The Case For Theism

[Uccisore]

Ingenium

The above reads as though you’re asserting that your particular position on Christianity doesn’t include a definition of “God” with particular characteristics. Can that be correct?

Kinda. I have thoughts on God, but there’s a lot I’m not sure on- I have no set opinion on how Omnipotence works, or what Omniscience is like, and my acceptance of theism (as you can see) isn’t centered on having one rock-solid understanding of what God is like. It’s solid enough from a laymen’s perspective; I’m not saying that I am God, or that Nature is God. But at the level this discussion needs to operate at, I’m not basing my theism primarily on a perfect, unassailable definition of God. We can get into what “many Christians say” about God, or what views are mainstream and what are not, if you feel it’s useful. Also, I’m in the middle of converting from one major sect to another, so there’s a lot I haven’t re-learned yet. If you think God can be shown incoherent in the broad strokes- that a broad understanding of His alleged qualities are in conflict, I’d have to say that’s very unlikely, but we can talk about it.

Or, can we assume that if it does have particulars, are they consistent with how God is addressed by the New Testament? Or, perhaps a better way to say it than ‘define’ is does your position include a description of God’s qualities?

That’s closer. I am striving currently to bring my understanding in line with tradition and the New Testament, and I am confident that once I arrive there, that understanding of God will be philosophically unassailable. It’s close enough for ‘practical’ discussion already.

If so, then what are they? And do you have specific beliefs about Jesus or Jesus’ qualities? And what are they? How does the trinity fit into your position, if at all?

Yeah, I think Jesus was fully God and Fully man, the kinds of things you would read in the Nicene Creed and such. Trinity is very important, but more to my understanding of the world than of God, if you can believe that. Having there be a Triune Godhead at the start of things establishes that the universe was ‘relational’ from the very beginning, which has an important impact on how I think about free will, ethics, and so on.

Which path shall we go down, then?

It’s been my experience that when talking about discrete entities, you can’t prove it to other people’ through philosophy. Philosophy can clear a path making a belief plausible, but justification is ultimately an individual thing.

I thought we’d try to agree that this discussion will focus only on the validity of Christianity as shown through logic and reason,

That’s where I’m more comfortable too- I’m no historian.

I’m going to be convinced in the ‘reasonableness’ of believing in the supernatural just because it all fits nicely into a coherent system.

Well, 'reasonable' doesn't mean 'true', so what else does it mean other than 'coherent'? 

Why? I have this niggling question that if this reality that God’s assumed to have created relies on thinking and evidence, then how can he, himself, be above or beyond it? In other words, why WOULDN’T he hold reason at the highest level?

I make no special appeals to God being 'beyond' reason or evidence at all. I think there's sufficient amounts of both to be a believer.  When I say that we can't require logic or reason to conclusively demonstrate the existence of God, I only say that because God is what we're talking about.  I also don't think logic or reason can conclusively demonstrate the existence of Abraham Lincoln, Utah, or our own mothers.  At some point, evidence requiring personal interpretation enters into it- that's just a feature of belief in concrete entities. 

How is that divorced from subjectivity? I’m not criticizing subjectivity or even claiming that it’s possible to be otherwise, mind you (although I have different ideas about it), but I’m just wondering how analyzing evidence through the filter of one’s individual circumstances is not subjectivity.

The distinction I’m making is that it is dependent on the person, without being up to the person. So, if God takes me up into heaven, shows me wonders, and generally gives me 100% proof that He exists, nothing about that situation has proven anything to you. At the same time, the fact that nothing has been proven to you doesn’t take away the value of the proof to me. But, none of this is up for interpretation or dependent on our attitudes- these are just brute facts about how evidence works. Another fact is that I can’t ‘give’ you the evidence, I can just tell you a story about it, which isn’t nearly as good. So I don’t know if you want to call that subjectivity or not.

Rather than me listing claims that I’ve heard that aren’t relevent to what fuels your belief, can you instead offer up a listing of the ones that you’ve expolored and been unable to refute through reason? Doesn’t have to be exhaustive, just the most convincing ones for you.

You mean the Christian claims I’ve been unable to refute through reason? The primary ones have been the Problem of Evil, and the existence of the supernatural. I’ve gone through phases in my life where both were very convincing positions for me, and I really do think they are the strongest angles to criticize Christianity from philosophically, but they seem very solidly defeated to me. A third angle would be the problem of pluralism- claiming that one religion is true when there are many others, but while I’ve written some about how to defeat it, I can’t say it was ever very threatening to me.

You claim it’s ‘coherent’ but I’m curious (and this is not intended to be an insult)…and this question arose from reading the phrase ‘a bigger portion of my personal belief’…do you think it’s possible that you’re compartmentalizing because there’s simply no other way to do Christianity?

I can’t discount the possibility, but I’m not aware of myself doing it. Now, there’s directions I don’t investigate in because they are so alien to what I already think about this and that that there’s no good reason to entertain them from my perspective, but it’s not a matter of the limits of my system of thought so much as the limits of time in a day. Can you give me an example of where most religious people do this, so I can see exactly what it is you mean?

This smells of strawman, because society doesn’t necessarily perceive the choice as ‘intellectually’ permissible, but instead considers it based upon ‘faith’ or ‘belief’, neither of which requires any particular degree of demonstrated intellectual capacity. If a doctor or lawyer or rocket scientist ‘believes’ or ‘has faith’, society equates their belief with that of a ditchdigger or housewife. It isn’t a function of intellect or talent or demonstrated expertise in some field.

Well, it seems like a strawman because it's designed to counter one.  If you knew how many times I've been told that religious people are idiots, and that 'all the right people' know better, you'd see why I feel the need to point this out. I've met skeptics who seem to base their entire case on the assertion that religious people are just plain dumb. I'm glad that you consider that a straw man, but the thought is common enough that it has to be addressed.  

that’s why we entertain stories of alien abductions, Bigfoot and gods. We don’t throw people in jail for what they believe to be true.

Well, the reason I’m bringing up the social point is specifically to refute the implication that believing in God is like believing in UFOs or Bigfoot, so I guess it’s not that big of a straw man after all. What I’m saying is, I have enough experience with intelligent, well presented theistic arguments that I can feel comfortable ignoring the ‘it’s just one of those crazy things people believe’ angle. Now, I understand that an atheist is bound to think of it that way, to some extent, but it has no argumentative baring on me.

That a being named Jesus was alive at some time isn’t really what’s central about the claim of him, is it?

I didn’t claim that. I’m claiming that THAT Jesus, the one we’re talking about, was alive at THAT time, and generally did the things ascribed to Him in the Gospels. That’s the point that only a few people considered to be ‘out there’ dispute.

Untold numbers of people can be verified through the usual evidentiary means (and from sources more reliable than the Bible, since it also contains a lot that is questiontable or contradictory)

Did you have a more reliable source of ancient history in mind when you said this?

Can you elaborate on what you mean by “the philosophical bias” that underlies skepticism towards the supernatural? And why do you claim that skepticism toward the supernatural can’t be based on historical documentation?

What I mean is, if a person considers it de facto impossible or very, very unlikely that anything supernatural could ever happen, then any historical record that describes such a thing is just demonstrating itself to be a flawed historical record, so there can be no good historical evidence of the supernatural by default. If, on the other hand, a person has no such bias, then the evidence of Jesus raising Lazarus is just as solid as the evidence of Him giving the Sermon on the Mount- they come from the same sources, and are presented in the same way.
I think a skeptic could use historical information to support his doubting (giving examples of famous hoaxes and such), but I don’t think they could be the basis of it- a reading of history that included no bias for or against the supernatural would have to note that there’s far, far more recorded instances of miracles and such than there are debunked hoaxes.

Agreed. Anyway, supernatural claims are common to most religious belief systems. There’d be a lot less reason to call them ‘belief systems’ if I could walk all the way to Japan, for example. Such a system would be invalidated if it were to allow for skepticism or free inquiry to find rational explanations for those of its propoents that don’t appear rational, and, if none can be found, to discard them.

I’m missing something here. When you say ‘rational explanations’, do you mean to say ‘explanations that conform to a materialistic framework’? My whole point in first establishing that belief in God is coherent is because once that’s agreed, then invoking God as an explanation for this and that is rational.

There are only anecdotal versions of ‘personal encounters with God’

No, there are also the actual experiences of the actual people who had them. These experiences are not anecdotal for the eyewitnesses.

and that there may be a lot of them can be just as reasonably attributed to be the product of cultural infusion,

And there you seem to be using ‘reasonably’ the way I would use it- it’s ‘reasonable’ for you to give that kind of explanation because of the philosophical framework you allow yourself to interpret these events through. I mean, do you have any particular examples of miraculous events in mind when you say this? Are there any examples of miraculous events that could happen to someone else, such that when you hear it in an anecdote, you would be unable to attribute it in such a way? If not, then this is a purely philosophical demand, and not evidential at all. It also sounds like the compartmentalizing you brought up earlier.

just as the children raised by non-Christians in a non-Christian culture do not come up with these anecdotes.

This simply isn’t the case, and I highly doubt you have any way to demonstrate that it is. What you’re doing above is inventing facts, because they fit with your way of seeing the situation. I don’t mean that insultingly, I wish there was another way to put it. But the fact is, reading the lives of the saints, you will find several examples of people, even from childhood, proclaiming uniquely Christian things, and describing uniquely Christian experiences when they had no known exposure to those claims, and certainly had been indoctrinated not to accept them. Of course, you’d be required to say that these things didn’t really happen, that people saying so must be lying or confused or whatever. But don’t confuse an interpretation required by your belief system for evidence of it.

[matmilne]

Who made them saints, who authorised the writings on the lives of the saints?

Your source of information on this subject is extreemly narrow.
you are a believer reading iformation from other believers. Therefore your objectivity in the matter is highly questionable.

The title is correct there is no way you can make an argument for theism without making it about personal belief.
it is a logical impossibility, because faith is the mechanism employed by the brain to bypass gaps in your knowledge. If you don’t have that knowledge then you have belief, you are a theist (not to be confused with Atheist)

You cannot logically prove a belief system, (requiring you to not use belief) by using belief, it is an irrational argument.

You cannot make a logical argument for theism without being a theist.

[Uccisore]

aporia

If you want to convince people that a religion based on certain extraordinary historical events is true, you’ve got to delve into that history. It’s a messy business, I can attest, and probably more work than anyone around here is willing to do.

What if I say that I'm trying to demonstrate that theism is rationally superior to atheism, and I'm using Christianity as my paradigmatic example of such?
 Now, there is a school of thought in the Christian west that seems to consider religion to be like Elizabethan-era magic: if your tallow candles were dipped during the wrong moon-phase, then you've completely ruined a 5 hour long ritual, and [i]no wonder[/i] the spirits didn't appear. 
 But I don't see any reason why I can't say that the Muslims have their miracle stories precisely for the same reason that Christians do - because they too are devout worshipers of God and have made a great deal of progress down the road towards theosis compared to the non-believer. Just as I can say that you are progressing down the path towards Christ because of your sincere love and pursuit of the truth (which is Christ in the end, after all) over those who run from the truth, seeking whatever they want to hear. 

From that reading I find that Christian apologetics about Jesus/miracles/resurrection generally ask us to assume way too much about the people surrounding Jesus that we don’t know. They insist that those people were faithful eyewitnesses who passed on only what they saw and not what they wanted to see or vaguely remembered.

I think that’s in line with how we’re asked to read history in general.

Many biblical scholars have opinions like this, and it’s not because they rule out the supernatural due to philosophical bias. They actually think the evidence suggests it, or at least that it’s a reasonably likely alternative to the orthodox story.

I don’t follow you here. We’re all reading the same Bible. If it says Jesus healed the sick, raised the dead, died, and came back to life three days later, then how does that body of evidence suggest that those things didn’t happen, except to the mind of someone who cannot accept that answer do to philosophical obligations, and must seek a different understanding? If I tell you I saw a flying saucer, you don’t start trying to figure out what I ‘really meant’ unless you’ve got some previous doubts about my really seeing a flying saucer, right?

[Reality_Check]

Uccisore wrote: When I say philosophical, I mean that the claims of Christianity are not logically impossible or inductively incredible.

Carleas wrote: As RC points out, a virgin giving birth is inductively incredible.

Uccisore wrote: Not just the virgin birth, but all the miraculous claims of the New Testament, right?

Right. So why did you write originally that the claims of Christianity are NOT inductively incredible?

Do you now admit, contrary to what you wrote earlier, that the claim, for example, that Jesus was physically resurrected from the dead IS an inductively incredible claim?

[Reality_Check]

@Uccisore

I don’t follow you here. We’re all reading the same Bible. If it says Jesus . . . died, and came back to life three days later, then how does that body of evidence suggest that those things didn’t happen, except to the mind of someone who cannot accept that answer do to philosophical obligations, and must seek a different understanding? [emphasis mine]

That is not a “body of evidence.” That is an unevidenced, inductively incredible assertion.

If I say (A) “I went to the supermarket yesterday and bought a loaf of bread,” well, fair enough. On the face of it, that claim is not inductively incredible and gives you no reason for undue pause in your provisional acceptance of it as true.

However, If I say (B) “I flapped my arms and flew through the air like a bird three miles to the supermarket, bought a loaf of bread, and then flew back home,” well, now we’ve got an entirely different claim to examine, no?

The latter claim IS inductively incredible. It is inductively incredible because in our common experience people do not flap their arms and fly like birds ( – and neither do they die, and three days later, live again). Now, you have a very good reason to doubt the verity of my claim.

You mean to say that you sincerely do not see an epistemic difference in cases (A) and (B)? . . . that, to you, both cases are imbued with the same degree of credibility?

[Uccisore]

Reality Check

You mean to say that you sincerely do not see an epistemic difference in cases (A) and (B)? . . . that, to you, both cases are imbued with the same degree of credibility?

Mm, not necessarily. But first, suppose I said I held the current world’s record for consecutive jumping jacks, or suppose I told you that my great grandfather was the foreman for the construction of the Hoover Dam. Would those be inductively incredible claims?

[Reality_Check]

@Uccisore

Reality Check

You mean to say that you sincerely do not see an epistemic difference in cases (A) and (B)? . . . that, to you, both cases are imbued with the same degree of credibility?

Mm, not necessarily. But first, suppose I said I held the current world’s record for consecutive jumping jacks, or suppose I told you that my great grandfather was the foreman for the construction of the Hoover Dam. Would those be inductively incredible claims?

Inductively, I can reason that someone does hold the world’s record for consecutive jumping jacks; thus, while it is unlikely that you are the person who holds that record, it would not be incredible if you were.

I can reason that someone very well may be the grandson of the foreman for the construction of the Hoover Dam; thus, while it is unlikely that you are that person, it would not be incredible if you were.

However, no one’s grandfather died, was dead for three days, and then returned to life. If you claim that your grandfather did so, then you are making an incredible, unbelievable claim.

The problem here is that you are confusing the unlikely with the incredible. Those are not the same thing. I suspect you do this only in regard to religious beliefs that you very much want to believe are true. I doubt that you do it with respect to any other belief that you have. This is not an atypical phenomenon among the religious.

[Xunzian]

I dunno, it all depends on what you take as a given.

Tonight over drinks, my girlfriend and I were laughing over a comment her co-worker made. He was giving an atheist co-worker some shit (jovial stuff, normal office humor, nothing to get excited about) when my girlfriend’s religion got brought up (she’s friends with both). She said she was a Buddhist and the Christian co-worker responded about how cool it was that everyone can worship God in their own way.

We were giggling because, of course, Buddhism doesn’t really have a God. She was saying how, “errr, Buddhism is a religion based on a guy who lived, and who died, that is all.” But I pointed out that what makes Buddha special, from a Buddhist perspective, is that he didn’t come back from the dead. I mean, Jesus came back from the dead three days later . . . psssssh, everybody does that.

I’m not saying that denying the antecedent is a valid philosophical position (for the record: it isn’t), but when taking a post-Christian view on life and death, you’ve gotta be careful.

[Reality_Check]

@Xunzian

I dunno, it all depends on what you take as a given.

What is the “it” that depends upon what is taken as a given?

[Uccisore]

Xunzian- Is someone in the thread committing the ‘denying the antecedent fallacy’? I’m not seeing it if so, which means it’s probably me!

Reality Check

The problem here is that you are confusing the unlikely with the incredible.

OK, let’s suppose I’m confused. How does one properly distinguish between the unlikely and the incredible? That is, what is it about my grandfather being the foreman of the Hoover Dam project that is merely unlikely, and my grandfather coming back from the dead that makes it incredible? You seem to be implying a qualitative rather than a quantitative difference, so I’m assuming it’s not just that one is more unlikely than the other, right?

[Reality_Check]

@Uccisore

Xunzian- Is someone in the thread committing the ‘denying the antecedent fallacy’? I’m not seeing it if so, which means it’s probably me!

Reality Check

The problem here is that you are confusing the unlikely with the incredible.

OK, let’s suppose I’m confused. How does one properly distinguish between the unlikely and the incredible? That is, what is it about my grandfather being the foreman of the Hoover Dam project that is merely unlikely, and my grandfather coming back from the dead that makes it incredible?

Medical science, to name one.

[thezeus18]

Well, knowing a theoretical way by which the thing could logically happen. You know, we all know how somebody could become skipping champion, or be the grandson of the guy who built Hoover Dam, but how on earth do you bring a guy back from the dead?

[Uccisore]

Reality Check

Medical science, to name one.

Glad to see you dodged that previous bullet, I had a reply almost submitted.
Anyways, in the most famous example of Ressurection that comes to mind, it’s alleged that God had a hand in it. What does medical science say about God’s ability to raise people from the dead?

[Reality_Check]

@Uccisore

Reality Check

Medical science, to name one.

Glad to see you dodged that previous bullet, I had a reply almost submitted.
Anyways, in the most famous example of Ressurection that comes to mind, it’s alleged that God had a hand in it. What does medical science say about God’s ability to raise people from the dead?

The question is not whether someone can assume the existence of a god. Anyone can assume the existence of whatever he wants.

The question is does anyone have a good reason to believe that a god exists?

You asserted that one reason to believe in Christianity is that Christianity makes no inductively incredible claims. I think I’ve shown that that is false. Christianity does make inductively incredible claims.

To expand on my earlier reply . . .

Frank Crowe, the construction superintendent for the Hoover Dam project, had children who had children. Although it is statistically unlikely that I know someone who is a grandchild of Frank Crowe, there is a real if slight probability that I do know such a person. Thus, if you claim that your grandfather is Frank Crowe then unless you’re just a liar or confused or mentally unstable, there is at least a fair probability that you are Frank Crowe’s grandson.

In other words, I will not disbelieve your claim because I find it incredible that a human being was the construction foreman for the Hoover Dam or that that human being had grandchildren. IOW, it is not the nature of the claim itself that causes almost instant disbelief. I will disbelieve the claim only on the basis that I figure you for a liar or for a mentally unstable person or the like.

OTOH, if you claim that your grandfather died, remained dead for three days, and then arose from the dead to resume his life, I will disbelieve that claim on the nature of the claim itself.

This is because medical science says that after a few hours of death certain irreversible physical processes take place that makes it unlikely beyond a perverse doubt for a dead person to regain life. No unbias person knows of such an event’s occurrence. So in this case, I either believe you or I believe generally accepted scientific theory and what reasonably seems to be the collective experience of the human species. No offense, but that’s not a hard decision to make.

[Uccisore]

Reality Check

You asserted that one reason to believe in Christianity is that Christianity makes no inductively incredible claims. I think I’ve shown that that is false. Christianity does make inductively incredible claims.

I don’t think you’ve established that the claims of Christianity are incredible without a presumption of materialism, which I addressed already. I think when you say ‘no unbias person’ towards the end of your post, that that’s code for ‘no materialist’, which is irrelevant, since materialism is incoherent on anything other than a pragmatic view of truth, which is clearly not what you’re arguing with here.
But to correct me on that, can you describe for me what an unbiased person, who believed that Jesus Christ died, remained dead for three days, then came back from the dead, would be like?
I know it’s not a hard decision to make, and that’s precisely the point- you haven’t shown that Christianity makes incredible claims, you’ve merely stated it. Your grounds of what counts as an incredible claim so far seem to be merely ‘that which present science can’t explain’, which rules out miraculous claims by definition , which is exactly what I’m talking about - a non-materialist has no reason at all to accept that standard, and since there’s nothing obviously incoherent about a non-materialist philosophy, that leaves you with a burden to demonstrate the truth of materialism (not just the validity, since you’ve made claims about what anybody has a good reason to believe).
Also, your stacking the deck of believing me vs. believing the collective human experience is a misrepresentation. A third of the planet is presently Christian, and most of the rest believe in a religion that makes claims you would consider incredible. The choice you’re making is to side with a tiny little minority of the human experience, which has only had a statically interesting voice at all for a mere century or two. That’s fine, but let’s call it what it is.

[Faust]

Ucci - what of this “most people believe it” claim? Isn’t that just an appeal to authority?

Trusting in one’s senses is not an appeal to authority. It is a necessity - toward the survival of the individual, at least. If it’s an appeal to the “authority of our senses” - so be it. That is neither unexamined (untested) nor relevant. “Appeal to authority” means “external authority” - that is the philosophical objection.

An appeal to authority is not nonsensical, nor incoherent, nor “incredible”. But it constitutes an unexamined allegiance to others. That many of these others are fine people - “good company” - doesn’t establish their authority, it seems to me. I do often trust the testimony of others, but not about everything. What we do not experience directly, we may accept by inference - if there are some common qualities between the experience of others and our own. But there is no analog between my own experience and your stated relationship with your god. No common denominator.

I realise that this is not your whole case, nor does your case rest upon convincing me. But my questions are the type any atheist might ask. In any event, each component of your case needs to stand on its own, as you have drawn no causal connection bewteen them.

[Mad_Man_P]

Uccisore

Damn!

I’d hate to put any more weight on your shoulders Uccisore… already you have so many people to contend with… but I did have a vested interrest in this discussion… so… here goes…

@Uccisore

I don’t think you’ve established that the claims of Christianity are incredible without a presumption of materialism, which I addressed already. I think when you say ‘no unbias person’ towards the end of your post, that that’s code for ‘no materialist’, which is irrelevant, since materialism is incoherent on anything other than a pragmatic view of truth, which is clearly not what you’re arguing with here.

You make an excelent point and I agree with you all the way… I cannot demonstrate that my epistemic position is any more valid than yours…

So what do you suggest our epistomology should be? after that please explain how we can arrive at the existence of the christian god so that the christian claims no longer seem incredible…

Surely you see the circularity of believing the claims first…

“It’s not incredible because there is a god and there is a god because it’s not incredible.”

You seem to be heading in the stadard direction of presupposing the existence of god… but this presupposition is in and of itself unjustified as of yet… how do you justify it?

[Uccisore]

Mad Man P,

Yeah, I should have said something about the apparent circularity of my reasoning in that last post to save you the trouble- I saw where it could lead. And don’t worry about adding to my workload, you were the person I had primarily in mind when I constructed my opening post.

But to clarify, I’m not saying we must first believe in God, to believe in the Resurrection, to believe in God again. I’m saying that if one is merely not a materialist (that is, not excluding the ‘supernatural’ by default), the evidence is sufficient to go from there, to theism. So, the presupposition I’m requiring is an open mind towards the supernatural, not theism specifically.

EDIT: Also, I think that the only rational position for a person to be in is “not a materialist”, because I don’t think that the distinction between material/immaterial really has any content.

Faust-

Maybe you can clarify something for me, I think I’m on the right track. Yes, I am making a blatant appeal to authority as a part of one of my arguments. However, my understanding is that that’s a completely kosher move in an evidential argument. That most people believe something really is a valid point in a body of evidence, though you wouldn’t want to base your whole stand on it. The example I give often is black holes- I believe in black holes purely on the basis that most scientists seem to agree they exist. I have neither seen the evidence first hand, not do I have the education to interpret it if I did. I would have a hard time accepting that my belief, so founded, is unjustified.
Also, like I’ve said, I don’t think I’m making any effort to deny the reliability of the senses, so I don’t get the relevance of your points in that direction.

An appeal to authority is not nonsensical, nor incoherent, nor “incredible”. But it constitutes an unexamined allegiance to others. That many of these others are fine people - “good company” - doesn’t establish their authority, it seems to me.

No, that's true, and I think this point is a very personal one.  Like I've told others, the main reason why I include the "good company" point is because of how often I see people claiming that Christians are mostly anti-philosophical, anti-intellectual types.   If neither that point nor my refutation of it are relevant, I can accept that.  The discovery of the existence of Christian philosophy was an important thing to me. Philosophy was initially presented to me as 'that thing you do when you grow out of religion', and I operating under that mode of thinking for a couple years.   The discovery that that is not always the case now, and historically has not been the case, was a major boon to me, and so I think it's worth stating for the benefit of others who might be in that position.  

Also, I think much of the “What evidence is there to believe in a God” debates seem to put the individual believer on the spot, as though that believer is proposing the idea of God to a world that generally has no idea what such a thing would be until the believer explains himself.

Lastly, I do think there is a sort of an appeal to authority involved in the reliability of the senses- not in our day to day survival, but in arguing about it. In those conversations I’ve had or read in which a skeptic is questioning the senses and someone else is defending them, a presumption that ‘everybody does it’ or that ‘the senses are part of the human condition’ always seems to come up. That I must trust my senses doesn’t seem to be enough.

EDIT: Faust, you aren’t the first to ask in this thread what my reasons are that an atheist should become a theist, instead of just the ways I defend my own reasonable faith. My argument from atheism to theism would loosely be this- materialism is an incoherent position, firstly. Secondly, once a person is ambivalent about the ‘supernatural’, inductive versions of the Cosmological argument are sufficient to establish theism as a prime contender for the origins of the universe. This should be enough to put a person in the position of being a ‘seeking agnostic’. Personal experience would have to go the rest of the way of confirming theism from being a workable theory, to the thing to believe.

[Reality_Check]

@Uccisore

Reality Check

You asserted that one reason to believe in Christianity is that Christianity makes no inductively incredible claims. I think I’ve shown that that is false. Christianity does make inductively incredible claims.

I don’t think you’ve established that the claims of Christianity are incredible without a presumption of materialism, which I addressed already.

Nope. No one is assuming physicalism for purposes of this argument. What we are discussing is what it is that is reasonable to believe.

Whether physicalism is true or false, the fact remains that no unbiased person that we know about has ever witnessed a person’s being resurrected from the dead after three days – and this argues strongly against anyone’s claim that someone was so resurrected especially when the claim is no more than hearsay.

Whether physicalism is true or false, the fact remains that medical science has documented irreversible physical processes that occur in the body only hours after death that make a person’s resurrection back to life unlikely beyond a perverse doubt – and this argues strongly against anyone’s claim that someone was so resurrected especially when such a claim is based on nothing more than hearsay.

And what is your rebuttal to these solid facts?

It seems to be only the second or third hand claim that two or three highly biased people allegedly witnessed a resurrection.

Inductively, that is an incredibly weak argument. But that’s not your real argument, is it? In essence, your real argument is that no claim is inductively incredible and so, obviously, no Christian claim can be inductively incredible.

Physicalism, as it relates to this particular argument, is neither here nor there. It is the inductive method of argument that you have an issue with.

I think when you say ‘no unbias person’ towards the end of your post, that that’s code for ‘no materialist’, which is irrelevant, since materialism is incoherent on anything other than a pragmatic view of truth, which is clearly not what you’re arguing with here.

“No unbias person” is code for “no unbiased person” and for nothing else. If an antisemitic person tells me that the dirty Jew did the dirty deed (whatever “the dirty deed” is) I will be (and should be) less disposed to believe that the Jew actually did it than I will be if someone without obvious bias says that the Jewish guy did it.

But to correct me on that, can you describe for me what an unbiased person, who believed that Jesus Christ died, remained dead for three days, then came back from the dead, would be like?

Someone who has nothing obvious to gain by Jesus’ alleged resurrection. Pontius Pilate might be such a person and, given the bible’s version of events, he almost certainly would have known about it had it happened. Where is his independent account of Jesus’ resurrection? Where is anyone else’s??? There are numerous contemporaneous extra-biblical records extant from Jesus’ alleged lifetime, yet not one of them mentions anything about one of the greatest miracles that has ever occurred on earth – and you don’t find this odd if it actually happened as the bible, some decades later, says that it happened?

I know it’s not a hard decision to make, and that’s precisely the point- you haven’t shown that Christianity makes incredible claims, you’ve merely stated it. Your grounds of what counts as an incredible claim so far seem to be merely ‘that which present science can’t explain’, which rules out miraculous claims by definition , which is exactly what I’m talking about - a non-materialist has no reason at all to accept that standard, and since there’s nothing obviously incoherent about a non-materialist philosophy, that leaves you with a burden to demonstrate the truth of materialism (not just the validity, since you’ve made claims about what anybody has a good reason to believe).

This is precisely backwards. It is not the job of science to “explain” a resurrection (or anything else) that never occurred. It is the job of those who say that a resurrection did occur to explain how they reasonably might have come to that conclusion. So far, you haven’t.

To do this, you might begin by explaining why you believe that the irreversible physical processes that are observed to occur only a few hours after a person dies did not occur in this one instance even though neither you nor anyone else was present to observe anything that might have prevented their occurrence.

Also, your stacking the deck of believing me vs. believing the collective human experience is a misrepresentation. A third of the planet is presently Christian, and most of the rest believe in a religion that makes claims you would consider incredible. The choice you’re making is to side with a tiny little minority of the human experience, which has only had a statically interesting voice at all for a mere century or two. That’s fine, but let’s call it what it is.

You are confusing belief with experience. I never said that a majority of the earth’s inhabitants cannot be mistaken about their belief. I said that it has not been their experience to witness a person who has been dead for three days returning to life and that they have no good reason, as outlined above, to believe that such a thing has ever happened.

[Reality_Check]

@Uccisore

Maybe you can clarify something for me, I think I’m on the right track. Yes, I am making a blatant appeal to authority as a part of one of my arguments. However, my understanding is that that’s a completely kosher move in an evidential argument. That most people believe something really is a valid point in a body of evidence, though you wouldn’t want to base your whole stand on it.

The fallacy of appeal to authority is often misunderstood. It is not a fallacy to appeal to consensus expert opinion. The fact that virtually all the experts in a given field believe that X is the case is actually a pretty good reason for non-experts, too, to believe that X is the case. In almost goes without saying that the fact that the overwhelming consensus of experts believe that X is true does not mean that X is necessarily true but means only that it is a good reason for non-experts to believe that X is highly probably true.

The fact that the vast majority of non-experts in a given field believe something contrary to expert opinion is never a good reason to believe that the non-expert belief is true even though non-expert opinion may be exponentially greater than expert opinion.

The fact that the majority of non-experts on matters related to the human body believe that once-upon-a-time in a land far, far away there lived a man who died and yet who inexplicably did not suffer irreversible brain damage as a result of that death does not count more than does the majority of expert opinion on matters related to the human body which argues against that proposition.