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Lecture 6.5 - Case studies from religion: miracles

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Philosophy, Science and Religion: Philosophy and Religion

爱丁堡大学

4.6（186 个评分） | 12K 名学生已注册

Philosophy, Science and Religion mark three of the most fundamental modes of thinking about the world and our place in it. Are these modes incompatible? Put another way: is the intellectually responsible thing to do to ‘pick sides’ and identify with one of these approaches at the exclusion of others? Or, are they complementary or mutually supportive? As is typical of questions of such magnitude, the devil is in the details. For example, it is important to work out what is really distinctive about each of these ways of inquiring about the world. In order to gain some clarity here, we’ll be investigating what some of the current leading thinkers in philosophy, science and religion are actually doing. This course, entitled ‘Philosophy and Religion’, is the second of three related courses in our Philosophy, Science and Religion Online series, and in this course we will ask important questions about the age-old debate between science and religion, such as: • What kind of conflicts are there between religion and science? • Does current cognitive science of religion effectively explain away God? • If there is a God who has made us so that we can know him, why do some people not believe? • Is belief in science also a kind of fundamentalism? • What makes us good at getting, giving, or sharing, knowledge? Is this different when it is religious knowledge? The first course in the Philosophy, Science and Religion series, 'Science and Philosophy' was launched early in 2017 and you can sign up to it at any time. The third course —‘Religion and Science’—will be launched early in 2018. Completing all three courses will give you a broader understanding of this fascinating topic. Look for: • Philosophy, Science and Religion I: Science and Philosophy https://www.coursera.org/learn/philosophy-science-religion-1/ • Philosophy, Science and Religion III: Religion and Science Upon successful completion of all three courses, students will: (1) Understand the main parameters at stake in the current debate between science and religion. (2) Have some familiarity with the relevant areas of science that feature in the debate—including cosmology, evolution, and the neurosciences—and will have begun to engage with them conceptually. (3) Have encountered key philosophical approaches to the interface between science and religion, and will have had the opportunity to engage them in practice. (4) Have embarked constructively in cross-disciplinary conversations. (5) Have demonstrated an openness to personal growth through a commitment to dialogue across intellectual and spiritual boundaries. You can also follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/EdiPhilOnline and you can follow the hashtag #psrmooc

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4.6（186 个评分）

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AS

Nov 15, 2017

Very informative and Well designed course to dive into the field of Philosophy, Science and Religion.

GR

Aug 18, 2018

Very intuitive to get to know the fundamentals of the Religions, Science and Philosophy.

从本节课中

Epistemic Virtues and Vices in Science and Religion

In this lecture, Professor Mark Alfano discusses the role of epistemic virtues and vices in science and religion. The lecture has three main sections. First, Alfano distinguishes four types of epistemic virtues and vices. Source virtues such as honesty make someone an excellent primary source of knowledge. Receiver virtues such as intellectual humility make someone an excellent recipient of knowledge provided by sources. Conduit virtues make someone an excellent conveyor of the knowledge they receive from others to third parties; these dispositions might include a willingness to gossip carefully in order to protect others from a sexual predator, as well as the virtues that journalists try to embody. Echo virtues make someone an excellent sounding board for others. Along the way, Alfano mentions various vices that can attach to people in the role of source, receiver, conduit, and echo. In the second part of the lecture, Alfano uses the notions of source, receiver, conduit, and echo virtues to make sense of scientific collaborations and trust in science by laypeople. In section three, he shows that unless we have unreasonably high credence in very long chains of conduit virtues, we should not accept testimony in favour of miracles or divine revelation.

Lecture 6.1 - Overview of the lecture4:06

Lecture 6.2 - Introduction to epistemic virtues and vices17:05

Lecture 6.3 - Case studies from science: scientific collaborations4:57

Lecture 6.4 - Case studies from science: trust and distrust of science by laypeople9:49

Lecture 6.5 - Case studies from religion: miracles7:24

Lecture 6.6 - Case studies from religion: transmission of revelation7:38

教学方

Dr Orestis Palermos
Research Explorer
Professor Mark Harris
Professor of Natural Science and Theology
Professor Duncan Pritchard
Professor of Philosophy
Dr J Adam Carter
Researcher
Dr Mog Stapleton

脚本

Let's now turn from the topic of Science to the topic of Religion and deal with the case studies that I mentioned before, Miracles and Revelation. Here's a picture of David Hume, who was a Scottish philosopher, and here's a quote from one of his books. He says, "There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education, and learning as to secure us against all delusion in themselves; of such undoubted integrity, as to place them beyond all suspicion of any design to deceive others; of such credit and reputation in the eyes of mankind, as to have a great deal to lose in case of their being detected in any falsehood, and at the same time attesting facts performed in such a public manner, and in so celebrated a part of the world, as to render the detection unavoidable: All which circumstances are requisite to give us full assurance in the testimony of men." Hume used this argument to say that, well, if you observe a miracle directly, then you might be justified in believing that it happened. But if you hear about a miracle through testimony, either second hand or third hand or fourth or fifth or sixth hand, then you should never believe that it actually occurred. And, you can see here in the quotation that I have underlined a few of the source, and receiver, and conduit virtues, that Hume refers to in his argument. He says that there should be multiple sources. So, he talks about the number of men. And then he also talks about the virtues that they should have, which include good sense, education, learning, as well as credit and reputation, so that they have something to lose if we find out that they were lying or mistaken. So, Hume thinks that, we who tend to be in the position of person N in this graph, should always disbelieve reports about miracles. This can be contrasted with the view of miracles that is articulated by Thomas Reid. Reid, argued that people should observe both the Principle of Veracity and the Principle of Credulity. He says, that we are social creatures by nature, and that means that we have a natural propensity to speak the truth. That means that, he thinks that people have a sort of inborn source virtue, that they are naturally disposed to say what they think, they are naturally disposed to report what they know, and not what they merely guess or what they think is false. And interlocking with this, Reid argued for the Principle of Credulity he said, because people observe the Principle of Veracity, we likewise have a natural propensity to believe what others tell us and that this is correct. Because after all, if others are observing the Principle of Veracity, then it only makes sense as a receiver, as someone in the position of person B in the network shown here, to believe what they say. So whereas, Hume said, we should be skeptical receivers and skeptical about conduits and sources. Reid argued that because we're essentially interdependent social creatures, we should take seriously the words of other people even when they report things like miracles. This suggests that the kind of creatures that you think human beings are, and the kinds of dispositions that you think they naturally have, the kinds of source and receiver of virtues that are appropriate for humans, will indicate to you what sort of credence you should put in reports about miracles. We can think about this using what's known as Bayes's Law. This is an equation that tells you how much credence you should put in a proposition, given a certain amount of evidence. This is a fairly mathematical bit of the story so, I'll take some time to walk through it. The large P in parentheses following it just means a probability. So we have on the left side of the equation a single probability, namely the probability of a hypothesis given some evidence. Whereas, on the right side of the equation we have three probabilities, the initial probability of the hypothesis to begin with, the probability of the evidence given the hypothesis also known as the likelihood, and the probability of the evidence occurring in the first place. Bayes's law tells you that, whenever you get some evidence relevant to a particular hypothesis, you can update your credence in that hypothesis by taking the product, multiplying the your initial confidence in that hypothesis by the likelihood, and then dividing by the probability of the evidence in the first place. This gives us what is now called a Posterior Probability. So, if you already had very low credence in the hypothesis to begin with, if the probability of H was say point zero one, one percent, then even if there was really strong evidence for it you might only increase your credence in it from .01 or one percent to say five percent. So, even really strong evidence for an incredibly unlikely hypothesis shouldn't necessarily be convincing. So, let's think about this in the context of miracles. If h the hypothesis is that a miracle occurred, then we can let e the evidence be either someone says that a miracle occurred, or someone says that someone says that a miracle occurred, or someone says that someone says that someone said that a miracle occurred and so on. This represents the number of conduits that the testimony has passed through from the original source to us. And as you can see from this, the probability that a miracle occurs should generally be considered quite low. So your prior probability in any particular miraculous event should be extremely low, unless you believe that miracles are occurring all the time all over the place, your probability should probably be something like .0000001, for any particular miracle. And if someone says that a miracle occurs, well how likely does that make it that a miracle occurs? We can think of lots of reasons why someone would say this even if it weren't true, and we can think of even more reasons why someone would say that someone else says it even if it weren't true. And this indicates that as Hume argued, the amount of evidence we need to get the number of sources and the epistemic virtues associated with those sources must be extremely high for us to believe that miracles have occurred.

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