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Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015 - Less Wrong
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Suppose it turns out that the skeptics are mostly right about Christianity, but that there really was an itinerant preacher called Yeshua in Galilee about 2000 years ago who talked about forgiveness and love and had a reputation for casting out demons and the like; but he didn't really work any miracles, he didn't get crucified, and he certainly didn't rise from the dead.
Then: Did Jesus exist? Well, kinda. Someone existed who's fairly clearly the person the gospels are about. No one existed about whom they're actually accurate accounts. Many of the most important things about "Jesus" don't apply to anyone. While it might feel a bit weird to say something like "Jesus 50% existed" in that case, I think it would give a reasonable idea of the situation.
I don't think manipulating definitions can (or should) give rise to probability claims along the lines of "Jesus 50% existed".
Jesus-the-Son-of-God and Jesus-the-itinerant-preacher are two very different people/concepts. No, they will not blend.
I wouldn't want to defend the "50% existed" claim too seriously, but note that the discussion here was never really about explicit claims of that kind. It was about whether it's appropriate to consider, e.g., "there is a god who gets involved in biological evolution" intermediate between "there is no god" and "there is a god who created every kind of living thing ex nihilo". I say yes; CCC says no. The affirmative answer doesn't require, e.g., being willing to say that a god who never does anything "50% exists"; only regarding a less-active god as in some sense intermediate between a more-active god and no god.
You can definitely plot all three points on the same graph - you can even plot them such that the distance from "there is no god" to "there is a god who created every kind of living thing ex nihilo" is greater than the distance from "there is a god who gets involved in biological evolution" to either of the two aforementioned points. That can all be done perfectly sensibly.
My claim is simply that the three points can't be colinear on that graph.
...I hope that makes it a bit clearer.
It seems to me that you can plot them wherever you want to, so this is really a question of aesthetics more than anything else. Or is there some actual consequence that follows from one or another answer to this question?
...it would be a bit like plotting 0, 1 and i colinearly. (I assume you're familiar with complex numbers?)
Yes, very familiar with complex numbers, thanks. But, I repeat, you can plot what you want however you want; the question is whether it's helpful, and that will depend on the application. (Suppose the values taken by your dependent variable are all on the circle of radius 1/sqrt(2) centred at (1+i)/2. Then plotting 0, 1, and i collinearly may make a whole lot of sense, though you might actually want to call them -3pi/4, -pi/4 and pi/4 respectively.)
I reluctantly concede the point, but firmly maintain that calling them -3pi/4, -pi/4 and pi/4 respectively would make a lot more sense.