my reply to Jonathon McLatchie on ECREE

I watched the ECREE debate between Jonathan McLatchie and Jonathan Pearce, see here.

I posted the following in the comment section:

The full text is

What do skeptics mean by "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"?  Just substitute the word "extraordinary" with its meaning as supplied from the dictionary (I use Merriam-Webster), and you end up with

 "Claims which go beyond what is usual, regular, or customary, or are exceptional to a very marked extent, require evidence which goes beyond what is usual, regular, or customary, or else is exceptional to a very marked extent".

 Yes, that means there is going to be inevitable  subjectivity as to what "beyond the usual" means, but that subjectivity is precisely why apologists cannot accuse skeptics of unreasonableness.  No, there is no magic "what quantity/quality of evidence should convince you" formula when it comes to claims that depart from our daily experience of reality, such as rising from the dead.   There is a very good reason that equally mature equally educated adult jurors often deadlock when interpreting real-world evidence of a crime created less than a year before the trial.   Only fools would expect such people to come to agreement on what quantity and quality of evidence for a miracle "should" be convincing (!?)

 As for myself, "beyond the usual" simply means evidence which has survived authentication challenges to some degree more severe than the authentication challenges we typically require to justify accepting commonplace claims by other people.  "beyond the usual" does not mean evidence that is different from documents, pictures, video or testimony.  It refers to how much more that type of evidence is authenticated, than is the evidence we typically accept from stranger who are making non-controversial commonplace claims.  A picture will normally suffice for us to accept the stranger's claim that they attended a birthday party.  But if the picture shows some kid in mid-air, and the claim is that this picture captured the child while levitating by the power of god...then suddenly, we demand this picture be authenticated much more than we did back when the picture was being used merely to document a commonplace claim like attendance at a birthday party.

 But at least this proves the deception of apologists who pretend that ECREE was intentionally designed to make sure supernatural claims would always falsely appear to be unjustified.

 If it were philosophically possible to come up with an objective criteria that would, when properly employed, enable all people to agree on whether some claimed event happened, I suspect the idea would have been discovered by now, sold to the Courts through the legal process, and we'd have stopped hearing about deadlocked juries years ago.  The claim that the skeptic is unreasonable to employ ECREE is actually a claim that ECREE is breaking some "rule" of historiography, hermeneutics or common sense.  But no apologist since Sagan first gave us ECREE has pointed out what the "rule" is, nor why those outside of Christianity "should" care about it.

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