This will be my last comment on it. I don’t see the point is A no B no A no B type of arguments.
My personal opinion has nothing to do with it. I grew up believing in it. For most of my life I accepted this as truth because of so many stories. Then realized it’s just bull crap. Every single person making magical claims have turned out to be fake.
Tarot card readers and palm readers don’t tell the future.
There are no levitating witches.
Those who see auras glowing off of people can’t find those people in the dark or behind concrete walls just an inch taller than the person.
Not a single person can turn into a bird. If you know someone who can turn into a bird please give me their contact I would love to be able to just animorph myself into one.
There’s no one who’s doing some ritual at night by candlelight cursing someone.
Then on the other other hand there is no American person who only knows English, decides to go to some third world nation to share the gospel and while there go into an African orphanage and heal crippled kids , make arms grow back and so on and we know this is true because they would be doing it and people would be believing it. They don’t go there and suddenly speak new languages they never studied.
None of this has to do with my personal opinion or even just my solo experience. It’s the fact they can’t go to st Jude’s right now and do it. Again, Jesus and the apostles did it before crowds. It made people believe.
If you want to believe in it, that’s fine and it’s fine if I don’t. Once a single person can provide concrete evidence I’ll believe it. So that’s my last comment in this thread on this subject.
Why should I believe that Dawkins exists? No amount of analysis of the electrons used in transmitting the statement supposedly from him has ever shown any trace of intelligence or meaning. The fact that Dawkins would have made humans differently if he were God should tell us that Dawkins isn’t God, but otherwise is not particularly useful information.
If the laws of nature are God’s usual patterns of running the universe, then “look this happens by natural laws” is not a good argument against God. But also, being merely patterns of running the universe, are not especially useful in and of themselves for telling us about God, just as analyzing the physics that allows you to read this post doesn’t help you to assess whether it has any intelligent content. Romans 1 says that God is evident to everyone, but he doesn’t start talking about molecular biology. Rather, Paul’s main example is the conscience. There is a Jewish legend that Abraham came to monotheism through contemplation of creation, but the biblical picture is that he was an ordinary pagan until God spoke to him. In light of knowing God, we can see His hand in everything. But considered merely scientifically, the universe is the way it is - this does not give proof or disproof of atheological or theological ideas on its own.
On a somewhat related subject, I particularly liked Tim Challies article on what happened at Asbury recently:
“You don’t need to care about everything. You don’t need to take an interest in everything. You don’t need to have an opinion on everything. You certainly don’t need to voice your opinion on everything. If a situation like that at Asbury doesn’t intersect your life in any way, you can pray for it or you can just never give it another thought—both perfectly valid responses under the circumstances.”
He is evident to me and other people. And my hunch is that on that great day, we will see that no one will have an excuse. But until then we will have to agree to disagree.
If you are interested, Faith and Philosophy has a review of a neat little book I came across last week. It’s a multi-view book on religious epistemology and each participant considers their viewpoint with respect to natural theology, divine hiddenness, and epistemic peer disagreement. The review is by Chris Tweedt, and the book is called Debating Christian Religious Epistemology.
I cannot approve of the arrogant westerner who marches into an aboriginal group to tell them how stupid, ignorant, and delusional they are.
Furthermore it puts one in the position of blind ignorance incapable of dealing with events which do not fit their conception of reality… and incapable of learning what a group of people different from them might teach them. I have seen this many times with atheists who prefer to think they are suffering from delusion and are out of touch with reality if they ever did have an experience with God.
So while I have not had experiences of ghosts, psychics, or UFOs to make me think they exist, I do not confuse the scope of my experiences with the limit of reality itself. And to make sense of this I have adopted the belief that reality is not exclusively objective (i.e. the same for everyone), but that there is an irreducibly subjective aspect to reality as well. Thus the gods or spirits of the aborigines can be just as real to them as quarks and black holes are to me.
This is not to say there is no difference between religious beliefs and what science has discovered – quite the contrary. The objective evidence in science provides justification for a reasonable expectation that others should agree with these things. There is such objective evidence for quarks and black holes. It doesn’t make them more real, but it does provide a basis for expecting other people to accept these results while I will deny that religious people (or ghost hunters, psychics, and UFO believers) can expect me to accept the truth of their claims, just because they claim to have experienced such things. Even if they are real to them, it doesn’t make them real to me.
Of course, all this will change if I do experience such things for myself… and it will not greatly upset my apple cart.
Just saying, once magic is shown to exist today I’ll accept it. Until then, I simply won’t. Does not matter what race, faith, age, gender or nationality they are. This is also not a uniquely western thing. It’s not a white thing, an American thing or a male thing. There are people from every nation that is equally skeptical because there is zero evidence.
This has nothing to do with personal experience and everything to do with the available data. I promise…. If one single person showed supernatural abilities… they would be billionaires and all over tv…… but there is not a single one…. Despite so many claiming to have seen magical bread or knows someone who knows someone who witnessed it.
You can’t experience what does not exist. I’ve not seen Bigfoot because I just keep missing him. I keep not seeing him because he’s not real. We can safely say he’s not real because there is zero evidence for it. Hundreds of thousands have seen it, none can provide any evidence for it. Same for these miracle workers and real life Harry Potters.
Perfectly reasonable. Same with the atheist who says this about God. Same for me regarding the things I have no reason to believe in. A reasonable expectation for others to accept your claims requires objective evidence.
And yes the magic show is an excellent demonstration why personal experience does not provide objective evidence. Just because your experience convinces you doesn’t mean it will convince another person even if they believe you really experienced what you say.
BUT I think people go too far when they assert their beliefs about reality over what they actually experience. If they make themselves immune to any change of belief about reality then they make themselves incapable of learning anything.
Doesn’t mean there is nobody with supernatural abilities who has no interest in fame and fortune. There are lots of people with no interest in such things. So… such generalities only show that no supernatural abilities is the general rule – it does not show that there isn’t even a single person with supernatural abilities.
Just saying…
There are in fact lots of things in the universe we have not experienced and that doesn’t mean they do not exist. So as reasonable as it is to not believe in what you haven’t seen – this doesn’t mean it is reasonable to equate the limit of your experience with the limit of reality itself, which is what you are doing when you make the limit of your experiences the measure of other people who are only too likely to have experienced things you haven’t.
Well people are free to believe in the superhero who just happens to escape all forms of evidence like Bigfoot. I’ll still state why I don’t believe it.
Anyways, for $25 I’ll do a magic spell for anyone in here for anything they want. No refunds. They work in mysterious ways. Ehh. If they don’t prefer me I have friends from every nations that can also do it. But because the moon is right tonight I’m willing to do it for 25% off.
Dale…I love it that you quoted that passage from Psalm 19…it was a night-time sky filled with stars —out in the deserts of southern California where neon signs and light from skyscrapers and cars did not (in those days at least) exist —it was a night like that when I began to wonder what the stars were telling me. Nope, I did not stop being an atheist that night — but it sure left an impression that had real meaning to me later!
There is a book called God’s Universe (by a retired astronomy professor) which quote one scientist as claiming that “nothing challenged his atheism so much as” some aspect in the development of the carbon atom. Guess you have to have been there for that one…never looked at a carbon atom myself…
But – point is — the universe does have a strange way of pointing to God…We’re just not conditioned to see things that way, I suppose.
I’d argue the existence of reason, the applicability of mathematics, the fact that anything exists at all point to the universe having a designer. Argument from beauty, argument from morality, etc all apply too.
Divine hiddenness is an interesting challenge to theism, and I’ve found some arguments like Hick’s idea of Epistemic Distance compelling to suggest God “needs” to keep a certain level of distance so we use our free will to know God. Otherwise we would be so overwhelmed by His goodness that it wouldn’t be much of a choice.