Factual evidence for Christians to rejoice in, remember and recount, and for true seekers to ponder

No, the former didn’t and the latter did, so we’re good. :+1:

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Who was the person who found a Turkish translator in Houston? I forget the specifics, but it something close to that. I seem to remember he was also a geologist. That was a good story. It also struck me how it was such an odd occurrence and it seemed to haunt him in the later years of his life.

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Yes, that was Glenn Morton. Cool story:

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Just rereading it, I like his discussion of the statistics.

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What are the odds of someone experiencing coincidences when they thought they could know God through philosophy apart from Jesus, to then discover that no one in the history of philosophy has taken the deductive arguments to mean that God can’t be proven apart from yourself? What are the odds?

It’s like what Glenn Morton says about having an astronomical chance of winning a lottery, and you were the only one who bought the ticket.

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I should have added that detail to Maggie’s five consecutive wins.
 

She was the only one who bought tickets.

It’s all a fluke and a lot of cats… oy vey

I remember the look of dismay when I told my agnostic philosophy of religion professor, whose other area of speciality was religious experience, my story.

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This claim can easily be tested by submitting your arguments to outsiders – which you have done here. It is an objective fact that outsiders frequently do not discern the objective meaning you claim is present in your accounts.

Given the notorious unreliability of human memory, I really can’t judge how good the correspondence was. Is it subjective when people – including those seeking God – pray sincerely and specifically and get exactly what they didn’t ask for?

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I could be mistaken, but I don’t think Dale is saying the meaning is undeniable, but the facts in their individual cases are.

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Now it feels like you are blindly throwing darts at the wall.

Only God can judge the sincerity of someone’s heart, and yes, sometimes God doesn’t fulfill sincere prayers, and sometimes he does.

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Thinking about it a little further… the one prayer that a person can count on, if asked for with sincerity, is the gift of the Holy Spirit. While that comes in different shapes and sizes, it is guaranteed to bear fruit and often remodels the entire house.

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It is also an objective fact that objective meaning can be simply denied. That denialism abounds may not be quite so obvious or welcomed by some (definitely not by those who are in denial!), but the proliferation of conspiracism and political tribalism certainly supports the contention (and there are of course other kinds of denialism).

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What if the meaning is denied by the denial of meaning?

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Yes, someone who presupposes that a certain kind of meaning cannot exist will not allow that meaning, even if it is true and evident to others. (That rather defines denialism, doesn’t it.) And some presuppositions are disingenuous and subjective.

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That may be the only way a person can look at the objective facts in these individual cases and not intuit the providence of God.

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I think your ‘intuit’ should be replaced by ‘deduce’ since we are talking about the presuppositions, the axioms, that deduction is based on. Call it cognitive bias, if you will – some biases are correct.

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Maybe we can settle on believe.

What I like about intuition, is the sense in which it is an instinctive, gutteral, or soulish understanding. Deduction seems too exclusively mental.

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But intuition can also lead us badly astray – it’s subjective and eminently fallible, like feelings. Children can be rational, wonderfully so, without breaking a sweat. :slightly_smiling_face: The ID crowd uses intuition extensively. (We have to use our minds to test our hearts.)

Maybe we can call intuition trustworthy if (and only if) it is correct cognitive bias based on correct belief?