
A defense of Christianity helped unlock the secrets of the brain - CapitalistCartr
http://nautil.us/blog/how-a-defense-of-christianity-revolutionized-brain-science
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danielvf
It took me some looking to find Price's writing mentioned in the article.
Warning - it's long - will probably take a half hour to read. Good stuff
though.

[https://books.google.com/books?id=g2M3AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA361&lpg=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=g2M3AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA361&lpg=PA361)

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euyyn
Thanks for finding this. Very enjoyable read, even in spite of its flaws of
reasoning.

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zzalpha
Clickbait title.

A great deal of science is rooted in the works of individuals who held a
variety of religious beliefs, and in many of those cases, their works were
directly motivated by those beliefs.

So the fact that Bayes came up with his theorem because of a desire to justify
a belief in the resurrection of Christ is, I suppose, somewhat interesting,
but not so much so that it needed to be the headline of the story.

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jabv
The fact that Bayes' work, which is more popular and possibly relevant than
ever, answers a serious philosophical challenges to claims about the nature of
reality (a consequence of any claims of divinity) is a mere historical
accident worthy of overlooking?

I am reminded of Fulton Sheen's comments on Jesus - a man that claimed to be
God is either a liar, a lunatic, or God; to say such a man is a great teacher
but not God stretches the limit of rationality.

I.e., either Bayes' theory has implications (not argument-ending proof)
regarding the claims of the divinity of Jesus, or it is not relevant at all
today.

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lucozade
The value of Bayes' work is somewhat orthogonal to his use of it to prove the
truth of the Resurrection.

It was valuable to show that Hume's approach was flawed but limited value to
prove the truth per se. To apply probabilities to the events you'd have to
make an awful lot of assumptions about the accuracy of the, non-eye witness,
reporting. However, it was an excellent approach for such an evaluation.

As to the Fulton Sheen quote. I's a bit unfair. I mean, if you're going to be
picky about it you can lose the lunatic option: someone who claims to be God
is either God or a liar, by definition. But you can be a liar by deliberate
act, by diminished faculty or by being mistaken. And plenty of great teachers
have been mistaken about important things.

And of course, in both the Bayes and Fulton cases, there is the implicit
assumption that what was recorded about Jesus had no systemic bias i.e. any
errors while recording what He said and did were mistakes, not deliberate
misrepresentations. Given the strong requirement to show that He fulfilled
scripture, this is a highly dubious assumption.

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jabv
See my reply above regarding the second paragraph - it's a good question.

Regarding the final paragraph and implicit assumptions regarding the veracity
of the content of the four canonical gospel accounts, I am not sure
attributing it to "simple" assumption (i.e., the colloquial assumption where
one just thinks something is true without examination) is reasonable given the
education of both men and the body of work done over several centuries on
examining epistemologically and historically the veracity of the gospels. See
for example the intense work of John Henry Newman, 19th century Oxford scholar
and intense defender of the historical reliability of the canonical gospel
narratives.

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bloaf
Just be careful appealing to the imprecise, several century long corpus of
work on the subject. By appealing to the works of the devout, people are apt
to raise the equally hasty generalization described by Upton Sinclair:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends
on his not understanding it.”

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jasonkostempski
"Hume, the probability of people inaccurately claiming that they’d seen Jesus’
resurrection far outweighed the probability that the event had occurred in the
first place."

Is there any evidence that anyone mentioned in the bible actually ever
existed? What is the point of examining the claims of fictional characters
about a fictional event?

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jasonkostempski
I can't really accept the reference of already famous names as strong evidence
they were part of any event or that the event described actually took place.
On a daily basis I see completely made up stories about kings, queens,
politicians, actors, actresses, socialites, etc.; and people believing those
stories without any evidence; and people retelling those stories, adding their
own flair. Often the subject of those stories let the inaccuracies continue or
even fabricate it themselves. And that's just people and things that happen
today, things that could likely be verified but just aren't because most
people don't care to. Over thousands of years and various translations and
interpretations, it is nearly impossible that any meaningfully accurate
information made it this far, i doubt it even made it to the stone.

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dancek
The same argument can be made regarding any person and any event in reasonably
distant history. Still, mainstream historians believe that we know a lot about
Caesar, for example.

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amazingman
That Templeton Foundation funding, though.

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pavel_lishin
What?

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simo9000
Nautilus, the publisher, is funded by the John Templeton foundation which is a
evangelical fundamentalist organization.

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pech0rin
Maybe you should back up this claim. Just because they are a religious
organization does not mean they are fundamentalist.

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simo9000
First line of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation).
It is just important to understand the possible motivations for the article.

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pavel_lishin
That seems to come from a single French article, in which the only reference
to fundamentalism comes from the description of the founder.

It seems that since the core tenets of fundamentalism seem to be biblical
literalism and anti-modernity, it doesn't accurately describe the Templeton
foundation or its goals.

The founder and his wife did donate something on the order of a million
dollars to causes opposing same-sex marriage, which definitely seems like a
fundamentalist trait.

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lambdaphagy
Is Barack Obama a fundamentalist for having opposed gay marriage in 2008, the
same year that the Templetons made their donation?

