If I had to choose which book would be the most challenging to Evangelical Christians, and which might turn them to atheism or agnosticicsm, it would be this book:
Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary
Foreword by Guy P. Harrison
Kenneth W. Daniels has produced a powerful work that will give Christian readers much to think about. Why I Believed: Reflections of a Former Missionary is an important book that should be widely read. The author’s approach is gentle and honest while still managing to be unflinching and thorough. As a former fundamentalist Christian missionary who devoted far more time and energy than most to serving that religion, he obviously remembers what it feels like to be fully immersed in belief. Fortunately, Daniels has retained plenty of sympathy for those who cannot yet see that the supernatural claims of Christianity cannot stand up to honest scrutiny. This brilliant book is not a vicious attack on Christians. It is a strong but polite plea for them to see and hear new ideas, to consider the possibility that their belief system might be a mistake. Daniels maintains a humble tone throughout the book. He does not blast believers with arrogant claims of intellectual superiority on the question of faith. He simply shares thoughts and questions about his journey through Christianity and escape from it. This is a powerful story and Daniels has many piercing ideas that are likely to carry considerable weight with believers because of his difficult work as a missionary in Africa. Daniels earned his stripes as a committed Christian. He went way beyond the easy life of a casual Christian sitting in a pew on Sunday mornings. He lived his Christianity; he made serious commitments and followed through with sacrifices for his religion. For someone like him to walk away from it, with great reluctance, humility, and no rage says a lot. It gives Daniels tremendous credibility.
Daniels is well read and obviously knowledgeable about Christianity. Most importantly, however, he has retained a sense of respect and compassion for believers. Yes, he thinks they are wrong about their religious claims, but he has not turned his back on them as fellow humans. It is likely that many Christians will struggle to reconcile the wisdom and challenges found within Why I Believed with their own beliefs. The author’s impressive logic and intelligence, combined with a sensitive approach and his top-notch credentials as a Christian missionary, make it impossible for anyone to dismiss him as an angry crank or an irrelevant outsider. Daniels walked the walk, believing and serving with far more sincerity and dedication than most believers do. He writes:
I invite Christian readers to consider the possibility that my apostasy is a result not of divine or diabolical deception but of a simple weighing of the evidence … It might be that I am wrong. It might be that I have not sought God sufficiently or studied the Bible thoroughly enough or listened carefully enough to the many Christians who have admonished me … Maybe. But the knowledge that billions of seekers have lived and died, calling out to God for some definitive revelation without ever receiving it, or receiving revelation that conflicts with the revelation others have found, contributes to my suspicion that there is no personal God who reveals himself to anyone.
This is a book I will give to Christians because it is forceful and devastating to their irrational beliefs without belittling or mocking them. That Daniels is able to make such a powerful case against Christianity is impressive enough; that he is able to do it without drifting into attacks and name- calling makes Why I Believed an important book that should be read and discussed by both believers and nonbelievers.
It is available on kindle for 99 cents! You can download the kindle reader for free at Amazon.
One may wonder why someone like myself, a professing Christian and creationist would love this book. It raises many of the questions that few Evangelical are willing to engage in. Daniels echoed so many of my deepest personal doubts as well. I found a kinship with his questions, though I arrived at completely different answers. There is a good amount of material on Michael Behe and Bill Dembski’s influence on him, and later how he came to reject their claims.
I myself have been critical of some of the things in standard ID literature, but unlike Daniels, I arrived at acceptance of ID via different routes, so when Daniels lost faith in God because he lost faith in ID due to arguments such as those put forward on the internet (by Abby Smith and Andrea Bottaro at PandasThumb), I arrived at opposite conclusions because I did not necessarily take the inferential routes Behe and Dembski took. Daniels even makes reference to the uncommondescent weblog and names of people I’ve interacted with on the net.
This is probably the most well-written anti-Christian book in terms of scholarship and compassionate tone. I don’t agree with the final conclusions, but the questions raised are well-worth considering by anyone serious about these topics.
Interesting perspective. I would have thought the opposite to absolute truth would be absolute falsehood.
Is relative truth pretty much the opposite of tentative truth?
.
That is my estimate, not yours. You don't like it, I'm not suggesting you have to accept it or that you are necessarily wrong. Your methodology doesn't work for me however.
I have evidence that falsifies Mormonism, hence I can affix a 0 to the P(Mormonism). [See the book Abraham by Joseph Smith and the fraud of the papyri]
I have good theoretical arguments that the X value for atheism is 0 on eternal timescales, even if the P(atheism true) is 99.9999….%.
So at least that part of my equation is correct. 🙂
So the question is what is the P(Christianity) value?
As I pointed out, your insistence or repeatability (though understandable) will fail if the Christian God exists. A God that is at your beacon call to show up in every experiment and is as predictable as the differential equations of physics, is no God at all, but a law of physics! Hence it is an epistemologically inferior approach on such questions.
Richard Dawkins illustrated the problem with the repeatability epistemology for detecting God. If God appeared to Dawkins, Dawkins has gone on record saying he’d presume he’s hallucinating. The epistemology of repeatability you insist on has similar flaws. I suggest a more open-minded approach.
Your implicit claim of:
P(Christianity True) = 0
is based on your flawed epistemology. It will make
P(Christianity True) = 0
as a matter of fiat, not actual probability that it is true.
That’s not to say, I’m right — I’m just pointing out, the approach you suggest cannot be promoted as superior to mine, and in fact, if God exists, it is clearly inferior.
But if you personally say there is a formal chance Christianity could be true, formally you can say
P(Christianity True) > 0
Which then starts to be closer to affirming the above inequalities I provided above.
Now if you assign:
P(Christianity True) = 0
That’s up to you since we are talking about our own personal journey’s after all.
As I’ve said, I wouldn’t wager my soul on mindless OOL, multiverses, and Universal Common Ancestry.
I do fear we will face a wrath-filled Jesus on judgement day, the same Jesus who made the wasp larvae Darwin spoke of.
stcordova,
Based on what? You have still provided no evidence and you’ve not addressed the problem of two equally plausible gods each of whom will punish you for eternity for believing in the other.
It doesn’t appear that Pascal’s Wager is why you hold the beliefs you do. My bet is on childhood indoctrination — am I wrong?
Based on the miraculous appearance of life on Earth to me.
You might say, it doesn’t look miraculous to you. I respect that.
At least one of us is wrong as a matter of principle.
I’m wagering you’re wrong.
Come on… the “direct observation” thing is preposterous.
When multiple independent lines of evidence point to a conclusion, it doesn’t matter if the event happened in a distant past.
According to you we can only know about here and now
Dazz said:
It’s not true. Faith is required for everyone to operate. Faith in one’s memory, for example. Perhaps you should define what you mean by “faith”? Do you mean “religious faith”? That would be kind of a useless statement of a tautology. How would theistic faith differ from non-theistic faith in general terms?
First, can you support your assertion that there is no evidence of the supernatural? If not, that statement sounds an awful lot like an assertion of faith.
Do you deny that Dawkins and many others who identify as atheists and materialists believe that there is no god, believe there are no “supernatural” phenomena, or believe there is no afterlife? It’s one thing to cling to neutral phrasing when one positions their ideology; it’s quite another when the belief you deny on behalf of others is demonstrated when the belief in such things is actively ridiculed and attacked. People who merely lack a belief in something generally don’t spend their time ridiculing others who believe in that thing.
What makes you think that in order to find truth, reason and evidence should be used in any case? It seems to me that you are asserting here an absolute position that absent evidence, the only possible “honest” answer is “I don’t know”. Do you know for a fact that one cannot know a thing even if there is no evidence they can use to demonstrate that knowledge to others? If so, how did you come by that knowledge?
I doubt you know anything at all about my position.
I’m a theist and the only thing I consider to be an absolute truth is “I experience”. So, you are already wrong.
That the “approaches” are different is irrelevant to the fact that prior to implementing the approaches, one has faith in the approach methodology as “the” means of acquiring “truth”, and one has faith in the type of results each approach delivers as the type of results that signify “truth”. There is no fundamental difference between the two.
IOW, if I have faith in the methodology of personal experience as truth, and consider “what works for me” the type of result that exemplifies what truth means, then “consensus” and being able to “prove things to others via evidence” are concepts entirely irrelevant to how I define and acquire truths.
IMO, that’s like a Christian saying that it is naive to ask why the Bible is a better approach to truth: it’s naive because you are so completely committed to your ideological position that you cannot imagine others not accepting it as “the truth”.
If “I experience” and “A=A” are not treated as absolute truths in anyone’s worldview, then either their worldview is nonsense or they are equivocating, IMO. Every worldview has absolute truths, whether people admit it, deny it, or are simply unaware of them.
Also, most theists consider many absolute truths to be attainable.
It works pretty well in describing it a certain way. Science doesn’t ultimately explain anything. It just creates reliable, useful, descriptive models of a certain class of experienced phenomena.
If only.
No, one trusts his memory, his mind, his reason, his perception. What you have is blind faith. It doesn’t really need to be specifically religious faith, but blind faith in general: A-priori, unshakable beliefs.
I think I’ve already explained this. Any approach to truth requires a minimal set of premises that are assumed to be valid. The very act of picking your axioms and defending them requires reason, so reason is the only, unavoidable axiom when it comes to seeking truth. But that doesn’t mean one needs to have blind faith in reason, it’s just the assumption that reason *can* lead to “some” truth.
So what does that supernatural look like and how do you know the claims of supernatural events are true? If there’s evidence why is it that there’s no global agreement on what does the supernatural “look like”? Where’s the evidence?
Why doesn’t the Virgin Mary appear to anyone other than christians? and why only those of certain denominations? Confirmation bias, obviously
It’s perfectly reasonable to believe certain Gods don’t exist. Deism is unprovable and unfalsifiable, but as God is described as personal, caring, omnipotent, omniscient, source of objective morals, as myths and miracles are put in the mix, as those myths clearly conflict with scientific evidence, one is entitled to affirm that God does NOT exist. Tentatively, of course, but incredibly well supported
I don’t mean to offend you here, not comparing your belief with others, but don’t you think ridiculous belief systems do actually exist?
I don’t deny any belief on behalf of anyone. Not sure what you mean to say here. But yes, some myths are laughable. Not sure where I heard this, I think it was a debate and it was Hitchens who once said: If someone tells you he just turned a cracker into the body of Elvis, you’d think he’s nuts. If it’s bread into the body of Jesus, it’s just religion.
No, because there’s no a-priori truth in the scientific approach, other than the inescapable assumption that reason and observation work. Science puts it’s premises to the test with every experiment. Scientific consensus is not just arbitrary agreement, it’s based on systematic study of observation.
OK, so you don’t think there’s absolute truth other than “I experience”. Fair enough, but that doesn’t change a thing. You exemplify my initial argument perfectly: that there’s a religion for every believer that exists. There’s no way to know any truths by the means of faith other than convincing oneself that your particular interpretation or experience is true.
I probably should have elaborated on that, but I’m going to repeat myself anyway. Let me put it another way.
The premises of rationalism and the scientific method are fairly well established. Not unmovable, but polished enough that one can easily build on that and the proof is all around us in technology and progress of humanity. Religious truth doesn’t exist as such. Everyone has their own premises. Tons of them. Some groups share some, but there’s no way to know who’s ultimately right or wrong
What absolute truth would rationalism be based on?
I know. Most do, some don’t… just take your pick and roll with it
Nothing explains anything ultimately. Let me ask you something. If one could know absolute truths, and be able to provide ultimate explanations, wouldn’t that person be a source of absolute truth? Isn’t that supposed to be God’s territory?
I didn’t say that nor does that represent my position. What counts as a valid inference for you doesn’t for me. None of us here at TSZ or in the mortal human race are final arbiters of what is the right inference. Evolutionists have no right to forcibly declare their inference is substantially more valid than the inferences a scientifically inclined creationist who may have come to his conclusion independent of the Bible.
During my bouts of agnosticism, rather than what Ken Daniels did, I studied the literature of agnostics and atheists regarding OOL. I’ve concluded life from their writings (Hoyle, Denton, Yockey and other agnostics/atheists) or anything of comparable complexity to life is an atypical rather than typical event. At some point atypical events might be indistinguishable from miracles.
I also don’t believe Darwinian evolution solves the problem posed by the law of large numbers and high specificity of bio-molecule interactions in the nano-machines of life.
PS
What I have said is not to say I agree with the way my associates like Winston Ewert criticize Darwinian evolution. I have a completely different line of making my inference based on expected physical results. And he and I have had pointed disagreements.
Daniels lost his faith in the works of Behe and Dembski. But since my ID is based on different inferential routes (one that I think are less assailable), I still accept ID despite the valid crticisms Patrick/Mathgrrl has fielded against CSI.
I actually supported Patrick/Mathgrrl here:
That post didn’t get me tossed by UD, but I was walking on eggshells.
“Evolutionists” go where the evidence takes them, just like any other scientists. It’s just the honest thing to do. “Scientifically inclined creationists” who reject evidence because it conflicts with their beliefs are not really scientifically inclined IMO.
It’s not about world views and you know it.
Yes. Atheism. Including Happy Atheism. 🙂
He loves to be seen as a martyr, does Sal.
Well thank you any way for your opinions and for reading and responding.
As an addendum to the question of Pascal’s wager, each person assigns their own estimate of the probability value of proposition being true.
The Dawkins scale of belief to unbelief:
1.0 sure God exists
to
7.0 sure God does not exist
So each person ranks his probability estimates.
One can have their own estimates of payoffs and costs.
All that Pascal’s wager does is identify the most logically consistent wager with one’s belief system. It does not mean the premises are right, but it does suggest which decision is logically consistent with ones accepted premises.
If one has a personal view of:
P(Christianity True) > 0
there is likely a logical inference that can be made given that. Given that few people go all the way to Dawkins scale at 7.0, that means some have a 1% view Christianity could be right. Even a 0.0001% probability would merit concern.
I assign P(Mormonism True) = 0 because Joseph Smith has been shown to be a fraud. I can practically assign P(Mormonism True) = 0
In the casino, in real time I had to constantly re-adjust my probability estimates in real time based on the cards I observed coming out of the deck. I was an exhilarating experience. Some days I though smoke should come out of my ears since my poor little brain was being overworked crunching numbers….so it is reasonable someone’s probability P estimates to change as they go through life.
All the culture war stuff aside, as a human speaking to other humans, I think it is a fearful think for the world to fall in the hands of the Intelligent Designer. I find the thought personally frightening — there being no Christian God would be merciful to most of humanity. Hence I don’t worry as much about being wrong about YEC or ID like I did 10 years ago. It would be better for most of humanity if I am wrong.
How convenient. But that completely obliterates Pascal’s wager doesn’t it?. I mean if I assign atheism P=1, problem solved
Daz said:
First,.according to Merriam-Webster, faith is:
Do you have a strong belief in the scientific method? In the principles of logic? Do you trust your memory and capacity to reason? Then, despite your insistence otherwise, we are both men of faith.
Second, how do you know what I have, and don’t have, in terms of faith and belief? Your characterization of me can only be from some template in your own mind, because it certainly doesn’t correspond to my views or how I hold them.
Apparently you are new here, or else you wouldn’t make such a statement, as I have written extensively on this site about the nature of what “belief” means to me.
In my worldview/metaphysics, “belief” only means “to act as if true (without actually holding the proposition to actually be true)”, and “faith” is nothing more than trusting in something as long as it delivers the results I desire.
Why should such a set be “minimal”?
Unless, of course, you do not pick that axiom to be the “only, unavoidable axiom”. You haven’t yet said what you mean by “reason”. Do you mean logic? Or what? Are you avoiding offering definitions?
Or, one can assume the Bible, or the Koran, or deep meditation, or divine revelation, or popping some LSD *can* lead to “some” truth. One needn’t adopt “blind” faith to look for “some” truth anywhere.
You seem intent on characterizing religious or theistic faith as fundamentally “blind” – or, I would assume, “unreasonable”, and atheistic/materialistic forms of faith as fundamentally reasonable, or “not blind”.
Yet, other than just sorting them into piles convenient to your own ideology, you have yet to offer any reasoning or argument why one set is “blind”, and the other not. What is the difference between a blind faith, and a faith that is not blind? Indeed, what definition of faith are you using?
One of the problems with atheism is that if it is true, there’s no compelling reason to be an atheist, and many pretty good, practical reasons to not be an atheist.
stcordova,
Raised Pentecostal but never a believer, I would call myself an agnostic or atheist, depending on who you ask for a definition of these terms (I’m good with atheist myself).
Let me leave you with an image of the deep history of the Earth. I look at this and think of the amount of time it took to accumulate those layers of sediment in an aquatic depositional environment, then for their burial deep underground to be turned into metamorphic rock by the heat and pressure, then to be thrust upwards by tectonic forces and then weathered by rain and ice. That’s no small amount of time!
Except apparently I don’t know how to post an image! Here’s the link, but just about any image of the Rocky Mountains or the Himalayas will do.
http://wikitravel.org/upload/shared//thumb/8/83/Saint_Mary_Lake_and_Wildgoose_Island_Glacier_National_Park_Montana.jpg/450px-Saint_Mary_Lake_and_Wildgoose_Island_Glacier_National_Park_Montana.jpg
Norm Olsen,
Ah photo post worked!
Daz said:
If we’re being honest, no human being exists without preconceived ideas and bias – including, confirmation biases. “Evidence” doesn’t exist in an ideological, emotional, political or financial vacuum. Evidence is an interpretation of facts in light of a model, perspective, theory or view. Evidence is not what leads; it is the perspective that is doing the interpretation of facts and data that is in the lead.
You keep equivocating the term faith. Would you compare your faith in God with your trusting your vision for example? The scientific method is not perfect but pretty damn good. There are good reasons to affirm that because there are tons of examples of science delivering and producing repeatable and consistent results, that anyone, independently of their beliefs, can reproduce. Do I have “faith” in the scientific method the way you have faith in God? Well, let’s put that to the test. I can conceive a future where the scientific method is improved, or even replaced altogether by a better way to go about knowing truth. Can you say the same thing about your faith in God?
It really doesn’t matter what you take on faith. I didn’t mean to misrepresent you, I’m talking about faith in general. Sorry if I didn’t word my arguments properly. My point is that with faith, anything goes.
I don’t want to be the first one to provide more supporting evidence for Godwin’s law here, so I won’t comment on that :p
I meant “minimum”. My bad. English is my 3rd language. The important thing there is that those minimum premises don’t assume anything metaphysical.
I mean reason as thinking in a broad sense. As in Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” I guess. It’s true that I need to also invoke the classic logic axiom of non-contradiction to claim that you can’t choose to avoid reason because you need reason to do that.
Again, all that still requires reason as a prerequisite. If you have the Bible, the Quran, or tons of LSD, it’s still your reasoning what determines which one is picked and assumed to be (inerrantly) true. The source of that truth is still a more or less arbitrary choice, not the Bible, the Quran or Timothy Leary. The difference between rationalism and the rest of the choices is that it doesn’t postulate unnecessary, potentially false entities
Absolutely. Because as I have said many times already, you can’t settle in principle, who’s right and who’s wrong when someone professes a faith that’s in direct contradiction with another person’s faith. Not if you accept that faith on it’s own is a means to truth.
Now you are misrepresenting my position. Tentative truth is never blind. Show me the evidence of the supernatural and I’ll embrace it.
Norm,
Thanks for your response.
Thank you very much for posting the photo. That was an impressive trick to get it to show up in the comment section!!! I’ve never been able to do that.
There were discussions here at TSZ at the request of Alan Fox about YEC. I addressed the physical evidence that makes me believe in YEC in that discussion.
I thought faded_glory had very good criticism of my viewpoints there, which I deferred responding to until the later comments:
Regarding the strata, I think the layers happened rapidly. There were experiments in the University of Colorado Mines that showed the process of fast strata lamination that involves water.
One thing to point out, those alternating colors. Did you notice how distinct each layer is? It seems personally absurd that one kind of sediment is deposited for an era and then another kind suddenly emerges to form the distinct layers.
I go into issues with radiometric C14 dating, erosion dating, DNA dating, amino acid dating and the faint young sun paradox to defend my points in that discussion.
When I met faded_glory at the old ARN forum in 2004, I was much more eager to explore the YEC case because I felt I had something of value to myself. I still feel that way, but now I feel so sorry for humanity if the YEC God is the Designer of Noah’s flood — a flood some YECs estimate drowned 500 million people, many with suffocation by being buried alive.
The Old Testament God delights in inspiring fear. I believe the YEC God exists. He does seem a very fearful Intelligent Designer.
I post on YEC because I do feel some obligation to explore YEC and refine my arguments at TSZ since I share what I believe to be true with others outside of the internet as part of my ethical duty to warn people about the Designer’s great wrath.
Of course, we all have a cultural background, an upbringing, a baggage… You seem to imply that it’s ok to have all that supersede truth, or filter truth. If that’s the case, excuse me if it’s not, there’s absolutely no reason for anyone to tell anyone the’re wrong. It’s ultimate relativism across the board.
Let me make a distinction here. There are certain matters that science can’t address, and obviously cultural background, education, etc.. are inevitably going to affect one’s view on those (morals, politics…) I take exception to preexisting beliefs on metaphysics, and science denial. The hypocrisy of those rejecting certain fields of science and accepting others based on religious beliefs
stcordova,
Sorry, I was unclear. On what do you base your choice of Christianity rather than some other religious belief?
If I was taking Pascal’s Wager, I’d choose Cthulhu over some guy who let a manifestation of himself get nailed to a tree. The Great Old Ones have a higher negative payoff if you’re wrong about them.
I have no problem with that Sal. I disagree with your theology and interpretation of the evidence, but I believe you speak in good faith. Cheers.
stcordova,
The idea that the observed sediments could have been deposited rapidly has been disproved repeatedly. See here for an overview. Also do a search for “geologic strata” on the talkorigins.org site where creationists claims are packaged up pre-debunked.
The evidence not only doesn’t support YEC, it soundly disconfirms it.
Indeed, even if it were true that they were deposited rapidly, you still have to contend with the process of being compressed and baked deep within the Earth to form metamorphic rocks, and then the whole process of tectonic uplifting, plus the subsequent erosional processes. Rapid deposition doesn’t buy you enough time in a YEC perspective. Plus we can directly observe all of the processes that are involved and they are all gradual. This was understood by researchers even before radiometric dating methods were available.
#1 A straightforward reading of the Bible is that it claims humanity arose through a miraculous act. The genealogy of Jesus in Luke 3 reads like a family tree going all the way back to “Jesus the son supposedly of Joseph, the son of……Adam son of God” — about 75 generations, about 6000 years.
The evidence to my mind agrees with the claim humanity arose recently because evolutionary theory does not look mechanically feasible, plus the mtDNA studies of human, dog, and cattle females converge on a recent bottle neck. That seems a compelling coincidence.
Why is no one willing to stick their neck out for other mtDNA studies? mtDNA of human Eve was 6,500? That doesn’t mean she was the first female, but then we have strange coincidence of dogs and cattle with comparable “eve” dates. What else will we find if we look? I also think natural selection eliminates species/complex features faster than it makes them, hence evolutionary theory doesn’t work for me.
“God did it” is a better explanation, and if God did it about 6,000 years ago, then that lends credibility to the Bible. Whether that means the universe is old is another story….but that’s plenty to increase my P(Christianity) > 1%. 🙂
#2 The Bible has surprising historical accuracy (names of individuals, places, etc.), makes me believe some of the other claims are credible. The latest was discovery of the seal of Hezekiah one of Jesus ancestors, about 10 generations down from King David, who was 13 down from Abraham, who was 11 down from Noah, who was 9 from Adam. There is evidence the tomb of Joseph great grand son of Abraham has been discovered. If the burial places of Abraham and Joseph are authentic, a DNA test might show consistency.
#3 The best explanation for Christian belief in the Era of Nero (AD 61 persecution) is because the Apostles (like Paul) and disciples (like Luke) were real people. Holy communion was instituted early in Christian tradition as far as can be told even by secular historians. So when was the resurrection Myth fabricated? AD 300, AD200, AD 100, AD 90, AD 61, AD 40? If Jesus died AD 33 that’s only about 28 years before Nero was feeding Christians to the lions. So when did the myth get instituted and how? Did a group of men in AD 33 conspire to say “Let’s go spread this false message that we’re eye witnesses to someone name Jesus dying on the cross and getting resurrected.” Or was it just one man concocted a story and got every else to believe there were a cloud of witnesses? What does the story sound like, “a poor carpenter’s son died on the cross so you can have eternal life.” Surely such a message is not quite as compelling as the pagan gods of the day. It would seem to me, people believed it because they saw the miracles performed by the Apostles and disciples. The numerous names listed in the New Testament letters suggest there was a real community there of Chirstians by Nero’s time. After all, why would a letter like Paul’s Epistle to the Romans be so venerated by a community that was getting persecuted by Nero if Paul were not real? How about Peter’s epistle to those who also knew Paul.
What about Luke’s mention of Sergius Paulus, the specific names of tribunes and tetrarch’s and all sorts of obscure facts in geographically dispersed areas. It’s not like he had google or that there were large public libraries with names of all these officials that he could draw upon in some conspiratorial account we call “Acts” and “the gospel according to Luke”.
Also how did the early Christian community accept it as cannon if Luke was not real since Luke mentions many of the early Christians by name. Did he leave his works on some park bench and it got picked up and people started believing it?
See this name:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergius_Paulus
See this:
http://www.biblehistory.net/newsletter/paulus.htm
As even agnostic Bart Ehrman points out, it seems many of the people name in the New Testament were real people. Jesus was a historical figure.
Ken Daniels gives his mass delusion explanation.
#4. I think there is credible evidence calling upon the name of Jesus stops demonic attacks. I posted this outrageous article at UD:
….
Any way, P(Christianity True) > 1% > P(Mormonism True) = 0%
That’s enough in my book to assert the superior Expectation Value payoff:
E_net(Christianity) = infinity
in view of my probability estimates:
E_net (Atheism) = -infinity
Hence even though my probability estimate is low, the expectation is still a vastly superior one to E_net(Atheism) on eternal timescales.
The one way for an atheist to make his EV favorable is to practically assume
P(Atheism true) = 100%, P(Christianity true) = 0%. One is free to make that assumption, but even Daniels won’t assert that, so where is the science and reason in his claims given his own words? That’s harsh, but that looks like a logical inconsistency even according to his own probability estimates. Among the skilled Advantage Players in my circle, we call people who consistently make negative EV bets : “ploppies”.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ploppies
If I thought P(Christiantiy True) = %1, that would be enough to get me on my knees to cry out for Christ’s mercy. And that’s where I was in 2001. That’s why Daniels and I took different paths.
You may not agree with my estimates. I respect that. But I told you the way I asses the odds. I wouldn’t risk my eternal destiny on Darwinian theories since I think a miracle made life.
Additionally, I think we can find even more evidence to increase my personal estimate of P(Christianity True). I find no such comparable physical/evidential arguments in other religions.
Finally, this one by physicist Richard Conn Henry that argues for the existence of God based on known science:
Makes me think God is very plausible, therefore everything listed above is not as outrageous as it may seem at first.
This hardly matters. The earth is old, life is young. It was born last Thursday, the night before Christmas.
If only it had been the night after Christmas – that would have saved me a fair amount of present-wrapping aggravation.
Daz said:
How can I be equivocating when I’ve asked you several times what you mean by the term and I’ve pasted a definition from Merriam-Webster? I’ve told you exactly what it means to me, and we all have that kind of faith. All of us. In something or someone.
If you mean something different by the term “faith”, then please share what you mean and I’ll let you know if I have that kind of faith or not – but you don’t just get to assume that I do.
I believe god exists, meaning I act as if god (and certain significant aspects of god) are true – most notably, I act as if morality is objective, binding, and carries with it necessary consequences. I’m not sure what you mean by “faith in god” because you haven’t defined what you mean by “faith” yet … I have faith/trust that everything which happens to me, occurs for my spiritual benefit. I have faith/trust that death is not the end of my existence. I have faith/trust that god is good, and that existence is fundamentally a system that promotes the good, even if we cannot see it from our limited perspective.
“Not perfect” for what? “Pretty damn good” … for what? For ascertaining truth? You haven’t responded to any question I’ve asked you about what you mean by this. How do you know the scientific method provides results that are even in the ballpark of “true”? You’d have to know the nature of truth in order to make any claims about the truth-value of the scientific method.
Where did you get the notion that truth has anything to do with “repeatable and consistent results that anyone, independently of their beliefs, can reproduce”?
You’re beginning with “what science is good at doing”, and then claiming that what science is good at doing = truth. But, you have not said why I or anyone else should begin with that notion of what “truth” is. To a Christian, for example, the Bible is what truth is, not “repeatable and consistent results that anyone, independently of their beliefs, can reproduce”. In fact, many Christians will say that the truth is only available through revelation to those with true Christian belief, and that it has absolutely nothing to do with consensus, predictable models.
You have faith that “truth” = what scientific method can deliver. Christians have faith that truth = what the Bible says, or what God reveals to believers. Both are positions of faith about what “truth” is and how it can be acquired. Your premise about the nature of what truth is doesn’t trump the Christian or any other premise about the nature of truth. It’s just the one you have faith in.
I don’t claim to know any truths (other than “I experience”); nor do I care if what I believe is true or not. What I care about is whether or not what I believe (“act as if true”) appears to be effective in acquiring the kind of life I wish to live. If I could more effectively live the kind of life I wish to live by being an atheist or by worshiping Zeus, I would adopt those beliefs.
I am a theist because theism provides me with the kind of life I wish to live – the kind of experience I wish to experience. I’m a pragmatic theist – I believe whatever gets me where I want to go, or whatever I think has the best chance of getting me where I want to go – meaning, experiencing what I wish to experience.
My particular, idiosyncratic form of theism has been very, very effective at providing me the kind of experience I want to have as I go through this life.
William, I believe that is the best argument for God.
Daz said:
What I’m doing is pointing out the fallacy of your claim that it is “the evidence” that is leading them, as if science magically bestows neutrality and objectivity upon humans involved in the endeavor.. It’s not the evidence that leads them, it is their personal, biased perspective.
There’s no way around pre-existing beliefs on metaphysics; it’s required to even think up a question, form a hypothesis and construct a test. Metaphysics, as defined by Merriam-Webster:
Without a concept of what knowledge, truth, reality, and the nature of things “is”, there’s no way to formulate a theory or figure out how to test it. Hence, metaphysics necessarily drives scientific endeavor, just as it drives any formulation of knowledge and truth.
You have faith in your metaphysics… others have faith in theirs. So? We all do. We trust our metaphysics, our memories, our minds, our methods.
Even when yours have failed you so badly in the past?
William,
Yes, you do. How many times do we have to go over this before it finally sinks in?
From May of this year:
Thank you for the NCSE article, but it is attacking a version of flood geology that many YECs don’t accept today. I know this because I attended ICC 2013 (International Conference on Creationism).
The fundamental issue are the internal clocks in buried fossils that indicate they were buried recently. Though there are issues with long-term radio metric dates, there are anomalies like 70 times more Uranium on the continental crusts than on the ocean floors. It seems to me a mechanism outside of normal ones was at work. There have been experiments at the proton-21 laboratory that indicate nuclear structure can be affected by electrical influence. If there were severe tectonic type activities it may have generated tremendous piezo electric effects that altered nuclear structure. I did a term paper in grad school on related topics.
I’ve read the works of Walter Brown, PhD from MIT and former professor at the Air Force Academy. It’s enough to put my P(Flood True) > 1%.
Even though your side has made a compelling case, I don’t feel has resolved it beyond reasonable doubt even on purely empirical grounds alone (theology set aside). Until there is a credible explanation for the issues I raised in the YEC 2 thread, reasonable doubt about the mainstream view persists in my mind.
If anything, I’m more confident today than in 2004 that the mainstream view about the supposed deep geological past is being refuted by the physical evidence.
What I wrote in the OP of the YEC 2 thread as grounds for reasonable doubt was not adequately refuted:
faded_glory made very good criticism of problems with the YEC model, but it did not solve the anomalies I put forward, and toward the end of the thread I put forward some responses to his objections. I don’t think either side conclusively resolved their case, but I don’t need 100% certainty to assert P(Noah’s Flood) > %1.
I provided 4 internal clocks that indicated youth of fossils (including 1 radiometric clock), and a possible alternative mechanisms to explain the issues with long term radio metric clocks, not to mention under the Old Earth/Young Life Creation model, old rocks (dated by K/Ar) don’t imply old fossils any more than a dog buried today in 65 million year old rocks implies the dog is 65 million years old!
As I said, I was an Old Earth Evolutionist growing up, I changed my mind in consideration of the empirical facts. And even if one might argue 99% of my case is weak, the 1% that is strong is enough for me to put forward my wager.
I put forward the wager in 2004, and in the last 11 years, new developments have emerged that have been quite heartening. Example:
How does this relates to Ken Daniels’ claims? Even he admits he holds out the possibility the creationists are right. He didn’t even address the OOL problem. Plain as day to me something non-living doesn’t spontaneously become alive. Biological and pre-biological materials (RNAs, DNAs, proteins) have half-lives. Time is the enemy against OOL, not the friend of it.
I’m not trying to be belligerent, but I’m stating the reasons, despite the fact Daniels made an outstanding critique of Christianity (one of the best), he most certainly could not erase reasonable doubt in my mind.
I gave a P(Christianity True) > %1 to emphasize that one doesn’t need a big number to arrive at E(Christianity) = infinity. Personally, I think P(Christianity True) is much greater than 1%, but I don’t need a big number to motivate me to pray for mercy. As well as Daniels argues his case against the Christian faith, he’s making a ploppy bet with his soul.
RichardTHughes said:
Whenever my metaphysics have failed me, I have changed them and moved on. The ones I currently employ have worked spectacularly for many years now.
Further comments:
Daz said:
What do you mean by “science denial”? Do you think someone out there denies that science is good at creating reliable, predictive/descriptive models of how physical matter and energy interact? I doubt that any theist out there (with the exception perhaps of a few fanatics) deny that science is good at this. Or, do you take exception what you think is a denial that the product of science is the same thing as “truth”?
Even scientists admit that science only provides provisional models, subject to later revision or abandonment for a better model. So what is it that you think anyone is “denying” about science? Is it “denial” to simply disagree with current scientific theory/perspective? Hardly.
What’s hypocritical about it? Many others, like myself, consider science a useful set of tools to be applied for our benefit and for our purposes as individuals and as a society. I’m not under any moral or ethical obligation to use only that one toolbox exclusively, nor is it hypocritical for me to only use those scientific tools that I find appropriate to my purposes. Nor am I under any moral or ethical obligation to accept every announcement or consensus proclamation from the scientific community as if they were robed priests purportedly repeating divine truths.
Science (or the product thereof) is a tool I use at my convenience and for my purposes, nothing more. It’s hardly “hypocritical” for me to dismiss what I don’t find practical or useful and only use that which I think will benefit me.
stcordova,
Don’t you think that rather predisposes you to approach the matters fearfully and non-objectively? Personally, I don’t buy multiverses, but do accept on reasonable grounds a non-created OoL and (on the evidence alone, which could just as easily point elsewhere) universal ancestry. That’s bad for my soul? Don’t care. I’m not going to pretend beliefs. The God that would punish integrity is not one I would waste any time worshipping.
Yes, that’s why I’m relying on you guys to contest and cross check my math, chemistry, physics and basic science. You all have corrected many of my mistakes and have raised valid concerns (especially as faded_glory did in the YEC 2 thread) that I should consider.
We don’t agree on many things, but when I’m convinced you’ve made your point, I will gratefully acknowledge it.
These internal clocks look suspiciously like Paley’s watch. Descent with modification?
Thank you for the kind words.
“Proclamation” from the scientific community is based on evidence. You don’t need to take any scientist’s word as gospel, nothing stops you from evaluating the evidence by yourself. What I was trying to convey is that I find intellectually dishonest to cherry pick bits and pieces of evidence, depending on what field they support because of some more or less arbitrary, preexisting religious belief.
Of course if you say you don’t really care about what’s true, I don’t think it matters all that much what definition of truth (absolute, provisional…) we’re talking about.
But yes, scientific knowledge is never settled. Not sure if you’re implying that it’s therefore a weaker form of truth than faith based truth.
The thing is that every time you use those tools, based on scientific knowledge, you are putting that provisional truth to the test. You’re often even entrusting your life to it. Provisional truth can’t be that bad, and I highly doubt you don’t care if it’s true when you’re on a situation where your life may depend on that provisional truth.
Not saying this applies to you, but many creationists claim evolution can’t produce innovation, that the process can’t get you anywhere even in principle, being partially driven by random events. They will go to extreme lengths to reject the evidence, or pretend there’s none, but the same models are applied in many fields of technology and industry, and have produced excellent results: genetic algorithms
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genalg/genalg.html#examples
If what they said was true, those tools wouldn’t work. Rejecting the evidence amounts to contending that the plane which wings where produced by a genetic algorithm can’t fly, that some telecommunication infrastructures they’re using shouldn’t work, etc…
There are tools that creationists use, possibly every day, potentially putting their own life on the line, that depend on models based on theories they claim are bunk.
I find it disingenuous to act like provisional truth is somehow in a different level of provisionality depending on what field of science one is dealing with. It’s just as provisional for evolution as for any other theory.
At some point certain hypothesis, or theories are so well supported by evidence that they are as close a fact as it gets. It’s still provisional because the theory can always be expanded or replaced by a better one, like Newton’s T of gravity, that worked almost perfectly and still does, but was superseded by Einstein’s.
It still requires no faith in gravity to go on a walkabout in fear of soaring up into the stratosphere because some scientist might have missed some term in an equation.
Maybe it’s not hypocritical, maybe it’s just ignorant and you’re actually using those tools without even knowing it. Maybe you couldn’t be reading this right now if it wasn’t for those tools
Such as? The creationist Blyth pioneered the notion of Natural Selection, not Darwin.
stcordova,
Using the bible as evidence that the bible is true is . . . less than convincing.
The same can be said for any historical fiction or even non-historical fiction. There are plenty of real world referents in Harry Potter. That doesn’t make Hogwarts real.
Even if some were, that has no bearing on the existence of a god.
The evidence for that is remarkably slim. There are no contemporary accounts to support that claim.
Now you also need evidence to support the idea that demonic attacks actually occur.
How about P(Islam True), P(Hinduism True), P(Buddhism True), and especially P(A god who will torment you forever for trying to scam it with Pascal’s Wager True)?
As I said before, it doesn’t appear that Pascal’s Wager is why you hold the beliefs you do. My bet is on childhood indoctrination — am I wrong?
stcordova,
The specific flood model doesn’t matter if it claims rapid deposition. All that claim that are disconfirmed by the evidence. Start at this paragraph in the NCSE paper and you find many examples of structures that could not have formed rapidly:
Is there any evidence that would convince you to stop believing in YEC?
That’s not what his argument said, so that’s a pathetic attempt at a rebuttal.
One sign of arguing in good faith is accurately representing the argument of your opponent. Wouldn’t you agree, Patrick?
Oh look, here’s a book that claims that Evolution is True. But we can’t actually use anything from the book to determine that the book is true. That would be … less than convincing.
The evidence for what is remarkably slim? There are no contemporary accounts to support what claim?
One sign of arguing in bad faith is holding on to positions that are untenable and refusing to be corrected. Wouldn’t you agree, Patrick?
You are wrong. I learned and accepted evolution in high school. No one in my family, not my parents ever seemed to even notice since in Roman Catholic households evolution is not a big deal. It was only in adulthood that my parents even knew I was a creationist.
Now you’re evaluating my story based on your stereotypes even though I have said repeatedly on the net, I was not raised as a YEC, but since high school, since junior high, even elementary school, I accepted the mainstream view. I even showed the diagram like the one that persuaded me since it was the picture I ran into in my books:
That wasn’t my argument Patrick, I stated what the Bible claimed namely the geneology of Jesus, and I gave supporting evidence the genealogy has physical evidence supporting that genealogy along many lines. You are attacking arguments I’m not even making. You are attacking the circular reasoning of others, but not my arguments. Again you attack the stereotypical arguments, but not what I actually said.
P(Bible True) > %1 in my assessment as a consequence of that physical evidence. Or do you deny Hezekiah was a real person? How about Aaron brother of Moses. Do you think the search for the Cohen Modal haplotype is in vain:
Harry Potter written in the internet age where names of people and cities easy to look up. Not so easy for Luke to write of cities going from Jerusalem to Rome and name officials like Pontius Pilate, Felix, Porcisu Festus, Sergius Paulus and accurate descriptions of customs and legal courtroom and legislative procedures is it? The distance from Jersualem to Rome is about 1,500 miles by air. Luke and Paul took a longer route by land and sea. The book of Acts reads like a diary. You think Luke (or some charlatan years after the fact) spent years researching names and places along a 1,400+ mile plus route without the means of modern libraries, maps, and Google? If it were a long-after-the-fact charlatan writing the book of Acts, how was he able to glean so many names accurately hundreds of years later without access to a vast repository of archaeological knowledge? The most reasonable explanation was it was a first hand account of actual events.
You can believe Richard Carrier and other Jesus mythicists if you want, but I don’t find their “scholarship” worthy of consideration.
Either Luke went through a lot of trouble to make find these names and places or Luke really was there. And if Luke was really there so was Paul and maybe the people Luke knew were really there from which the gospel of Luke was written.
That is why William Ramsey former atheist changed his wager:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Mitchell_Ramsay
Additionally what about the 5 porticos listed by John in the Pool of Siloam or the Pool of Bethesda discovered by archaeologist almost 2000 years after the writing by John. No where else in ancient literature were these place mentioned till discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. Maybe the John made it up or maybe he really was there and saw Jesus just as he said.
You asked why I view Chrisitianity based on the Bible as more credible than other religions. I don’t think the your choice of Chtulu has as much credibility as the two books Luke wrote in the New Testament.
Not that I think you would actually care, but I write for the benefit of those who might actually care. Here is an excellent treatment by a skeptical atheist turned Christian. He is a nationally known homicide detective who is skilled in recognizing fabricated testimonies. He found something about the New Testament that had the ring of authenticity relative to other religious writings (like Joseph Smith’s works):
http://www.ColdCaseChristianity.com
stcordova,
I’m about to be incommunicado for most of the rest of the day, so I won’t be able to respond to your response in detail until tomorrow. In the meantime, I am genuinely interested in this question?
I see nothing special about Christianity that makes it more credible than any of those.