Yes. A discussion in person would have been far more productive.
I think it can help some Christians get a sense of how other people process claims of the supernatural, but as a historical hypothesis it’s not worth much.
I don’t know about none, but as far as their conclusions go, that’s about how Paul’s entry sounded to me.
I think he could, but he’s more interested in meeting people closer to where they are.
For example, if Christians regularly resurrected people, or healed them, and these results could be recorded and verified by scientists, that would boost my confidence for sure. I couldn’t be 100% certain (how could I rule out some other unknown natural phenomenon?), but it would be enough for me, I think. A personal experience wouldn’t do it, though (I hope).
I think it has the advantage of needing fewer assumptions.
By “they” I was referring to “claims” not “apologists” - sorry it wasn’t clear.
I’m basically saying - if there is no historical argument that can or could ever be made, is Paulogia wrong for agreeing to a written debate on these grounds?
OK. So a specific miracle that Christians could perform on demand, as to having a scientist there? Seems reasonable at first, but I think people would still wonder if it was a magic trick and the scientists were taken in by that. And as you say it would be hard to get to 100%.
Related to anyone’s level of skepticism or level of comfort on reasonable belief, I am also curious:
Is it reasonable that if God exists, He should reveal Himself in the specific way that would erase any possible skepticism for you? And should He do this for each person who’s ever lived or lives now? Does it depend on His character?
A specific miracle on demand would definitely be impressive. That’s not the only situation that would convince me, but you get the gist of the kind of evidence I’d need to be convinced. And yes, it’s possible my own acceptance of this alleged miracle would be due to cultural bias (what if it’s caused by some other entity who likes to piggyback on religious devotion?). The way I look at it, though, is like this:
Imagine my neighbor comes up to me and says “a Sasquatch was in my backyard this morning.” I don’t believe them. If instead, they told me “a deer was in my backyard this morning,” I would believe them, sight unseen. I could still be wrong—maybe there was no deer and the person was lying or mistaken, but deer are so commonplace that it’s very reasonable to conclude this claim is likely to be true.
If sasquatches were similarly common, I would be reasonably confident in the truth of my neighbor’s claim. The same goes for miracles. I suppose a big difference would be that miracles are supernatural and Sasquatches (in theory) are natural, so only the natural effects could be studied.
I seem to have that sort of thing said to me a lot. It seems to me that it tries to crank the issue around exactly to the reverse: to make it sound as though the unbeliever is DEMANDING conformity by the god-critter to his expectations. But there’s no demand at all. There’s just a “failing suitable evidence, I don’t accept the truth of this claim.”
So, yeah, if something doesn’t want to be found in an evidentiarily-convincing way and it has the ability to not allow itself to be examined, then sure, it won’t be found. No shocker there. But that’s not an argument for its existence; it’s just a philosophical “well, what if the invisible unicorn was also WEIGHTLESS? What are you going to do with your scales NOW?” retort. And that, y’know, is less than compelling.
I do think that it’s silly that he has to debate it but not that he does. Similarly, it is very silly that we have to debate whether evolution is true or the earth only 6000 years old. But there are too many people silly enough to believe those things, so here we are.
If he did some amazing miraculous stuff, then I would believe there exists a being who can do such stuff, sure. Why not? It would not necessarily demonstrate he was God, of course.
Yeah, my point in asking the question is to the skeptic - what counts as “suitable”? Is it demanding conformity to a certain level of your expectations?
I guess I don’t follow your last point. My point was more - how are you determining that what is suitable to you is reasonable? If you multiple that standard times billions of people, assuming that the character of a divine being might be to reveal himself to that level of suitability for everyone, what would that look like? To me that looks like the God I believe in.
I wonder if someone who doesn’t believe that way and would need more to be convinced is also considering what that looks like on a global scale (as we tend to think very highly of our own experiences and opinions). Is it reasonable for God to act in such a way on a global scale and if He did, would that also make His actions to be known less believable? I tend to think so. But if someone doesn’t agree, I’d like to know why.
@SlightlyOddGuy so I get your analogy but when the analogy is uses a fringe idea for the comparison of the existence of God, then to me it’s a bias for the natural explanation always being more plausible than a supernatural explanation.
I was just reading recently an article quoting someone in the military regarding what they’ve seen with UFOs and what they’re now able to release publicly. I very much believe there is no extraterrestrial life but I realize that if there is no other natural explanation forthcoming I can’t rule it out as a possibility anymore if I take his experience as legitimate.
Yeah, this is sooo weird. I’ve gone through this with a close friend. Like… if I had someone say I had a second Dad who cares for me more than anyone else in the world, and I ask to see evidence that such a Dad exists, and that person calls it a “demand” and insinuates I’m overstepping my bounds… it kind of blows my mind. Like, how does this not raise red flags? At this point, I’m willing to settle for this person to just understand why this might raise red flags for just me.
A person comes to you and says they witnessed someone rise from the dead. Based on this information, do you:
A) lean towards believing them
B) lean towards not believing them
If you tend toward B, we share whatever bias that is (though I would just say it is no bias, rather simply a very direct and straightforward conclusion of natural theology). If A… I’m not sure there’s anywhere we can go from there.
I think I might be going about this all wrong, though. I get this anti-supernatural bias thing a lot from Christians. They really seem hung up on it, as if that’s the root of the unwillingness of someone to accept the resurrection (despite the billions of theists who reject the resurrection yet believe in the supernatural). So I will come as close as I think I possibly can to make my point:
For the sake of argument, I will grant the supernatural exists, I will grant that Yahweh exists, I will grant that Jesus Christ actually died by crucifixion and rose again bodily on the third day, and was witnessed by 500, and I would still maintain that it’s not reasonable to believe it happened based—based—on the historical evidence we have today.
Well, it depends on the character of the claim. In the case of the claim that a god exists, I would expect evidence of a kind and character to support that claim: not ancient texts, not claims of witness to the miraculous, but actual evidence bearing directly upon the existence of that god. The fact that one so often is offered only evidence of a wholly unsuitable character, e.g., the texts collected as the “Bible,” suggests that there is no worthwhile evidence that bears on this, which is fine.
Now, something might exist and be poorly evidenced. But evidence is the only guide we have to what is and isn’t true, and the fact that one has no good evidence is not a good reason to rely upon evidence of an entirely useless character. It’s a good reason to say “I don’t know.”
Yes. In all my discussions on this subject I presume for the sake of argument that a god or some other being exists who is capable of performing miracles like raising the dead.
The operative words there are “exists” and “miracles like.” That is to say, this being still exists. It did not just blink out of existence sometime shortly after Jesus’s death. And this being is able to perform any sort of “miracle” on the order of raising the dead. He is not a one trick pony.
So where does that get us? If we want to evaluate the propabilities of various scenarios that could explain the facts at our disposal regarding the events after Jesus’s death, we can only do this based on the probabilities we observe today. And what do we observe today? People hallucinating. People lying. People mistakenly believing things that are not true. Etc. etc.
What we do not observe is dead people coming back to life. There is not a single instance of this that we can all agree happened.
And, the crucial point: This the case even if we assume a miracle-causing God-like being exists today. So if such a being existed 2000 years ago, it makes no difference. The odds are unaffected.
What would I do if God appeared to me? Even if I was a Biblically inerrantist Christian, this would be problematic. Even taking the Bible as inerrantist, the number of times that God directly appears is vanishingly rare – Moses, Elijah and the like. Psychotic breaks, resulting in delusions and hallucinations are comparatively common. It’s not hard to do the math on which an apparent apparition is more likely to be.
What would convince skeptics? In In defense of naturalism, the article that I linked to above, Gregory Dawes has already made a suggestion:
Modern scientists and historians, I shall suggest, are right to maintain their naturalistic stance: they are justified in their commitment to natural rather than supernatural explanations. But that commitment is merely provisional: it is neither a priori nor non-negotiable. So while there exists some tension between a historical and a theological perspective on history, the historian and the believer are not necessarily at war. How could this tension be resolved? It would be resolved, in favour of religion, if theologians were to produce adequate theistic explanations of a range of phenomena and show that these were preferable to any proposed natural explanations. Until they do this, historians and scientists are justified in setting aside proposed theistic explanations.
I see parallels between this and @SlightlyOddGuy’s Sasquatch example. Show that Sasquatches are a plausible thing to see in your back garden, and people will accept a Sasquatch in a back garden. Show that theistic explanations are superior to natural explanations for a range of phenomena, and they too will become accepted.
This type of scrutiny is not in fact an unusual occurrence. Take a further part of @SlightlyOddGuy’s example, that of a deer in the back yard. I live in an inner suburb of a medium-sized city on the east coast of NZ’s South Island. If I suggested that I encountered wildlife larger than an opossum in my back yard, I’d be greeted with skepticism (I suspect the nearest deer would be at least tens, and probably hundreds, of km away). My eldest sister lives in a rural area on the West Coast backing directly onto a forested area. She regularly has problems with deer eating their roses, and has in the past had trouble with wild pigs digging up pipes.Different location, different plausibilities. What Gregory Dawes and @SlightlyOddGuy were suggesting is simply applying analogous logic to less probable scenarios.
I would tend towards B. Another thread was asking about cessationism versus whatever the other term was. I would consider myself a cessationist. I tend to doubt claims of miracles today, though I think they are possible. I tend to think the Holy Spirit works within cultural context. If people in the Middle East put a lot of stock in dreams, I think God may give them dreams. If people in the West put a lot of stock in rationality then God will reveal logical arguments. If miracles, then sure maybe miracles. I tend to think evil powers work the same way.
Definitely not overstepping your bounds. I feel a “demand” is saying you can’t be convinced by weighing evidence and there must be no doubt at all - something beyond what is even required in a courtroom
I just feel like when I ask people in the forum regarding evidence apologists present, their answer is really - “yeah, there’s no evidence that could convince me because that type of evidence could never exist” but they won’t quite write that.
Honestly clueless on what you mean. So you’ll grant that it’s all true, but it’s still not reasonable? Help me follow you.
Here is an example that I find helpful: For all of human history up to the early 20th century, no one was asking for evidence to support quantum mechanics arguing over what evidence would be persuasive to people who did not accept quantum mechanics. That’s because no one even thought of it as something that could exist. But then we saw a bunch of stuff that didn’t make sense according to physics as we understood it at the time and, in short order, quantum mechanics became something that was undeniably true. Up to that point, however, no one was saying. “You know what would convince me of quantum mechanics? The double slit experiment. Someone does that, then I’ll believe.”
I don’t really need to come up with an example of evidence that would convince me a god exists. If someone can comes up with the equivalent of the double slit experiment, then I’ll believe. But it’s not incumbent upon me to come up with that equivalent.
I ordinarily think that that question is best addressed to the proponent of the hypothesis, who, familiar with the phenomenon he purports to demonstrate, is likeliest to know how to demonstrate it. But it would be, as others have indicated, a demonstration of some aspect of reality, not a historical claim.
Or, to put it more simply: what evidence would convince you that squirrels exist? Or, in the realm of invisible forces, what evidence would convince you that magnetism exists? That’s the kind of question to ask, and the answer with regard to the existence of pretty much anything is going to be in the same class of things.
Sasquatches have been mentioned, and here’s a useful point. What if you said, “well, I’m not convinced sasquatches are real,” and I responded to you at length with historical accounts given by Native Americans, reaching back hundreds of years, of the Sasquatches they saw? And every time you asked for hair, or bones, or clear photographs, and the like, all I did was go back and say, “well, but these Native accounts are REALLY credible!” Within a short period of time you would understand the problem. The evidence has got to be of an appropriate type; it’s got to bear upon the question at issue. This is the experience I have with proponents of gods all the time: they think that they can dance around the absence of useful and meaningful evidence by going back again and again to useless evidence. But argument doesn’t amplify evidence; it doesn’t matter how much stress is laid upon ancient texts; they’re still ancient texts, at the end of the day, and quite irrelevant for this purpose.
Your analogy doesn’t make sense to me. If we’re relating this to history, you should be giving me the double slit experiment for atheism as that is the more modern concept.
I’m not following this either. While I was researching nephilim and giants and the like I came across Sasquatch stories. Stories of this type are all over the world but somewhat different, yetis etc. Since native americans also have creation stories similar to the Bible I believe they were very good at passing on stories which were common thousands of years ago. Obviously giant men have made an impression on many cultures. So in this case I think the stories have truth and people’s imaginations today have some basis in historical reality.
What do I think is evidence for God? Well - lots of things. Stories and how they captivate us and how are lives seem to fit one and that the Bible is one overarching narrative with many genres of books that fit a theme. That humans care about having children and loving them and that even in our modern era we seem quite enamored with the idea and ideals of marriage and these are the relationships God uses to describe his love for his people. The way Christianity is embedded in our culture and we don’t even realize it and we strive for it’s ideals. The beauty of sunsets and the sunrises. The great variety and beauty of plants and animals. The fact that humans thirst for knowledge and justice and kingdoms. That the sun and moon can appear to us to be of such similar size that we can have eclipses. The mystery of life and consciousness. Science from the tiniest quantum realms to the scale of the universe in its vastness and insane number of stars and weird astronomical objects. The fact that we love and laugh and cry and hope and dream. All sort of mixed up for me into one idea that objective goodness must exist. And one man who lived and died and fulfilled prophecy that peoples all over the world would be gathered into Israel to the God of Abraham - and no one accuses him of sin (at least this is rare). That the resurrection is unlike any other event foundational to a religion its historicity and oddness - Christians use a symbol of torture and humility to mark themselves. The testimony and faithfulness of Christians under persecution. My own hunger for righteousness and seeing a need for grace. Those are the things I think of off the top of my head.
The subsequent verses would seem be to an incrementally expanded and varied addition. It is almost recording the idiosyncratic chain of provenance of the confession, which would be different for different people.
Oh, dearie me. I had purposely gone for the Sasquatch because nobody who is a reasonably good judge of evidence regards the existence of actual Sasquatches as remotely probable. I see that I have misjudged you.
The point, of course, is that ancient tales are terrible evidence for Sasquatches, and that the absence of other evidence is no excuse for turning to ancient tales. Since you evidently do accept Sasquatches as part of your capacious reality, I’d suggest substituting some other thing you don’t accept into that analogy.
It would have been nice if at least one of the things which followed that was actually evidence for the existence of the gods. I think that you do not understand the basic difference between evidence for a fact and feelings about a version of the facts. One of the nice things about actual evidence for a proposition is that it doesn’t depend upon others sharing your presuppositions about that proposition.
I thought Faisal’s typo was deliberate! I was just being a pedant. Surely, I reasoned, he couldn’t have spoken in modern English but in Latin. “Alea iacta est” (the die is thrown). Luckily I checked first and the rumour is, according to Plutarch (or Wikipedia on Plutarch):
He [Caesar] declared in Greek with loud voice to those who were present ‘Let a die be cast’ and led the army across.
And that the Latin is a typo and should be “Alea iacta esto” - “Let the die be thrown” which makes more sense.
Confession, when I first heard “the die is cast” I thought it related to this.