That's the thing about all of this that I find the most absurd. Jabba isn't even trying to defend a religious belief he holds or understands. I'm not even sure what point he's TRYING to make.
He has no specific claim. That's one of our periodic criticisms. He says he can "essentially prove immortality mathematically using Bayesian statistics." But in five years he hasn't come up with a testable causal mechanism for immortality. And the way he's formulated his proof (i.e., indirectly), he thinks he doesn't have to. In other words, he has no specific claim and he argues that at this point he doesn't need to have one so long as he can show that whatever his critics believe is so statistically improbable as to be impossible. ("All I need is any reasonable alternative.")
This is the same logic the conspiracy theorists use. They use one standard of proof to dismiss the conventional narrative for some event. Then having, as they claim, gotten rid of that, they assert some other theory has to be true, has to hold by default. Maybe not some specific theory, but some nebulously defined allusion to conspiracy. If they have proved that it's impossible for Apollo astronauts to go to the Moon for real, then "some" hoax had to have happened even if they can't or won't give details. If Oswald can't have fired the fatal shot, then "someone else" must have conspired to kill Kennedy, even if the proponent has no idea who. If jet fuel can't melt steel beams, then "somehow" there must have been some other form of demolition. Jabba jumped into this with both feet, telling us that if materialism were statistically impossible, then "some" kind of immaterial essence must attend human life, and he's keeping his options open after that because he can't be sure what kind.
I mentioned his proof is indirect, as above. For him to be immortal, whatever persists beyond death has to be immaterial. Thus if materialism turns out to be wrong, he can say it's not impossible for him to have an immaterial soul. So he sets out to disprove materialism. But he bounces off several guardrails while careening down that path. The complement of immortality, he asserted, was "OOFLAM," or "only one finite life at most." But that isn't itself a hypothesis; it's one consequent of the materialist hypothesis. In translating his affirmative claim to an indirect one, he converted the conditional. Now the operative theory is "whatever the reincarnationists believe comes back to life," which is merely a vague reference with -- again -- no testable detail. Loss Leader has pressed Jabba most on that:
Add, "Willfully ignorant of religious beliefs about reincarnation despite the information being freely and readily available."
I've gone on to point out that what Jabba is really arguing in favor of is animism, and that most reincarnationists (e.g., the dharmic religions) are not animists. But Loss Leader's challenge is still more powerfully operative because it illustrates that whatever Jabba's claim may be, he shows no interest in trying to make it testable or even to understand it in any competent detail. As long as he remains vague, his hypothesis is not directly refutable, and this is what sustains him for years.
Jabba relies on keeping his claims vague because he has to juggle a false dilemma. He proposes the Bayesian problem as between H and ~H, where ~H is "whatever Jabba claims" and H is whatever straw man he pins onto his critics from day to day. Notationally, H and ~H are complements, the union of which is the universe. Some days, in Jabba's argument, H is a single hypothesis and ~H must therefore be the set of all other hypotheses. Other days ~H is a single hypothesis and therefore H must be every other hypothesis. But Jabba never treats them consistently, and thus keeps his false dilemma afloat.
His point seems to be to advocate for some idiotic equation with no basis in science or theology.
Yes. In short, he's ignorant of science, mathematics, and theology, and he wants to believe everyone else would have to be just as ignorant as he on those subjects. Therefore he thinks he can throw out a bunch of stuff he barely understands, if at all, and which objectively is pure gibberish, and bank on being able to gaslight any critics into thinking they can't possibly be competent or clear-thinking enough to refute him. If he can't understand it, why should anyone else be able to?
In his more amusing moments, he actually claims one has to be a "holistic" thinker to understand the genius of his proof. We translate that into a claim that his "mathematical" proof requires something beyond mathematics.
How, exactly, has this thread gone on for this long without any coherent or intelligent input from Jabba?
Because these forums are rivers, not ponds. Jabba stands on the bank and presides over whatever little bit of water he can see that day, knowing that tomorrow there will be a whole new parcel of water untainted by the effluence of today. Jabba's proof is patently absurd. It looks to some like low-hanging fruit that they can easily refute and be satisfied with having done their skeptic duty for the day. But this presumes Jabba will remove his fingers from his ears to hear them. He offers facile engagement to draw people in, then dumps them as soon as they become too contrary to be effective sycophants. But by then it's too late; they're hooked.
On at least one occasion Jabba has interpreted the inevitable critic's flounce as a victory on his behalf. This is why stonewalling works sometimes in the real world. If you simply refuse to budge, you can interpret other's frustration at displacing you as a failure on their part no matter how absurd your position. Jabba's critics throw up their hands and give up, and Jabba interprets this as the reward for patiently sticking to his guns. He likes to tell a story about how his father told him never to give up. He cites it as his excuse for stonewalling.
