Request for reader help

August 10, 2013 • 10:30 am

As I work on my book, I’ll be asking from time to time for readers to track stuff down for me—to be, as it were, my online assistants. (I’ll of course acknowledge the readership as a whole in the book, as it’s been very important in my thinking.)

So here’s an easy request: can you give me the page number for the following famous quotation from Hitchens’s God is Not Great (and check if the quote is accurate)? I’ll verify the citation later.

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

Would that the faithful absorb that statement!

kthxbai!

82 thoughts on “Request for reader help”

      1. “What can be accepted without PROOF can also be dismissed without PROOF.”

        it appears on Daily Hitchens in this manner.

        Also,thank you Jerry for doing this website.

    1. Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

      I should get this Routledge Dictionary of Latin Quotations.

      I only know the ones Augustus said like festina lente Hurry slowly.

      1. From Wikiquotes:

        Jon R. Stone, The Routledge Dictionary of Latin Quotations (2005), p. 101. Anonymous, widely used since at least the early 19th century (e.g. The Classical Journal, Vol. 40 (1829), p. 312).

        /@

      2. Hey, thanks for that one! I am always saying, “Take your time, but hurry!” Now I know there is ancient precedent for the idea.

        2. From “The Mom Song” lyrics by Anita Renfroe (set to Rossini’s “William Tell” overture), admonishing her children at breakfast:

          “Don’t shovel, chew slowly,
          But hurry, the bus is here.”

  4. Hi,

    I’d gladly give you my humble subjective opinion, tough as an agnostic Christian (and a researcher in Chemistry), I’m probably going to disagree with you at least a few times.

    The quote from Hitchen can be traced back to thinkers of the ancient Greece, and it is obviously true.
    I would say it is one of the foundation of a rational and just society.

    But it cuts both ways.

    What’s the evidence that we don’t live in one kind of computer simulation carried out by very advanced aliens?

    Both assertion: our reality is a simulation
    our reality isn’t a simulation

    have no evidence to be based upon.

    So in at least this case, agnosticism seems to be the most reasonable position.

    Kind regards from Germany.

    Lothars Sohn – Lothar’s son

    http://lotharlorraine.wordpress.com

    1. Isn’t “reality is a computer simulation” the extraordinary claim? The burden of proof is on you to substantiate such a claim, not on me to falsify it.

      1. Agreed. Lothar’s son’s claim is a variant of the “What if it were true?” school. My comeback is, “If my aunt had wheels, she’d be a tea cart.” “That’s impossible”, one might reply. I’d say, “Yes, but what if it were true?”

      2. At the same time, a distinguished British philosopher and transhumanist in a widely discussed paper has offered evidence to back up that idea: http://www.simulation-argument.com/ Possibly it’s lotharson’s source for the idea.

        BTW, how does one become an “agnostic Christian?”

        1. Do he really offer evidence, or just a philosophical argument? Not that philosophical arguments aren’t interesting, but they don’t equal evidence.

          2. Read it and decide for yourself.

            In all fairness, I think it’s likely that Nick, who was clearly an atheist back in the days we were both posting to the Extropian list, is making the claim to demonstrate that philosophical arguments supporting belief in a god could just as easily be used to support a belief in the computer simulation explanation and were therefore pointless.

        2. BTW, how does one become an “agnostic Christian?”

          With a lot of woolly thinking and a disinclination to abandon the comforts of childhood.

        3. @ jwthomas
          Posted August 10, 2013 at 1:38 pm

          BTW, how does one become an “agnostic Christian?”

          God knows.

    2. If you only look at the trees you will never see the forest. Expand your horizons. How would you know what the compound is if you limit yourself to only acknowledging oxygen atoms?

      If you look at the whole of the evidence that has been collected and examined concerning the universe and life, plus the follies and inconsistency of god-ideas, you should be able to do better than I don’t know.

    3. “Agnosticism” is _never_ reasonable, because it is not a reasoned position. Religious agnosticism is a theological claim. I think it is obtuse to imply that there is a more generic form of agnosticism. Where are those forms, what do they say?

      Nor is agnosticism equivalent with accepting the null hypothesis, as you seem to imply.

      The null hypothesis regarding magic is that there is none, because we have no observations of such. The NH isn’t that we don’t know anything about magic, so we can’t say anything.

      What’s the evidence that we don’t live in one kind of computer simulation carried out by very advanced aliens?

      That is obtuse, since specific questions have nothing to do with the generic claim.

      But there are at least 3 kinds of evidence, one is rejecting the alternates as far as we have checked:

      1. Reality is the simplest, most powerful theory.

      2. All mechanics has realism build in at the most basic level, as constrained reaction on constrained action: action-reaction in classical mechanics, observation-observables in quantum mechanics.

      Why would mechanics be such in non-realistic cases? Especially since it puts the most strain on them?

      3. Quantum mechanics prohibits hidden variables. Meaning we can always decide by increasing resolution. (In the proposed variant overwhelm the simulation resources.)

      I don’t know why people propose alternatives, even serious scientists. I assume it is because of a misdirected interest in philosophy, which is another reason why I warn against philosophy.

      1. Of course, when I claim (and IIRC there are now support papers in arxiv) that we can tell by increasing resolution, I don’t mean that we can yet reject all the way up to Planck scale. But as far as we have probed, no hidden variables, no simulations.

        More importantly, with the LHC completion of the standard particles with the Higgs field (if not yet “the” Higgs particle), we can tell that humdrum everyday magic can be rejected once and for all. No souls/afterlife/rebirth mechanism, no prayer mechanism – the EM sector is sufficiently protected by way of the quantum vacuum to prohibit any magic from knowing the full state of the brain.

        I also like the WMAP/Planck find that the universe is a result of a spontaneous process, not flamboyant extraordinary magic.

        So while there is still a gap for simulations, there is none remaining for magic.

    4. Agnosticism with respect to what? With respect to computer simulations? With respect to a momentary instability in the vacuum serving as the seed for the growth of existence? With respect to the idea that time is circular, or infinite, and that what is always has been and was never created? Or with respect to the theory that random dances of tiny organisms living in the center of black holes patiently constructed our Universe prior to the big bang as a scrap heap in the four dimensional space where they heaped their feces?

      If we stretch our imaginations, there are probably millions of possible scenarios for the mystery of how space, matter, and energy came into existence. And it is quite difficult to stretch our imaginations to conceive of what nothing would be, that non-existence could even be possible, a complete absence rather than a presence. So obviously our minds are too limited and weak to even approach the question of ultimate origins.

      Then there is one additional story, that an enormously powerful conscious intentional being of some kind somehow came out of nowhere to become the prime mover and create everything for some kind of plan that nobody is allowed to know.

      How is it reasonable to assume that one story, somehow arrived at by primitive societies in Bronze Age Palestine, should be at least 50% probable, while all the millions of other possible explanations for the mystery we can’t explain are far less probable individually? No, this is not reasonable at all. What is reasonable is to see that agnosticism generally gives an unequal weight to human cultural conventions, and that the product of constrained human minds, the conception of a being, an intelligence, an intentional conscious entity of some kind, whose own origin and existence is left entirely unexplained, is really just a minor abstraction of the simple minded anthropomorphic Father God narrative, and that it has no more credibility.

      It is reasonable to see that the truth of earth bound narratives, when considered against the overwhelming array of possible unknown alternatives, has a microscopic probability of being true. It means atheism is far more reasonable than agnosticism, which is colored by parochial human cultural concerns.

    5. Hi folks, thanks for all your answer, you do raise some interesting objections!

      Obviously, I just meant that with respect to CERTAIN propositions, agnosticism is the most reasonable position.

      I’ve recently written a post on my blog dealing with Ockham’s razor and why I think it is at most only a tool to converge towards truth:

      http://lotharlorraine.wordpress.com/2013/08/04/deconstructing-the-popular-use-of-occams-razor/

      I’m also going to write posts about the related assertion “the absence of evidence is evidence of absence”.
      Challenging comments are always most welcome, provided they’re respectful.

      We’ve good grounds for thinking that humans will be able to carry out computer simulations of increasing complexity. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll be capable of simulating entire universes (albeit less complex than ours), whereby the simulated intelligent beings could very well completely ignore our existence.
      And if it so, I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t be ourselves in one such universe.

      Clearly, this doesn’t seem as unlikely as the hypothesis we were created 6000 thousands by a bronze-age deity, does it?

      Regards.

      Lothars Sohn – Lothar’s son

      http://lotharlorraine.wordpress.com

      1. I would suggest that you don’t understand the original rebuttal to your assertion about “computer simulations”. It is easy to ask questions that are not meaningful, to wit: “What if there are nine continents instead of seven continents on Earth?” or “Who is standing, north of the North Pole?”

        The ability to put certain questions in the form of sentences that ~sound~ meaningful does not make them meaningful. And, simply parsing the rebuttal further, simply can be done ad infinitum, because the original premise has no meaning….a question without meaning goes on forever…

      2. It is true that it is logically impossible for us to absolutely rule out the position that we are part of an incomprehensibly sophisticated computer simulation — or even part of Alice’s Red King’s dream or that of Lao Tzu’s butterfly’s dream or what-not. For proof, just take any of the common proofs of Turing’s Halting Problem and fiddle with them for a bit to create a suitable parallel.

        However, it cuts both ways. Even if we are in a simulation, then those simulating us themselves have no way of ruling out the possibility that they themselves are being simulated.

        Indeed, even Jesus with all the superpowers you might wish to give or even invent for him cannot rule out the possibility that he himself is trapped in a simulation of Satan’s making.

        As such, the concept of simulations demonstrates yet another way that the fundamental claims of religions are just so much bullshit — married bachelors living their deaths north of the North Pole, only in fancier and more obtuse language.

        Cheers,

        b&

        1. Have you read Mark Twain’s “Mysterious Stranger?” His character, Satan, has the ability to create little people and towns out of dirt, and when he gets tired of them or doesn’t like how they behave he simply wipes them out

          3. You think of one of the signs of wealth in a past age: a massive bookshelf filling a huge wall, lined with classics.

            Today, any schmuck with a tablet (smartphone, etc.) has a far huger library in something about as substantial as a single book cover…and only the cover has to be paid for. Granted, it’ll cost you about as much as a dozen or three books, but that’s all it’ll ever cost you….

            b&

          4. Yes, it’s what might qualify as a miracle to people living a hundred years ago. By miracle, I mean literally an object of wonder.

            You can get a whole bunch of philosophy real cheap too. 😉

      3. Have those arguing for simulation ever written any form of a simulator? Mine have always been less faithful than the original & consume several orders of magnitude more resources. Of course, these aliens may well live in one of the other universes that are much larger than ours.

        Then, it reminded me of MIT’s turtle simulator for teaching programming. It must be turtles all the way down?

        http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/logo/turtle.html

          1. The cosmologist Sean Carroll in his blog at:
            http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/06/04/purpose-and-the-universe/

            has his talk from June 2013 up as a video and also a link to his slides.
            At 42 minutes into the talk he talks about how you could describe the gas in the room.

            Slide 25 of 37 has the comparison of 10 to the power 30 equations using kinetic theory / statistical mechanics with the computational approximation of only one equation using fluid mechanics / thermodynamics.

            To me this hints at the computational cost of a realistic simulation of even some gas molecules, let alone a universe with possibly trillions of galaxies/stars/planets/blackholes plus the dark energy & matter yet to be determined. That’s without the weirdness of quantum behaviour and that everything is a field until examined.

            I failed at humour with the turtles. It was cited in Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time – the flat Earth is supported on the back of a turtle. What then supports that turtle?

          2. I wouldn’t call the turtle joke a failure. It was amusing, but the turtle story is pretty familiar. It was mentioned in a recent thread on this website, one with a turtle video at the head.

            I just finished watching the Sean Carrol video and I thought it was a pretty good overview of lots of interesting stuff.

    6. Are you also an agnostic Hindu? Muslim? Why Christianity? Do you find that story more probable?

      1. So one cannot be agnostic about ANYthing if one isn’t agnostic about EVERYthing, did I understand you correctly?

        Concerning the listed entities: it hangs on the definitions!

        If for example Santa Claus is merely defined as “an old wealthy bearded men who anonymously bring gifts to poor children” then I’m afraid I’m agnostic about his existence even if I’m almost thirty years old :=)

        Lothars Sohn – Lothar’s son

        http://lotharlorraine.wordpress.com

        1. Have you ever considered you might be in a scam artist simulator that prods you to increase your blog hits?

          1. Exactly what I thought about “read my words, my post, my blog…”. Can I read your palm?

          4. Yep, I suffer under a severe mania and I sometimes think of myself as being Napoleon the conqueror.

            But being very attached to my region Lorraine, my fatherland, I most often have the delusion to be its founder, king Lothar the great.

            However, I never thought of myself as being God, or a gorgeous woman, so my madness is not harmful for society.

            Lothars Sohn – Lothar’s son

            http://lotharlorraine.wordpress.com

    1. I checked in my hardcover copy & the Google Books version. ISBN 978-0-7710-4142-6 copyright 2007 published by Warner Books

        1. Good 🙂

          So there is a difference in versions, which is perhaps a good info to include when referencing.

          1. As Bobby and I have pointed out, the Slate quote predates the book by several years; don’t know how JAC is going to use the quote, but the earliest is usually the best.

  7. The phrase is a translation of the Latin proverb “Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.” In english: What is asserted gratuitously may be denied gratuitously.

    Hitchens first popularized it in his article about Mother Theresa entitled “Mommy Dearest” published on October 20th, 2003, by Slate.

    Here is how it appeared in that article — and I think his best articulation of it:

    “Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”

    Link to Slate article:
    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html

  8. It dates back, not to Hitchens, but to William of Ockham in c.1300.

    “For nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture.”

    (Obviously we might nowadays dispute the last bit of Ockham’s claim!)

    1. Perhaps Ockham was just adding a touch of humor? “proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture” should be universally LOL.

        1. I like this one. I’m sure it will be used. And some day someone will ask for its origin.

      2. The quote is from the wiki page on Ockham, which refers it to “Spade, Paul Vincent. The Cambridge Companion to Ockham. CUP, 1999: 104”

  9. Copyright 2007; page 150

    “The “evidence” for faith, then, seems to leave faith looking even weaker than it would if it stood, alone and unsupported, all by itself. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence. This is even more true when the “evidence” eventually offered is so shoddy and self-interested.”

  11. My Kindle version (read on an iPad) shows it on “p.257 (or 258)” (of 492) or “Loc. 2404”.

    I have no idea how to translate this into paper pages, sorry.

    It is in Chapter 10, just befoe the sub-section that discusses the “Argument from Authority”, and about 51% of the way through the book.

    1. Chicago style says-
      http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

      Book published electronically:
      If a book is available in more than one format, cite the version you consulted. For books consulted online, list a URL; include an access date only if one is required by your publisher or discipline. If no fixed page numbers are available, you can include a section title or a chapter or other number.

      1. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007), Kindle edition.
      2. Philip B. Kurland and Ralph Lerner, eds., The Founders’ Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), accessed February 28, 2010, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/.
      3. Austen, Pride and Prejudice.
      4. Kurland and Lerner, Founder’s Constitution, chap. 10, doc. 19

  12. As noted, it’s accurate and it’s on p150. I used Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature to establish this. It’s jolly handy for quick checking of such stuff.

  13. Of course, JAC, if you want horrendous and telling quotes from the other side, always useful for jaw-dropping irony, these two lesser known examples from Psalms could come in handy:

    It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man. Ps. 118:8-9

    Blessed shall be he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock. Ps. 137:9

    1. Is that 137:9 Psalm lifted directly out of the KJV of the bible? Or, are some other Old English words used?

      I guess if you are in the home crowd, and hold up a sign that reads “Psalm 137:9 !!!”, pushed at the visiting crowd, you could be cited for assault!

        1. Context is revenge on the Babylonians for the enforced exile; it ain’t rape, it’s plain murderous revenge. Take your pick on the moral nullity.

  15. Maybe this is just a quibble, but I’m not happy with the language of the quote.

    Shouldn’t it be, “What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence?”

    After all, anything can be asserted without evidence.

    According to some sources, that’s a more accurate translation anyway, if you google the Latin.

  16. You have probably received numerous confirming replies to your query; if so, here’s another.

    “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” appears in paragraph 2, top of p. 150, in God Is Not Great. The sentence is perhaps a corollary of “And exceptional claims demand exceptional evidence,” bottom of p. 143.

    Jim Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 17:30:39 +0000 To: skeptique@hotmail.com

  17. Hitchens’ Razor has a corollary —

    Hitchens’ Razor can be asserted without evidence, ergo Hitchens’ Razor can be dismissed without evidence.

    Hitchens’ Corollary is that Hitchens’ Razor is self-refuting or self-annihilating, so Hitchens’ Razor is not a fact or true, because it’s not in the category of things that can be facts or true. Instead it’s a rule or convention for epistemic systems or debates.

    Some people agree to play by the rule; that is a fact and true. And we may support people playing by the rule. And their epistemic systems may go on to achieve great things.

    But thinking the rule is a fact or true is a gateway error to scientism. When scientismists offer you this category error, just say no!

  18. I think this is from Carl Sagan originally. On the show Encyclopedia Galactica [Episode 12] at 1 min 10 sec in he says “What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” in 1996 I think it was.

  19. Carl Sagan said it in 1996, just fyi

    Encyclopedia Galactica [Episode 12]

    What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
    1 min 10 sec

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