Ordinary Claims

The title of this blog comes from the dictum, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." The phrase -- based on a cursory Web search -- seems to have been originated with Paul Kurtz and been popularized by Carl Sagan.

By strict logic, it does not necessarily follow that ordinary claims require only ordinary evidence, though I do believe it to be the case in general. That is to say, there is an proportional and direct relationship between a claim's "exraordinariness" and the strength of the evidence its belief demands.

Further, it seems logical that, for any given level of "exraordinariness":

• The more evidence, the stronger the belief should be; the less evidence, the weaker it should be.
  
• The more important the claim's subject, the more certain one would like one's belief to be; the less important, the less important it is to be certain one way or the other.

It therefore follow that belief in gods, which is widely tied not only to the very meaning of life, but also its ultimate scope (eternal or finite), must be arrived at only after:

• Extraordinary evidence is presented, becaue the existence of gods is an extraordinary claim
• Even stronger evidence is presented, because the subject is of such great existential importance

And yet, believers tell us, we are to take it on "faith", which is to say, no evidence at all. Faith does not cut it when it comes to cashing a check. Why would it be sufficient when it comes to our very mortality?