Probability And Plausibility: A Kinda-Sorta Rumination

     Any number of persons who call themselves atheists do so because, as they would put it, “I just can’t believe all that stuff.” If you probe a wee bit, you’ll discover that the can’t is about the plausibility of the claims made for God, the supernatural, an afterlife, and so on. In the case of Christianity, it’s about the plausibility of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, most particularly His Resurrection.

     I wrote earlier this year that:

     [T]here is no way to determine “the probability that God exists.” That would require:

• The attribution of a specific, spatiotemporally based definition to God;
• Deductions from that definition about what circumstances “should” evoke a manifestation of God;
• A tally of observed manifestations of God and failures to observe such manifestations.

There’s only one word for any such proposed investigation: ridiculous.

     However, the typical atheist bases his assessment of implausibility on a different standard:

• The miracles attributed to Jesus of Nazareth, particularly His Resurrection, cannot be performed by anyone living today.
• That makes the Jesus story one of a unique life and unique events, not to be reproduced, and beyond rigorous historical investigation.
• The premise first enunciated by David Hume – “Proportion your belief to the evidence” – seems applicable.
• Therefore, the evidence being infinitesimal, the atheist dismisses the Jesus story and its appurtenances.

     I’ve said it before: That is an entirely respectable position. Its defensibility is unaffected by my quite different, equally respectable, and equally defensible position. That’s why it’s called faith.

     But plausibility is not certainty. It’s a subjective evaluation of probability, founded on one’s personal exposure to the world and personal knowledge of times past. It is therefore the weakest, factually and procedurally speaking, of all methods for arriving at a probability. Though it can thwart the acquisition of faith, it does not disprove what persons of faith believe and hold to be true.

     Any problems that arise between atheists and theists emerge from disrespect: the unwillingness of one to concede the intellectual defensibility of the other.

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     The weakness of the plausibility approach to religious questions can be shown merely by applying it to any other dramatic but unique event of the past. This works for a single, simple reason: there is always more than one possible explanation – i.e., one causal hypothesis – for a past event.

     Hillary Swank’s excellent movie The Reaping provides a good example of this:

     [Hilary Swank as protagonist Katherine Winter:] “In 1400 B.C., a group of nervous Egyptians saw the Nile turn red. But what they thought was blood was actually an algae bloom which killed the fish, which prior to that had been living off the eggs of frogs. Those uneaten eggs turned into record numbers of baby frogs who subsequently fled to the land and died. Their little rotting frog bodies attracted lice and flies. The lice carried the bluetongue virus, which killed 70% of Egypt's livestock. The flies carried glanders, a bacterial infection which in humans causes boils. Soon afterwards, the Nile River Valley was hit with a three-day sandstorm otherwise known as the plague of darkness. During the sandstorm, intense heat can combine with an approaching cold front to create not only hail, but also electrical storms which would have looked to the ancient Egyptians like fire from the sky. The subsequent wind would have blown the Ethiopian locust population off course and right into downtown Cairo. Hail is wet, locusts leave droppings, spread both on grain, and you have got mycotoxins. Dinnertime in ancient Egypt meant the first-born child got the biggest portion, which in this case, meant he ate the most toxins, so he died. Ten plagues. Ten scientific explanations.”

     Given that the events in question are past, and that they and their precursor conditions can no longer be observed, the above explanations are intellectually acceptable. To the observationally-oriented mind, they will seem more plausible than the supernatural explanation offered by the Old Testament’s Book of Exodus, because the proposed causes are more mundane – i.e., they rely upon causes and influences that have been observed in other contexts, rather than postulating intervention by something that cannot be observed, reproduced, measured, and studied.

     Which doesn’t prove that they did bring about the ten Biblical plagues that afflicted Egypt, any more than the narrative in Exodus “proves” that it was God’s way of loosening Pharaoh’s grip on the Hebrews.

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     The great challenge, both to the theist and to the atheist, is to find and to exhibit respect for the other’s position. You cannot validly claim to respect another person if you insist on deriding his cherished beliefs. That doesn’t mean you must accept those beliefs. Neither does it mean you must accept their implications, nor grant the other any special exemptions from the law or the rules of polite discourse. It’s more a matter of conceding the nature of a faith: the acceptance of a proposition or a set of propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved. Theism and atheism are both faiths by that standard.

     It would be easier, I think, if we were more conscious of the many things we take on faith at each and every moment of our lives. Anything believed upon authority is taken on faith unless personally verified – and not merely by recourse to another authority. Any assumption made “for practical purposes” – e.g., the assumption that the floor of a room will not collapse beneath you – is taken on faith until it’s tested and found to have been true — but we must allow that such a test verifies the assumption only for the duration of the test!

     Arthur Herzog, in his masterpiece The B.S. Factor, exhorted us to become “rational skeptics.” His rational skeptic accepts that there is indeed an underlying objective reality, which is composed of facts rather than opinions or suppositions, but that his sensory and ratiocinative capabilities are only partially capable of apprehending it. It’s rather a pity that the word skeptic has a negative connotation, because the Herzogian approach to reality and the conditional nature of the many propositions upon which we rely is the best defense against the arrogance that has so frequently precipitated rhetorical warfare, if not worse, between theists and atheists.

     May God bless and keep you all...whether you believe in Him or not.

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     UPDATE: This literally just arrived in my email:

     I find it compelling. What about you, Gentle Reader?