How far can testimony take us toward believing in miracles like the resurrection, and what follows for how we understand religious belief, fine-tuning, and decision theory?
My links: https://linktr.ee/frictionphilosophy.
1. Guest
Arif Ahmed is a philosopher at the University of Cambridge. He is a Reader in Philosophy, University of Cambridge, and is Nicholas Sallnow-Smith Lecturer in Philosophy, Gonville and Caius College. His work focuses on decision theory, philosophy of religion, Wittgenstein, and other topics.
2. Interview Summary
In this interview, Arif Ahmed—introduced as a philosopher at University of Cambridge and Gonville and Caius College whose work spans decision theory and philosophy of religion—revisits his debate with Gary Habermas about the resurrection and miracle testimony. He argues that once you “let miracles in,” you open the door to indefinitely many rival miracle-stories, so “a miracle occurred” by itself doesn’t single out the resurrection without substantial ancillary evidence. Jesus is used as the central case, but Ahmed stresses that even broader religious experience reports don’t straightforwardly raise the probability of that specific event, and he draws a sharp line between near-death experiences and bodily resurrection. He emphasizes that mundane explanations—mistake, exaggeration, deception—are vastly more common than resurrections, and so (absent extra evidence) testimony is typically less credible than the miracle claim it’s meant to support.
The discussion then turns to Ahmed’s provocative view that many religious people may not literally believe their religious doctrines. His thought is that genuine belief should typically (i) “penetrate” a person’s life—showing up robustly in action, fear, risk-taking, etc.—and (ii) display a kind of evidential responsiveness; but many ordinary religious “commitments” look patchier than that. He suggests that the concept of belief may function more like a rough, useful label over a complicated range of brain-and-behavior patterns (with vague boundaries), rather than naming a sharp natural kind; he illustrates this with examples where someone talks as if a proposition is true but won’t bet on it, and he compares disputes about whether the state “counts as belief” to Ship of Theseus-style borderline cases. He also draws on W. V. Quine’s idea that belief-attribution is a “dramatic idiom,” and he notes that many otherwise secular religious people continue to fear death, trust medicine, and live by largely non-religious moral norms—often fitting religion around prior moral commitments rather than the other way around.
Finally, Ahmed engages fine-tuning arguments and then pivots into decision theory. On fine-tuning, he’s sympathetic to the idea that specific “designer” hypotheses should often get a much lower prior than broad naturalism, potentially offsetting any likelihood advantage, and he adds a further worry: fine-tuning claims often rely on unsupported choices of “uniform” priors and parameterizations. Since we observe only one universe, he doubts we have the frequency-style grounding needed to justify probability assignments that make life “extremely unlikely” on naturalism in the first place—especially given how results can swing with different ways of measuring the same parameter. He then discusses why evidential and causal decision theories are highly idealized (axioms real agents don’t satisfy), yet still useful as clarifying models and as a way to make disputes more precise; he endorses loosening the formal assumptions where possible, and he comments on pressure points for causal decision theorists (including arguments associated with Adam Elga) and on proposals that try to “fix” causal decision theory by restricting attention to certain worlds. He also praises Richard Pettigrew’s work on choices affecting future selves while questioning whether we should model intertemporal choice as a literal “vote” among temporal selves versus a present-self weighting that merely takes account of them.
3. Interview Chapters
00:00 - Introduction
01:03 - Habermas and the resurrection of Jesus
03:41 - Testimony and the Humean argument
05:24 - Near-death experiences
08:40 - Choosing between miracle hypotheses
10:23 - Religious belief
15:38 - Sufficient condition vs. necessary condition
17:37 - Vagueness of mental categories
19:17 - Potential criticisms
23:34 - Cautious conclusion
24:33 - Applicability elsewhere
26:58 - Approach to fine-tuning
34:52 - Design hypothesis
40:14 - Difficulties with priors
40:56 - Ahmed’s response to fine-tuning
43:09 - The space of possibilities
46:01 - Decision theory as overly idealized
50:00 - Expanding the theory
52:18 - Richard Pettigrew and Choosing for Changing Selves
56:10 - No need to change standard decision theory
58:07 - The Value of the Future and discounting
1:05:40 - Relevance to extended life
1:07:21 - Confession of a causal decision theorist
1:10:56 - Causalism and one-boxing in Newcomb’s problem
1:12:02 - Determinism, Counterfactuals, and Decision
1:16:24 - Motivating the view
1:20:56 - Argument for two-boxing
1:23:30 - Analyzing the conditionals
1:26:22 - Fatalist argument
1:27:45 - Salvaging Pascal’s Wager
1:31:39 - Deciding between actions with infinite utility
1:36:32 - Issue with infinite utilities
1:38:06 - Responses
1:41:22 - Value of philosophy
1:44:38 - Conclusion
