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Psychohistorian comments on A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies - Less Wrong
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As someone who grew up hearing countless sermons comparing the conquest of Canaan and other Old Testament battles to the spiritual victories we should have in our lives, I can really appreciate this. For example, when the walls of Jericho fall down, this means that the "walls" that keep us from spiritual blessings need to fall down. Of course, the actual writers meant the destruction of real, stone-and-mortar walls and the death of real, flesh-and-blood people. (1)
As a child the true implications of killing every man, woman, and child in a city were lost on me. Rethinking the Bible stories as an adult, especially after seeing real footage of the aftermath of war, has a very different effect. It is interesting to note the rationalizations people use to try to reconcile the cognitive dissonance: http://epsociety.org/library/articles.asp?pid=63&ap=1
(1) I think this is what the writers of the Old Testament had in mind, regardless of whether or not the specific battles actually took place.
This reminds me of a rather interesting argument I foolishly got into on an internet forum that had no connection to religion. First mistake.
Anyhow, it involved someone saying Christianity was a religion of peace, and I couldn't help but quote:
"Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father..." (full quote here)
His response, with what I assume was a completely straight face, was, "I'm glad you quoted that. Christ is just encouraging spirited debate within the household."
This would be hilarious if it weren't so terrifying.
My own view of that and similar statements is that Jesus was clearly expecting world-changing divine intervention to occur during his lifetime - he was basically the leader of a "the end is near" cult, waiting for God to go all Old Testament on the Roman Empire, much like he did to the Egyptians in the book of Exodus. The "Kingdom of Heaven" was to be a Jewish nation-state on Earth, which would be established after Rome was defeated by the hand of God. (Yes, indeed, embrace pacifism and endure your suffering, because God is coming to smite the wicked. And he's coming any day now!)
The religion that we now know as Christianity owes at least as much to Paul of Tarsus than to a certain wandering preacher that pissed off the local authorities and ended up nailed to a piece of wood.
There is no meaningful historical evidence that "Jesus" ever existed. The arguments for the existence of that figure boil down to "I don't think Paul would have made all that stuff up, it's too awesome", and I don't think they merit a high degree of belief in the historicity of Jesus (although plenty of career academics would argue vociferously that this argument does indeed merit belief in a historical Jesus).
Not even a rather bland carpenter who got slightly popular, enough for folks like Paul to make stuff up?
No, just as there is no evidence for Russell's teapot.
There is only one historical document from the time of Jesus' supposed life which even resembles evidence of a teacher called Jesus (or Yeshua or whatever), and that is just a reference to a rabbi with the right name who had one brother with the right name. Given that Jesus supposedly had four named brothers and multiple sisters, at least one of whom is also named, there's plenty of scope for that to be a false positive. Taking it as strong evidence would be like taking the discovery of a journalist named Clark who worked with a journalist named James in the 1920s as strong evidence that those two were the historical basis for the story of Superman.
There could have been a historical Yeshua so boring that none of his contemporaries, including the Romans, wrote anything about him during his life or for decades after he died. Or the character could have been entirely made up. Evidence to differentiate these two possible universes does not currently exist.
There are passages in Flavius Josephus that talk about him but are clear fakes. The untampered versions might have been about a real guy named Jesus, but more likely they were reports of Christians beliefs, or just nonexistent. I don't know of any other evidence for the existence of a carpenter turned rabbi who disliked Romans.
As the word evidence is commonly used, there is evidence for Russell's teapot -- just not evidence that you or me believe in. If someone says "Russell's teapot exists! I've seen it!", that is anecdotal evidence for its existence. Anything that suggests something is true or false is evidence, no matter how flawed that evidence may be.
It is by considering all the evidence, for and against our beliefs, that we progress towards truth.
I think I might have to write something specifically addressing this misconception because a few people seem to have picked it up.
It's only evidence for the existence of Russell's teapot if more people say they have seen it than you would expect in a universe where Russell's teapot does not exist.
(That's ignoring the fact that Russell's teapot is by stipulation non-observable and hence in that artificial situation we can skip Bayesian updating and just go straight to p=1 that anyone claiming to have observed it is lying or deluded).
I think our disagreement is to do with our differing usage of "evidence", not a misconception. I'd say that a sole anecdote of someone seeing Russell's teapot can be considered evidence for its existence, even though it's not credible evidence.
I would add that different situations require different standards of evidence, depending on how willing we are to accept false positives. The fire service only requires one phone call before they respond.
Perhaps a less abstract example would help. Uri Geller used to claim he was projecting his psychic powers over the TV or the radio and invite people to phone in if something "spooky" happened in their home. Inevitably people phoned in to report clocks stopping or starting, things falling off shelves and so on. It was pretty convincing stuff for people who believed in that sort of thing, but it turned out that when skeptics with no psychic powers whatsoever pretended to be psychic on the radio and invited people to phone in they got exactly the same flood of calls. Odd things happen all the time and if you get a large enough sample of people looking about the house for odd things to report you get a fair number of calls.
What would have been evidence for Uri Geller having psychic powers is if he got more calls than normal people when he did that stunt. Just getting the base rate of calls anyone else would proves nothing. As you said yourself, you have to look at all the evidence.
You might be thinking "I read this Bayes theorem essay, and it said evidence for X was whatever was more likely to be true in a universe where X was true. In a universe where Russell's teapot existed I'd be more likely to hear someone say they saw Russel's teapot, right? So it's evidence! Bayes says so". That line of reasoning only works if you don't have all the evidence to look at so you can't determine the base rate. If you can determine the base rate then it's probably going to turn out that the number of claimed teapot-sightings is consistent with the base rate of stupid noises humans make.
If all you have is the one anecdote then it does count as evidence, but only in a strictly philosophical or mathematical sense. Not in any practical sense though since the shift in the relevant p value isn't going to be visible in the first twenty or thirty decimal places and I doubt anyone alive has that level of precision in their decision-making. (The odds of someone having seen Russell's teapot could be said, very conservatively, to be lower than the odds of someone winning the lotto twice in a row).
But nobody is saying that... er, right?
Even "Jesus the Bible character" shows signs of this.