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David Hume's confirmation bias: he used the prior improbability of miracles to refuse even examining the evidence

Do Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence? Nah. 00:36:34 – 00:37:34

Mike connects Hume's philosophical approach to the confirmation bias critique (Problem 3).

Mike quotes Hume's essay "Of Miracles" Part 2, paragraph 38: if a miracle is associated with a religious system, that alone is "full proof of a cheat" sufficient to reject it "without further examination." This is the philosophical root of the anti-evidential stance. Mike also quotes paragraph 26: testimony for miracles is "more properly the subject of derision than of argument." Mike connects this to the New Atheist culture of ridicule championed by Hitchens and others.

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