The Validity of Christian Religious Experiences

You can’t prove a historical hypothesis. You can only assign them a probability – high, low or negligible.

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If you read the rest of my post, you’ll see I agree with you here.

Not really.

@Faizal_Ali was suggesting outcomes like a horse (high probability), zebra (low probability) or unicron (negligible), and I was agreeing with him.

Addendum: I’d go so far as to suggest, given any supernatural story other than one in the Bible, you’d probably also assign it a negligible probability.

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And I agree with him too. But he hasn’t explained why my position is a zebra and his is a horse.

Nope, you assumed wrong. We can argue whatever else you want, and each assign it a probablility.

See my addendum above.

See my edit once I saw your edit. :rofl:

So what probability would you assign Muhammad splitting the Moon?

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  1. What probability do you want to assign it? What are your arguments for and I’ll rebut them.

Your is not a zebra, but a unicorn.

Here, I’ll explain:

People believing things that are not true and founding a religion based on this belief = Horse.

Guy coming back to life after he was dead = Unicorn

I don’t know how much more simple I can make it.

Now, maybe the hoofprints are in my back yard. In that case, it would be kind of weird that a horse was running there, and I might not have an explanation for what it was doing there. By the same token, it might not be possible for us to completely understand why the early Christians believed so fervently in the resurrection of Jesus and how the religion eventually spread so widely.

Be that as it may, there is still no good reason to believe it was a unicorn that made the hoofprints in my yard, and there is still no good reason believe that early Christians believed Jesus was resurrected because he actually was resurrected.

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Why? Again, you haven’t explain why it’s less likely that it’s a unicorn, or a horse or anything. Basically you have hoofprints (all the people in the New Testaments writing, the writings themselves, the places they describe, other historical events regarding the churches that came after, and the people that mention all of the above), and you’re saying that you don’t have to examine them because your hypothesis is that horses and unicorns don’t exist.

And I would point out that zero is a (very) negligible number.

My point is that you’d assign a very low probability to any supernatural story not part of your own belief system, so it is not unreasonable for a non-Christian to assign a very low probability to a Christian supernatural story.

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So you base your beliefs on what Christians do?

No. That was most definitely not what I was saying.

I was talking about the Outsider Test for Faith.

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I am doing no such thing. Kindly take more time to read my comments before responding, because you keep getting them wrong.

Oh, good. So I’m not the only one. :wink:

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@thoughtful

Another way of putting it is, if you assign a zero probability to everybody else’s supernatural stories, why are you surprised when everybody else assigns a zero probability to yours?

I didn’t bother to read past the first few paragraphs. This is a flawed argument as it assumes Christians don’t adopt a skeptical view about their own religion, so therefore it’s OK for you to be skeptic about Christianity or that if I’m a skeptic about anything else I’m a hypocrite. Prove to me I’m not skeptical by poking at my religion and seeing if I say that I don’t care if I’m wrong or right. Notice I’ve answered what arguments I’ve can that you’ve already given me in this forum.

I believe Mohammed existed. I believe 99% of the Quran was spoken by him. No zero probability here.

None of that was a “supernatural story”.

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@thoughtful

Answering arguments is not the same as being skeptical.

Addendum: Christian Apologetics is answering arguments, but is still completely drunk-the-kool-aid on Christianity.

So can I say that you are not skeptical about atheism because you believe there is no God? Or am I not allowed to make assumptions about how open-minded you are?