Odone avoids the evidence question

About halfway through the conversation between Richard Dawkins and Cristina Odone (accessed 26.09.11), he asked how she decided which parts of religious teaching and scripture to doubt and which to accept, adding:

RD: As scientists, we do it by evidence.
CO: You can’t boil everything down to evidence!

If you turn up the heat, and boil everything down only to find nothing, what then? The difference between people of faith like Odone and people of reason like Dawkins is that one expects to find some residue of evidence underpinning every belief while the other is happy with an empty pan. Reduction is not always a bad thing, especially if you’re trying to enjoy the good things in life, like gravy.

Christian beliefs, in particular, depend crucially on certain historical propositions being true, and how we usually determine the truth or otherwise of such beliefs is by appeal to certain types of evidence, often written but sometimes archaeological and so on. Scholars, of course, do not take documents such as the gospels on faith or at face value. (Even at face value, there are many deficiencies in the gospels as supposed accounts of historical events. For example, internal contradictions – in the absence of external corroboration to resolve the issue one way or another – cast doubt on the accuracy of many details.)

Dan Barker, who was an evangelist before seeing the light and becoming an atheist, was astonished to discover that the book he had lived by for so many years was not what it seemed, and refers us to Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman “for documentation of this fraudulent tampering with the bible” (Barker 2008, pp. 233–34). In a later book, Forged, Ehrman (2011, p. 5)  puts it bluntly:

The Bible contained errors. And if it contained errors, it was not completely true. Eventually I came to realize that the Bible not only contains untruths or accidental mistakes. It also contains what almost anyone today would call lies.

In Misquoting Jesus Ehrman (2005, p. 7) puts a key evidential question:

What good is it to say that the autographs (i.e., the originals) were inspired? We don’t have the originals!

If you’re Odone, of course, or anyone prepared to accept on faith alone, it doesn’t matter that we don’t have the autographs, because that would be boiling the Bible down to evidence.

Odone’s avoidance of the evidence question is unsurprising in someone who would also be unlikely to embrace the phrase “the God delusion”: the reason why someone is said to labour under a delusion is because their belief is not reasonable, not warranted by the available evidence. Someone who declares with absolute conviction that they are going to win the Lottery is deluded, as I’m sure Odone would agree. The reason why they are deluded is not because their belief is certainly false. After all, they might win the Lottery. It is simply because the chances are heavily weighted against their winning the Lottery, a judgement all reasonable people, considering the evidence, will reach.

This is why it is common to find religious believers operating an epistemic double standard. What is a reasonable objection to someone certain they will win the Lottery becomes an outrageous and offensive insult to someone certain they will win Everlasting Life. (The difference between the Lottery and Everlasting Life, of course, is that we know that people have won the Lottery.)