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Spirit Realm Investigator
Spirit Realm Investigator
1:41 AM
@NotThatGuy: "Based on what they said, they wouldn't have needed to "fool" the native speaker, but instead simply needed to understand and communicate the gist of what's being said."

But if they were able to understand the gist of what the other was trying to say through basic communication skills in the context of two parties interested in communicating with one another despite the language barrier, those very same basic communication skills should have allowed them to get the gist of what the other party was trying to say the very next morning. Yet the very next morning they were in shoc…
 
Spirit Realm Investigator
Spirit Realm Investigator
2:01 AM
Anyways, my whole argument relies on the assumption that they are honest and remembering the events accurately, and that they were not victims of a prank, and I can't prove any of those thinks.
More generally, I can't prove any of those things for any specific testimony that I'm aware of, so there is always a degree of uncertainty, and that's why testimonial arguments are always probabilistic.
By the way, what are your thoughts on this testimony: youtu.be/k-4vEXH5bcA?t=4443 ? (Just 5 mins from that timestamp)
(*) and I can't prove any of those things.
 
 
6 hours later…
NotThatGuy
NotThatGuy
8:23 AM
@SpiritRealmInvestigator If the parties involved are desperate and neither level-headed nor calm, OF COURSE they're not going to be all that critical of how well they're actually able to communicate, and they would try harder to communicate and be less inclined to be overwhelmed by their lack of confidence in speaking the language (especially if they're convinced God gave them the ability to communicate in that moment of desperation, rather than this being something they managed to do all on their own).
"my whole argument relies on the assumption that they are ... remembering the events accurately" - I guess that's the problem / where we disagree then.
 
 
2 hours later…
NotThatGuy
NotThatGuy
10:52 AM
@HoldToTheRod I have no objection to starting by rebutting a weak version and then incrementally making it stronger by addressing the flaws you point out (by ideally presenting the strong versions of the argument that people actually present).

If it were me, I'd probably more clearly differentiate the weaker positions from the stronger ones, but your edit is already much less objectionable.
Regarding your post-script, my response would probably question how you can reliably know that what you interpret as the Holy Ghost is actually the Holy Ghost. This goes far beyond being able to distinguish this from thoughts you don't interpret as the Holy Ghost, and also (while closely related) goes far beyond how trustable that voice is as a source of knowledge (while these may result from being able to reliably know what is and isn't the Holy Ghost, it does not work in the opposite direction: these do not provide a reliable means of knowing that is actually is the Holy Ghost).
 
 
3 hours later…
NotThatGuy
NotThatGuy
1:52 PM
If other people also claimed to be called by Jeff Bezos, now you only have evidence that there are phone calls which people attribute to Jeff Bezos, not that this is actually Jeff Bezos. It might be that some prankster is going around calling lots of people while trying to sound like Jeff Bezos, or it's just random unrelated people not trying to sound like anyone, but people simply interpret these as being Jeff Bezos).
So this also does not serve as evidence that this is actually Jeff Bezos, unless the reason why those people believe it's Jeff Bezos is compelling (which links back to the point above).
 
NotThatGuy
NotThatGuy
2:07 PM
It might also be that Jeff Bezos is actually calling people (perhaps he's publicly stated as much - whether we can say the same about God is a different story). This would certainly serve as evidence that the person who called you is Jeff Bezos, but other people believed they were called by Jeff Bezos at some point, but concluded differently later, and others still claim to have had very similar calls to what you had, but never attributed that to Jeff Bezos.
So you'd still need good evidence for your calls specifically to be able to rationally justify your certainty.
 
Spirit Realm Investigator
Spirit Realm Investigator
2:19 PM
@NotThatGuy: "If the parties involved are desperate and neither level-headed nor calm, OF COURSE they're not going to be all that critical of how well they're actually able to communicate, and they would try harder to communicate and be less inclined to be overwhelmed by their lack of confidence in speaking the language" - Less inclined does not mean 0% inclined. And seriously, there is no way that 3 people would hold a conversation without ever noticing that they don't speak each other's languages. Even if you are surprised by someone who out of nowhere is coming at you crying and seeking …
 
NotThatGuy
NotThatGuy
@SpiritRealmInvestigator "They were convinced of this after the fact on the next day, not the night before" - yes, that's exactly what I meant. If they thought they did it on their own, they'd be more confident in their ability to do it again.
 
 
3 hours later…
Spirit Realm Investigator
Spirit Realm Investigator
5:47 PM
@NotThatGuy - But that's the point, they were confident in their ability to do it again, but this confidence was stopped dead in its tracks when they realized that they couldn't communicate the next day. Hence the surprise ("How come we can't communicate now if we were able to perfectly communicate last night?!!"). The conclusion that they were enabled to communicate miraculous was after they failed to communicate the next day.
Therefore, this lack of confidence cannot be the cause of their failure, it was a consequence of their failure.
They were confident before the failure.
(*) The conclusion that they were enabled to communicate miraculously [...]
 
NotThatGuy
NotThatGuy
6:26 PM
@SpiritRealmInvestigator You're making a lot of assumptions there.
 

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