I wouldn’t argue with others, but I might argue with myself.
When I was a student, one of my flatmates went for an evening walk and when he came back he was very excited and somewhat confused. He told us that he had seen a vision of Jesus. The rest of us looked at each other and went, yeah, ok. We didn’t argue, but we did keep an eye on him for a while to make sure he was allright. He seemed to be ok, and moved out not long afterwards. I never heard from him again.
I should perhaps add this: that when I read old documents which tell paranormal stories, to me the question is never whether the reliability of some other aspects of those stories lends credibility to the paranormal claims. It is, rather, to what extent the paranormal claims diminish the trustworthiness of the rest of the account.
To believe something like the resurrection, I would need evidence of a far more compelling nature than anything history could ever offer. I think the only test of such claims is whether the powers that account for them can be shown to exist in the here and now; once that is demonstrated, then one may evaluate historical claims in the light of our new knowledge of the paranormal, using what we know about the paranormal entities and their capabilities and inclinations to help us judge what is historically plausible. Otherwise, any respectable plausibility filter has to keep all of it – from all branches of paranormal belief, not just Christian – out.
I should also-also add:
Trusting scripture is not where one should begin in an honest inquiry. One should begin by regarding scriptures of all of the religions as texts which may or may not contain something worthwhile on religious topics. Whether to “trust” them or not depends – or should depend – largely upon first exploring their credibility as judged against external criteria. Now, one MAY “trust” scripture; but if one does it without having good grounds for doing it, this is a massive vulnerability – a potential injection point for a whole corpus of potentially false belief. One should be especially careful not to allow the apparent credibility of a source on ordinary matters to influence one’s judgment of its credibility on questions of the paranormal.
Which is exactly what I have done 
Well, that may be, though the amount of external evidence for the paranormal claims of the various Bible tales isn’t much to hang anything on – the problem again being the inability of historical evidence to bring much to it. Another difficulty, of course, is that when one judges the credibility of one part of an anthology on one topic, it says very little about the credibility of another part of the same anthology on another topic. And when one takes the anthology together, one can unwittingly import a lot of unscrutinized material.
Fair comment. But if you saw a neurologist and they found nothing wrong what would you do then? As Sherlock Holmes observed “when you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The trick of course is in knowing what is impossible.
Addressing the words but not the point. The Anubis Gates, which could be true in our world, is a better example in every possible sense.
Knowing what I do of the state of neurology, I would not go to the doctor expecting a definitive account or diagnosis. But I would be concerned, and would want to begin to establish a history.
Seeing the neurologist in itself would resolve nothing, and eliminate nothing, but it might, depending on the result, help with early diagnosis.
On visions, and the paranormal: there is nothing about visions, or about the paranormal, that is outside of our ordinary experience.
Claims of the paranormal are made constantly by all sorts of people, and when they are subjected to scrutiny they are invariably either fraudulent or the product of mistakes of the imagination. One need not eliminate every other possibility, which is rarely feasible anyhow. But one has to recognize that any claim that someone has been raised from the dead, or has committed some other paranormal act, in the distant past is exceedingly unlikely to differ in its basic quality from any of the many, many such stories told today. To show that it does differ is not a problem in history; it is a problem in demonstrating the reality of the paranormal.
Visions – well, visions are had every day. To those who have them they are generally a great burden. Students at law school used to be awakened in the night by a man who routinely yelled at the walls of buildings. I have met people in evangelical book shops who told plain stories of sleep-paralysis accompanied by terrifying hallucinations. We all have encountered those who have visions, and we have a pretty good idea what the phenomenon looks like in its usual manifestations.
What we do NOT see is the vision accompanied by demonstrable existence of the things said to lie behind it. Whether we can trace the causes in the brain or not, we never do find that there is a reality underlying the vision.
On “what would I do then?” I hope that I would keep my wits. But human subjective experience is a powerful thing, and so if you find me yelling at the walls of buildings beside your workplace, then, yes, I will have believed.
On Holmes, by the way: I always disliked Conan Doyle’s formulations of what careful factual investigation was supposed to look like. And the man was horrible at it. He wrote an entire book about how the fairies that two girls had photographed in their garden were, in fact, real and could not possibly be the product of any sort of forgery. There is, it turns out, a difference between having an open mind and having a storm drain that empties into one’s mind.
@Puck_Mendelssohn you are a smart guy. I wonder if you’d be open to God revealing himself to you,
Have you given any serious thought to how he might do so, without reducing him to a pitiful entity (i.e. not God) defined by futile attempts to prove himself by jumping through personal and ad hoc sets of objections and epistemological trials. If God exists, he certainly would not be reducible this way. So how would a God reveal himself to you? Are you open?
Perhaps he could appear as a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night, or a bush that burns without being consumed, or as a person you could talk to or wrestle with, as in the old days. Why have all these obvious, physical manifestations become unfashionable nowadays, when they were quite prevalent once?
Wasn’t he reported to walk on water?
Yes, but does he need to incarnate again and walk on water for every skeptic? That seems pretty absurd.
It seems a bit unfair to those of us who didn’t have a chance to be there the first time.
Rather, it seems absurd to think that the Creator of the Universe (if he exists) is at our beck and call. It is not really “unfair,” any more than saying it is “unfair” we were not there for the Scope’s Trial show in 20152. Due to our place in history, we are all in the same boat.
If he is really intent on saving us all, why did he ascend to heaven and become invisible instead of staying down here? Seeing him go round the world for 2000 years, giving lectures and performing the occasional miracle would, I think, have made an enormous difference in the number of believers. Who would need Mohamed when you have the real deal?
Perhaps I shouldn’t try to apply too much logic…
Why? What trouble would it be for him? And again, why is he so much less present now than he was thousands of years ago?
The accounts of those events also state that they were pretty unsuccessful, producing only short-lived effects but not lasting change. Jesus is recorded as saying that it would to our advantage if he left and sent the spirit to us. Whether you consider those accounts to be fiction or not, they seem to be consistent in that regard.
I think Puck has nailed it in his typically honest and thoughtful way: Nothing will be sufficient to convince someone who is determined not to be convinced. That’s why I don’t waste a lot of time trying to persuade people to change their minds.
I’m not a great fan of Holmes either Puck, I read them once when I was young and haven’t had any desire to read them again. But that phrase always stuck with me because of the glaring flaw in it.
Please apply more logic.
It seems you’ve reduced God to:
Whatever entity this is, it is not the creator of the multiverse. I’m far more sympathetic to skepticism to the crazy notion that the God of Creation would care one whit about us.
Well, you know, I did describe for you what was a very long searching process of attempting to evaluate the scriptures of various religions, to validate their various paranormal claims, and to understand what classes of evidence might be helpful to me in doing that. I do find that when one has spent many years as a seeker but has concluded that “not finding” is as good a provisional answer as any, and preferable to rushing to judgment in the desire to “find,” one gets a certain amount of hostility.
And while you do have a gentle spirit, as I have said, I am getting a bit of that vibe right now. When my openness is questioned, it is never questioned after a sound demonstration grounded in evidence has been rejected. It is always questioned when, after being presented nothing beyond the ordinary arguments, I decline to follow an inference which I believe, with substantial justification, to be not only unwarranted but quite absurd. I am not the sort of person who “decides” to believe something. I am persuaded that it is so, or persuaded that it is not so, or persuaded that I do not know. But I do not speak of it as though I have a choice in the matter because I think that choosing is a mistake. One must be drawn by the force of the evidence to a conclusion; one must never allow one’s prejudices, upbringing, or mere subjective feeling, to dominate in the matter.
So, am I open? Absolutely. But I will not follow the A. Conan Doyle “open like a storm drain” model of intellectual openness. I stand ready to be convinced of anything. Demonstrate it well enough, and I will believe that two plus two is five, that the Holocaust didn’t happen, that vaccines are poisoning our nation, that all American politics is secretly run by a cabal of underground-dwelling lizard people, or any number of other propositions that I presently believe, even with the strongest conviction, are false. But for each of these I will expect, prior to being convinced, that evidence that justifies the conclusion will be on offer and that it will bear up under scrutiny. And I will not “choose” to believe any of them; I will be drawn there by evidence.
This passage is, I think, extremely troubling in a variety of ways and it will take a bit of examination to unwrap them. It is built from insupportable theological postures and a misunderstanding of what I have been saying. Let’s examine this.
I am interested in the question whether there are any gods, and if so, what the nature of these things is. I do not come to it with any preconceived notion that any of these gods are inscrutable, ineffable, mysterious, or any such thing. When these notions are brought into it, they are invariably brought into it to discourage, constrain and disparage responsible scrutiny of the evidence. I have no prior commitment as to what would be “God” or “not God,” whatever Barth or any other writer on these things may have to say. The one thing which is evident from my review of theological writings is that theologians have no special access to evidence, except in the textual/historical sense which I regard as entirely worthless on this topic.
But you believe that this particular god has demonstrated considerable ability to “prove himself,” on prior occasions. I’m not sure why you would think that someone who was there when the stars sang, who raises people from the dead, and who creates people from the dust of the earth would be incapable of taking some sort of action that would demonstrate that he is, at least, there. I should think “futility” is the farthest thing from this.
And this comes from you after you have said that you consider the evidence for the resurrection persuasive. You look to evidence – not evidence of a character that can really justify the conclusion, but evidence – and then you seem to think that when others look for evidence, there is something the matter.
Personal? If you think I am asking for an interview of the big guy, I think you have me wrong. I am suggesting that if we live in a universe governed in its every detail by a supernatural being of unimaginable power, who knows of every sparrow that falls from the sky, SOME aspect of that being is certain to be subject to evidence-based scrutiny.
Ad hoc? How so? I have not specified some particular set of demonstrations I want the big guy to do. The difficulty is that we live in a world where there are no demonstrations of paranormal power ANYWHERE, of ANY type or quality. What we have is a variety of texts which purport to recount events which we would not believe if we had the eyewitnesses before us. We know that when such events are reported in the here and now, they are invariably false reports. We know that other accounts of the paranormal, reported by people who are otherwise apparently credible, abound in the literature, from many faith traditions. To believe the absurd when it is too far away to be reasonably well scrutinized is the “ad hoc” here – it is an ad hoc departure from every reasonable standard of evidentiary judgment.
And where were YOU when the stars sang? The same place I was, that’s where. How do you know this? What is your evidence? Inscrutability is evidentiarily convenient, but while it deprives the doubter of the power to disconfirm, it also deprives you of any basis for claiming that confirmation is even possible. And if the gods are inscrutable, then the nature and extent of their inscrutability is precisely one of the things about which nothing can be said. And “reducible” to what, evidentiary substantiation? Your faith tradition does not hold that there is a distant and unknowable god. It holds that there is a god that can act in the physical world. It holds that this god does indeed so act, from time to time.
But what has this god left us? Textual traditions. Surely even the omniscient can understand that this is not a convincing manner to communicate the idea that forces which can set aside the very laws of nature exist, have potency, and are potentially active in the world.
Now, if you want to have a god which is inscrutable, and not “reducible,” that can be done. But it cannot be a god that acts in the world. A god that cannot be witnessed is, as Huxley suggested, as relevant and meaningful for us to discuss as a question of lunar politics. Nothing can be known about it, and we have got to follow Wittgenstein: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent .
But I would go farther than that; as I said in another thread, I believe that claims which are so structured as to recede from scrutiny are inherently suspect; they often reflect, if not “dishonesty” in the ordinary sense, the kind of dishonesty which caused Medawar to remark of Teilhard de Chardin’s book, “Its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.”
I have never suggested that I seek revelation, and I think that revelation – which I take to mean a private experience, like a vision – is not very trustworthy. I expect to be able to observe the nature of things by the same forms of ordinary observation which suffice for other purposes. I believe that police officers and gravel exist, because when I walk down the street I sometimes see one or the other of these things. A god that acts in the world is like that policeman or that gravel. It may not be manifest all the time, and everywhere, but it will be manifest SOME time or other, some place or other, in some way or other.
Of course. But, as I have said, there is “open minded” in the “sensitive to evidence” sense, and there is “open minded” in less laudable senses. My mind, as the great Howard DeVoto sang, “ain’t so open that anything can walk right in.” If it is, one falls into the trap of believing the first thing on legs; this is undoubtedly why so many people find truth in the faith tradition in which they were raised. I seek to get it right.
I am of course adopting the Christian view arguendo - that God loves us all and wants us to be saved. In adopting this stance I can’t help but notice that he doesn’t seem to employ every possible and/or reasonable way of making this happen (even when considering the Free Will conundrum).
If God could show himself to a group of people 2000 years ago, why then could he not show himself to everybody at other times? In my view the simplest and most parsimonious explanation for this is that he didn’t show himself back then either. I don’t see too many logical problems with that one. No more than in thinking that Allah never actually had Gabriel dictate the Qu’ran to Mohamed.
Note that I’m only presenting a logical argument against some of the tenets of Christianity. A God that made the multiverse and doesn’t care a whit about us isn’t the Christian God, right? I haven’t given such an entity much thought, to be honest. Not sure why I should.