An open call for evidence

2PhiloVoid said:

Well, for someone who is against stupidity, you seem to have a short-change in understanding what the forum rules actually are.

2PhiloVoid

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Sorry, I usually write and speak my mind. Do you have a rebuttal to anything I said?

Anti-stupidity said:

Sorry, I usually write and speak my mind. Do you have a rebuttal to anything I said?

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Yes, welcome to CF! I'd make a rebuttal, but since I'm not dependent in the least upon the Kalam Cosmological Argument, I'll let it pass.

Actually, feel free to post and bring up challenging things for all of us to think about, just try to do it in the forum areas that permit an intelligent atheist such as yourself to do so. Unfortunately, the "Exploring Christianity" section is for people to post a question and receive responses by Christians.

Probably, you'll find some action over in the Ethics & Morality section, the Physical Science section, and when you get enough posts and asks for permission from the CF moderators, you can go into the Christian Apologetics section and pour out all of the challenges your little feline heart desires.

Anyway, we're glad you're here, and I'm sure I'll probably bump into you again sometime.

Peace,
2PhiloVoid

hedrick said:

For example, you can make a reasonable argument that the Christian Church couldn’t exist if the Resurrection hadn’t happened. N T Wright has made such an argument, and it looks convincing when you read it.

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That would be my argument as well. Reasonable people have believed the central claim of Christianity to be true. Some of them spent some time considering the evidence.

Similarly, I think many (hopefully most) Christians find that faith improves their lives. This is also evidence, though it’s open for other explanations as well.

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I think this is a good pragmatic argument. Christian faith is compatible with a life well lived. People that go to church, believe in a higher power, and connect with other people seem to be happier and less likely to do drugs and engage in self-destructive behaviors.

I agree I find alot of classical apologetics unconvincing. However, I believe in Jesus, ergo I believe in Jesus Father, God. Otherwise I would admit alot of the talk about the God of philosophers is not particularly persuasive.

ug333 said:

I'm an ex-Christian, now an atheist. To find the truth, I often revisit beliefs I have. Right now I am revisiting theism.

I'd love to hear the best evidence you have for God. How would I find out if he's real?

I'm really looking to listen, not argue. So while I may respond to tell you why the argument doesn't convince me (if it doesn't), please understand I'm just helping you understand my position so you can counter me.

I appreciate anything you have to offer.

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I believe that since God is a spirit, he must be found spiritually. Through salvation and a born again experience. That probably won't mean much though if you only accept physical evidence as evidence of God.

You can see evidence of God's existence by observing certain events taking place everyday. If you want 100% proof that Jesus Christ is God, study Bible prophecy and observe how everything God said would happen happens just as He said. Watch some videos on the revelation 12 sign. There is a sign taking place in 2017 written about in revelation 12 and there is astronomy software which proves that the sign will take place in 2017. There is 100% proof that God's prophecies concerning Israel are being fulfilled. I could tell you things and provide you with numbers that seem to very strongly indicate that the rapture and tribulation are very close. I could provide a whole lot of information. I watched a lot of videos on the internet and read a lot of articles and you might be able to find people more knowledgeable than me to validate what I tell you. If you seek God and want to know The Truth, He is waiting. Dont wait. The time remaining to receive eternal life is very very short. You may have been a part of a group of people who said they were christians who did not believe in Jesus. You need to find a church where the true gospel is taught. A church where God's love and judgment is taught. You may have been taught things about God that are not true. God hates sin and He loves you. Find a church where they believe that salvation cannot be lost and that man cannot earn eternal life. Do not believe lies the world tells you about God. Believe God who has infinitely great love, knowledge and power. Satan tries to deceive. Jesus Christ is The Truth, The way, and The Life. Seek God while there is still time. Seek God who gives life. I would be glad to talk with you about God.

ug333 said:

Historical documents don't provide me with a sufficient body of evidence to accept the claims of the supernatural. Add in the existence of other books which claim the same qualities, but directly contradict the Bible, and I can't find the Bible as a sound reason for me to accept a God.

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Me neither.

I'll tell you how I know that there is a God. When I was 11 or so, I dove off the end of a dock in a strange lake that looked like mine (so I was deceived). The water was shallow and rocky, not deep. I dove at a headlong run, hit the bottom full on with my head, snapped my neck, rolled with the momentum of forward motion onto my back and lay on the bottom, paralyzed, drowning and alone.

I did not believe in God, but I cried out to the Universe a single word prayer. And a miracle happened. Nobody spoke to me in words, but I knew. I was able to move. I was able to stand. I was able to walk. Something was very terribly wrong - my neck was broken - but I knew that if I said nothing - nothing - to anybody - that I would be allowed to live and to be whole. I also knew that if I said anything, I would be rushed to the hospital, they would take an x-ray, see my broken neck and severed spine, and that I would be paralyzed for life from the neck down.

The universe itself had performed a miracle and saved my life. And the price of that miracle was that I could tell nobody. So I never did. That was how I came to know that God exists. This did not make me a Christian, however, because there was nothing about the miracle in the lake that had anything whatever to do with a book or a bearded figure or a visible angel or any doctrine.

(Unless maybe I was really one of God's after all, because I had been baptized as a baby and had his "seal" on me, even though I didn't recognize it was him.)

And thus began a 27 year period of virtuous pantheism, recognizing (not worshipping, for what would be the point in that?) that in Divine Nature there is a conscious will that CAN reach down and save little paralytic boys in lakes. So, even if nobody else knew, I knew. My God was an "It", not a He.

That is why I accept the concept of "God", understanding that God is that which is omnipotent, omnipresent, eternal and omniscient. Simple natural law is the first of those three things. The thing that healed my neck and saved my life and bade me keep the secret was a conscious thing. Though I did allow that perhaps I was simply the luckiest person who ever existed and that perhaps the "divine right" of kings to rule was truly just the more supreme example of luck.

So, that's why I know God exists.

Of course, I would not accept such an account from another person as a reason to believe in HIS God unless I saw for myself.

Which would be the next chapter of this discussion, should we decide to go on with it.

ug333 said:

I do not believe that something came from nothing, nor do I believe in eternal existence. I simply don't have an opinion about what came before the big bang, if such a concept is even cohesive. Those things are beyond our current understanding of the universe. As such, it's an acceptable mystery. So I have no faith in something from nothing, because I don't make any claims about the origins of the big bang.

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I respect someone who takes the agnostic position of not knowing the answers to those issues, but someone who does have a belief concerning those issues who believes that God does not exist doesn't have a lot of other options, and I find the options they do have to be at least if not more difficult to believe than in the existence of God. Even a belief in the big bang itself is taking someone's word about what happened over billions of years that no one was around to observe. I agree that concepts such as the beginning of time and not easy to understand, which is why I prefer proofs such as Aquina' Five Ways that don't depend on the universe having a beginning. Nevertheless, I think it is far more reasonable to think that the universe had a cause than that it does not.

ug333 said:

My approach focuses on the axiom that reality exists. I further assume that my senses provide me a reasonable approximation of reality. From there, I attempt to minimize assumptions when discussing issues of fact, and I think it's possible to do so.

Because I do not assume that my senses are 100% reliable, my experience is not the gold standard of evidence. Repeatable, verifiable experiment is the gold standard.

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I agree with the first three things. To the last thing, though, I won't grant gold standard status. Perhaps bronze standard. The problem is that "repeatable, verifiable experiment" often contains bias within its design that is not visible along the narrow range of things that it tests. So, one can get repeatable, predictable results, describing "what", but mistakenly think that what one has demonstrated is "why". Only later does it become clear, usually by a different vector, that it is not true.

Example: for the first thirty years of my life, medical science knew that stress and nervousness caused ulcers, and for my entire life medical science "knows" that colds are not caused the cold. The reasons for those assertions were contained in volumes of data. But actually, ulcers are caused by a virus. And in the real world, getting a chill is the primary vector for developing a cold (and we all know it, too).

For the first ten years of my life, eggs were the healthiest breakfast. Then suddenly they were bad for you. Then they were SO bad for you that the journals and articles read that eating an egg was like smoking a cigarette. And now they're good for you again. There was repeatable, verifiable science behind each claim, but the assumptions and conclusions drawn from what was seen was erroneous. (And may still be.)

Also, there has been a relentless desire to "professionalize" science in such a way that the ability to wield knowledge with authority is sought to be limited to those who have certain credentials, much as the practice of law is limited to people with a bar license. This "sacerdotalization" of science has contributed, in some minds, to its elevation to the new priesthood. Other minds see that as utterly preposterous.

Everything's fraught, and you can never find objectively rock solid ground, because human agreement is wrapped up in matters of power and advantage for very temporal creatures.

So the best you can do is rely on your own experiences, you own senses and your own common sense. You are ultimately the judge and jury in your own court, and you must never cede that authority.

To quote JRR Tolkien in part of a poem called "Mythopoeia" he wrote as a letter to the younger C.S. Lewis:

"I will not walk with your progressive apes,
erect and sapient. Before them gapes
the dark abyss to which their progress tends -
if by God's mercy progress ever ends,
and does not ceaselessly revolve the same
unfruitful course with changing of a name.
I will not treat your dusty path and flat,
denoting this and that by this and that,
your world immutable wherein no part
the little maker has with maker's art.
I bow not yet before the Iron Crown,
nor cast my own small golden sceptre down."

He's exactly right. We must - you must - never, ever, cast your own small golden scepter down. In the end, you are the final judge of every single thing you believe or do not believe, that you accept or do not accept. YOU are the gold standard of judgment of what is and is not reasonable. You have to be. If you defer to others, they will not be any more accurate than you are, and they'll pick your pocket.

ug333 said:

The supernatural forces can never directly be tested,

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You don't know that. It actually isn't true.

ug333 said:

For example, it would be very convincing if prayer had a non-zero chance of healing an amputee because we have a good understanding of human regeneration, and regrowing limbs is well outside of our ability.

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So let me ask you: if you produce an amputee, that you know to be an amputee, and someone, say me for instance, tells you that if you will pray to me and worship me as your God I will heal this amputee before your eyes, but then after that you belong to me forever. Would you do it? Would you produce the amputee and pray to me and offer me your service forever?

Is that what you need?

If it was offered, and you sensed that the offer might actually happen, would you go through with the proof?
And if the proof were then delivered, would you serve faithfully all the days of your life?
Or would you become an apostate anyway, because you just didn't want to do what I would demand of you - even though you knew for sure.

Is that your price, to see an amputee healed?
And if your price is paid, will you keep your bargain? Or will you seek to renegotiate when I demand of you things you don't want?

ug333 said:

Historical/Biblical: I do not see how a writing of what happened 2000+ years ago could ever be sufficient to justify a belief in a deity. If a deity exists and interacts, we should be able to see evidence today. If it does not interact, it is indistinguishable from a world without the deity. So ultimately we are dependent upon evidence that such a thing could even exist before historical documents might be of use to determine which one exists.

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It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to throw out evidence of God's existence and interactions and then say if God exists and interacts, then we should be able to see evidence today. There are billions of people who have seen evidence that God exists and interacts, which is why they are theists.

Origins: There will always be a question of origins. If we completely answer questions of the origins of life & the source of the big bang, we will then ask what caused the source of the big bang to exist. The solution for me is not to fill the void, but to acknowledge our void in understanding by saying "I don't know"

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If every explanation required knowing its explanation before we could believe it, then that would resort to infinite regress and we couldn't believe anything, so it is not necessary to know the cause of the cause of the universe in order to know that it was caused. Likewise, if we discovered a large artifact on the dark side of the moon, then it could be reasonable to think that it was created by aliens even if we knew nothing else about these aliens. So do you think it is more reasonable to think that the universe has a cause even if you don't know what the cause is than to think that it does not have a cause?

Faith first: I had faith, but nothing that I experienced in that time convinces me in hindsight that God is real.

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"Faith" is synonymous with "trust" and it doesn't make much sense to trust God to exist, so we must first have reason to believe that God exists before we can have faith in Him to do something.

I had real experiences, but they all seem clearly explained through known scientific and psychological phenomenon.

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Understanding a scientific and psychological phenomenon does not show us whether or not a deity is causing it because that at most simply tells us how the deity is causing it.

As a skeptic I withhold belief until I find evidence proportional the significance of a claim. If that isn't a solid way of going through life, I would love to hear what standard I should use for belief.

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It is perfectly reasonable to withhold belief until you find what you consider to be sufficient evidence for it, and in fact there is not a single person who has ever formed a belief when they thought that there was insufficient evidence for it.

Soyeong said:

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to throw out evidence of God's existence and interactions and then say if God exists and interacts, then we should be able to see evidence today. There are billions of people who have seen evidence that God exists and interacts, which is why they are theists.

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If I might, many of those billions do not believe based on evidence, but based on faith, custom, culture and comfort.

And it may very well make sense to throw out so-called "evidence" - old books and the like - "of God's existence and interactions" in the past, because one thinks that those are fantasies and fairy tales. There has, after all, been "medicine" practiced for millennia, but it probably wasn't until after 1900 that doctors, on average, actually extended their patients' lives. Before that, the fairy tales and quackery, truly believed and piously taught, caused men to do things that harmed their patients on average more than it helped. So it is perfectly reasonable to discard all so-called "evidence" before the 20th Century as unreliable. It is also not unreasonable to assume that a God who interacted with the world throughout past centuries, with so many saints and records of miracles, would also do the same in the 20th and 21st Centuries, and to expect to see evidence of such things in the hear and now to evaluate scientifically. Indeed, that's what the International Scientific Committee at Lourdes has sought to do for over a century, recording in modern medical detail the various healings and claims of healings at that site. Most people are not theists because of Lourdes. They believe because they were taught it. But Lourdes has made theists out of some who have delved into the miracles there.

Of course for some, no internal cures are enough. They must have the healing of an amputee, or it's not real. When they get that, it will be interesting to see what happens.

Soyeong said:

If every explanation required knowing its explanation before we could believe it, then that would resort to infinite regress and we couldn't believe anything, so it is not necessary to know the cause of the cause of the universe in order to know that it was caused.

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While that's true, as far as it goes, we don't actually know that the universe is caused. After all, what was the cause of God? "God always was and always will be", it might be said, or "God is the uncaused first cause". But this is simply begging the question. God is an entity added to explain a thing, the universe. But if God can be uncaused, then also the universe itself might, too, be uncaused, obviating the need for a God to start it. It cannot be demonstrated that the universe requires a cause any more than it can be demonstrated that God does.

Soyeong said:

Likewise, if we discovered a large artifact on the dark side of the moon, then it could be reasonable to think that it was created by aliens even if we knew nothing else about these aliens. So do you think it is more reasonable to think that the universe has a cause even if you don't know what the cause is than to think that it does not have a cause?

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The artifact would have to be artistic, something that nature could not do. For example, if I drove through the snowy woods and I passed a scale-model replica in snow of the Statue of Liberty, I would know for certain, without a shadow of doubt, that human beings had made that, because all of my experience with Nature shows me that a chaotic thing like snowfall cannot spontaneously form a statue. So if I see a statue, then I know that a creature made it. And if I sat watching the snow, and I watched the snowflakes spontaneously form the Statue of Liberty with nobody there to do it, I would know that invisible beings of some sort were doing that intelligently, because it is flat out impossible for entropic systems to spontaneously become highly ordered, with a massive increase of information content, through random chaotic action. The world does not work that way and we all know it. So yes, if there were a statue on the far side of the moon, that would mean that there were alien beings of some sort, or perhaps that the world existed long ago and had civilization, which was then destroyed, and we're only just getting back to that.

Soyeong said:

"Faith" is synonymous with "trust" and it doesn't make much sense to trust God to exist, so we must first have reason to believe that God exists before we can have faith in Him to do something.

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That is logical.

Soyeong said:

Understanding a scientific and psychological phenomenon does not show us whether or not a deity is causing it because that at most simply tells us how the deity is causing it.

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It depends on what it is. The Statue of Liberty spontaneously forming in a blizzard in the middle of Antarctica, where there is no human agency present seems supernatural, except for the informational content: a New York statue. As we saw that forming, we would assume that the US government was conducting some sort of secret test, not that nature was performing art.

But if the statue that emerged was the image of an angel, strange and with captured light, we would know that we were in the presence of the supernatural, of a non-human intelligence with command over nature.

The information conveyed in the phenomenon is determinative of what we will believe about its origins. If it's a burning bush that tells is that it is our God speaking, and the bush is not consumed, we are likely to recognize what this is, and to think that we are being blessed like Moses was, even if we didn't believe that the story we read of that having happened was true before we saw it happened ourselves. In fact, one of the unfortunate reasons that people do fall into the possession of bad spirits is because when people have a true supernatural experience, and encounter with spirits that seem fair, they are very much inclined to think that they are specially blessed on account of that, and to thus be more easily manipulated by a thing that is not fair at all but foul. People's first instinct on seeing something wonderful and supernatural is not "I am damned!" but rather "I am blessed!"

Soyeong said:

It is perfectly reasonable to withhold belief until you find what you consider to be sufficient evidence for it, and in fact there is not a single person who has ever formed a belief when they thought that there was insufficient evidence for it.

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Well, gosh, that last sentence is pretty categorical, and I don't think it's really the way people work. Most of the the things we believe we learn very young, before our rational faculties are more than barest impulses. We are told something and we believe it. We become more critically minded later in life about many things, but most people in the world cling quite tenaciously to the culture of their youth, including its religion, because they were born into it and grew up in it, and always accepted it as just so.

ug333 said:

I never said anything about worship. I'm just talking about belief. Belief is necessary but not sufficient for worship.

But if I was convinced that a deity existed, and I was further convinced that it was a trustworthy moral guide and worthy of worship, I would trust it and worship it.

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No, I added in the worship. And I added it because you're asking for something from God: heal an amputee. There is somebody about the quality of an amputee - perhaps that the wound is not internal, so actual bone and flesh have to be regenerated - that particularly interests you. THAT level of healing would appear to persuade you in a way that mere internal miracle would not (because the claim of internal miracle might not be true, but you can SEE the amputation).

Also, there's a meme that amputees never are healed. The stories of the saints include healings of amputees, but those are discardable.

You're not likely to really believe a news report of a healed amputee either - you would suspect a fraud of some sort.

So, really, the proof you seek is for God to perform a major personal miracle for somebody missing a limb, and to perform that miracle in your presence. And then, AFTER God has performed a parlor trick for you, you will assess whether or not you will follow Him based on your assessment of God's morals, sort of like a "God interview."

If you're particularly precious to God, he might very well give you what you're looking for in this life. He can. Sometimes he does.
If you're not, he may decide to just let you wait for the next 40 or 50 years, however much time you have left, and then you'll see later.

ug333 said:

I never said I dismissed it. I said it wasn't sufficient to be convincing.

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Why?

It's reasonable to assume that there is an explanation for the universe's existence. It's not reasonable to assume that we have that explanation without sufficient evidence. And so long as we don't have that evidence, it's reasonable to just say we don't know.

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Clearly it is not reasonable to believe anything without sufficient evidence, but just as clearly theists consider their to be sufficient evidence.

I agree that it doesn't prove that a god isn't pulling strings. But it's certainly consistent to accept a naturalist explanation when well supported scientific theory can explain what we see without a god.
Or as Laplace said when asked about the existence of God in his model : "I had no need of that hypothesis"

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As I mentioned earlier, Naturalism of the Gaps reasoning is just as problematic God of the Gaps reasoning. So someone saying that they don't know what caused the universe, but it wasn't God, is just as problematic as someone saying that they don't know what caused the universe, so it must be God. We should argue from what we do know, not from what we don't know. It's fine if you don't know what caused the universe, but if you go from agnosticism to naturalism, then you need to defend your position, and I find the answers that naturalism comes up with to be at least as hard to believe as those found in theism. In other words, if you have no need of God to explain the origin of life, then you need to be able to explain how it originated without God. If you have no problem buying the waving the magic wand of billions of years and presto, you've got life, then you should have no problem with accepting the existence of God.

If you accept naturalism, materialism, and evolution, then you can't think of your cognitive faculties as being reliable. Under evolution, our behavior is adaptive toward survival and reproduction, so the same goes for the neurology that causes our behavior. The neurology that causes our behavior also causes our beliefs, so what we believe makes no difference in regard to whether it is true as long as it increases our adaptability. So if you take a particular belief, then it is as likely to be true as false, which means that the probability that our cognitive faculties give us reliable information about what is true would be rather low. So anyone who believes naturalism, materialism, and evolution has good reason to doubt whether they or any other belief that is produced by their cognitive faculties is true.