Reaching consensus on words happens in discourse communities of people contemporaneously using the same language. We can’t negotiate a consensus on what the 21st century English word ‘evidence’ means with Koine Greek speakers in the first century who used ἔλεγχος, which can also be translated “conviction,” so I have no idea how you think this relates to understanding how a Bible verse written in Koine Greek in the first century and translated to 21st century English corresponds to the same reality.
Hebrews 11:1 is defining faith as being confident in your hope. None of that speaks to any scientific claim about reality, as both faith and hope are abstractions, not aspects of the physical world about which one could theoretically collect empirical evidence anyway.
Science can examine and make claims about the physical world. Only the scientific naturalists claim that the physical world comprises all of reality.
What is not part of your experience of this world could be part of other people’s experience of this world. You do not have access to all of reality and you perceive a different reality than other people. I thought we already established that no one has objective access to absolute truth or absolute reality. It’s a kind of intellectual colonialism to say that you get to define reality for others based on what you can or cannot perceive. You don’t have to believe they are correct, but your perceptions aren’t the standard by which other people’s perceptions are objectively judged.
I agree with you. But my interests are not limited to the physical world and my definition of “this world” is not equivalent to “the physical world.” It is based on my experience of other dimensions of reality. It’s not scientific evidence, and it is subjective, but as I have said, empiricism is not the only path to knowledge and all knowledge is subjective to some degree, even empirical knowledge. At the bottom of every assertion about reality is some human construct. The question is how confident we are in our constructs, not what we have “proven.”
If a religious person is trying to make a scientific claim based on a faith-based epistemology. (“Humans lived with dinosaurs because the Bible tells me so” for example) they are applying the wrong source of knowledge to the quesiton at hand. We should use scientific epistemologies to answer scientific questions and faith-based epistemologies to answer other kinds of questions, like existential and relational and metaphysical and moral questions. So, if you are asking do I agree that religious people improperly reject evidence they should have confidence in when they reject scientific conclusions about scientific questions, absolutely.
5 minutes in the first commentary I grabbed and I think see the misunderstanding:
“The examples that follow demonstrate a posture of firm confidence in the promises of God even though the believers had not yet received the fulfillment of those promises (11:39).”
I agree that some personal experiences can be pretty compelling. But the growing awareness about how the mind is influenced by prior experiences, expectations and biases is precisely why skepticism is so appropriate.
I referred in my first post to evidence that suggests that all experiences are a kind of negotiation between bottom-up sensations and top-down mental models: what we experience is the modulated errors between what the brain expects its next inputs to be and what they actually are.
With the rotating mask illusion, you can experience this directly. The sensory input from your eyes faithfully transmits light bouncing off the concave surface of a mask, but your brain’s high-level model of faces insists that they are convex and literally over-rides the sensory input.
A YouTube presentation by neuroscientist Anil Seth (skip to the the 20:42 - 25:00 time segment if you’re in a hurry) further undermines the assumption that God experiences can be taken at face value, and demonstrates that our most private personal experiences are indeed open to scientific investigation.
What constitutes evidence for the way the world — including us — works, and what is our best guide in making our way through its moral landscape? “God is not the conclusion of an argument but the subject of an experience report” seems to me to beg a whole series of interesting questions. But is it evidence of a God’s reality?
If it seems to you that I am continually trying to sow doubt in your mind, you’re right! But doubt should be the flip side of curiosity, and I try to practice what I preach.
Your reading comprehension is different than mine. She won all five in the same order that she bought the ticketsandshe was the only one who bought a ticket in each (out of how many possible numbers?).
Two things I’ve grown fond of saying in these kind of discussions when they get to this level.
All it takes is a single instance of a person acting or making a choice for determinism to be false.
The other is that there are only 3 possible statements to explain the world: from nothing, an infinite regress, or an uncaused cause (whether it is aware of its action or not).
Beyond astronomical probabilities, orchestrated from outside of time and space and miraculous – I’m okay with that and so was Maggie. They didn’t happen when she didn’t need it, either!
So the question is, do you want to find God? I take it that’s a no.
And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who approaches Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him. Hebrews 11:6
Or do you want him to find you, recognizing your lostness? Sometimes that’s what it takes, being desperate, as we have just seen. Here is another – being found by God:
During a dark time in her life, a woman in my congregation complained that she had prayed over and over, “God, help me find you,” but had gotten nowhere. A Christian friend suggested to her that she might change her prayer to, “God, come and find me. After all, you are the Good Shepherd who goes looking for the lost sheep.” She concluded when she was recounting this to me, “The only reason I can tell you this story is – he did.”
While I haven’t asked it this question, I did ask it if an infinite series is possible through sequential steps. The answer was quite fascinating. If you are interested, I can find ChatGPT’s response which I copy and pasted here a few weeks ago.
To defer implies recognition as a skeptic that I might be wrong; not to defer to recognizes that you might be wrong.
Desperation leave any of us hoping for a saviour, but desperately wanting for something to be true doesn’t make it so. And lostness, confusion or uncertainty can point to an entirely different motivation: curiosity. Scientists eat confusion for a living!
In any case, the Amazon blurb for the book you quote says “Keller explains how the belief in a Christian God is, in fact, a sound and rational one.” Which brings us, again, to the question: what constitutes evidence?
No, that brings you again to the question. My take on God’s providence is quite clear, in my own life, you may have read, and in multitudes before and after Jesus’ time here in person (or Person). And there are other evidences that have long been written about.
…may be more about epistemic and presuppositional humility than it is about evidence, plus maybe one other question, what constitutes gullibility as opposed to reasonable belief and faith.
