What’s harder about it?
I have taken a burden of proof to demonstrate a negative.
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Yeahhhh. The kind of thing that got OJ off. A miracle that blows science and rationality extrapolated from it out of their socks would be nice, how many sigmas away is that?
The impossibility of this makes me wonder if this is sarcasm?
The only reason to take such a burden is if you want others to accept the truth of such a negative claim. Agreeing to disagree is the only reasonable course when there is no objective evidence either way.
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I don’t think you would say that agreeing to disagree was the reasonable course if the claim was something we both consider outlandish. Like the existence of unicorns or dragons. I’d guess that you would also see the lack of evidence for such creatures lead to the reasonable conclusion that they don’t exist. Right?
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Not really…
I put my belief in God on the same level as the belief in fairies, UFOs, psychics, ghosts, healing with and crystals. No objective evidence or ability to demonstrate the truth of these things is all the same. I have only subjective reasons including personal experience for my belief in God and thus I accept that I can have no reasonable expectation that others should agree any more than any of these other things. If anything the existence of unicorns or dragons is even harder to shoot down because the universe is a VERY big place and even the possibilities among living things in the long history of earth does not exclude a possible tangible explanation for such myths.
Mostly what the evidence does is place limits on the claims in regards to these things which can be considered reasonable. Like… if Santa has a workshop at the north pole then it must not be visible… etc…
What a strange thing to do! He’s infinitely above and beyond those mental malfunctions.
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Then we have empirical evidence of >50σ lottery wins.
Wait. Are you saying you consider belief in unicorn reasonable? Is no belief unreasonable?
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But do we have evidence at a rate greater than their expected value? If so can we rule out lucky totems from other cultures as the active ingredient?
Absolutely. Ask Maggie, or read about George Müller’s answers to prayers, lucky totems pejorative aside.
You may dismiss Glenn Morton’s Turkish translator experience as a one-off, or Tim Keller’s parishioner, above, but they are hardly unique in Christian experience.
Every lottery win that has ever happened is 100% certain. 50 sigmas takes us to gambling by every inhabitant of many universes. At least 10^27. Universes.
That flourish was just for your enjoyment. But the larger point is, when the unusual happens, how do you pin down the active ingredient if there even is one? Every mathematically unlikely outcome has some expected value or other. Your assurance that “sure they do” doesn’t persuade.
Since the resurrection is the unexpected outcome which actually matters to Christians why do you muddy the waters with this sort of sideshow?
Your confirmation bias is showing, but it’s understandable, given your worldview. God’s providence in the lives of his children is hardly a sideshow. Was that a flourish for my enjoyment, too? You really should reread Maggie’s account again, putting yourself in her shoes. You don’t think it was ‘an unexpected outcome which actually mattered’ in her life? And you obviously have never read any of George Müller, not that the occasion has never been presented to you. We could talk about my own decades long Co-instants Log sometime, too. I have one series of a dozen disjointed events, except for their mutual meaning, and they became significant in a couple of lifepath changes, and not just mine.
This exchange is getting us nowhere - my impression is that you want me to persuade you or somehow make you believe what I say, or perhaps you wish to persuade me to believe what you do?
We are free to come to our beliefs and thus I would rather each person comes to his/her beliefs by their own effort. The only proviso I would bring is that information is available to enable an informed decision.
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I was saying that the most the objective evidence can do is limit the claims we can make about such things as unicorns. How is it reasonable, for example, to insist there are no unicorns anywhere in the universe?
A lot of beliefs are unreasonable… even beliefs about unicorns… these are the ones which contradict the objective evidence, i.e. those which FAIL to limit themselves accordingly.
I’ve certainly read some Christians acknowledge the unreasonableness of what they believe. Its unreasonableness just isn’t sufficient to discount that belief. Even as an outsider I don’t think that is necessarily an unreasonable stance.
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The beliefs of some Christians and the beliefs of some atheist are indeed unreasonable, i.e. contrary to the objective evidence. But there is a big difference between contrary to the objective evidence and simply not having sufficient objective evidence for them. It is only the former type of belief which is unreasonable and I don’t buy into beliefs of that kind no matter how many Christians might support them.
What atheist belief is contrary to objective evidence