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
There is a difference between “beliefs of some atheists” and “atheist beliefs.” The following are claims I have heard made by atheists which are not reasonable.
- People only believe in God or in a religion because their parents raised them to do so.
- People only believe in God because they are afraid of death.
- You cannot be a good scientist if you believe in God.
- Atheists are more intelligent than theists.
Of course many if not most atheists know better than to make claims like this. And to be sure some atheists who have said such things are just being careless, but other atheists perhaps only repeating the careless claims of other atheists will insist they are true. Obviously being an atheist doesn’t automatically make you more intelligent, no matter what the statistics are.
Some more I’ve heard:
Religion is a primitive attempt at science which has now been replaced.
Evidence is needed to support any belief whatsoever.
Science will soon or at least eventually provide answers to all questions.
It may well become possible to live for ever inside computers.
I can’t insist that X does not exist anywhere if X is not defined. We know unicorns from tales and if someone say they saw a unicorn we can reasonably conclude that they are mistaken from the basis of what we understand unicorns to be. You can say that maybe there is “something” that we haven’t discovered about the universe that actually allows for magic and unicorns. But for now, the reasonable tentative position is that unicorns do not exist.
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I agree 1000%. Tentatively of course. I mean, you can never prove a negative can you? OOOOOOOOOH!!!
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Your second part sounds very defeatist. You are saying “do your own research” and I have. We could discuss why our conclusions then differ. Neither of us have the accumulated human knowledge. That’s why we discuss things, to point out important points the other part may have overlooked.
But that wasn’t the point here. The question was about an argument against theism. And the point was that the particular type of God that has the power to demonstrate anything and provide sufficient evidence for anyone AND wants everyone to believe he exists CANNOT exist by the mere fact that I don’t believe. The question of WHY that god has not provided sufficient evidence is less important to me. I care more about why I should believe. Because if I in fact should believe then I want to believe.
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Hmmm. I don’t want to should believe when there is no warrant for doing so. I just want to believe. Should I?