Don't Be Like Elvis!

Uber Genius said:

I don't recall Elvis being cruel. But I didn't follow him. I mean don't be intellectually lazy. Do your own research. Engage the best arguments for and against the views your hold, not the worst, not the first one you find on Youtube that has adjectives like "Poned, Crushed, X Destroys Y, X Destroyed by a REAL scientist," and the like.

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OK, I was more interested in Elvis, but at least you got me to click on the thread.

A few comments just the same:

Uber Genius said:

I mean don't be intellectually lazy.

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Don't be an inteleaholic either, this isn't nearly as complicated as you might think. The fact God exists is common sense, pure and simple. Nothing could exist unless it was put there/created. Cod creates, and we create from what he created for us to work with. The only mind blower is he has always been there, and all other things considered, I'll just take his word for that.

I guess I got my answer on if you were Christian or not, so I'll take that to mean this is no more than an attempt to get Christians, or those interested in Christianity to lose faith/try to explain Christianity away, or see it as a myth through our petty intelligence. Reason being, we already believe, so that isn't what you are trying get us to do, and that only leaves the one thing.

Prov. 3 Verses 5
Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.

And no, that isn't just a seception to get us to not think, it's actually very good advice, at leas when iot comes to out attempting to explain God out of the picture.

Don't Be Cruel is an Elvis song.

Uber Genius said:

Not sure what an inteleaholic is referring to?

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Don't worry about it.

Uber Genius said:

I don't recall being asked if I was a Christian. I am.

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You missed it or I accidentally removed it...apologies if I did.

Uber Genius said:

I can't make this idea out.

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Got me. Spell Wrecker got hold of one of the words there so that even I, the writer can't decipher it.

Uber Genius said:

Strange. I expected you to respond to my questions about substance, namely how Jesus and Paul praised and modeled reasoning rather than mocking it and how basic Bible study rules preclude Christians from using a single prooftext out of context to incoherently ARGUE against ARGUING.

But I often set my expectations to high.

Perhaps I should have put something about appeals to mockery in my bulleted points above. My bad.

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Are you Christian with no denomination, or non Christian who naturally has no denomination?

Uber Genius said:

The universe is fine-tuned for life

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I don't know many atheists that would agree with this statement.

Uber Genius said:

I hope this helps clear up misunderstandings about my OP.

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It does, and thanks.

Uber Genius said:

But Jesus taught the disciples to not only argue with reason but to cast out demons, and heal the sick, and raise the dead, which go way past the justification of argument and evidence.

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Do you think we should be able to do those things?

[QUOTE="Uber Genius, post: 74701297, member: 389967"
I believe that Romans 1:20 hints at an innate faculty to perceive God's existence and further that an investigation is sufficient to empower one to enter into a relationship with God wholly without evidence and argument. It is not what Jesus did, or what Paul did, or what any of the disciples did or were taught to do. They all seemed to act like Peter, Phillip, Stephen, Paul and Barnabas and Silas and Mark, Apollos acted in the book of Acts, providing testimony, arguments from OT Prophesy to the Jews in the synagogues, arguments from natural theology in places like Mars Hill and the school of Tyrannus in Ephesus.

So no one needs evidence and argument to become a Christian.

But Jesus taught the disciples to not only argue with reason but to cast out demons, and heal the sick, and raise the dead, which go way past the justification of argument and evidence.

I hope this helps clear up misunderstandings about my OP.[/QUOTE]
If you both don't need evidence and argument to become a Christian and yet are expected to argue with reason, that seems suspiciously contradictory in that what precedes belief is the opposite of what's expected to proceed from it.

If you just try to find something that seems rational, then that's backwards from finding the beliefs to be rational in the first place.

But if you also are effectively trying to say some things don't require reason, the question becomes how you can say they're reasonable in the first place to believe in and also make arguments to support them with reason?

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Faith and grace being essential in terms of the conversion is one aspect, but the apologetics angle can be as much about preaching to the proverbial choir to make it seem reasonable in a rhetorical manner as trying to frame Christianity in a way that cribs from Greek philosophy to make it seem reasonable when you've almost excised it from its historical context to a degree, even if Greek philosophy coexisted in some respect with Christianity, but wasn't initially utilized to the extent it would become later by Augustine, Aquinas and others.

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Sensus divinatus is wholly unfounded and borders on circular reasoning to appeal to us being created by God to have that sense in the first place. To claim you have a sense of God, you also assume there's some coherent or cogent notion of God that is universal when people only tend to agree about God based on particular exposure to the ideas rather than considering the broader possibilities

Your argumentation and reasoning can seem at first glance reasonable to any person, the question becomes whether one is willing to apply scrutiny and skepticism to those beliefs you reach based on the argumentation rather than finding them compelling and stopping there and only trying to find the ways to defend those beliefs instead of taking challenges to them seriously

Uber Genius said:

It seems some have misinterpreted the meaning of my OP as being somehow demanding evidence and argument.

While it seems that in a forum marked "Christian Apologetics," we would expect to giving a defense of the hope that is in us. After all ἀπολογίαν (apologian) comes from 1 Peter 3:15


15 But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,

So although I am talking about what respect looks like:

Certainly NOT intellectual laziness of the type I have described.

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Every person should be respected, not all ideas should. Sometimes we think we are ridiculing an idea when we are ridiculing a person. We should always respect people no matter what ideas they have.

What I am not talking about in the OP is that in order to become a Christian one must have reasons and evidence tied up in a tight rationalistic bow. In fact my current belief is that over the history of the church the majority of Christians, and holders of other religious views as well, have NOT EVEN BEEN ABLE TO READ OR WRITE!

Reading and writing by commoners is a modern phenomena.

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This is an issue I have with many modern apologists, they have elaborate arguments for god that most people in the world do not have access to the historical writings and education they would need to understand the argument.

I believe that Romans 1:20 hints at an innate faculty to perceive God's existence and further that an investigation is sufficient to empower one to enter into a relationship with God wholly without evidence and argument.

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Our perception is not a reliable way to determine truth.

It is not what Jesus did, or what Paul did, or what any of the disciples did or were taught to do. They all seemed to act like Peter, Phillip, Stephen, Paul and Barnabas and Silas and Mark, Apollos acted in the book of Acts, providing testimony, arguments from OT Prophesy to the Jews in the synagogues, arguments from natural theology in places like Mars Hill and the school of Tyrannus in Ephesus.

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Yes this is what they did. However Jesus did not need to believe without evidence, neither did Paul. Jesus claimed to be god so what he had plenty of evidence, Jesus directly interceded with Paul. Why did Jesus intercede with Paul directly but will not do that for me or others with doubt?

So no one needs evidence and argument to become a Christian.

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I require evidence. How can I possibly have confidence that god exists by looking at things made per Romans 1:21.

But Jesus taught the disciples to not only argue with reason but to cast out demons, and heal the sick, and raise the dead, which go way past the justification of argument and evidence.

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Where are the miracles being done today?

I think you are conflating two ideas. First what is necessary to warrant belief. Second what Jesus taught his followers was how they were to represent the case for Christian belief.

If I asked you to prove the existence of things like an external world, that other people exist, the reality of the past, the consistency of how the world has operated, one would have no way of proving these claims. None. Rene Descartes helped us realize that conundrum. But we find that are beliefs in those things arise naturally and are justified based on proper basicality that is they seem impossible to defeat. So too, when God through the HS engages a person they seems to know it is God, and exactly what God wants to communicate. Also when we experience natural phenomena like the Grand Canyon, or seeing the Milky Way for the first time, our awe often is expressed as crediting a creator. These are cross-cultural phenomena and are not accompanied by argument or evidence.

There are many ways to gain knowledge of our world. Abduction, induction, deduction, properly basic warranted beliefs. That latter makes up the lion share of our beliefs about other intelligent agents (our family and friends, God).

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If you're asking me to prove any of that, you're misusing the word in the vernacular and I prefer the technical usage which only applies to formal science, not stuff that applies to metaphysics and epistemology in general, which is provisional by nature of rational understanding that we can be mistaken

They're not impossible to defeat, it's called cognitive dissonance, people can hold things they hold to be rational even if an outsider can point out contradictions in holding both a belief that the external world exists, but that somehow only their perceptions really are accurate, a form of solipsism.

You're appealing to generalized ideas psychology can explain as a universal phenomenon that varies by cultural ideas at best, but still falls to human tendencies of pattern seeking and the like (apophenia and pareidolia in particular). Something seeming to be anything is insufficient to make the conclusion it is that way

Properly basic is somewhat loaded language in my experience to get into purely probabilistic modal logic arguments for something, which is an exercise in mental masturbation of what one thinks is a base probability for things that are not remotely set in stone, the abstract notions in particular

Is it reasonable to deny there is and external world? How about that other people exist? What argument would you give for the reality of the past that couldn't be knocked down by the suggestion that you were just a brain in a vat hooked up to something akin to the matrix?

So we have to first determine what is epistemically reasonable.

We need to account for non-inferential beliefs that are basic and without argument but never the less rational due to them being grounded in things like objects (tables, chairs, oxygen) other minds (people), etc.

The majority of scripture is various account by the author of an interaction with a personal being they took to be God. They didn't believe in God due to going through Anselm's or Aquinas' or Plato's Timaeus. They had a properly basic belief grounded in a sense of the divine. That doesn't preclude us from engaging evidence and argument, especially in a forum specifically designed to present, wait for it... "Evidence and argument."

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You're bringing up the problem of hard solipsism, it's not easily solved and I never claimed I had a perfect answer

Axiomatic notions like belief in an external world and other minds have as much of a pragmatic benefit as a cogent structure to understand the world around us. Believing the world is just a concoction of our minds leads to utter insanity in the sense that you reduce anything to a figment, a phantasm, rejecting object permanence and other things we take for granted just as much

They took it to be God, I'm not sure why that's meant to be any basis for a reader to agree with them based merely on their testimony, that's rubbish. They had a perception of something based on preconceptions that may arguably be faulty in the reasoning, insinuating agency behind events and things they observe in general because, again, that's a psychological tendency we have, even if it can be demonstrated to be utterly irrational (the weather is not messing with us when it behaves oddly, we can understand weather patterns scientifically, there doesn't need to be a mind behind them)

You can try to engage, but when you take the bible as anything reliable, you'd have to demonstrate that first and foremost before you expect a skeptic to take it seriously in the authority you ascribe to it

Again you are conflating differing ideas. If something is true in the real world any way we have of investigating those types of truths could be used to identify the truth. Math could be used in new ways to confirm Pythagurus' claims. Arguments for God's existence due to the beginning of the universe don't make sense during a period where human understanding of the beginning of the universe doesn't yet understand it had a beginning.

So as our methods of understanding our world get more accurate and sophisticated we are open to use appropriate methods to engage ancient claims.

So I think you may be making a category error here. What is true of the world is described as ontology. What can be demonstrated as human knowledge is epistemology.

The Earth always revolved around the Sun even though Copernicus only showed up recently in human history. New theories or ways of arguing for any knowledge like scientific knowledge, don't impact what is ontically true of the real world.

Now if one is an idealist, that statement above might not hold.

I can use Aristotelian logic to prove things that predate Aristotle certainly...the two are completely independent.

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The "beginning" of the universe as you so quaintly refer to it, is merely our perception as such, we cannot be certain it is the absolute beginning of the universe as a whole, only so far as we can investigate. That argument doesn't hold water unless you expect someone to be so credulous to not think critically about even basic cosmology, which doesn't necessarily posit a static universe or an eternal universe, etc.

You're distinguishing between things that would exist regardless of human observation and our understandings evolving with investigation respectively. Even if humans didn't exist, it would be true in itself that the sun is the center of a solar system, etc. But human investigation allows us far more understanding than simple physical realities one could observe in some hypothetical outsider perspective from the universe (looking into a snow globe as it were)

I never claimed the models affected reality, but they allow us to get far more precise than generally just taking things as they are, which is intellectually lazy and dishonest.

I think we are back to an Elvis senario here. Please engage the research and ask why Alvin Plantinga's Reformed Epistemology is taught in just about every graduate program in philosophy in the western world. Could it be that you have missed something and need to do a wee little research to figure out why that is the case?

But nice job calling it "Wholly unfounded." You are making some basic logic errors, and conflating ontic and epistemic concepts and yet have the boldness to make that pronouncement. You wonder why some of us out here don't deconvert as a result of such claims.

Please... The whole point of this thread is to get theists and non-theists alike to do some research... this isn't the first time I have made that request of you either. Please respect the knowledge project and do some research.

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It's taught because it offers a new perspective, that doesn't mean one has to take it seriously in terms of your approach except in some general understanding, same as I don't have to hold all the beliefs of religions I studied as a religious studies major in college, that's begging for utter cognitive dissonance and insanity.

Appealing to authority is not helping your case, you're just digging yourself deeper into trying to rationalize the irrational by rhetorical spin

I'm not expecting you to deconvert, that's your delusions to deal with same as anyone who has intellectual honesty in considering that what they hold to be true might be mistaken. Call me arrogant, but I'd say the contrary, I'm not making absolute claims or even grandiosely certain claims in regards to what I hold to be the case, because I realize my fallibility without appealing to a transcendent agent that governs the world and my ultimate purpose outside of me (a horribly depressing idea, if you ask me)

You'll forgive me if I don't want to engage in intellectual discourse CONSTANTLY and act like I have some great wisdom or knowledge, I prefer to balance my life in a way that doesn't create this needless contention you seem to relish in as if you're somehow being victimized by someone criticizing your views as facile or otherwise simplistic in nature and assuming malice on the part of someone rather than some form of ignorance, violating Hanlon's razor.