Toggle comments on Questions on Theism - Less Wrong
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As C.S. Lewis would say-are they lying, are they mad, or are they telling the truth? People do lie sometimes, and perhaps my difficulty in letting go of Christianity despite a mountain of evidence against it is that my prior on people making up stories is too low. It would take an awful lot of psychosis to make someone believe that a leg had regrown, but again, people do go insane. But is there a way to get a sense of how likely/unlikely this is? With Pascal's Wager on the table, it's not enough to say there's ~40% chance Christianity is true, that's less than half, it's probably wrong. Rejecting it without constant fear would take near certainty that accounts like this one are fraudulant or deceived.
One of the interesting things about Christianity is that it's not using a probabilistic uncertainty framework at all. "Belief" in Christ is not just some confidence >30% in the godhood of Jesus- in Christianity, one simply believes or does not believe. This is part of why Lewis' logical dialectic has an appeal in that culture; it's basically Aristotelian, accepting propositions as True or False (this is also one of the reasons Thomas Aquinas is so revered for integrating the two in the first place, if I had to guess).
But, while this is the accepted inside-view way to approach the question of Jesus' divinity, it is probably a flawed way to interpret material experiences such as miracles. Note that even the Catholic church uses a formal system involving evidence and testimony, and thus in practice has a kind of rough 'confidence interval' for the truth of a miracle. Basically, you're stuck with the standard of actionable confidence.
Try to think of a precise answer to the question, just as an exercise. When miracles are the load-bearing component of your religious belief, it's going to come down to the degree of confidence that you need. If 40% is too high, what about 10%? 2%? For that matter, try to think about your current probability estimates in concrete terms as best you can, and notice when a given piece of information lowers that or raises it.