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

(Not that they are persuaded to take! I’m pretty sure we could also establish that he took it for a cut in pay, maybe even a considerable cut. Oops, sorry, I picked up the leash again. ; - )

So your evidence for God is that people can be talked into taking a job they initially didn’t want to take?

1 Like

Yep, that is the sum total of my argument. :roll_eyes:

The two nots make the nevertheless superfluous. Or the second not.

More want to believe. Their mind set is that they’d be ecstatic if a miracle happened. There would be no doubt if one ever did. No way of explaining it away through natural means like spontaneous remission. The fact that a naturally impossible healing happened without prayer could not be a coincidence. Claims of healing where nothing breaks the statistical surface aren’t even coincidence.

…neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead.
Luke 16:31

While it’s not absolutely irrational to think credible eyewitnesses for supernatural events are all mistaken, it seems incredibly unlikely to me.

I am not unconcerned that by editing my post I failed to make clear what I found unpersuasive.

2 Likes

Never have clearer points failed to have been made.

Objective evidence of our capacity for disingenuousness?

It’s the conclusion that they are supernatural events which is under question. Millions of people witness home runs, but that does not make home runs supernatural events.

You mentioned an example of spontaneous cancer remission before. How is that a supernatural event? While rare, spontaneous remissions happen quite often. So why would someone say that spontaneous remission is supernatural instead of natural?

1 Like

This seems to play well into Dale’s argument that there is objective and verifiable evidence for God’s providential intervention.

Glenn Morton’s Turkish translator experience is not on its face supernatural, but the sequence of events are, or his experience is one of the most astounding flukes ever recorded. And yet it’s just the tip of a proverbial iceberg (or an infinite number of cats).

Which parts of Glenn’s testimony can we verify?

That plays well into another argument here, since it objectively verifiable (:slightly_smiling_face:) that it is obviously not the sum total of my argument.

Which brings us back to my previous comment.

In my early experience, Henry Blackaby had an influential role for me. Like I said, Morton’s story is just the tip of the iceberg. Getting a sense then of God’s remarkable ability to intervene in my life, I was astounded by how he can do that with so many people in the world making their own decisions. Like the Turkish translator looking for change to buy cigarettes.

I shared with Dale the story of father coming home, and that was the experience that opened my eyes to the power of God’s providential intervention. And several years later, I would see first hand the power of God to heal in relation to believing prayer.

More likely evidence of our capacity to fool ourselves. Which is precisely why I’m looking for some principled way of evaluating evidence here.

2 Likes

At least you are acknowledging that there is some kind of evidence. ; - ) I don’t think anyone has pointed to any actual evidence from any of the witnesses that I have talked about as being subjective evidence. It appears to be just labeling the evidence from the witnesses as subjective merely because they are witnesses. Also note that they are firsthand witnesses.

You already have it. And you know that you can’t find it in others making claims using their own definitions of words.

Evidence is evidence. It does not have to be scientific for it to be factual and true. The righteous George Müller’s testimony of God’s providence is going to be denied next.

It is subjective because we only have the witness testimony.

The argument itself is also subjective because you are making discoveries after the data is in. False discoveries are a very real problem in big data sets within science. Life itself is perhaps one of the largest data sets, so we would expect to find extremely improbable events and correlations to occur even when they are not connected to one another. There is a very real threat of a scientist fooling themselves into thinking they have found an important connection within a massive data set, and the same would apply to real life.

1 Like