Is it me, or does acknowledging objective and verifiable eyewitness testimony, create a crisis of belief for the agnostic atheist? Jamie Smith may call this cross-pressure. And rather than to live with this crisis, they must cast doubt on the evidence, the problem is, even at this time in modern history, the evidence is absolutely overwhelming.
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It’s you. (And in case you’re not aware, I’m a practicing Christian.)
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Fellow Christians mischaracterizing evidence is actually one of the things that made me initially start to question my faith and it eventually led me to leave the church.
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Just like it’s me when I see the contradiction of positing an infinite number of things?
It’s sounds like it was a faith that was received, and God began to test it. Be glad that it’s not over with yet.
(My point about their verifiability was that they were third party verifiable at the time. The facts in the accounts I have reported – I am not talking about miraculous healing, please note – the facts were external and not resulting from anyone’s subjective feeling or mere opinion, like “It’s my opinion that someone was miraculously healed.”)
It seems to me that the effort expended here has little to do with whether the facts are true or not, but how we label them. If we can label them as subjective, ta da, then we do not have to pay any attention to them.
I have no clue on that subject
That’s not what you said before
If (and since) they are true, then the ingenuous reader has an obligation to not disallow their obvious implications about the existence of the supernatural and truth in the Bible.
Keener’s chapter on Hume has been on my mind. Check out this quote where I substitute ‘providential intervention’ PI for ‘miracles’:
“Hume claims that uniform human experience leads us to not expect PI. But what happens when eyewitnesses report experiences of PI? How then can human experience be “uniformly” against PI? Many things happen that are not typical experience; we do not for that reason deny they ever happen.”
“We can come up with a nonsupernatural way to explain it if we wish, but merely dismissing inconvenient evidence is not a fair way to argue.”
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“PI” also works because we are talking about an M.O. ; - )
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Which is fine in court, as I can testify. I probably have here on BioLogos. I’ll search.
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There are very few, next to no, ingenuous readers. We have objective evidence.
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I don’t believe I’ve ever committed myself to any view of your thoughts or feelings on the subject of positing an infinite number of things.
This is the comment I remember:
Good, because that’s the comment I remember as well.
So it wouldn’t be wrong to read it as:
It might depend on what they meant by ‘logically possible’. In any case, I have no clue and I am confident that debate and thought are able to get us farther from an answer.
What I read in those quoted words, heymike3, is an over-riding vote of no-confidence expressed about our ability here in this forum to compellingly lay that question to rest. It wasn’t an expression of confidence in his own grasp of it all. He’s just more willing to wager on your ignorance or mistakenness about your own certainty in this than on his own affirmative knowledge of it. That’s what this outsider heard, anyway - please correct as necessary, @glipsnort.
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(An infinite number of things is impossible if they are produced one at a time! You can only have as many as have been made up to that point at any given time, no matter how far you look into the infinite future. An infinity of things in reality is a mirage.)
That’s not an impossible reading of his comment, and I can see how that could have been meant.
Forming an infinite set through successive addition is nonsense, plain and simple, philosophers of religion like Draper, though he is agnostic, last time I checked, would affirm as much.
It’s the possibility of an infinite regress as a brute fact (to which present events are added), that is the pivotal question. And brute facts that have no interest in the rational possibility of solipsism, appear quite disingenuous to me. Especially given the remarkable number of coincidences one can find in the world.