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In this episode, Trent responds to atheist Matt Dillahunty’s claim that “claims aren’t evidence” when used against doctrines like the Resurrection.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to the The Counsel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist Trent Horn. And today, I want to talk about a claim that atheist Matt Dillahunty often makes and what’s wrong with it. But before I do that, if you could like this video and subscribe to the channel, I would appreciate it.
And I think you’ll appreciate it because you don’t want to miss out on all of our new content that’s coming out. All right. So Matt Dillahunty has been arguing for atheism for a long time. He does a lot of debates and I even debated him on the resurrection on Pints with Aquinas not too long ago.
One of Dillahunty’s stock arguments he uses to discredit miracles like the resurrection is this statement, claims are not evidence. He basically says there’s no evidence for Jesus’s resurrection because all the purported evidence for it are merely claims that Jesus rose from the dead. And those claims by themselves are not evidence. The first time I saw Dillahunty use this approach was when he debated Mike Wininger on the resurrection.
Matt Dillahunty:
So what is it that makes something convincing or what is it that should make something reasonably convincing? Well, we have to evaluate the claim and then the evidence for the claim. And one of the thing that Mike consistently did as he was talking was say, “This is evidence, this is evidence, this is a fact, this is evidence, this is evidence.”
When virtually everything that he was talking about at some level is the claim and not the evidence for it. Right up to the end where he says, “Oh, well you know this is the evidence for the resurrection.” No, these are the claims about a resurrection. The evidence for the resurrection is something else other than a whole bunch of people say it, they saw it happen or had an experience afterward.
Trent Horn:
A few weeks ago, Dillahunty released a video defending his assertion that claims are not evidence because according to him, even some atheists have criticized him on this point. So let me say what I think Dillahunty is saying, why he’s wrong and I’ll go through a few clips from this recent video on this matter.
So in order to show what’s wrong with Dillahunty’s claim, we need to understand what a claim is and what evidence is. First, what is evidence? Evidence is anything that makes a statement more likely to be true. Evidence is not the same as proof. Proof makes it unreasonable to deny a statement. Evidence just makes a statement more likely to be true, but the statement could still be denied. Dillahunty fails to understand this point when he says the following.
Matt Dillahunty:
And so if a piece of evidence can consistently be used to support multiple different hypotheses, then it’s not evidence for any of them distinctly.
Trent Horn:
The problem is that in courtrooms, the prosecution and the defense will argue over the same evidence since the evidence by itself doesn’t prove who’s right. It supports multiple hypotheses. The butler being stabbed with Mr. Plum’s favorite knife is evidence Mr. Plum killed the butler. But it’s also evidence that someone took Plum’s knife and killed the butler.
When evidence does support multiple hypotheses where you can combine the evidences so that when they’re taken as a whole, it only supports one hypothesis. So an eyewitness seeing Plum stab the butler and the fact that it was Plum’s knife makes one hypothesis more likely than the others.
Likewise, individual pieces of evidence for Christ’s resurrection can support other hypotheses beyond the resurrection. The empty tomb supports the fraud theory or that the body was stolen. The post-mortem appearances support the hallucination theory, but when all the evidence is taken together, it shows that only one theory makes the most sense of all of the evidence.
For example, since an empty tomb doesn’t fit with the disciples merely hallucinating. Now if Dillahunty is only saying that claims are not proof or that merely claiming something happened doesn’t always prove it happened, well then he’s right. People make false claims, but people also make true claims.
And here’s what’s important, the claims themselves are what lead us to believe a statement is true, which means the claims are evidence. And in some cases the convergence of claims even rises to the level of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. For example, if three strangers in a public park all independently went to the police and said that Smith indecently exposed himself, most people would consider that proof Smith committed the crime, even apart from other facts that would confirm this unrepeatable event like surveillance footage.
That’s why we can make a case for something like Christ’s resurrection based on claims from people like Paul who saw the risen Jesus and the gospel authors who knew the disciples. Intersecting claims from sources that have nothing to gain and everything to lose from making a false claim, become powerful evidence that an event happened. But in this video, I’m not making a case for the resurrection. I’m just refuting Dillahunty’s assertion that claims are not evidence. Because he often uses this statement to undercut any possible evidence for the resurrection.
However, if he goes that route, then Dillahunty gets rid of evidence, not just for the resurrection, he’ll get rid of all historical and testimonial evidence we rely on every day to be rational. This shows Matt’s epistemology or his theory of knowledge is just wrong. I’ll give some more examples of that in a minute, but before I do that, we also need to distinguish claims from propositions. Listen to what Dillahunty says here.
Matt Dillahunty:
But we could look at a bunch of different claims like Jesus rose from the dead. That’s a claim. We could look at Jesus walked on water. That’s also a claim. All ravens are black, obviously a claim. This video is terrible. Each of these claims are the proposition in question. They aren’t evidence that of anything that Jesus did. They’re not evidence of what Ravens are or aren’t and they’re not evidence of the quality of this video. The claims aren’t evidence for the claim in question. That’s mostly all I’ve been saying.
Trent Horn:
The mistake Dillahunty makes is he conflates claims with propositions as if they’re the same thing. A proposition is a statement that can be true or false. The house is red is a proposition. And note that a proposition refers to language neutral truths. So the statements “The house is red” and “La Casa is roja” are different sentences, but they refer to the same proposition because they have the same truth content.
Here are some other propositions, Donald Trump won the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, Rick Astley won the 2016 election, a square circle won the 2016 election. In fact, there are an infinite number of propositions and only a tiny portion of them are true. So this means that just because something is a proposition that does not mean it’s true.
Just because something can be the case, that doesn’t mean that it is the case. If that’s what Dillahunty means by claims or not evidence, well, I agree, but everyone agrees on this point. You need evidence to show a proposition is true before you can justifiably believe it is true. But one piece of evidence for a proposition being true is that a person says the proposition is true or they make a claim. Remember, propositions and claims are not the same thing.
If people never existed, there would still be propositions just as there would still be mathematical truths. But if people never existed, there would be no claims because no one would exist to assert that certain propositions are true. Consider these propositions. One, Pontius Pilate crossed the Alps with elephants. Two, Hannibal of Carthage crossed the Alps with elephants.
One reason there is no evidence for the first proposition is that no one has ever claimed Pontius Pilate crossed the Alps on an elephant. No one has ever asserted that the proposition is true. But there is evidence for the second proposition because some people have asserted it’s true or they claimed Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants.
Of course, someone could assert right now Pontius Pilate crossed the Alps with elephants and that would be evidence, but it’d be very weak evidence. However, when ancient sources make this claim about Hannibal, historians recognize that that evidence is strong enough to justify belief in the proposition. So claims can be weak evidence that fail to justify belief, but they can also be evidence that justifies belief in unusual events that have never happened before.
Likewise, me claiming Jesus rose from the dead 2000 years ago, it’s evidence, but it’s pretty weak evidence for the resurrection. Jesus’s immediate disciples and even opponents of his movement like Paul claiming he rose from the dead, that’s much stronger evidence. The fact is we treat claims like evidence even as convincing evidence all the time.
Consider the proposition “My father has a headache.” There are a ton of medical propositions about my father, nearly all of which are false. My father has gigantism, my father has dwarfism. But if my father tells me, “I have a headache,” then that is a claim about reality. It’s an assertion that a certain proposition is true and it serves as evidence that the proposition my father has a headache is true.
In medicine, the claim that a person is in pain is often the only evidence a person is in pain. Now sometimes it’s weak evidence, like if the person isn’t sincere and you can see they’re trying to get pain pills to sell to other people. But if someone sincerely makes a claim about an invisible reality affecting him and he has nothing to gain in making that claim, then that’s evidence for the invisible reality that he’s talking about.
Now hopefully you can see where I’m going with this. Once again, that doesn’t mean all claims are proof, claims are evidence. They make a statement more likely to be true. Sometimes only weakly, but sometimes they make a statement overwhelmingly more likely to be true.
Now Dillahunty would probably say that when it comes to headaches or Hannibal crossing the Alps, we have other evidence beyond the claim itself. We know that headaches, elephants and mountains exist, but we don’t know God exists. We don’t know that resurrections happen, so those claims are totally different and so they don’t count as evidence. He basically makes this point when he talks about the claim, “I bought a new car.”
Matt Dillahunty:
But when you say something like, “I just got a new car,” that’s the claim. The fact that you said it is not evidence for that claim. That claim can be accepted rationally, reasonably, and we’d like to even say at face value, we’ll just accept that claim at face value. You just got a new car. But that’s not true.
That’s not what we’re doing. It’s really not at face value. We have a mountain of evidence for each aspect of that claim. We have evidence that you exist, we have evidence that cars exist, we have evidence that people own cars, we have evidence that people get cars, we have people, evidence that people will tell you when they get a new car that they’re especially happy about it or proud about it or if they’re upset or irritated about it.
All of those aspects come together to such that when someone says, “I just got a new car,” you don’t need any additional evidence, not because the claim speaks for itself, but because the claim is consistent with the mountain of evidence that you have in your model of reality.
Trent Horn:
Why can we rationally accept this claim about a person buying a new car if the claim itself is not evidence? The fact that cars exist and are sold does not provide evidence that a particular person bought a new car. If I pointed to a stranger and said, “He bought a new car because lots of people buy new cars,” you’d point out my conclusion is irrational. Just because a statement is consistent with reality, that doesn’t mean the statement is true.
It gives us good reasons to think the statement is not false but no reason to think it’s true. What makes it rational to believe a particular friend bought a new car is because the friend himself asserted that this proposition is true where he made a claim about himself. And this means claims are evidence.
They don’t merely point to evidence since background evidence is not enough to convince us of many propositions. That’s basically where Dillahunty takes the argument because he says that claims can at best point to the evidence that confirms them, like the car title with a friend’s name on it or the car sitting in your friend’s garage. And so these facts are the evidence, not the claim about the facts. That may be why he says this.
Matt Dillahunty:
That claim in and of itself isn’t evidence for the proposition because it’s evidence for competing propositions as well. If you were to consider it evidence. The better thing to do is to say this is the claim, let’s evaluate what evidence we can find that is consistent with the claim to either confirm it or fail to confirm it. The claim requires confirmation because it on its own isn’t confirmation for anything beyond someone made a claim.
Trent Horn:
First in many cases, the confirmation for a claim is just another claim. How do I know my friend bought a new car? Well, there’s a new car in his garage. Ah, but what if he stole it and did not buy it? Well, there’s a title that has his name on it. But this is just a government document that claims he bought the car and claims aren’t evidence, right?
What if it’s a fake title? Well, I can go to the seller and he can tell me. But once again, we have another claim. In many cases, the fact of the matter is simply a claim made by one person that is repeated by other people. This also came up in my debate with Dillahunty on the resurrection when he said there was no evidence that Jesus even died, to which I asked him what would count as evidence that Jesus died.
Matt Dillahunty:
I’m asking you, are you willing to accept a claim of resurrection is reasonable in the absence of any physical evidence?
Trent Horn:
What do you mean by physical evidence?
Matt Dillahunty:
Well, did we have doctor’s reports on the cause of illness and death and then a period of time where they were confirmed to be dead and then a period of time where they were confirmed to be living again after that?
Trent Horn:
Notice that the evidence is just somebody else’s claim. In this case, a doctor’s claim about Jesus’s health. Second Dillahunty’s explanation also doesn’t work in cases where there is no currently existing physical object like a car in a garage, that is the focal point of a claim. That’s why I use the examples of Hannibal crossing the Alps and my father having a headache.
These are the kinds of claims we believe to be true even though there is no fact that can confirm the claims are true. Not every historical or medical claim is true, but some of them are, which means claims are evidence. Like with the car example, in the Hannibal and headache cases, the background evidence is not enough to convince us of these propositions.
The fact that elephants exist does not mean Pontius Pilate crossed the Alps with them. The fact that headaches exist does not mean the stranger across from me at Starbucks has a headache. What justifies belief in the headache and Hannibal cases is an assertion about a proposition involving Hannibal or headaches or a claim. Most of Matt’s argument seems to be hung up on background knowledge. He might concede everything I’ve said and say that what makes a claim true, the evidence is that it conforms to our background knowledge of the world. That’s the evidence, not the claim itself.
Matt Dillahunty:
And that’s why I say claims aren’t evidence. They may contain evidence, they may point to evidence, they may in fact be true, but the way to know that is by verifying the facts and comparing it with what we know and understand about reality and what we can discover about reality.
Trent Horn:
Now I’ve already shown how in many cases the background knowledge is not what proves the claim. It makes the claim more reasonable, but the claim itself is what provides a specific evidence to justify believing a certain proposition is true. But saying that a claim can only be believed if it conforms to what we know about reality, that assumes we have a perfect understanding of reality.
What if a claim changes our background knowledge? For example, if you told an indigenous Polynesian tribe cut off from the modern world about water becoming solid, well, they have no background knowledge of liquids becoming solid, especially through cold air. But your claims about the existence of ice would still be evidence for ice. Saying unprecedented claims don’t count as evidence fails to appreciate just how weird our world is.
It fails to keep an open mind and be a free thinker about reality. In some cases, background knowledge is enough to disprove a claim. Saying everyone in Arlington National Cemetery rose from the dead contradicts our background knowledge that those bodies are still in the ground.
When it comes to the resurrection, there is no background knowledge that says Jesus did not rise from the dead or he’s still in a grave. The relevant background knowledge is that dead people stay dead. And that knowledge makes Jesus’ resurrection a miracle. If dead people don’t stay dead, then what Jesus did would not be a sign of divine power.
Also notice that part of discussing background knowledge will include whether you think God exists and can perform miracles and is a part of that knowledge. All right, let’s summarize. Evidence is not always proof, but it does make something more likely to be true. A proposition or what can be the case is not evidence.
It is the case, since there’s an infinite number of propositions. The fact that something can be doesn’t make it more likely that it is. But when a person asserts a proposition is true or when a person makes a claim that is evidence for the proposition.
It might be bad evidence, it might be irrefutable evidence, but it’s evidence that needs to be judged on its own merits and not dismissed through faulty epistemologies like claims are not evidence. And it can’t merely be judged against what we previously know about the world because this would cut us off from understanding new aspects of reality through new claims.
If you assume that miracles don’t happen and so every miracle claim is not evidence for miracles, then you’re engaging in circular reasoning. In fact, a lot of what’s driving Dillahunty’s epistemology is his metaphysics or his previous assumptions about the world such as that immaterial persons do not exist. Listen to what he says near the end of his video.
Matt Dillahunty:
Someone believes they’ve seen a demon, that is evidence for demons is simply fallaciously circular reasoning and not worthy of the level of debate that we should have for some of the most important questions in the world like whether or not a God exists. It’d be really handy though if rather than just sitting here arguing about whether or not claims are evidence, God would just show up and present the actual evidence. That’d be nice, but so far hasn’t happened.
Trent Horn:
You can see the flaw in Dillahunty’s argument when you replace demon with undiscovered creature or previously unobserved phenomenon. It represents a closed-minded view of the world. Matt is assuming that actual evidence is some kind of physical object. It’s why he says this.
Matt Dillahunty:
If every single other human being on the planet confirmed to me that they saw George Washington dragged out of his grave, revived in public and presented to all of us, I would have to say, I will accept that that is exactly what these people think, but I need evidence beyond that to confirm that that’s actually what happened. I will fully accept something happened that convinced these people that that’s what it was, but I can’t merely take their word for it.
Trent Horn:
Ironically, this is the kind of thinking that causes people to believe in pseudoscience. I don’t care if everyone says the earth is round, I won’t believe it until you take me into space and I see with my own eyes that it’s round. As we’ve already seen, much of what we believe involves claims about things we can’t personally observe, like subjective experiences or past events.
If you only believe in things you can visually observe for yourself, then you’ll have a ridiculously impoverished view of the world. Finally, one of Dillahunty’s most popular quotes is, “I want to have as many true beliefs as possible and as few false beliefs as possible.” Now it’s difficult because the more you try to get true beliefs, the more false ones will creep in. And the more you try to shut out false beliefs, the more you’re going to accidentally shut out true beliefs.
I think many atheists only see the harm in believing false statements and they see no harm in failing to believe true statements, but we can be harmed if we miss out on the goods that come from the truth. For example, if we’re overly skeptical of vaccines and medicine, we can miss out on the preventions and cures they offer and needlessly suffer.
Likewise, if we’re overly skeptical of religious claims, we can miss out on the spiritual benefits that they give us when they prevent and cure spiritual afflictions. In closing, I’d exhort atheists to not become the mirror image of Christian fundamentalists and for Christians to not become fundamentalists.
Don’t embrace absolutist cliches that sound great but are completely wrong. Whether it’s a Christian cliche like the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it, or an atheist cliche like claims aren’t evidence. Instead, take a nuanced approach. Some claims about what happened in the past are false or unprovable and some are true or at least believable.
What we should do is carefully follow the evidence, which includes taking claims seriously and not immediately dismissing them just because they don’t conform to our present understanding of the world. And we should be open to revising our understanding about reality because the world is kind of a weird place.
But I hope this is helpful for you all and yeah, I just hope that you have a very blessed day. Hey, thanks for watching this video. If you want to help us produce more great content like this, be sure to click subscribe and go to Trenthornpodcast.com to become a premium subscriber. You’ll help us create more videos like this and get access to bonus content and sneak peaks of our upcoming projects.