Ok. So, your example holds even when agents in B had said - they are massing 5000 extra troops in our border. Agents in C had said that they are massing 5000 troops at our border (assume these borders are separate) and agents in A (who work at an armament factory) had said production has been ramped up for around 4000 troops.
What can we agree on - there is a production rampup going on for atleast 4000 troops. Position remains uncertain.
Now, take this example to the much more complex example of theism.
95% of humanity believe in a supreme force, and their disagreements are about the interpretation of that force. Written manuscripts are handed down and most people treat these as evidence. For the better part of history religious practices are on. These are the B's and C's of our example. Directly contradictory evidences.
But then, come a bunch of people (the theosophists, new agers, "law of attraction" followers )who say - look, there is no need to totally and completely believe every word of manuscript. Follow some practices sincerely until you feel the presence yourself - something which a whole lot of dedicated believers do everyday. Unfortunately there is no way to mechanise this yet, since it is something like human intelligence, only one working demo, with no other examples, not yet replicated outside the cranium.
The point that they are saying is - There is something real about spirituality. This is evidence/interpretation that A brings to our table. Not quantitatively the same as B or C, but supporting the argument that there is something real going on there.
Maybe we can say that there is something real to spiritual practices/ritual that would be true even if there were no 'G'.
So, if there is something real, what spiritual practices are you adopting as your own?
Is "a supreme force" the kind of thing you can add up like troop movements? A main point of the original argument is that the supreme forces claimed are mutually exclusive, whereas troop counts are not.
If the counter-claim is to be as vague as, "There is something real about spirituality," we can all agree on some level. Some people will go with the level of common problems in human psychology that lead to the delusion of spirituality. Others will go with the existence of a supreme being. Taking these points together and adding them...
If a majority of experts agree on an issue, a rationalist should be prepared to defer to their judgment. It is reasonable to expect that the experts have superior knowledge and have considered many more arguments than a lay person would be able to. However, if experts are split into camps that reject each other's arguments, then it is rational to take their expert rejections into account. This is the case even among experts that support the same conclusion.
If 2/3's of experts support proposition G , 1/3 because of reason A while rejecting B, and 1/3 because of reason B while rejecting A, and the remaining 1/3 reject both A and B; then the majority Reject A, and the majority Reject B. G should not be treated as a reasonable majority view.
This should be clear if A is the koran and B is the bible.
Positions that fundamentally disagree don't combine in dependent aspects on which they agree. On the contrary, If people offer lots of different contradictory reasons for a conclusion (even if each individual has consistent beliefs) it is a sign that they are rationalizing their position.
An exception to this is if experts agree on something for the same proximal reasons. If pharmacists were split into camps that disagreed on what atoms fundamentally were, but agreed on how chemistry and biology worked, then we could add those camps together as authorities on what the effect of a drug would be.
If we're going to add up expert views, we need to add up what experts consider important about a question and agree on, not individual features of their conclusions.
Some differing reasons can be additive: Evolution has support from many fields. We can add the analysis of all these experts together because the paleontologists do not generally dispute the arguments of geneticists.
Different people might justify vegetarianism by citing the suffering of animals, health benefits, environmental impacts, or purely spiritual concerns. As long as there isn't a camp of vegetarians that claim it does not have e.g. redeeming health benefits, we can more or less add all those opinions together.
We shouldn't add up two experts if they would consider each other's arguments irrational. That's ignoring their expertise.
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