Fuck Up About John Earman

Schmid continues by playing a long clip by Tim McGrew which basically commits the same mistakes that Schmid has been making and so I’m not even going to address much of them specifically here (again: Hume’s argument does not close off the possibility of miracles, it’s not an ontological argument, his translation of Hume is wrong, etc.)

What I do want to discuss is the shameless appeal to John Earman, the agnostic statistician who wrote Hume’s Abject Failure before many people reading this post could read anything period (but I could! Ha), let alone read philosophy. Earman is the archetypal example of the trope of an apologist appealing to a non-religious authority with no regard for truth.

To be clear, I don’t want to smear Earman, but I will point out that he was catastrophically wrong about Hume. From what I’ve read from Hume scholars, the reception to Earman when he first published Hume’s Abject Failure was that it was so bad that it was almost not worth responding to. He just got basic aspects of his philosophy wrong.

Thankfully, many people, such as Vanderburgh and Millican wrote articles refuting Earman. I wish I could give you a full overview of how Earman got Hume wrong, but that deserves its own post. The short summary is that Earman projected Bayesian assumptions on Hume’s argument that were anachronistic. He also completely misunderstood Hume’s argument, to the point where he made up concepts like “Hume’s Straight Rule of Probability” which were fake.6

Now, there is a nuanced true criticism of Hume that Earman put forward, but it’s not really relevant here, and it doesn’t undermine Hume’s core argument. Millican’s piece does a good job of revising Hume’s maxim to be more in line with Bayesian probability. But considering Hume’s argument wasn’t a Bayesian one in the first place (but weighted probability comparing two mutually exclusive hypotheses), among other reasons, it’s good enough.

Again! This is nuance! But I guarantee you that Schmid and other apologists who smirk and say “Read John Earman” have not actually read responses to John Earman. It’s just considered a truism in apologetic circles that Earman refuted Hume because that talking point made its way into William Lane Craig’s stump speech. No one really follows up to see if what Earman said was true or in line with the correct readings of Hume because they don’t care about the truth or seeking falsifying information.

To be clear here, I think Schmid is motivated to find the truth more than the average theist, he just lives in this pro-theistic, anti-skepticism echo chamber (see my criticisms of philosophy of religion not promoting skeptical arguments) and absorbed this by osmosis. That doesn’t make it right, and I’m calling it out.

Bonus Error

Okay, I’m kind of mailing it in on this section, as I’ve been successfully nerd sniped. I want to get this post out tonight as I have work tomorrow morning. When I first listened to this video clip (I didn’t watch the whole video) I was stun locked to the point that I didn’t notice the final error that Schmid made, that pointed out to me:

At this point, I think I’ve made the case abundantly clear that Joe Schmid has no idea what the hell Hume’s argument is. He’s not being inconsistent for dismissing both Catholic and Protestant miracles. In fact, he even explains how miracles are mutually destructive of each other in both their “impossible” probabilities given the impoverished nature of their testimony. I would say more, but I’ve already said so much, so I will refer you to my various posts already written.

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Closing Thoughts

Joe Schmid does not understand David Hume’s argument on miracles, nor do most popular theists and Christian Apologists. This is not a matter of interpretation, but of a clear understanding of the text. It’s exhausting to seemingly be the only person committed to the truth of the matter.

I don’t actually care if you believe in miracles. I care if you believe that it’s irrational to believe there is reasonable doubt here, because you’re calling me irrational (as well as a rich philosophical tradition that’s informed both science and philosophy for centuries). I care if you believe that there’s no reasonable doubt, and as a result, that we should all become Traditionalist Catholics, which would be a catastrophe for reason and society. We’ve run that experiment before.

In the past, I’ve written about the political project of Christian Apologetics and why I oppose it, even if God is real. I’m happy for people when they find faith. My parents are ministers, my wife prays Hail Marys on most days, some of my best friends are Christian, and I imagine they believe in miracles.

But the sleep of reason produces madness, and I fear some of us have dozed off.

Schmid’s conversion is relevant here because arguments for miracles were decisive for his conversion. That was disappointing to me because I consider many of the arguments and evidence for popular Catholic miracles really really bad.

Seeing an agnostic convert for those reasons is kind of like watching your political party lose a wave election for reasons outside of their control (like the predecessor nuked the economy or something before the term started). It’s a gut-punch and a wakeup call, but it’s not the kind of wakeup call where you throw your entire worldview out the window, so much as you change your communication strategy.

I will not be addressing anything else Schmid-related. I’m happy for him so long as he’s happy. At the risk of sounding like a hippy dippy liberal, I don’t care what he believes so long as he’s kind to other people.

My primary motivation for this post was, as usual, education. I wanted to give a clear account of the skeptical position, especially given that there’s so much misinformation and misunderstanding on the internet about what educated skeptics, Humeans, and non-theists believe about miracles.1

Though I’m agnostic on whether miracles can happen,2 for reasons I’ll get into in this post, I’m confident they don’t. At the very least, if God exists and works miracles, I would hope he wants the faithful to believe in miracles for good reasons, and I don’t think we have any at the moment.

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A Recap Of Humean Philosophy

I’m going to start this post off by referencing and summarizing some of my previous writing. It’s important table setting.

One of my more recent posts I published before going on a semi-hiatus outlined why testimony was practically not evidence for low-probability events. I still think it’s a banger, and haven’t heard any substantive negative feedback about it.3 Below that post are some additional posts on Hume’s essay Of Miracles

Below is a rough recap of the main ideas of these posts. I’ve put them in numbered format because this post is already pretty long and I don’t think we need to overcomplicate things further. If you’ve already read/remember/understand my previous posts, you can skip to the next section.

Key Ideas

1. Testimonial evidence is by its nature inferior evidence to non-testimonial evidence because testimonial evidence requires additional inferences about witnesses on top of the data they report.

2. For Hume (and me) natural laws are observed patterns in the world that have not been observed to deviate. When I or Hume say a law of nature hasn’t been violated, we mean no one has credibly seen it deviate from the observed pattern.

3. People confuse this to think Hume is defining a miracle out of existence or proposing a circular argument, but that’s not what he’s doing. Rather his model of probability is implicit in his writing (and really only comes to full light when someone like explains it to you separately).

4. In this way, a miracle being “by definition” the most improbable event isn’t Hume just describing the definition (though I think reasonable people would agree with his definition), but saying “If a law of nature is the most universally attested and frequent pattern with no contravening observation, and someone claims to observe a contravening event, that claim would consequentially be one of the most unlikely observations imaginable to be true.”

5. I’ll admit that #4 is confusing and nuanced, but to get at the core of this you have to understand Hume’s formulation of probability, how it contrasts contemporary probability, and how it plays into his vocabulary. Namely:

   1. Probability is a weight, not a calculation, where one event is tallied and compared against another also-tallied event.

   2. The events that have no counterweight and are observed in extremely high frequencies are natural laws.

   3. Those that have counterweights are considered mere probabilities,

   4. Probabilities that have no observation in favor but with great observation against are considered impossibilities.

   5. Hence, the contravening evidence against natural laws is considered a posteriori impossible (as a matter of fact, it could otherwise be different and we can revise this assessment with new evidence).

6. Laws are not rendered useless or meaningless with single observations contravening them. They’re just downgraded to very high and reliable probabilities. Similarly, impossibilities are not upgraded to likely with single observations, but just mere (very low) probabilities.

7. Hume believed that religious miracle testimony do not meet the standard of probabilities because of the universally low quality.

8. In all, this means that a wise person is always justified in rejecting that a miracle happened when only presented with eye-witness testimony. Even if a witness is highly credible (or if there are multiple credible witnesses), the probability of error by the testifiers is higher than the probability of the laws of nature being violated.4

9. Now, that doesn’t mean we a priori object to novel observations of spectacular events merely because all the evidence we have is testimony. If many people say they saw something weird, something weird may well have happened. It’s just unlikely that the weird thing is a religious miracle because of the nature of religious testimony. We’ll talk more about this in this post!

10. Keep in mind that Hume’s argument is an epistemological one, not an ontological one. If your ontology permits the existence of miracles, then it can be rational to believe in them. But for Hume, this is a trivial assertion. His argument is examining whether neutral wise observers should believe in miracles based on testimony (and thus whether it’s wise to believe in religion, given the only evidence we have for the foundations of modern religion is testimony). Saying “well if you presume the religion is true and that miracles do happen then it works out” is question-begging and circular logic.

11. As this relates to my posts on testimony not being evidence for improbable events, I’m basically echoing Hume’s belief (though I don’t think he says it directly or clearly) that we should proportion our credence in eye witness testimony to the baseline probability of an event.

12. In this way, eye witness testimony for everyday events is credible because those events are probable (or at least not improbable). At the same time, that testimony is useless when it comes to near impossible events or even rare ones.

13. If you audit your own behavior when it comes to improbable or rare events with severe life circumstances (not just miracles) you’d find that you also don’t trust mere testimony. That’s because we structure our lives over what is true and what is probable, and learning of improbable consequential truths usually entails restructuring our life or making radical financial decisions. Before making these changes, we demand non-testimonial evidence because we intuitively understand the high probability of human error and deception.

14. And so with miracles, we demand more than testimony to be convinced.

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Miracle Explanations Aren’t Like Other Explanations

For non-believers, skeptics, naturalists, Humeans, and other miracle-skeptics, miracle claims are inherently suspicious because they assert causality where we have little evidence to support it, often without investigation.

Let’s explain this with an illustration. Think of two people performing a spectacular event: a real miracle worker (Jesus Christ himself perhaps) and the world’s best magician. If both of them performed a feat where they similarly appeared to walk on water and you didn’t know which person was which, both of their walks would look identical. You couldn’t tell them apart!

In this way, when we experience a novel spectacular event, by definition, we do not know what we are observing. For these events, whether they be miracles or magic tricks, we do not see the underlying causal forces creating the appearances we are observing. They are hidden from us, as we see the consequence of the miracle/magic trick, but not the cause. That’s what makes it a miracle or magic trick!

I call this problem the problem of auxiliary or secondary causality. I don’t think this is something Hume talks about directly (outside of general problems of inferring causality) but Hume scholars like Vanderburgh allude to it in their work.

The problem of secondary causality is this: When we see an extraordinary event, whether it be the sun moving weirdly or a diseased person healing unexpectedly, we are seeing the effects of that event, not the cause. We are completely unfamiliar with the cause.

This, in contrast with ordinary events. When you see a car crash, you see a car going too fast and hitting another car. You have an understanding for the plausible causes for this event, from human carelessness and intoxication to mechanical failure. You also have an understanding of how to investigate or eliminate alternative candidate hypotheses. As a result of abundant experience with cars, drivers, and the causal forces that influence them, we know how to evaluate those candidate hypotheses, affirming or eliminating them.

You cannot say the same of supernatural causation.

The problem for miracles and supernatural events is that they resist the same level of explanation as natural events. If our car example were judged miraculous, people would recall and explain the event as: “We saw a car crash, God caused it, and no further explanation is needed.” This is an odd way to draw a conclusion about anything, but because it’s judged miraculous, it’s considered permissible. At the risk of sounding like a cringe 2010s New Atheist, “God did it” is not much of an explanation!

In this way, causal explanations need to be plausible, well explained, and better fit the data than alternative hypotheses. Merely reporting the event as observed and implying “no additional explanation needed” eliminates all aspects of explanation.

To use a marginally more concrete example, there’s a difference between saying “God made the host bleed” explaining how God made the host bleed, and explaining how God made the host bleed using high quality evidence, methodologies, and measurement tools, while also eliminating alternative hypotheses with that same data.

In my experience, miracle proponents almost always lack high quality evidence or tools of measurement, and are generally unconvincing when eliminating naturalistic explanations.5 They may have a quasi-plausible sounding story about how God did something, but no good evidence to support it.

Instead of finding this high quality evidence, miracle proponents will use the sophisticated-surrounding rhetoric of hypothesis testing. As I’ve written before, this rhetoric is misleading because, at best, it’s inferior to other evidentiary methodologies. At worst, it’s outright deceptive and abused. After all, when we use hypothesis testing methodologies in science or our everyday life, we’re applying them to data with which we have abundant experience of its causal relationships. What’s more, we’re also using it for events that are highly probable or not improbable. The same cannot be said of extremely improbable miracles and supernatural causation, where we have scarce familiarity.

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Miracle proponents seem to think hypothesis testing and conditional probabilities are incompatible with Hume’s argument, but they’re wrong.6 If anything, Hume’s argument accurately frames these methods, as most non-philosophy-of-religion uses of them are done in a context of familiar causal relationships and non-improbable events. In this way, miracle proponents are misusing these methods because they’re taking them outside of the context of highly probable and familiar cases.

And so, the miracle proponent will use tactics like asking a question around the lines of “Does this evidence best fit the supernatural or natural hypothesis?” pretending that baseline probability of either hypothesis is similar.

Such questions also presume that supernatural hypotheses aren’t catastrophically under-defined. They may sound legitimate, but compared to naturalistic hypotheses, they are much less detailed. It’s an impressive rhetorical move (and I want to reiterate that I don’t believe it’s intentional or bad faith) by believers, but it doesn’t get us closer to the truth.

This note below does a good job of explaining this asymmetry with magic as a stand-in for supernatural explanations. (To be clear, I don’t think Charlie is a skeptic, he just knocked this explanation out of the park)

For the skeptic, it appears as if miracle proponents are playing word games. Naturalistic explanations are held to higher standards, while supernatural explanations seem to have no standards. It’s easy to call a competing hypothesis ad hoc, unparsimonious, and all these others bad things when your hypothesis doesn’t say anything at all.

Correcting a Humean Confusion

Here I want to clear up a misconception about the Humean position on novel spectacular events (that is, amazing events you’ve never seen before).

Non-skeptics (and unfortunately, some skeptics) erroneously believe that the Humean wouldn’t believe anything spectacular based on testimonial experience. Or, if a credible novel observation undermined the Humean’s understanding of the laws of nature, they would disbelieve it. Both of these beliefs are wrong.

For a Humean, eye witness testimony for something spectacular is good evidence for something spectacular, it’s just not evidence for something miraculous in origin because we do not observe miraculous causal origins. 7

We can formulate reliable natural probabilities because we have abundant evidence of conjunctive natural events. At the same time, we cannot formulate supernatural or miraculous probabilities because we don’t have sufficient evidence or experience for those events.

Even if you believe miracles happen, they are exceptionally rare, non-replicable, and their causes (beyond “God did it”) are mysterious. Consequently, it’s impossible to identify them with high confidence if and when they do happen, especially because miracles rarely happen in the same way (a healing miracle is different from a sun miracle).

Put another way: I’ve seen plenty of billiard balls move, make contact with other balls that conjunctively move, and so I can formulate reliable probabilities and expectations about those events and similar events. In contrast, I’ve never seen someone miraculously move a billiard ball, so I can’t formulate any reliable probabilities or expectations of what that looks like.

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And so, the Humean or skeptical position is that these spectacular observations are not evidence of supernatural causation. Hume did not deny that spectacular or novel events happen, just that it’s unjustified to infer that their cause is supernatural or religious instead of natural.

It’s thus no major concession to say extraordinary things happen when presented with testimonial evidence for something extraordinary. It’s also not a major concession to observe a purported law of nature being undermined. Rather, at worst, the Humean merely downgrades the law of nature to a very strong probability. No harm, no foul.8

In all, saying something spectacular happened is different from saying something supernatural happened; downgrading a law of nature to merely an extremely strong probability is much different from saying a supernatural force interceded and overruled the law. On those two points, the Humean will always object because there is not sufficient evidence that something supernatural happened (or that something natural yet currently misunderstood didn’t happen) or that something supernatural “interceded” or “overruled” the law.

We just don’t know what those causal forces (supernaturalism, a force overruling the laws of nature) look like.

Hume’s Maxim Is Just Correct

As a consequence of all of this, I instinctually shrug off pretty much every miracle claim. I think purported miracle evidence is usually just evidence for the spectacular, and upon further examination, that spectacular event is either clearly natural or inconclusive in origin.9

The primary reason I don’t argue about specific miracles, though, is that they typically only have testimonial evidence supporting them, and I think Hume’s Maxim10 is simply correct.

That is, when witnesses claim to observe a miracle, the two explanations (human error and the uniformity of nature vs. human correctness and the violation of the uniformity of nature) are mutually exclusive, and so we should weigh the probabilities. From there, it’s exponentially more likely that humans have made a mistake in their perception than it is that the laws of nature no longer function as universally observed.11

What’s more, even if you assume a spectacular observation is accurate, it’s unlikely to be supernatural in origin, for at least two reasons that even supernatural believers should affirm:

1. Natural causes are exponentially more likely than supernatural causes (I don’t feel like I have to elaborate on this?).

2. In the history of unexplained events that have been investigated, the overwhelming majority (being generous to supernaturalists) have turned out to have a natural origin; why think the next one would be different?

I understand that some may object to my general dismissal, believing that a sufficient number of witnesses could make a miracle claim probable. Still, I disagree with this for reasons I expressed in a note while restacking a great post by . I borrowed from an argument advanced by the Humean philosopher Arif Ahmed:

Long story short, we can identify the circumstances when otherwise reliable tools of measurement and “attestation” are clearly concurrently failing (even if the concurrent failure is itself improbable). I apply that same reasoning to otherwise reliable eyewitness accounts.12 Humans in groups are much more likely to concurrently err than the laws of nature are to deviate.13

I understand if theists and general miracle believers think I’m stubborn and pig-headed for thinking this way, but at the end of the day, I’m just acting the most wise/rationally I can.

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Wrapping Up

Originally, this post continued on for another few thousand words, diving into the psychology of miracle believers and skeptics. I was going to talk about how some believers insistence on the necessity of believing in bad miracle claims created an interesting problem of evil. But upon uploading this into substack, I realized that it read like a completely different post, with a different overall tone, and so this was a good time to pause. I’ll upload that at a later date.

For now, the key takeaway from this post is that skeptics disbelieve miracles because they believe that:

1. Supernatural explanations are unsatisfactory, as they lack explanatory power relative to natural ones,

2. Hume’s maxim is correct,

3. We don’t know what supernatural causation looks like, so claiming it as an explanation is unjustified,

4. Eyewitness testimony for the miraculous is really just evidence for the spectacular,

5. Sufficient investigation into the spectacular is exponentially more likely to reveal natural causes.

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People joked about the world cup being a utopia for unemployed people, and being one of those unemployed people I can confirm it was! But that was the only “good” thing about the last few months. The last 6 weeks especially have been extremely rough.

I was worn down from being unemployed a few months longer than anticipated, and it long enough where the precipice of financial ruin was much closer than I was comfortable. I was in no condition to write long posts, read books, or research anything but a job lead.

But the good news is that it’s over now! I start a new job in about a week, and I’m excited about it. My brain is returning to factory settings. I don’t know how much energy my new job will take up relative to my previous job, but I won’t have the same ambient stress that I had the last few months, and it’ll also be easier to segment my day and allocate my energy.

If you’ve ever been unemployed for an extended period of time, you know exactly what I’ve gone through. When you’re unemployed, you’re always “on” in the sense that you’re looking for jobs online at random hours of the day/night, you have email notifications on, and you’re constantly thinking about ways to get a job, network, make more money, and so you. You may not be working per se, but you are thinking about work at more times than you otherwise would if you had a job with decent work-life balance.

At my previous job, I did a chunk of my writing after work because I could turn off my work brain and think more about philosophy. I couldn’t do that while job hunting. But now that I have a job, I hope to return to writing very soon.

What’s Next?

Mitigated Skepticism

As I said in a previous post, this substack will focus a little bit more on Hume studies than it has previously. The reason why is because I see a niche for Hume education and popularization. The best Humean philosophers are busy with their academic lives or not on substack. Though I’m a mere philosophy BA who would love to one day have an MA, I put enough attention and care into researching Hume where I have a little bit of an advantage over pretty much anyone who hasn’t studied Hume at a graduate level. In short, I want to be a Hume/philosophy educator, if only as a hobbyist.

In absolute terms, I consider my Hume knowledge only intermediate, even if I’m advanced relative to other people. I’m sufficiently advanced that I have been approached to do a podcast (a philosophy/theology podcast that you’ve probably heard of) about Hume, specifically about his argument on miracles and my writings on the argument. Though this was flattering, I had to turn them down for various reasons.

For one, I’m not quite confident enough in my Hume knowledge to go in a debate/confrontational conversation. A lot of the contention about Hume is not about the things he said (which I can defend right now), but the implications of the things he said (which I can also defend, just not as well), where I need to do more research. I’m confident I can get to that point relatively soon, but I have to get my brain back in shape (I haven’t thought about Hume in almost two months!) and do more research about these subjects.

Now that I have a job and getting back on my proverbial Hume horse, I’ll be more open to such opportunities in the near future, but it would be unwise to do so until at least the end of September. Still, I’m proud of this invitation, as it was great positive feedback, indicating that I’m on the right track with what I’m doing here.

Sports And Philosophy

I also hope to fire up my second blog with philosophy of sports content. I think that’s another “market” in online philosophy that’s undersupplied, and I think I’m well positioned to provide that supply. The reason why is because most sports fans don’t care about philosophy, and most philosophy enjoyers care little about sports (nerds!). I consider this tragic because sports metaphors are great vehicles to communicate philosophy, and sports are often the most readily available expression of real world philosophy.

Weirdly enough, I think writing about philosophy in sports will be much easier than Hume because there’s just so much low hanging fruit. If you’d like to join me in writing about Sports and Philosophy, let me know and you can be a contributor. I think there’s more potential for the sports substack to blow up relative to the Humean one.

All to say, it’s my aspiration to build a little side hustle and likely a podcast out of one or both of these ventures. I don’t anticipate substack or philosophy ever being a full time job for me, but if I can get to the level where I make a few hundred (or even one thousand!) dollars a month writing a couple posts or a podcast, that would be great.

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Upcoming Posts

Mitigated Skepticism

Before I took my little hiatus, I was writing a long post continuing on the theme of awesome evidence. I’m not sure if I want to continue that, but I think there are interesting things to say about the best strategy of assuming uniformity of nature when modeling reality. I wrote a lot on this in a half-finished draft, and I’ll have to investigate what’s worth bringing up again. I’ll hopefully have something on this in the coming weeks.

I’m also reading Massimo Pigliucci’s book on “happy skepticism” and I’m loving it so far, and I see an opportunity to use it to contrast Humean, Academic, and Pyrrhonian skepticism. I already had plans to eventually write a post contrasting Hume from Pyrrho, but Pigliucci’s book is strongly pro-Academic, so I think that would enrich the post. I may write that post next week (no promises!).

Sports And Philosophy

With college football season starting in about two weeks, I hope to write something college football related on my second blog, but not sure what yet. I literally have dozens of sports philosophy post ideas on a google doc somewhere, but I have to sit down and actually write it.

Thanks Everybody

In all, I’m very glad this trying chapter of my life is over and I can start looking forward to getting my finances and everything else back on track. I hope you’ll join me as I get back into writing/reading/talking about philosophy.

Right now, I have roughly 370 subscribers (give or take a few), and that’s more people who have ever read my content. I’m very grateful for that!

I’m aiming to have 500 followers/subscribers on Mitigated Skepticism by the end of the year, and hope to get 50 for Sports and Philosophy.

Thank you to everyone who follows and subscribes!

Joe

Would you believe in God if the stars in the sky realigned to say “Jesus is Lord?” What if we discovered data interwoven within the fabric of the universe, that, when decoded, was an unambiguously religious message?

In this post, I’m going to argue that there are so many problems and false assumptions within AAEs that nontheists can safely reject them. In a future post, I’ll talk about Humean reasons to reject AAEs.1

Should One Datapoint Overturn Your Worldview?

One of the implicit assumptions about the AAE is that one data point could be sufficiently strong to overturn an entire worldview, already informed by multiple data points. The problem with this is that it’s not how rational actors evaluate evidence.

To illustrate this point, let’s postulate a world in which the evidence for theism was lower than the world we live in now. Let’s say that we lived in a world where everyone agreed there was no fine tuning for life, no objective moral values, where the best physics pointed in the direction of an eternal universe, the ontological argument had not been formulated, that the best physics somehow established the necessity of the universe, and that there was no Christianity in this universe (say the events of Christianity happened, and even that Jesus was an established historical figure, but like many ancient religions, died out millennia ago).

If the stars rearranged in the sky to say “Jesus is Lord and God is real,” that would certainly be evidence of some sort for God and Jesus as Lord, but I don’t think rational actors would be justified in believing in the Christian God. This piece of evidence would be the only evidence in support of God as real and Jesus as Lord that inhabitants of that universe would have, while they would also have more evidence against God as real and Jesus as Lord.

All of this illustrates that one datapoint rarely, if ever, overturns a worldview. Rational actors form their beliefs based on cumulative cases of multiple data points. When we’re presented with outlier datapoints that don’t support the “line of best fit” of our theories, we look to explain these outliers with reasoning that assumes the general theory. Put another way, we informally explain how the world functions in terms of rules, and when we find exceptions to those rules, we don’t throw the rules out, but look to explain the exceptions.2

In this way, there’s confusion among both nontheists and theists/Christians about the nature of evidence as it relates to religious or metaphysical beliefs. Namely, both have a misunderstanding of how to interpret strong individual contravening datapoints within a general framework.

When a nontheist says that they only need one piece of good evidence to believe in God, they’re being unintentionally dishonest. In reality, the nontheist will evaluate supposed good theistic evidence through the lens of the cumulative case against God/theism. And so, when rare, purportedly “awesome,” evidence emerges that contradicts their worldview, they won’t overturn their understanding of “the rules” of reality, but look to explain apparent exceptions using the reasoning within that framework.

And before it comes off that I’m being too hard on the nontheist, I think this is true of theists and Christians as well! Their reasoning process is exactly the same: If awesome evidence emerges against their worldview, they don’t overturn their faith. For example, I don’t know of a Christian who agrees with the nontheists on all the arguments against God except one and still claims theism.

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How People Actually Form (And Change) Beliefs

All to say, when the Christian advances the AAE or the nontheist says they “just want one piece of good evidence,” they share the implicit assumption that one strong datapoint could overturn their worldview. That assumption is false.

There are many explanations for why this assumption is false, but I’m not going to go too deep into all of them. My preferred explanation is that the human need for multiple paths of explanation is probably an evolutionary adaptation. If all it took to change our mind over something important was one singular datapoint, we couldn’t form consistent belief, we would be easily deceived and exploited, we wouldn’t be able to infer patterns from complex information, and thus we would have a harder time surviving, passing on our genes, or thriving.

And so, a better framework to understand how people form opinions and change their minds is through the lens of cumulative cases and personality types. That is, people form opinions and beliefs through their life experience, which includes but isn’t limited to their personality types, and the expectations, inferences, and positions that they already hold. To alter their beliefs and opinions, you have to present a cumulative case in a manner that’s compatible with that life experience and prior understanding.

Now, for some readers that may appear as mundane Bayesian reasoning, but the important thing to understand is that there is no objective means of formulating the Bayesian equation. Before we can come up with a Bayesian equation to calculate the conditional probabilities, we have to make all of these subjective judgments about the nature of evidence, causality, etc. All of this is grounded in our subjective experience, culture, language, understanding of logic and science, etc. Though the Bayesian equation itself may be mathematically objective, everything else is not.

Digression: Don’t Be Rude!

As a sidenote, this is why I try my best to be nice to people who disagree with me on philosophical and religious issues online, provided they are nice and polite to me. It’s kind of silly to think one can change the opinion of someone on an issue that they’re so committed to or that they have built a blog or a career on.

One single interaction, or even a continuous discussion about a specific argument is not going to change someone’s mind on an issue of such personal importance. If it did, that would be irrational. And so, it’s very silly to me that some people try to force debates with strangers, or cast judgments on their intelligence, or are just in general rude. You’re not educating people or demonstrating superior intellect. Rather, you’re being a jerk and showing you don’t really understand how people reason.

It’s Never Just About The Evidence

The source of disagreements between people on fundamental issues, religious or otherwise, is not one side being more informed, intelligent, virtuous, or rational, but the variation of their life circumstances creating variation in their expectations, inferences, positions, and personality types. This variation makes individual people less receptive to ideas and explanations that don’t already fit within their framework, especially when the subject matter is beyond verification or falsification.

Yes, some arguments are superior to others, but the force of those arguments is subjective and dependent on the psychology of whomever is contemplating the argument.

To name one example, I’m a nontheist who doesn’t care too much about the problem of evil. That seems embarrassing to admit because most philosophers, theist and nontheist alike, agree the problem of evil is the most compelling challenge to theism. To be clear, I think the problem of evil successfully defeats theism, it’s just not the main reason I’m a nontheist. I suspect that’s the case because I’m not confronted with the scale and intensity of suffering in the world. Even though I intellectually know suffering is there, it doesn’t really influence my opinion on the truth of theism or Christianity because it’s just not at the top of my mind.

So, if I ever change my opinion on Christianity or theism, or if the problem of suffering becomes more salient to me, it’s not going to be because I’ve heard a single new theodicy or am exposed to a new argument. Rather, it’ll be because my underlying personality changed or someone presented me with multiple new arguments, compatible with my current personality and my worldview that increased my credence in theism.3

All to say, if you’re going to change someone’s mind about the truth or falsehood of theism, a single datapoint, no matter how compelling, is not going to do the job. Instead, you need multiple pieces of evidence and arguments that are compatible with their underlying personality and identity. If all you provide is a single datapoint, even if it’s extremely compelling, you’re more likely to see that person explain it away, making it compatible with their prior framework.

Again, this is a rational human process to maintain cognitive consistency and protect oneself from deception and exploitation. Humans don’t form beliefs in a void, but in the context of their experience. To the extent that “awesome” evidence exists, it can only exist so far as it is compatible with a prior framework.

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Problems With The AAE

The AAE Begs The Question

Let me just repeat what I just wrote, because I think it’s very important:

Humans don’t form beliefs in a void, but in the context of their experience. To the extent that “awesome” evidence exists, it can only exist so far as it is compatible with a prior framework.

I wanted to reiterate this point to transition to my many problems with AAE. Primarily, AAEs beg the question. In an effort to indict the nontheist of dogmatism or irrationality for not changing beliefs based on awesome evidence, it presupposes what awesome evidence looks like.

Specifically, the AAE presupposes that humans observing improbable natural data resembling a religious message for unknown reasons is itself awesome evidence.

I put emphasis on “humans observing improbable natural data” and “for unknown reasons” because nontheists are more likely to doubt initial observations of improbable data and to deny explanations that lack explanation supported by evidence.

Put more directly:

Awesome evidence for a skeptic or nontheist is evidence that is

1. Affirmed by multiple datapoints (or auxiliary evidence)

2. And establishes a clear causal explanation for an event or pattern in the universe.

AAE thought experiments do not meet those conditions, and so from the skeptic and nontheistic perspective, they are not actually awesome evidence.

AAE And Abusing Hypotheticals

Once you recognize how AAE begs the question by presupposing what awesome evidence looks like, other problems become more apparent.

As a nontheist and skeptic, I’m sensitive to when I feel language in a philosophical discussion is doing too much work, glossing over important questions of plausibility. For example, one AAE proposes the stars in the sky rearrange to say something like “I am God and Jesus is Lord.” My follow up question is “what exactly does that look like?”

Some other questions that pop into my brain:

• Are we talking about every star in the sky?

• Is the writing as “clear” as many constellations supposedly look like certain shapes?

• Is this a permanent change? Or something that happens only once?

• Will our best astronomers be able to publish studies on the various gravitational and interstellar impacts of this event?

• Will the stars return to their original position eventually?

• Is this something that just appears in our sky, or will our satellite telescopes see it as well?

These questions may seem like pedantic nitpicking to avoid answering the metaphysical questions, but I don’t think so. That’s because metaphysical or physical impossibility should be important constraints when evaluating counterfactuals and thought experiments.

Let’s say you’re a big supporter of the politician George Monroe, while I am an opponent. I think your support is irrational and bad, so I ask you “Would you be a supporter of Monroe if he murdered 10 people in cold blood?”

If you say you wouldn’t support him, that’s not a big indictment of your current position on account of Monroe hasn’t actually murdered anyone! At the same time, it would be a perfectly valid response for the Monroe supporter to say that the hypothetical is an irrelevant question. After all, the many reasons they support Monroe are probably tangible to the fact that they find the idea of him murdering 10 people in cold blood implausible.

And so, it’s very odd to propose hypotheticals that your interlocutors think are impossible, and use their response as an intellectual failing. There’s no real cost for a nontheist to either reject the hypothetical or admit that they would change their opinion when presented with compelling evidence. But they don’t have to concede that the aforementioned AAE is compelling evidence, because as we’ve seen, the AAE begs the question in ways that the nontheist would disagree.

What if the stars rearranged themselves to say God was real? Would you believe in God then? I don’t know man, that seems like an impossible scenario. The details would be important and I don’t think we could capture them in a hypothetical that seems more to be a word game.

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What About Awesome Evidence Against A Religion?

I understand that the formulation of the AAE is supposed to fit neatly into a Bayesian or hypothesis-testing framework, to illustrate the irrationality of non-theists who refuse to accept a prima facie/intuitively more plausible hypothesis. Regardless, I don’t think the hypothetical demonstrates anyone is being irrational, because we can come up with alternative scenarios using the same kind of data that test theists in similar ways. Those theists would be similarly noncompliant as nontheists to the argument, but I don’t think we would say those people are being irrational or dogmatic.

Let’s say the stars realigned themselves to say “Christianity is False” or “The Church of Rome is the One True Church” or “Protestants Are Correct.”

In any of these hypothetical situations, you have the same kind of evidence as a theistic AAE, with the difference being that they would challenge a specific religious sect. I don’t believe the challenged sect would abandon their faith, but instead see the event as demonic.

And so, theists presented either with awesome evidence against their position or with aforementioned AAE scenarios would, like nontheists, not be convinced. They would do any or all of one of the following:

1. Denying the hypothetical is possible,

2. Affirming they’d hypothetically change their position if the evidence was good enough,

3. Or postulating plausible explanations from within their worldview that accounts for the evidence.

As I’ve already explained before, I don’t see anything wrong with this. I think this is rational behavior! Though theists may find nontheistic explanations (like extremely powerful aliens) ad hoc or weird, I don’t see how such explanations are weirder or more ad hoc than demons. Sure, religious ontology may explicitly make space for malevolent beings capable of great works, but nontheistic ontologies don’t preclude the possibility of malevolent-yet-powerful beings. I don’t see why one hypothesis is more acceptable than the other.

The AAE Is An Unfair Dunk

My last criticism of AAE is that it’s an unfair dunk. They’re a gotcha argument against nontheists, trying to expose them as unreasonable and dogmatic.

Beyond all of the substantive reasons I’ve criticized the AAE, it misses something important about the philosophy of religion. Namely, much of the field of philosophy is about coming up with unintuitive answers to questions that appear intuitive on first glance.

A nontheist saying he would not be convinced of God’s existence based on an AAE scenario does not reveal him as irrational or dogmatic, but invites us to listen to his reasoning in the first place!

Put another way, the subtext of AAE arguments are that the nontheist is “coping” when, as far as I can tell, the nontheist is just doing philosophy.

At the same time, a nontheist has good grounds to believe that theists are “coping” themselves!

Specifically, I think many people who are presented with compelling expectation-violating or hypothesis-falsifying evidence against theism or Christianity (problem of evil, religious abuse, problem of teaching factually false things, etc.) merely leave theism and Christianity. For many non-believers and apostates, these evidences are themselves awesome. And so, those who see these arguments and remain within the religion are the dogmatic ones.4

But this is a very silly and rude way of looking at people who disagree with you or who assess evidence differently from you. Indeed, I think one of the purposes of philosophy of religion is to understand how different viewpoints come up with intuitive and counter-intuitive explanations. Nontheists have counter-intuitive positions to theists, and vice versa. Being stunned that someone else denies something obvious to you says more about your own deficits of wisdom than theirs.

And so, I think this is an unfair dunk on nontheists. It’s rightfully considered rude for a nontheist to assume theistic interlocutors are dogmatic and irrational merely because they come to radically different conclusions based on the same set of facts. Yet at the same time, the whole point of AAEs seems to be to imply that nontheists are dogmatic and irrational.

So not only is the AAE a bad argument, but it’s also a double standard in decorum that dumbs down conversation. For that reason, I think theists should refrain from using it. If they disagree, that’s fine: I’ll return with the mirrored of this tactic from the atheist perspective, which is just affirming the problem of evil or hiddenness and respond to all responses with an incredulous stare.

• I’m still unemployed. It sucks, especially considering I’ve had about three or four very near misses at this point.

• I’m not yet nihilistic or angry, but I am feeling a little bit spiteful. In the past, my typical reaction to this kind of failure has been to take matters into my hands, and do some sort of certification or project to shore up weaknesses on my resume. At this point in my career, and given how far I’m getting in my interviews, I don’t think this is a good use of my time.

• So instead, I’m leaning into substack more!

• That may seem a little silly, but I’ve been on the platform for about 18 months now, and I think it’s still a platform with lots of growth potentiall. I think it’s still in the early adoption phase.

• I am rebranding my main blog “Constructive Skepticism” into “Mitigated Skepticism.” I want the main blog to reflect my more Humean instincts. The constructive skepticism title came from not wanting to be penciled in to one kind of content (religion), and wanting to demonstrate the general applicability of a moderate skeptic philosophy. I still stand by that project! I just think it’s better expressed by communicating Hume’s philosophy. When I started this substack, I did not realize how ignorant the median online philosophy enjoyer was of Hume’s philosophy.

• With this rebrand, I’m going to aim to write more specifically about Hume’s philosophy, how people misunderstand it, etc. That’s not to say I won’t write about other things, but I want to focus more on Hume research as a sort of psychological anchoring for my writing projects.

• I am also rebranding my second blog “Joe writes about sports” to be “Sports And Philosophy.” I’m aiming to write a lot more about sports and philosophy because I think it’s a neglected topic online. There’s a whole field of sports philosophy, but I don’t think it’s that influential. I’m going to be doing some research on sports philosophy, but I’m also going to have my own takes as well. I’m hoping this substack doesn’t just communicate sports philosophy, but perhaps even primarily communicates sports to philosophy enjoyers (who seem to be nerds who need to touch grass) and philosophy to sports fans (who could use to read more).

• I’m changing my profile name back to my real name so I can associate more with my work on substack. The reason I changed it in the first place was to avoid drama with various companies’ social media policies that I may apply for. I don’t really care about that anymore. I don’t think there’s anything controversial in my actual posts, though notes may be another story.

• This is also so people can differentiate my two different substacks. I imagine sports people may not be interested in, say, Hume’s argument on miracles.

• I’m going to try to post less notes and be on the substack app less. I am addicted to this platform. To the extent that I make myself look bad here, it’s by being mean to (objectively foolish) commenters who respond to my notes. I don’t like that. I also don’t like how I reach for substack as much as I do.

• On a more personal note, I’m changing the way I read books now. I typically read lots of books at once, often not making progress or DNFing after having a book on my reading list for like 6 months. Instead, I’m going to read primarily books that I can write posts about. Obviously, this is kind of limiting, but I’ve always been transactional in the books I read in the first place. I like reading, but I have to differentiate between reading because I want to and reading because I think it would be cool to say I read something.

• In my early to mid 20s, I could read 60 books a year on average. Now, I just don’t have the time. Even when I don’t have a job, I have more life obligations to keep up with. I also prefer to spend my time catching up with culture (like watching sports or YouTube) and writing than I do reading that many books. I also like practicing guitar! You’ll read in a lot of self help books that the key to productivity is knowing when to say no to things. That is, knowing when a new opportunity costs you more than it benefits you. At this phase of my life, I have to be much more selective with the books I read; part of this is because I’m not as curious as I used to be, but a big part of it is just knowing my interests as an adult, but also my specialties. I’d rather read a book on Hume than, say, Black Holes. If this sports philosophy substack takes off, I’ll definitely read more about philosophy in sports because those are two interseting subjects for me.

• I will still post pictures of Margaux the Chinchilla. I will not betray my brand identity!

  Mitigated Skepticism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

• The importance of relevance and causality when evaluating evidence, and that vague gestures to Bayesianism do not actually address those problems.

• A clear definition of what a claim was, which I defined as merely a declarative sentence.

• A better vocabulary to talk about evidence, to differentiate irrelevant data, dormant evidence, and compelling evidence.

In this post, I’m going to go a step farther. Namely: I think there’s good reason to treat testimonial claims as non-evidential in some circumstances (those attesting to highly improbable events). Similar to my conclusion in my previous post, this assessment is an a posteriori one. It could have been otherwise that testimony is evidential in all circumstances. But it’s not, so it isn’t.

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Why Testimony is Flawed

In our everyday lives, testimony is evidential. This is because, through the testament (pun intended) of human knowledge, we find that people claiming to have perceived x is correlated with x being true at a sufficiently high probability to where we can conclude that x is more likely, given testimony. So far, so good.

But testimony is also flawed. Everyone agrees on this point, though different philosophers disagree about the implications.

Often in these conversations between skeptics and non-skeptics, the shortcomings of testimony aren’t explained in much detail. To differentiate this post, I want to outline (very briefly!) some of the science of why testimony is unreliable. Please note: what I’m listing here is not a comprehensive overview of the literature, but a snapshot in less than an hour of research.1

In 1974, Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer showed how leading questions and post event information can alter a person’s recollection of an event. You can read about the details here. These findings were replicated in 2025, which you can learn more here.

In 2015, Julia Shaw and Stephen Porter convinced participants that they had committed crimes in adolescence using suggestive interviewing techniques plus real autobiographical details supplied by family members. From the abstract:

“After three interviews, 70% of participants were classified as having false memories of committing a crime (theft, assault, or assault with a weapon) that led to police contact in early adolescence and volunteered a detailed false account. These reported false memories of crime were similar to false memories of noncriminal events and to true memory accounts, having the same kinds of complex descriptive and multisensory components. It appears that in the context of a highly suggestive interview, people can quite readily generate rich false memories of committing crime.”

In 2020, Elizabeth Loftus and Rachel Leigh Greenspan showed eyewitness confidence can be inflated by misleading feedback after identification. Witnesses become more certain after receiving subtle confirmation, even when their original identification was wrong. You can read more about that here.

Finally, in 2014 Krissy Wilson and Christopher French used a staged “paranormal” magic event to test how suggestion and social influence alter eyewitness reports. From the abstract:

“Participants watched a video of an alleged psychic seemingly bending a metal key by the power of psychokinesis. Half the participants heard the fake psychic suggest that the key continued to bend after it had been put down on a table and half did not. Additionally, participants were exposed to either a negative social influence (a stooge co-witness reporting that the key did not continue to bend), no social influence, or a positive social influence (a stooge co-witness reporting that the key did continue to bend). Participants who were exposed to the verbal suggestion were significantly more likely to report that the key continued to bend. Additionally, more participants reported that the key continued to bend in the positive social influence condition compared to the other two social influence conditions. Finally, believers in the paranormal were more likely to report that the key continued to bend than non-believers.”

One way I like to summarize all of this evidence is that our memories are weird. We don’t remember the past as it was, but through the lens of how we feel and think in the present. We are impressionable, and minor social prodding can lead us to change our testimony, feel more confident in what we perceive, or believe things we did not actually perceive.

Because of that, memory and testimony are always subject to change and doubt.

Why Testimony Is Inferior To Non-Testimonial Evidence

Okay, so testimony is evidential, but it’s weaker evidence relative to other forms of evidence because of all the aforementioned ways in which it can be misremembered, revised, deceptive, etc. In this way, I want to advance a simple principle to communicate why testimony is inferior to other forms of evidence:

Testimony is inferior to other forms of evidence because objective evaluators have to draw inferences about the motives and reliability of testifiers, in conjunction with drawing inferences about the data the testifiers are reporting.

If we were to put this in probabilistic terms, the difference between the reliability of testimonial and non-testimonial evidence is that the probability of the accuracy (though not necessarily interpretation) of non-testimonial data is 1 (because you can observe it as it is), while testimonial evidence will always have a probability of less than 1 because of the unreliable nature of testimony.2

Let’s illustrate this point. Take two points of evidence that support the same conclusion: A child testifying that they got a C on a test and the actual graded paper. Together, both of these pieces of evidence support the conclusion that the child got a C. But over time the child’s memory of the paper will change, while barring the paper decaying away or being lost, objective observers will have access to the paper.

The child’s memory and testimony could change for any number of reasons. He may feel shame and want to lie about his grade. He may have been an inattentive student and couldn’t recall the grade he got on that particular paper years later. He could have been a bad student to begin his academic career, and then later improved tremendously causing him to misremembered his grade. And so on. The child’s original testimony on this mundane matter may be accurate (provided the child isn’t being deceptive) but its accuracy degrades over time. Sometimes that degradation is as soon as minutes after the event!

Meanwhile, barring an incident, you, me, and anyone can all look at the child’s paper that is graded as a C and infer that the child got a C. Though the inferences we draw from non-testimonial data points may change with better understanding, explanations, or new evidence, the raw data that we perceive, have access to, and so on, remains stable, relative to the child’s memory of the event.

In this way, the reason why we trust non-testimonial forms of evidence over testimony is because, relative to other forms of evidence, the medium of the data of testimony is the human brain, and the human brain has limited capabilities and abundant opportunities to make mistakes or change.

Again, nothing about the unreliability of testimony is written in the laws of logic, but are matters of fact, derived from experience. Not only do we have well documented flaws and mistakes in testimony from witnesses sincerely trying to recall an event, we also have numerous instances of witnesses lying about what they witnessed in service of an ulterior motive. This didn’t have to be the case! Humans could have psychologies completely optimized for accurate testimony at all times. But that’s not the world we live in.

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Hume, The Base-Rate Fallacy, and Testimony By Itself

As the Hume guy on substack, I feel the need to point out the inferior nature of testimony relative to other forms of evidence is one of the primary reasons that Hume says it’s unwise to believe in a miracle on testimony alone. At the end of the day, Hume’s argument is a first draft of what’s today called the base-rate fallacy.

Per EBSCO:

“The base-rate fallacy, also known as base-rate neglect, is a cognitive error in which individuals fail to adequately consider the general prevalence of an event when evaluating the probability of specific outcomes. This phenomenon occurs when people focus on particular details while overlooking relevant statistical information, leading to misjudgments about likelihoods.”

For Hume, the laws of nature are reliable, unchanging, and without deviation. This isn’t because there’s some sort of rule written into the universe that is enforced by some sort of universal governor, but because we quite literally never (credibly) observe a deviation in these natural events. As Hume views probability as something weighed and not measured, the tally of a natural law is uniformly and massively on one side of a metaphorical scale, while credible deviations/violations measured on the other side of the scale are non-existent (hence why he says that miracle testimony doesn’t even amount to a probability).

So for Hume, the baseline probability of a miracle is extremely low, while the probability of a witness being wrong is much higher, with religious testimony for miracles being especially bad, increasing the probability of a witness testimony being wrong. Altogether, a miracle may seem probable given the relative reliability of a witness, but when that probability is contextualized with the base-rate probability of a miracle, it’s vanishingly unlikely to be true.

Let’s illustrate this a little more concretely, albeit quick and dirty. Let’s say you have a witness to a miracle that is 90% reliable (which I would argue is generous because of the flaws of human psychology). The 10% chance that the witness is wrong is much higher than the vanishingly small probability of a miracle (which I would say is lower than 10%, or 1%, or .1% or even .00001%). So when we put them on the scales of probability, it’s more likely that the witness is wrong.3

The key point: Hume himself doesn’t say that testimony for miracles isn’t evidence, just that it’s bad evidence, and not enough to establish a miracle.

I’m emphasizing this because pop skeptics make a mistake when they say testimony isn’t evidence for a hypothesis or that a claim made in the context of testimony to an event isn’t some kind of evidence.

In this way, they’ve misunderstood the Humean argument, conflating:

1. Hume’s understanding of evidence with

2. What Hume believes is wise to believe about miracles based on testimony.

Namely, Hume does not say that miracle testimony isn’t some kind of evidence, just that the evidential standards of establishing a miracle is high, while religious miracle testimonial evidence is so uniformly bad, at such a consistent level, that it doesn’t meet that standard, and so you shouldn’t believe in religious miracles on testimony alone.

In this way, I think lazily (emphasis on lazily!) saying “claims aren’t evidence” is wrong because it confuses the practical wisdom of Hume (miraculous testimony is uniformly bad) and the actual argument against miracles and the supernatural (the base-rate fallacy of testimony exclusively). And so, when this standard or argumentation is used against theists and miracle believers, it seemingly begs the question, skipping arguments about the base-rate fallacy and conversations about the nature of evidence; it’s asserting the conclusion without showing the work.

Still, I think when we take a step back, properly explain the base-rate fallacy, the inferior nature of testimony to other forms of evidence, and so on (as I have), we can re-assess our pragmatic definition of terms like evidence and conclude “Actually, testimonial claims aren’t evidence for extremely low probability events.” Here’s how.

A More Nuanced And Controversial Version of “Claims Aren’t Evidence”

To be clear, I still think testimony is evidential in many circumstances, but we need to be explicit about what those circumstances are. The answer is pretty clear cut: We should trust testimony in direct relation to the baseline probability of the event the testimony describes.

In this way, if someone attests to a probable (or at least non-improbable) event, we should trust that testimony. But if someone attests to an unlikely or every impossible event, we need to possess non-testimonial evidence to be confident in it.

Let’s use some examples to illustrate the point.

• If someone tells you that they bought a soccer ball, you should probably believe them because that’s not an unlikely event. It’s common and perhaps likely.

• If a single witness tells you a very unlikely thing happened, like a super underdog beat the defending champion at a specific sport,4 you shouldn’t believe them (they could have just as easily misread a score). Indeed, this sounds like stubborn skepticism, but if you audit your behavior, your first reaction when hearing a single person testify to a very unlikely event is to investigate it, and find other evidence affirming or denying it.

• If multiple people tell you the very unlikely event happened, you should believe it probably happened, or at least be encouraged to investigate for yourself, looking for non-testimonial evidence. Similar to the previous point, many people attesting to an improbable event piques our curiosity. It may be the case that we stop our investigation before we find “objective evidence” because of the volume of people affirming the event. I think a good example of this is any national news story. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this, so long as one does not make important decisions merely on this testimonial.5

• As events become increasingly improbable, testimony becomes less evidential. If someone tells you that they won the lottery, you probably shouldn’t believe them until they produce non-testimonial evidence, like a newspaper clipping or financial records. People attesting to such things often like to brag or to use such information to exploit or scam others. Testimony still has some weight in this situation because winning the lottery isn’t impossible and people win it all the time, but it would be unwise to act upon the belief that someone won the lottery merely because they told you they did (more on that in a moment).

• For events that are downright miraculous, in that they seem impossible by definition, you shouldn’t believe them based on mere testimony. Say your friend Jake says he saw your other friend Sinclair walk on water. You shouldn’t believe Jake. The baseline probability that Sinclair walked on water is so low while the likelihood of Jake being wrong is so relatively high, that Jake’s testimony alone does not have evidential weight. It’s not about hating or disliking or distrusting Jake, it’s just being wise with probabilities. Now, that doesn’t mean that Sinclair didn’t walk on water, just that you shouldn’t believe Jake absent other evidence.

To use the language of my previous post, testimonial evidence for improbable and miraculous events is dormant evidence. It’s better than an irrelevant datapoint in that you would expect this kind of evidence if the attested event happened, but it’s inferior to compelling (or non-testimonial) evidence because this data is also compatible with the attested event not happening.

The main distinction I want to draw here, though, is that:

Needing non-testimonial evidence to affirm a testimony6 is functionally indistinguishable from saying testimony is not evidential for improbable or miraculous events.

Maybe I’m just playing word games, but I don’t think so. When I reflect on what “wisdom” entails, not believing improbable events based merely on testimony is wise!

If you re-examine my examples above, you’ll see one of the emergent motives is the costs and risks of believing witnesses at different stages of probability. There’s little risk and cost to believing people (especially those you know and trust) when they testify to likely/not-unlikely events, but that risk and cost increases as witnesses testify to increasingly less likely events. As the base-rate improbability of an event increases, the costs and benefits of believing testimony become more salient.

This is because beliefs have costs and human societies are structured around our collective assessment of the probability of events and beliefs. Improbable events are rarely acted upon because they are improbable by definition, but when they are judged to instead be probable, it can radically change the world, causing rational actors to make big decisions with their time, money, and attention. Think of a natural disaster, a market crash, a pandemic, etc. Dishonest actors know this about human psychology and try to exploit it to harm others for their own gain.

And so, this heuristic of recognizing the costs and risks of believing witnesses as they attest to increasingly improbable events is rational. A wise person should not act in response to only witnesses attesting to an improbable event.

For example, if I saw my wife an hour ago and three people I barely know messaged me at this moment and tell me she was just murdered or imprisoned or hospitalized, it may be psychological denial that says I shouldn’t believe them, yet at the same time, it would be irrational of me to act as if it were true, absent further investigation. It would further be very silly of me to give these witnesses money for her burial, bail, or something else. We all know this is how scams work!

And yet, when it comes to miracles, supernatural claims, and other improbable events, some people consider it wise to hand over their metaphorical money based on testimony alone!

We also don’t live in a world where institutions put strong confidence in witness testimony alone, and we also wouldn’t want to. If I hypothetically angered a brigade of online commenters so much that they decided to make 1000 phone calls to police, telling them I murdered my wife, the police would not arrest or charge me without confirming my wife was deceased by unnatural causes. I would not want to live in a society where they would, and I imagine you wouldn’t either!

Now, I would hope law enforcement would exercise due diligence to check in on my wife and I, just as I would hope witnesses to the miraculous would lead to independent investigation, but anomalous data (such as testimony) motivating someone to further investigate an event is not the same as that person believing an account of an event, based exclusively on anomalous data.

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Closing Thoughts

So to wrap all of this up, is testimony evidence? Most of the time, when we’re dealing with probable events, it is. But when we’re debating religion, supernaturalism, and miraculous or improbable events, for all practical purposes, testimonial claims are not evidence.

Let’s close with some rules on testimony and evidence:

1. Testimonial evidence is inferior to non-testimonial evidence because it requires observers to draw inferences from the data of the testifier, which is prone to error and deception, on top of the data that it testifies to.

2. For probable (or at least not-improbable) events, testimony should be seen as evidential.

3. For improbable events, testimony should be seen as dormant evidence, not decisive evidence by itself. For these improbable events, decision makers should not make big decisions on testimony alone (and they usually don’t).

4. For events so improbable that they appear impossible, given our understanding of the laws of nature, testimony is not evidential. The reason why is because needing non-testimonial evidence to affirm testimonial evidence is functionally indistinguishable from saying testimonial evidence isn’t evidence.

5. This position isn’t merely a word game, as it reflects a reliable heuristic when balancing the costs and risks of believing improbable events. Human beings that act unwisely on insufficiently evidenced belief in improbable events are more vulnerable to scams, exploitation, deception, and other bad outcomes.

Closing out, I’ll say that “Testimonial claims by themselves are not evidence for miraculous events because the probability of erroneous testimonial evidence will always fail when balanced against the probability of the observed laws of nature being in error.”

If we were to crudely abbreviate this sentence to say “Claims aren’t evidence in religious, supernatural, or miraculous debates,” I’d be okay with it as an a posteriori understanding of evidence in this subject, given that it deals with unlikely and improbable subject matter.

All to say, I think in this narrow context, the even briefer abbreviation “Claims aren’t evidence” when talking about religion, the supernatural, and miraculous, is defensible, once again on a posteriori grounds. That is, claims are evidence, broadly speaking, but when we get into the nuances of assessing evidence for highly improbable events, it’s functionally non-evidential for wise assessors.

And so, [testimonial] claims aren’t evidence [for highly improbable, near impossible events].

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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5 months 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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5 months 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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5 months 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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10 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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10 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!