Suggesting that you’re not a ‘crazy person’ and that the alternative is a ‘mass delusion’ sounds dramatic - an emotive appeal to incredulity; but a non-believer would have an equally valid alternative interpretation using the same evidence you have cited.
The fact that you find that it’s always other people like you, who’ve had similar experiences, that come to believe in Jesus, could equally well be taken as evidence that, in those circumstances, certain people are particularly susceptible to that belief…
If, on the other hand, you’d found that there was no significant resemblance between all those people and their experiences, other than the belief itself, you might have a little more justification for thinking that was evidence it wasn’t just a ‘mass delusion’.
But in any case, given that nearly a third of the world’s population has Christian beliefs, I would suggest that a single anecdotal account that they have a ‘family resemblance’ and have ‘similar stories’ and ‘similar experiences’ is probably not representative.
Laws of nature are inferred, not observed. The laws are not physical, therefore abstract. Take a look at the mathematical expression of General Relativity. That’s abstract, not concrete.
If there are no laws of nature, then the patterns of nature from which they are inferred are generated by nothing but chance (brute fact) and the predictability of natural events is pure illusion. This is just another way of expressing the Problem of Induction made famous by David Hume.
Concerning motivated belief, I would like to believe, truthfully, that I will be offered Covid vaccine this week. My wanting to believe it does not compel me to believe it. It might even make me doubly suspicious of someone’s facile claim that Covid vaccine will be made generally available in my area within a few days. Motives are not as easy to parse out as it may seem, and we have the choice to push back against our predispositions in the search for truth.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
68
The natural laws are logically preveniently what they have to be prior to instantiation and funnily enough that’s what nature does, continues to do, with its laws.
It wasn’t an emotive appeal to incredulity, it was recognizing I’m not offering anything close to “proof” or “evidence.” I’m appealing to stories. I actually don’t have much use for apologetics. I am well aware that we all pick our preferred narratives. So I think that if Christians want to be convincing to people outside the faith, they should tell the best stories.
Um, except I specifically pointed out that it wasn’t people like me whose stories I find most compelling, it’s people most unlike me, from totally different cultures, time periods, and religious backgrounds, who in spite of our differences, have similar experiences.
Oh, OK, my bad; I was going by what you said in the post I replied to:
“The way I know I’m not just a crazy person is you can go all over the world and find a family resemblance between believers whose hearts have been healed and transformed by their encounters with Jesus. They tell similar stories, testify to similar experiences, and show similar fruit of the Spirit in their lives, no matter what culture, language, or time period of history they inhabit. That a single reality could transcend the tremendous gaps of time and diversity of culture is compelling to me.”
[my bolding]
Yes, but do you see how what you just quoted is specifically referring to people not like me? People who have similar spiritual experiences to me could be unlike me on a hundred other significant metrics.
Apologetics or otherwise, what we believe to be true is largely (entirely?) about what we accept as evidence, including what we experience personally, and that may not be evidence that is ‘transferable’ or accepted by someone else as legitimate, depending.
An analogy is a three-legged horse, but try this:
An aborigine who, let’s say, has had no contact with moderns until he is given a demonstration of a functioning piece of 21st century technology, maybe a smartphone. He then later, without the device, tries to explain what it does to a fellow tribesman. His mate then pooh-poohs the description, calling it impossible and meaningless, saying it is irrational, and then demanding that his reasoning is flawless. God’s ‘technology’ and relationships with time and space and material are likewise beyond our ken.
We could stretch the analogy to include somehow that believing in the existence of the smartphone is a matter of life and death, and the fact of not accepting legitimate testimony has become lethal.
And then the conversation about gullibility ensues.
Of course, they could be unlike you, but you say that there’s a family resemblance, which suggests to me people who are similar. If you meant it to indicate people who are not like you, it seems an odd way to express that.
But I’m happy to accept that you didn’t mean that. Posts can be misinterpreted.
One thing that I like to keep in mind is that even in the text of Genesis, when God looks around at his creation (before humans are even mentioned) he looks and says that it is good. In other words, the Bible is saying that God delights and enjoys his creation, even independent of humans. He delights in the natural world even apart from living things according to Genesis 1. So if we want to put these two things together, God spent billions of years enjoying creation which as a scientist, I’m pretty jealous of that!
Some other assorted places in the Bible we have Psalm 104:31 where it talks about God rejoicing in his creation. It also speaks in Psalm 104:21 as lions seek their food from God. The idea that God was doing nothing for billions of years without humans I don’t think is consistent with God’s views on how he delights in his own creation.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
77
Close but no cigar! He’s greater than infinite. From eternity. He does physical things by letting them do themselves beyond ‘Let there be light’ (humbly instantiating the prevenient laws of physics). And they do the same things accordingly. He also does the transcendent; glory, Heaven.
I don’t even believe that God was sitting around for billions of years watching the universe as Mathew suggests.
I would not be jealous of such a thing and I don’t think God did any such thing. I love science but just doing that for billions of years is something else entirely.
What we do find in science is that time is part of the very structure of the universe. Therefore since God created the universe, God is not a part of that structure. And thus there is no support for the claim that God must have been sitting around for billion years watching the universe before getting around to the creation of human being. The Bible certainly tells a very different story: Genesis 1:23 “And there was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.” After creating the creatures of the oceans it was only a day before He started on the creatures of the land, capped off with the creation of man. So mankind didn’t even have a whole day to ourselves. Of course, I am no YEC, claiming this all took only 24 hours earth time for all this to happen. But 2 Peter 3:8 makes it quite clear that God is not confined to the measure of time in the physical universe, which only makes sense since He is not a physical/natural being whose existence is founded on the laws of nature.
I would not bet either way on the issue of God creating other universes any more than I would bet on the idea of other intelligent life in this universe. We simply do not know. The 13.8 billion years of the universe does not seem so long to me compared to the 4+billion years of life developing on the earth considering all that had to happen just to provide the materials out of which we are made (possible not only from supernova but maybe even from the collision of neutron stars as well).
The question asked is too simplistic. I also would give a 100% answer. Other ways of framing the question are more helpful than such a 0 to 100% linear scale. So for example, I rate myself as 1.5 on the Dawkins scale because I think doubt and questioning is necessary for mental health and living as if something is true is the only kind of knowledge we have. He could have also asked for comparisons with other types of knowledge. My 100% knowledge of God’s existence is not objective knowledge by which I think it is reasonable to expect others to accept such a thing as true. With regards to objective knowledge and what can actually be demonstrated, I am agnostic – I don’t think that sort of knowledge of God is even possible (not given the way God is running things in the universe we observe).
I give an answer of 100% because it is no less certain to me other things considered certain like whether the sun rose yesterday. I cannot prove that the universe was not created this morning with all our memories and data the way it is. So by 100% I am not referring to a nonsensical sort of certainty which simply does not exist but only referring to the usual sensible scale of knowledge in our lives.
First was, what if Dawkins included the claim of objective knowledge of God on his scale?
But then I realized that would be an irrational claim so he wouldn’t have thought of that.
Then I thought… what about an irrational extension to the Dawkins scale?
But then how should we number them? Should we just use negative numbers when we actually have irrational numbers? LOL I have included my 1.5 position as well.
1/sqrt(10) ~ .316 - I know God exists because I am God.
1/sqrt(7) ~ .408 - Atheists are lying about not believing in God.
1/sqrt(3) ~ .577 - I have objective knowledge of the existence of God.
1 - Strong theist. 100% imaginary probability of God. In the words of Carl Jung: “I do not believe, I know.” 1.5 - Rational theist. No probability can be calculated. I know God exists as well as I know anything which means I live my life accordingly, but doubt is a necessity for mental health.
2 - De facto theist. Very high imaginary probability but short of 100%. “I don’t know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there.”
3 - Leaning towards theism. Higher than 50% but not very high. “I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.”
4 - Completely impartial. Exactly 50% imaginary probability. “God’s existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.” sqrt(17) - Nobody can possibly have knowledge about the existence of any gods.
5 - Leaning towards atheism. Lower than 50% imaginary probability, but not very low. “I do not know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be skeptical.”
6 - De facto atheist. Very low imaginary probability, but short of zero. “I don’t know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.” sqrt(41) - I am not a victim of that particular childhood brainwashing, since that is the only reason people believe in any gods.
7 - Strong atheist. “I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung knows there is one.” sqrt(53) - I have objective scientific knowledge of the nonexistence of God.
I have changed “probability” into “imaginary probability” since there are no such probability calculations. I also leave some room for additions if you want to use 1/sqrt(2), 1/sqrt(5), 1/sqrt(6), or 1/sqrt(8) to stick some more irrational claims in between on the irrational extension to Dawkins scale. You can stick irrational numbers anywhere in this scale… in fact, why don’t I stick in a few.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts things very carefully about baptism: it is the only way the Church knows that definitely leads to salvation. That is doubly hedged: there may be other ways the Church does not know, and other ways that do not definitely lead to salvation.
