Post Author: Bill Pratt

Recall that in part 2, we looked at a couple skeptics’ views on testimony.  The first skeptic’s view appeared to be self-defeating, but the second skeptic singled out testimony about supernatural events, thus avoiding the self-defeating approach of the first skeptic.  However, the second skeptic has a different sort of problem, which I flesh out below.

I (Bill) trust people who tell me that some supernatural claims are legitimate; he (the skeptic) trusts people who tell him that no supernatural claims are legitimate.  How do we decide whose testimony to trust without begging the question?  For if the skeptic starts out by knowing that all supernatural claims are false (which he seems to have done in this case), then he clearly has begged the question of whether a specific supernatural event occurred.

This is where worldview presuppositions come in.  Skeptical atheists will generally claim that their worldview has nothing to do with their skepticism.  They claim that they are able to remain neutral when assessing any evidential claim (it is religious folks who are hopelessly biased).  But this is clearly false.  Because I believe that a theistic God who can perform miracles exists, I am very open to the possibility that some miracle reports from history are true.  Because the atheist denies that such a God exists, then he is closed to these miracle reports.

So when the Christian asks atheist skeptics to look at the historical testimony supporting a miracle claim, most of these skeptics, though not all, will argue that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, that people make mistakes all the time, that magicians can fool us, that ancient people were gullible, that witnesses in trials are sometimes wrong, that UFO sightings are bogus, that hypnotists can trick us, and on and on and on.

My response to all of these points is this: I know about all of these things, but we trust eyewitness testimony to tell us about much of what we know about the world.  Therefore, when I hear testimony about a seemingly unusual event that I personally have not ever experienced, instead of ruling it out immediately, I should apply criteria developed by experts on testimony of the kind I want to investigate to determine if the testimony is credible.  That way, I can hopefully detect false testimony.

Some skeptics have retorted: “You disbelieve miracle claims from other religions, and you don’t apply the same criteria to them as you do to the miracle claims of Christianity.  Therefore, you are inconsistent and biased, just like you accuse us of being.”

My response is this: I do not categorically deny all miracle claims from other religions, so the accusation is false.  I believe that God is able to perform whatever miracles he wants whenever he wants.  In addition, I believe in the existence of angelic beings who are also able to perform feats that are supernatural in nature, and they may be involved in alleged miracle claims of other religions.  Bottom line, I don’t take a hard position on any miracle claim until I have really looked into the testimony evidence for it.

Where does this leave us?  First, testimony is a fundamental way we learn about the world.  To cast serious doubt on testimony is ultimately self-defeating because you have to rely on testimony to doubt testimony.  The more rational and reasonable way to approach testimony is to apply criteria that have been developed by experts who have studied testimony in a particular discipline (e.g., law, history).

For my Christian friends, when you are dialoguing with a skeptic who starts denigrating the reliability of testimony, ask them to list their criteria for establishing  when testimony is credible or not.  That will move the conversation on to something more profitable.

For my skeptical friends, please understand that telling us all the ways that testimony can be wrong is just not a fruitful approach.  We know about all that.  Move on to giving us your non-question-begging criteria for determining whether particular testimony is credible or not.  If you cannot do that, then our suspicion that your worldview is driving your skepticism starts to become confirmed.

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In the previous post, we talked about the role of testimony in our everyday lives.  There are some, however, who cast serious doubts on the reliability of testimony.  Here is a typical quote from a skeptic who commented on this blog:

As we all should know, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. There are numerous examples of situations in which large numbers of people have individually presented eyewitness testimony which has later turned out to be false (UFO sightings are a case in point). Numerous trial convictions hinging on eyewitness testimony have been shown to be wrong when the evidence is analyzed more fully.

Here is what is interesting to me.  First, note that the skeptic fails to give a balanced account of testimony, in general.  Why, for example, doesn’t the skeptic note that there are also numerous examples of large numbers of people who reported testimony that turned out to be true?  With regard to trial convictions, the skeptic does not remind us that the vast majority are never overturned because the eyewitnesses got it right.  We only hear about the overturned convictions because they are so rare.

The second thing to note, and this is really important, is that the only way the skeptic knows about most of the cases where large numbers of people got something wrong, or that trial convictions have been overturned due to false testimony, is through other testimony!  The skeptic did not personally experience most of these cases himself.  He had to hear about these cases from other people (through books, blogs, magazines, etc.) who did, supposedly, experience these cases.  So, in tearing down the reliability of testimony, the skeptic must rely on testimony.  This approach is clearly self-defeating.

Here is another typical quote:

In thinking about the past, we can only reason about unknowns using knowns. Among the knowns are the laws of science and the propensity of eyewitnesses to make mistakes. Among the knowns when it comes to tales of supernatural events are human foibles such as prevarication, gullibility, superstition, wishful thinking and ignorance.

Notice the skeptic’s negative outlook on eyewitness testimony.  He says that we know when people report supernatural “tales” that they prove to be gullible, superstitious, ignorant, and engage in wishful thinking.

How does the skeptic know these things?  You guessed it: through testimony.  The skeptic relies on the testimony of people he trusts to tell him that most people who report supernatural events are gullible, superstitious, and ignorant.  Here again, the skeptic tears down the reliability of testimony by relying on testimony.

At this point, the second skeptic may cry foul and say the following: “I was specifically writing of testimony about supernatural events, not testimony in general.  So there is nothing wrong with me using testimony from people I trust to back up my claims.”  And he has a point; it seems he may have escaped the self-defeating approach of the first skeptic.  However, it leads to another difficulty.

In the next post, we will discuss this difficulty and wrap up this series on the reliability of testimony.

Post Author: Bill Pratt

There are 3 ways that a person can gain knowledge: experience, reason, and testimony.  Experience simply means that we observe something directly with one of our five senses for ourselves (e.g., “There is a computer screen in front of me”).  Reason means that we make rational and logical inferences from knowledge we already have to new knowledge (e.g., syllogisms).  Testimony means that we gain knowledge by hearing it from another person (e.g., “Napoleon was a short man”).

For the average person, it would seem that much of what we know about the world comes from testimony, from facts we hear from other people.  Think about it.  If you just start listing in your mind all the things you know about every sort of subject, a tremendous amount of it you read in books, were taught by teachers and professors in school, read on a blog, and heard from your friends and family.

We rely very heavily on testimony because as a person who is limited in space and time, we cannot possibly experience everything directly that we want to know.  Any knowledge you have about places in the world you’ve never been is because of testimony.  Any knowledge of people whom you have never met is because of testimony.  Any knowledge of human activity from before you were born is known from testimony.

Let’s take two special cases of where testimony is used: law courts and human history.  Every day, criminals are convicted of serious crimes based on evidence from testimony.  Attorneys and judges always want to know who saw what.  There are other kinds of evidence used in courts, to be sure, but there is no doubt that our legal system would completely fall apart if testimony was disallowed.

Are there sometimes mistakes made by witnesses in recalling what they saw?  Sure there are.  But often the way we know a  mistake was made is because of someone else’s testimony!  In other words, we trust one person’s testimony about the facts over another person’s testimony.  We don’t just throw out all testimony and call it all unreliable.  We work to determine whose testimony is credible by using standard criteria.

What about human history?  The truth is that just about everything we know from human history is based on testimony.  We read written accounts left behind by people who directly experienced the events of history.  Are there testimonies from history that we think are false?  Absolutely.  How do we know they are false?  Often because they contradict other testimony that we trust more.  Without testimony, however, we would know precious little about anything that happened before we were born.  Historians, like jurists, employ criteria to discern which testimony from history is credible and which is not.

If testimony is so important to our everyday lives, to our legal system, and to our knowledge of history, then why do skeptics of Christianity seem to downplay its reliability so much?  We tackle that in the next post in this series.