I think, having known atheists who believe in astrology, crystal healing, feng shui and various -mancies, that it’s an overestimate.
LOL! What did I tell you?
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At least for me, it isn’t about rejecting claims as much as not accepting claims because of a lack of evidence. Many atheists are just unconvinced by the arguments made by theists. Obviously, many here have found very compelling evidence in their lives that have led them to what they believe now. Not everyone has followed that path.
Please don’t take this as an insult, but in my expierence being exposed to various arguments for/ against the existence of God, most of the decisions we make regarding what to believe is ultimately left to us. In those arguments, there’s always seems to be an out for either side. Many people aren’t convinced of a entirely natural explanation of the Resurrection and the evidence we have can swing a person either way. The Prime Mover argument can be seen as evidence of a Prime Mover, but isn’t it possible that the Prime Mover is something natural? Are religious expierences just brain activity flaring up in certain regions, or the brain activity is being caused by something external (reaction to something external). Is the mind separate from the body and consciousness, or is it all neural activity (or maybe a electromagnetic field as new hypotheses suggest) ? Abiogenesis is another example. I personally am not convinced that any good explanation accurately overcomes the numerous hurdles that the specific theory has. Though I freely admit that whatever the first lifeform was could be significantly different than what we are imagining it as, which could help with some of the hurdles. For myself, I do take it as evidence of the creator and my belief is that it’s not a overcomable problem. If we get a better theory of abiogenesis then I’m certainly okay with accepting it as part of God’s design. Call me out for a God of the Gaps fallacy but it’s my belief and I don’t really care lol.
What I have learned is that ultimately if you aren’t starting with a supernatural paradigm then overcoming a naturalistic paradigm is almost impossible. I don’t see any amount of evidence that can’t be given a natural explanation which doesn’t allow for the possibility of the spiritual. I don’t know what evidence convinces people regularly to make the leap of faith outside of personal expierence but I hope that more people allows themselves to be open to the spiritual and maybe that changes perspective. To me most arguments and/or apologetics shouldn’t prove the existence of the Divine but lower our barriers and make it open to whatever might lie beyond our naturalistic assumptions.
-Liam
I might question the assumption that the term naturalism excludes the spiritual or any possible acts of a non local consciousness such as God. What seems miraculous to us may indeed be non- miraculous to an eternal non-temporal consciousness who exists in a “now” time (as does a photon). If this is the case, then God could exist within the natural world. This would turn our thinking upside down perhaps when we talk about what is meant by the term natural philosophy. Quantum physics it would seem can be evidence for this type of reality. Observance of a mind has been proven as a requirement for creation. It’s not only biblical, it’s scientifically feasible.and if this explains creation, all the other biblical truths are possible as well.
Hmmmm…it depends on whether your paradigm is axiomatic or open to contrary evidence. If your convictions are axiomatic, then no amount of evidence would ever persuade you otherwise. (I’m not referring to you personally—you aren’t an atheist; I’m using ‘you’ in a general sense.)
For example, imagine you experienced what is sometimes called an apparition crisis (and now I’m referencing an event that actually happened in my family): you see someone (for a brief second or two before he disappears) in your room saying goodbye, telling you that he has to go. Then, thirty minutes later, you discover that this person is actually dead—that he died in a car crash at the time of the apparition and that you had absolutely no way of knowing or even suspecting this beforehand. If you hold an axiomatic naturalistic paradigm, you would simply dismiss the event as a “coincidence” (
), or as a delusion that just happened to occur at exactly the moment of that person’s death, for no particular reason.
If, on the other hand, you are a materialist but remain open-minded and not dogmatically closed off to the possibility of a spiritual dimension, you might regard this as fairly strong evidence of a spiritual realm.
So ultimately, it comes down to whether your naturalistic convictions are dogmatic or merely the result of a lack of evidence or experience. If it’s the former, then there is literally nothing that could convince you. Even if you were to travel back in time and witness the risen Jesus appearing to the apostles and showing the peculiarities of the glorious body, you could still explain it away, perhaps by claiming that Jesus was an alien, a member of a human-like race that evolved in another galaxy (à la Battlestar Galactica; what a masterpiece of a show https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=48_xPLVZxKo&pp=ygUqTW9tZW50cyBvZiBwZXJmZWN0aW9uIGJhdHRsZXN0YXIgZ2FsYWN0aWNh ), using highly advanced technology that it’s inconceivable for us.
Luke 16:31: “they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.’”
That’s similar to what I have found. It’s just really, really hard to make yourself believe in something you don’t believe in. It does seem to be a chicken or egg type of problem.
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I have definetly heard this line of thinking before and I’m not necessarily opposed to it. Even arguments could be made that the Resurrection wasn’t a “miraculous” in the sense of no physical laws were violated. If Christ resurrected as a embodied spiritual entity, then I don’t think our natural laws have much to say that. With QM, I’ve heard one say here that QM could allow for God’s back door “intervention” into creation without disrupting normal laws. Ultimately though, to an atheist, I don’t think the distinction of what’s natural or not is necessarily helpful.
While I understand the distinction you’re making between dogmatic and axiomatic atheism, I think the barrier of a given naturalistic paradigm is still very hard to overcome even if you’re open to the evidence. In your understanding and expierence of apparition crisis, even a axiomatic atheist would is open to other interpretations is perfectly valid in suggesting that he doesn’t know what those expierences are but believe that science will find the answer to it eventually. Yes I’ll admit that their claim goes down to a belief, but I think some atheism is built on the belief that the evidence will continue to not show any evidence of reality beyond the natural. I still don’t see any particular aspect, evidence, or expierence that couldn’t be denied by a axiomatic atheist just to the lack of current scientific understanding.
And in my studies, I think that’s the most detrimental (in my personal opinion) result of the Enlightenment: the de-enchanting of reality. When everything is empirical and can be rationalized away, it’s hard to see anything more to reality. We lost the assumption that stated there’s something more out there (for better or for worse). But yet wierd things still happen to people, and most of the world still has that enchantment. But to me it remains a question unanswerable yet of how do we open people to the idea of a enchanted reality (that one must not escape reality in its various modern forms to feel that our world is enchanted)?
Hint: I think stories and storytelling are one of the best possible solutions to that but I’ll leave that for now
-Liam
I see a lot of wisdom in that. We humans like stories, and we are willing to suspend our disbelief when we are being told a story.
I would add modern skepticism to the list. I have heard from many other atheists that once you go down the road of asking if you are fooling yourself and apply the tools of skepticism, it’s hard to stop.
But that’s exactly where the dogma comes in: even if something can’t be explained materialistically now, it’s assumed that it surely will be in the future. And even if all the evidence surrounding a particular experience aligns with what religious people claim—say, an encounter with a soul—it’s still taken for granted that they must be wrong in interpreting it as a spiritual event, and that I, from a materialistic standpoint, must be right in insisting “it wasn’t real.”
If that’s not a dogmatic attitude, I don’t know what is.
To be honest, even witnessing the Resurrection of Jesus wouldn’t count as “proof” for someone who holds the unshakable belief that reality is purely material. After all, they could just as easily say that Jesus was a highly advanced alien using incomprehensible technology, and lying about being the Son of God. That explanation wouldn’t be a logical impossibility, just a desperate way to preserve the materialist worldview.
In short: being open to the spiritual requires the willingness to interpret a spiritual phenomenon for what is is. If you’re constantly trying to force it into naturalistic, a priori assumptions—then where is the openness, really?
If experiencing something firsthand (and I’d argue that seeing a deceased person when you have no idea that he was deceased and only after the apparition you discover that he just dies in a car crash) isn’t enough to convince you of its reality, then what would be? The answer: nothing. Not even the Resurrection like I said would force a supernatural interpretation if you aren’t open to it.
That’s absolutely true.
Even this is absolutely true. And this radical skepticism is one of the “sons” of the enlightenment.
Thanks for the reply. Regarding your comment about whether this would be a helpful argument with an atheist: I might suggest that if natural laws would allow for God to do what He does or at least Christians claim he does, an atheist is left with a very weak argument for their belief.
- Reading this, and recalling my own personal variation of a brief encounter with a deceased brother-in-law—two days before his nephew and I independently confirmed that he had died—it struck me that we are almost certainly not the first people to have had such experiences.
- If encounters of this general kind, in all their variations, have been occurring across cultures and generations—perhaps even as far back as humanity’s earliest experiences of death—then the origins of burial practices and religious belief seem less mysterious to me. At the very least, they would not require a purely abstract or speculative starting point, but could arise naturally from repeated human encounters with death that resist easy reduction to coincidence alone.
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I’m not sure we did. Perhaps we simply updated our ideas regarding ‘out there’.
We’ve discovered a lot of things that could be described as ‘something more out there’ since the enlightenment, including plate tectonics, genetics, lots of small islands, lots of previously unknown species (especially abyssal ones), undersea vents, planetary features, cosmic background radiation and antibiotics, and we’re in the process of discovering hundreds of planets ‘out there’, with the consequent questions of what or even who might be on them.