In my post on “Which God?“, I discussed cl’s hypothetical case of a man being decapitated, and having his head miraculously re-attach to his body, in the context of some Christian praying for him. To illustrate that this would not really be reliable evidence for God, I said:
Let’s say that during the hour the victim was decapitated, some saffron-robed monk wanders by and begins to pray, “Oh great Buddha, have mercy on this poor soul and heal him of his decapitation by your divine grace.” The rest of the story remains the same: after an hour, the head reattaches and the man walks away unharmed. Would this be evidence that Buddha is really God?
I think a lot of Buddhists would be fairly surprised if that were the case. But notice, the actual evidence of the miracle itself is no more specific than it ever was. The facts pertaining to the actual “recapitation” are exactly what they were before. All the prayer has really done is to create a context in which we might be prejudiced to prefer one superstitious attribution over another.
Commenter cl objects:
That’s incorrect. The facts are not exactly the same as before. In the first hypothetical scenario, we had no Buddhist praying, hence no reasonable grounds to connect the incident to a Buddhist prayer. In the second example, we have stronger evidence – the event occurred after a Buddhist prayer – providing us with a verifiable connection that strengthens preliminary justification for the possibility that Buddha performed this particular miracle.
Our friend cl has fallen into the fallacy known as post hoc, ergo propter hoc. “After this, therefore because of this” is an age-old tendency in human thinking that deceives a lot of people because it resembles scientific thinking in some respects. But it is still a fallacy nevertheless.