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Below are some helpful considerations to keep in mind when evaluating ‘evidence’.

What is evidence?

I’m not interested in debating definitions of evidence, so I’ll just rely on a rather neutral source to give me a definition – the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy should do:

“Evidence, whatever else it is, is the kind of thing which can make a difference to what one is justified in believing or (what is often, but not always, taken to be the same thing) what it is reasonable for one to believe.”

(Kelly, 2016)

Along this vein, evidence essentially confers justification – it makes something reasonable to believe, and it sort of functions as a physical or objective reason.

Does testimony count as evidence?

The following are snippets of a really good video put out by Emerson Green. No use reinventing the wheel. I think he makes good points. All credit for the points in this ‘Does testimony count as evidence’ section goes to him.

“First, what is testimony? It’s very simple: testimony is when other people tell you things – that’s it...Testimony can be unreliable. People make honest mistakes, they’re subject to biases, their faculties can mislead them – not to mention, people sometimes people lie. Even setting that possibility aside, we have hard evidence that eyewitness testimony, for example, is unreliable.

Of course, none of these people actually conducted those experiments themselves. They hear about that hard evidence on podcasts, YouTube channels, articles, and so on. Then they believe that you can’t trust testimony on the basis of the testimony they received about its untrustworthiness.

No one thinks testimonial evidence is the top-shelf gold standard of evidence, that it’s irrefutable proof, or that it couldn’t possibly be misleading. So why do skeptics think it’s so damning to point out that testimony is not an infallible guide to truth? There’s a gap between “X is fallible” and “X provides no justification for anything.”

Testimony does provide some justification, and it’s fallible. It’s not unique in that way. Our senses are fallible—does that mean that our senses can’t provide evidential support for anything? Of course not. They’re fallible, and they confer justification. Scientific instruments are also fallible—does that mean we should toss out results produced by scientific instruments? The experts in a given field are also fallible, and so on. The fact that testimony is fallible is not enough to justify the idea that testimony provides no justification for a given belief…To quote Michael Huemer: “Almost all my interesting knowledge about the world is based on testimony. I know, for example, that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, that Japan is a country…I didn’t figure out any of that myself; I learned all of it from other people. Without testimony, practically none of my current beliefs would be justified.”

Without testimony, how would we learn about most history? How would we learn about scientific findings that we didn’t discover personally? Really, how would we know about much of anything outside our immediate field of awareness? Some philosophers argue that you’re justified in trusting testimonial evidence by default—that’s our starting point. The default is to trust it, to assume that what people are saying is by and large true or at least reasonable to think given the evidence they have available to them. That’s the beginning assumption, and we’d need specific grounds to doubt a piece of testimonial evidence, not to trust it.

Just to reiterate the point that’s going to preclude 90% of the skeptical objections to this. You’re justified in trusting testimony by default as long as you have no specific grounds for doubt about a given piece of testimony.

But why would you think it’s definitely true? Well, I didn’t say that. I said you are justified in trusting testimony by default. I didn’t say it was definitely true. But what if they have an extensive history of lying about the subject? That would be a good reason for doubt. Their testimony claimed to have built a perpetual motion machine that contradicts the laws of thermodynamics? Yeah, that sounds like a pretty good reason to doubt their testimony. Again, you’re justified in trusting testimony by default as long as you have no specific grounds for doubt….

Another reason we might be entitled to trust testimony by default is the principle of charity in interpretation, which holds that one must try to interpret other people’s words in a way that makes their statements by and large correct or at least reasonable. Ordinary communication would be nearly impossible without this presumption. When someone makes a claim, we assume, all else equal, that they’re telling the truth. We also assume they’re using words in a normal way—in the same way that we assume that you’re using words in a standard, mutually understood way until given reason to think otherwise. We also assume that you’re telling us how the world seems to you until we have reason to think otherwise. Both are built into our ability to interpret what anyone else is saying. If we start by taking no one’s word for anything and not believing that your testimony correlates at all with how the world seems to you, then communication and understanding would break down entirely.”

(Green, 2023)

I think we can give a resounding ‘yes’. Testimony does count as evidence, given that it can confer justification. Of course, the quality of the testimony, the nature of the claim, and some other things need to be considered, but yes, although fallible, testimony does in fact count as evidence for a claim. Of course, a given testimony can support multiple claims, as a result of which the final matter may remain underdetermined if it does not support one claim any more so than another.

Do extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence?

Kinda, but it depends on what you mean. Joe Schmid explains this pretty well.

Remember the little bit of maths that I introduced in the last post – Bayes theorem? It went a little like this:

P(A|B) =

The point to be made is quite simple – if you drop P(A) – i.e., if an event becomes more improbable (and more along the lines of extraordinary), to maintain the same posterior probability (P(A|B)) – that is, the probability given the evidence, one must provide evidence that strongly supports A (i.e., increase P(B|A) by the same proportion). That’s about it – it’s quite intuitive.

The problem with a lot of presentations of this argument is that they implicitly claim that the nature of the evidence itself should also be ‘miraculous’ to some extent – but the issue with this approach is that it can quite easily create an insurmountable epistemic barrier. It’s a problem encountered as a consequence of many sceptical worldviews – if you drop P(A) low enough, then the quality of evidence required to maintain P(A|B) must be increased by the same proportion.

More simply, if one asserts that the evidence itself for a miracle (B) should be extraordinary, then it’s not hard to close yourself off to potential truths – e.g., if you dogmatically claim that we should have 4k HD pictures of Jesus walking out of the tomb. Ultimately, whether this is something one wants to do is up to them. Still, it’s counterintuitive to anyone that values rational inquiry – you should want to maintain an epistemological system that doesn’t close you off to potential truths at all. To reiterate a point stated earlier – it’s also sufficient to show that alternative naturalistic explanations are less expected given the evidence to justify the Christian position. It could be the case that P(A|B) = 0.05 – but if P(A’|B) is 0.01, then the Christian argument should be favoured.

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Next will be to show that the God that causes miracles, is the same God that rose from the dead, but that’s gonna take a while 😊

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Sources:

Kelly, T. (2016) ‘Evidence’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/evidence/ (Accessed: 15 March 2025).

Green, E (2023) ‘5 Mistakes Atheists Make About Epistemology’. – YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dalQu-vdMU (Accessed: 15 March 2025).