The pitfall of believing someone's testimony about God or the supernatural

Testimony. It's a common word in the law.

But until I read an essay in the New York Times book collection from their Stone Reader series, Question Everything, I wasn't aware that it had a philosophical meaning. The essay was about Deep Fakes where someone makes a convincingly real video of someone.

Contemporary philosophers rank different kinds of evidence according to their reliability. How much confidence, they ask, can we reasonably have in a belief when it is supported by such-and-such information?

We ordinarily tend to think that perception -- the evidence of your eyes and ears -- provides pretty good justification. If you see something with your own eyes, you should probably believe it. By comparison, the claims that other people make -- which philosophers call "testimony"-- provide some justification, but usually not quite as much as perception. Sometimes, of course, your senses can deceive you, but that's less likely than other people deceiving you.

...Now, with the emergence of deepfake technology, the ability to produce convincing fake video will be almost as widespread as the ability to lie. And once that happens, we ought to think of images as more like testimony than perception. In other words, you should only trust a recording if you would trust the word of the person producing it. 

Of course, here we're talking about physical eyes and ears. The possibility (which I'd say is a near certainty) of being deceived by someone's testimony that they've seen or heard God, or another supernatural entity, obviously is much greater.

For at least a deepfake video can be observed by anyone with functional vision.

This isn't the case with the vast number of instances where someone claims either to have experienced a mysterious physical object -- Bigfoot, alien beings, the Loch Ness monster -- or a mysterious supernatural object: God, heaven, angels, divine light.

They may sound utterly convincing. Such is possible for several reasons.

Maybe they're a good liar. Maybe they actually believe they experienced the mysterious entity, though in truth they didn't. And there's a very small, yet non-zero, probability that they did experience a mysterious physical or supernatural entity which really does exist.

So unless we give up on the idea of separating supernatural fact from fiction, which I'm definitely not willing to do, what's our option when presented with someone's claim that, say, they've experienced God?

If everyone who supposedly experienced God made the same claim, things would be simpler. But there are countless (almost) descriptions of God, many or most of them contradictory. God is a person. God is impersonal. God has a form. God is formless. God is forgiving. God punishes the wicked. God abhors violence. God wants believers to kill unbelievers.

One approach that I like has support in science. 

The Lie Lab has now come up with a new approach to lie detection in which people base their judgments on just one signal. A simple rule of thumb which focuses entirely on the level of detail in the story told by the 'liar.' It certainly takes a bit of getting used to.

"It feels very counterintuitive to just listen to what people are saying and not to pay attention to all kinds of other signals, such as how convincingly or emotionally someone conveys their story," explains Verschuere. "But people who tell the truth can give a rich description because they actually experienced the event, whereas although liars can come up with details, this increases their risk of being caught."

Of course, the Lie Lab approach is aimed at lies about things in this world, not a supposed supernatural world.

So that makes it more difficult to tell the difference between someone who truly believes they have experienced God or some other divine entity, and someone who is merely claiming this happened for a reason such as ego, money, fame, enjoyment fooling people.

Regardless, I like the emphasis on details. 

Anyone who claims to have had a supernatural experience should be closely questioned about what, exactly, the experience consisted of. After all, this isn't like the experience of going to a Taylor Swift concert. If a Swift lover exaggerated what happened there, no big deal.

But a religious devotee who claims to have experienced God is making a monstrous claim, one which, if proven to be true, would upend both science and spirituality. They can't be allowed to get away with a fawning acceptance of their claim, notwithstanding the natural human tendency to believe that other people are telling the truth. 

Instead, they should be asked questions like: 

How do you know you experienced God?
What did God look like exactly? 
If God spoke to you, what did God say?
Did you learn anything from God that wasn't already known to humans?
What did you do to experience God?

When I wrote my book about Plotinus, the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher, I included a quote from a scholar that deeply appealed to me then, and still does. Here's what I said in a 2004 blog post, "How to talk to a fundamentalist."

Fundamentalists, especially those of the Christian and Muslim faiths, have a bad habit of wanting to force other people to live in accord with their beliefs. Another bad habit is making dogmatic statements unsupported by objective facts, and then feeling offended when someone challenges their dogma. Bad habits like these should be discouraged, not encouraged.

A classics scholar, A.H. Armstrong, has some apt advice about how to talk to fundamentalists:

When claims to possess an exclusive revelation of God or to speak his word are made by human beings (and it is always human beings who make them), they must be examined particularly fiercely and hypercritically for the honor of God, to avoid the blasphemy and sacrilege of deifying a human opinion.

Or, to put it less ferociously, the Hellenic (and, as it seems to me, still proper) answer to “Thus saith the Lord” is “Does he?,” asked in a distinctly skeptical tone, followed by a courteous but drastic “testing to destruction” of the claims and credentials of the person or persons making this enormous statement.

So the next time someone says to me, “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life,” I’ll reply: “Oh, really? How do you know? What makes you think that statement is true? I’m all ears, all highly skeptical ears.”

Comments

[um]

In the distance I saw a wobbling blob. If the blob would have been erased it would have made no difference to me and the surroundings the blob moved in.

That blob, when I came closer, was a human being, when i came to talk to that human a "whole life, an whole reservoir of knowledge and memorize was poured out of that blob.

So grandma was tight when she taught me very very youing that one can see the head of people but not inside that head.

Nobody can show and/or prove what goes on in his or her head in terms of feelings, thoughts., dreams, hallucinations and what has come to be known as inner exzperiences.

He/she can talk about it or write it down, or put it on canvas as an artist. but even that will often be a problem as can be known from listening to artists that they have something in mind, very clearly, but are unable to express it with the means they have available. The literature of art is full of the agony of painters having an given color in mind, very clearly and are unable to produce it on canvas.

Artist, writers, painters, sculptors etc once finished their work have to face the world that grabs their work and start to attribute meaning and value to it, without often not even verifying with the artists if these attributions are correct.

They, the consumers, "know" what the artist had in mind, they have no doubt about it and they even know better than the artist, in case of the attribution be done by so called "scientific schoold experts"

They, the experts, have a problem, that they will never have more in their hands tthan their own projections, attributions ... and ...BELIEVING their own mental workings.

But as they can never ... NEVER ... verify their own believes which the launch into the world as facts, they are bound to end up in a fight with other experts.

So grandma taught me a lesson at early age, just to hear what others have to say, as a product of themselves, their own conditioning, nothing more nothing less and that it was up to us children to do with it what we liked.

Most of our life is based upon ..BELIEVING and trusting others

[Spence Tepper]

We choose what to believe and what to discredit. It's a choice. If only it were a simple matter of evidence. Certainly we should be good scientists, careful consumers, good inspectors.

But to believe in anything is to take a risk.

To believe in a future that has yet to be built it is necessary to believe in the unseen, and on the basis of confidence in that unseen future, to strive for that future.

So, believing in things yet unseen is part and parcel of human progress. And giving up too soon is also a very human condition.

If we have no trust, no faith, what can be built?

I think we must find what to believe in, what to pursue first.

When Abraham Lincoln wrote that the phrase "All men are created equal" is actually a promise not just for white men but the entire family of humanity, he made a decision what to believe in.

When he wrote that this promise might never be fully achieved and was an eternal commitment and duty of every citizen, but was the most crucial justification for the existence of America, he couldn't prove it.

When he said, in the Gettysburg Address, that this promise was work yet to be done, and we should honor those who died by continuing that work, this was all based on his belief in a purpose for humanity.

I don't believe Lincoln because of any proof at all. I believe him because what he wrote was stunningly beautiful.

[Spence Tepper]

If one were to look for evidence, they would find all of it in the Status Quo. There is no evidence for what has yet to be seen or yet to happen. You can prove that the only way to do things, the only reality that exists is the one you know.

When some inspired fanatic says one day we will have colonies on Mars and along the way claims they can end all automotive pollution, who believes such fanatical claims?

The future, whether in this world or within ourselves, must be built. And that requires faith, trust and effort in something worthy.

Then you don't need to believe in anything else. Though you might start to believe in many things you never thought you would.

[Ron E.]

It’s interesting to learn that testimony, with regard to philosophy, is defined as the intentional transfer of a belief from one person to another. The religious or spiritual interpretation is generally said to be an acceptance that something exists or is true, and pertinently, especially one without proof

But the term ‘belief’ we bandy about needs to be qualified somewhat. When it comes to belief in any area of life, it may be important to understand what the word, or the term we use is attempting to describe. More often than not, we use the term belief when it would be more pertinent to use the term ‘think’.

We glibly use the word believe when in fact, when we are saying “I believe it is going to rain later”, we really mean is “I ‘think’ it is going to rain later”. The ‘thinking’ is based on the weather forecast you saw earlier, or perhaps the darkening sky, or some other sensed weather sign possibly announcing rain. It is also possible to say nowadays that “One day, ‘I think’ man will live on the Moon or even Mars,” a statement that reflects the thinking based on cur-rent knowledge in space technology. Such, is not a belief in the kind of acceptance that some-thing is true without proof or facts.

Whether we ‘believe’ something or somebody, we are using the information our brains have accrued, that is, we are ‘thinking’ about it and our brains deliver the decision according to the information it holds and gravitates toward a particular conclusion – I won’t call it choice, mainly because such outcomes are almost inevitable and inevitably based on the type of in-formation the mind has amassed either through conditioning, fear, insecurity, desire, ignorance or hope etc.

But we still habitually use the term ‘believe’, believing that our beliefs are true and correct. Whatever we think or believe, true or not, has certainly arisen from and to some degree established itself in our minds. We may seek to perpetuate this in ourselves which is the way various beliefs systems effect people – and interestingly, how conspiracy theories establish and spread.

The type of belief (thinking) that may be addressed as being worthwhile is more likely to be the thinking that can change as new facts and relative information is presented – but, don’t rest on laurels as nothing, particularly our cherished beliefs and thoughts is permanent.