Well, definitions aren’t based on evidence.
Oh, I didn't think I was talking about definitions. I was talking about claims of fact.
Now if you’re working with a concept of God according to which God is not a necessary being, then that’s your prerogative.
Right, it is. Because the necessity of God hasn't been demonstrated one way or the other. Any argument that rests on the necessity of God must first demonstrate that necessity.
But obviously any participants in the debate will need to agree on some definition of what they’re talking about or they will just be talking at cross-purposes.
Correct, which is why conversations about supposedly-spiritual or divine phenomena between someone who is a believer and someone who isn't a believer always collapse, because the believer can never demonstrate the truth of their foundational assertion (that God, for example, exists).
The point I was making was that the disconnect you mentioned between God-talk and mathematics wouldn’t have seemed so problematic to people who think that God is a necessary being, and that’s just an observation about intellectual history that has nothing to do with whether such a being exists.
Oh. Yes, definitely. "Deism", in addition to being thinly-disguised agnosticism, is intellectual judo. It sidesteps having to answer the question of whether God exists and so allows everyone to move ahead with the important work. This is one of the reasons the freedom of religion and the separation of church and state are so important. If we agree on those, we don't need to agree on whether or not God exists to coexist as a polity.
Yes, but normative ethicists typically think there are objective ethical facts too.
Hm. I'd have to think about that.
All right, I’ll grant that I phrased it poorly. When I say “religious experience” I mean it in the metaphysically neutral sense of an experience that appears to have a divine object.
Merely saying that an experience has a divine object isn't neutral, it's interpretive.
Whether it actually does have such an object is another matter.
Indeed. There's layers to this onion.
I don’t think that something has to be testable or repeatable to count as evidence.
If it's not, then it's not evidence, it's just a claim. If it's not testable or repeatable, then you're just saying "trust me, I know what I saw."
That might make it better evidence, of course. But as long as some phenomenon E is more probable given the truth of hypothesis H than it would be given the falsity of H, E is evidence for H, whether or not it’s repeatable.
E can't be evidence for H at the same time H is evidence for E. That's circular reasoning.
If someone sees what they think is a flying saucer and nobody else sees it, that is evidence for the existence of a flying saucer,
By "flying saucer", do you mean extraterrestrial aircraft or spacecraft? Regardless, someone saying they saw a flying sauce is a claim that flying saucers exist, not evidence that they exist. Evidence has to be verifiable, or it's not evidence.
since such an observation is (marginally) more probable given the existence of a flying saucer than given its non-existence.
Given how many claims of flying saucers have been debunked, it's not even marginally more probable. The history of claims of flying saucers being demonstrated as accurate is zero. A cynic would say that a claim of flying saucers is by definition unlikely. That's where the "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" thing comes from. I'm not exactly that cynical. I actually think life on other planets seems probable to me, based on the evidence we have, I just don't think any of them have ever been here.
Of course it’s extremely weak evidence, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t evidence at all. I’d say there’s evidence of this sort for God’s existence, but for the reasons given it’s similarly very weak evidence.
The difference between strong (or "conclusive") evidence and weak evidence is whether or not it's been corroborated. In journalism, something that has only 1 source might be unpublishable, because it's too weak. In science, experimental results that cannot be replicated have to be disregarded until the problem is resolved. In criminal law (at least in countries where the burden of proof is on the accuser) an accusation that can't be supported by evidence has to be tossed out. In each case, weak evidence can be enough to get some distance into the process: A journalist sees enough to keep investigating; a scientific paper that breaks new ground gets published in a journal; an accusation of criminal conduct is investigated by police and gets in front of a judge. And, in each case, we rely on the skill and professionalism of the investigators, and sometimes we get hoodwinked.
