Ragwortshire wrote:
However, if Thommo wishes to use the statement that resurrections are impossible as a premise in an argument, then naturally I want to know how this premise is to be justified!

Classic strategy for those with indefensible ideas of their own. Pretend you are teaching critical thinking to other people, who may simply be ragging on you, Rags. Sporting, IOW.

chairman bill wrote:we can conclude in certain circumstances a body can be 'dead' for some time... No miracles needed.

Somehow, when this comes around, I'm always reminded of the Miracle Max scenes in "The Princess Bride". All dead, and there's nothing to do but go through his pockets for loose change.

Ragwortshire wrote:
Obviously there is a massive gap between "we do not know that resurrections are impossible" and "I believe that Jesus was raised from the dead".

There's a massive gap somewhere. Perhaps it lies in pretending that such ideas should be discussed "seriously". Well, there's theology, and there's apologetics. And then there's wibbling.

chairman bill wrote:Resurrections are possible, and happen many times a day on operating tables or otherwise in the company of crash-carts & people delivering CPR (though less successful than some might think).

For several hours after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow. Phone calls tend to taper off.

Cito di Pense wrote:

Ragwortshire wrote:However, if Thommo wishes to use the statement that resurrections are impossible as a premise in an argument, then naturally I want to know how this premise is to be justified!

Classic strategy for those with indefensible ideas of their own. Pretend you are teaching critical thinking to other people, who may simply be ragging on you, Rags. Sporting, IOW.

I would not presume to try to teach critical thinking to anyone on this forum. And if you think my ideas are indefensible, then there is no use going on about how silly they are and how open I am to being made fun of - if you want to actually enlighten me, you must refute them!

Ragwortshire wrote:And if you think my ideas are indefensible, then there is no use going on about how silly they are and how open I am to being made fun of - if you want to actually enlighten me, you must refute them!

You know what they say about beating a dead horse, Rags, as far as enlightenment is concerned.

When I see someone seeking the limelight on an internet forum, I know what to make of it. I've seen four-year-olds who were more subtle about demanding attention.

Ragwortshire wrote:

tytalus wrote:
We'll have to agree to disagree on this one, Ragwortshire; I think there is a vast difference between the terms you're falsely equating here, that is, 'correct' vs. 'consistent', i.e. not explicitly debunked by reality. So far, from your three explanations I have 2 points for consistent vs. one for correct.

Apologies - the equivocation was actually unintentional, and I ought not to have used the word "correct". Of course there is nothing to say that a belief which is consistent, for which there is soft evidence, which I can live with and which rests on few assumptions must necessarily be correct. It just makes the belief, well, believable (for me at least). And so a belief which is consistent and meets the other three conditions (in order) better than any other belief, is simply, to me, the most believable belief.

Ok, glad we've settled that piece. I've already noted the poor quality and selective nature of your evidential standard, so on with the show.

tytalus wrote:No evidence so far that your belief system has been altered; though we have plenty of evidence of tortured and abandoned apologetics. I know of no credible evidence for, say, immortal souls. No alteration of hypotheses here. But that's fine, they're just your rules after all. Nothing riding on whether or not your arguments live up to them.

I must admit I am rather disappointed by this response. I thought you might give some description of what was actually wrong with the method I laid out, or how it could be improved. Alternatively, if you think I have some approximation to the right method, but am failing to actually follow it, then I thought you might point to a specific example where I have failed.

I think the differences between your method and its poor standard of evidence, and reason and science, are quite clear. Thommo has addressed the quality of evidence specifically already. So I was pointing out the lack of evidence that you follow your rules -- i.e. no evidence of a 'new' hypothesis, i.e. new belief system.

I have, in fact, altered my beliefs many times over the years for a wide variety of reasons, but I do not see what evidence I could possibly provide, on this forum, for this fact. If you can suggest evidence which I could provide but have not actually provided, then by all means, go for it!

So is it safe to say that none of the discussion here has produced any change? Because you could readily point to it if so. For my part I am an ex-xian, change noted; I also made a recent change to my views on abortion as a result of a thread on this forum, admittedly a slight one but still a change. You might understand why, after various skeptics have savaged your various apologetics over the course of this thread, that I would be dubious about these rules of yours.

tytalus wrote:
Thommo seems to have dealt with this adequately; your standard of evidence here is simply poor and not rigorous, and so I rightly dismiss it. It is interesting, though, how this sort of intuitive approach is so selectively applied by the believer as demonstrated by Occam's Laser's old favorite, 'you owe me $10,000.'

I'm pretty sure 'you owe me $10,000' is inconsistent with reality. If I owed someone money, there would be a reason for it (that is, after all, what it means to owe someone money), and if there was a reason for owing such a large sum then I would doubtless remember it. But I do not remember any such reason. Therefore I do not owe you $10,000.

On the other hand, I cannot possibly fault the method here. Present me with a statement which satisfies all of the conditions I have listed, but which I would find absurd (on the scale of 'you owe me $10,000'), and I will happily concede that the method I have outlined is irrevocably flawed.

Ok, to review your rules,

Ragwortshire wrote:1. Adopt an intuitive hypothesis (i.e., belief system).

'You owe me $10,000.'

2. Examine whether this hypothesis is logically consistent and concurs with the available evidence. If not, either alter the hypothesis so that it meets these criteria, or if this is impossible find a new hypothesis (again, intuitively). Once a consistent hypothesis is found, then proceed to 3.

Any logical inconsistency here? Is it illogical that you might owe me $10,000? Certainly not. Is there any available evidence? At least as much as there is for the immortal soul. Money exists, debt exists. It is possible.

3. Compare the hypothesis with alternatives on the basis of: soft evidence (as I defined in my previous post), number of necessary independent assumptions, and willingness to accept the implications (and possibly other things which I am forgetting at the moment) - the first being rather more important and the other two of about equal value.

The basic alternative being, you don't owe me a cent?

Edit: I suppose it's best to address what you would 'doubtless remember.' Do you remember everything that happens to you? Do you remember everything you owe to everyone? Why is your memory or intuition better than mine, in this hypothetical? I can pretend to be just as certain, after all. What are the chances that there is a reason and you forgot? What if it's been a couple of decades? What if it was recorded and no one told you? All possible.

By the way, I realise I have again failed to be precise here: I should have defined B as being soft evidence for A if A implies B, and in addition ¬A does not imply B. Obviously propositions which are necessarily true ought not to be included in the definition.

It is possible that you could owe me; I could have an intuition; I could claim there was a bill or receipt, or that I saw one, or someone else told me; how is this difficult given the poor standard of evidence?

If an alternative is deemed superior on these grounds, then investigate if a hybrid between the two, combining the best elements of both, is possible - if not, simply adopt the alternative. Either way, return to step 2 and check the new hypothesis for consistency. Leave the original hypothesis aside, to be returned to if the "better" one is discarded later.

If no alternative is deemed superior, then proceed to 4.

4. Be satisfied with the hypothesis/belief system.

Therefore I smile.

tytalus wrote:Please explain how asking the question 'does god exist?' and answering it with 'I don't know' is not even asking it. I mean, 'agnostic xian' is lol-worthy enough -- god is unknowable and yet you believe thus and so about it -- but the language just fails you here. 'I don't know' is an answer. It may be an answer you don't care for, but it is still an answer and the question was asked. I have asked and answered it: dispute the claim if you wish.

Technically, "I don't know" is merely a statement about your relation to the question. It's short for "I do not know what the answer to this question is." That clearly cannot itself be an answer to the question! If it were, you would know the answer - after all you presumably know that you don't know.

Ok, here I can see the complaint has moved from the asking to the answering, as clearly you haven't a leg to stand on re: asking the question. We now move to the equivocation over the meaning of 'answer.'

WordNet wrote:# S: (n) answer, reply, response (a statement (either spoken or written) that is made to reply to a question or request or criticism or accusation) "I waited several days for his answer"; "he wrote replies to several of his critics"
# S: (n) solution, answer, result, resolution, solvent (a statement that solves a problem or explains how to solve the problem) "they were trying to find a peaceful solution"; "the answers were in the back of the book"; "he computed the result to four decimal places"

My response satisfies the first definition and that makes it an answer despite your protests. But I see you are interested in a solution. The problem is, though, an article of faith is not a solution. It pretends to be a solution, certainly -- but there's no knowledge, no understanding. What does it mean, after all, to be a solution, as to a problem?

WordNet wrote:# S: (n) solution (a homogeneous mixture of two or more substances; frequently (but not necessarily) a liquid solution) "he used a solution of peroxide and water"
# S: (n) solution, answer, result, resolution, solvent (a statement that solves a problem or explains how to solve the problem) "they were trying to find a peaceful solution"; "the answers were in the back of the book"; "he computed the result to four decimal places"

Clearly we are not speaking of water-soluble solutions; so I suppose we're talking about a statement that explains something. Then we get to the believer's standard equivocation over what it means to explain something.

WordNet wrote:# S: (v) explain, explicate (make plain and comprehensible) "He explained the laws of physics to his students"
# S: (v) explain (define) "The committee explained their plan for fund-raising to the Dean"
# S: (v) excuse, explain (serve as a reason or cause or justification of) "Your need to sleep late does not excuse your late arrival at work"; "Her recent divorce may explain her reluctance to date again"

So, at what point did your article of faith answer that 'god exists' make something comprehensible, or explain something or explain how, or solve anything? Your article of faith seems to have the same explanatory value as 'I don't know,' i.e. none, except that my answer requires no enhanced interrogation of dictionaries to see it.

Although I hope to have predicted this series of moves accurately, I expect some further obfuscation, so by all means have at it.

Also what is wrong with being an agnostic theist? It merely highlights the distinction between knowledge and belief. Surely if someone described themselves as an agnostic positive atheist (not knowing whether or not God exists, but believing that God does not exist), that would not be a major problem, right?

I find it amusingly absurd:

wikipedia wrote:Agnostic theism is the philosophical view that encompasses both theism and agnosticism. For theism, an agnostic theist believes that the proposition at least one deity exists is true, but, per agnosticism, believes that the existence of gods is unknown or inherently unknowable. The agnostic theist may also or alternatively be agnostic regarding the properties of the god(s) they believe in. [1]

So, the agnostic theist believes that the existence of gods is unknown or unknowable, but believes in one anyway; and in your case, further adds the xian belief system on top of this unknown/unknowable quality. To me, it's like saying 'look, I have no idea, but based on jack-squat I will believe in all these articles of faith.' It is possibly the penultimate admission of intellectual bankruptcy -- conscious formation of baseless beliefs on nothing, knowing, admitting that you've got nothing.

As an aside, I don't find the 'agnostic positive atheist' construction any less absurd. That's like saying 'weak strong atheist.' I am 'weakly' atheistic in general (lacking belief in gods) and 'strong' towards the xian god-concepts I'm familiar with, that is, I believe they do not exist based on evidence (logical, ethical, evidential contradictions).

As further evidence of absurdity, you profess that the existence of gods is unknown or unknowable, but believe that one of them made itself...known.

Jesus of Nazereth existed as an historical person and possessed a complete human nature. He was endowed by God with the knowledge and authority necessary to reveal God's nature and purpose to the Israelites and by extension to all of humanity. The purpose of this revelation was to reconcile human beings both to God and to each other, and to strengthen by means of forgiveness our capacity to love. No additional knowledge, beyond that available from the natural world and the revelations of Jesus, is necessary to any person for this reconciliation to be achieved. As part of the revelation and as a sign of God's power over mortality, Jesus was resurrected after his bodily death.

The contradiction inspires another wtf picture, in this case a nod to Sophie since she liked the last one. You may need to take a few deep breaths.

Ragwortshire wrote:What reason is there at all for either of these things to be correct? If God does not exist, it does not follow that the universe must obey natural laws.

I should probably have written "only" natural laws. The universe does obey natural laws - unless you are going to deny things like gravity or the strong nuclear force.

So your contention is that other than "a god" (any god) and natural laws there are other things that could determine the behaviour of the universe - like what?

There are simply no other logical alternatives. If I'm wrong, this is a falsifiable statement and you should be able to give an example.

Ragwortshire wrote:Similarly for resurrections - just stating that God doesn't exist doesn't mean there can't be some other being which occasionally raises people from the dead, or even some sort of method accessible by humans for raising people from the dead. (I don't personally believe either of these, but while we're on the level of whether or not the universe obeys natural laws at all, then they are possible at least in principle.)

Incidentally, how does one prove that resurrections are impossible? That would be of course be hard evidence against my beliefs, if it were shown by rational argument to be the case.

Well, it really depends on whether you have a constantly shifting standard of evidence.

By your standards I could just say that it's not impossible and therefore reasonable to believe it, but by my much stronger standard (which you seem to be challenging me on for some reason rather than accepting it by your own standard, which seems to be shifting the goalposts I have to say), then we need more.

Fortunately, we have that more. If resurrection is not impossible, then it's possible. This means that for each person X who dies there is some finite probability p such that X is resurrected.

Whenever someone dies and is not resurrected, this therefore raises the probability of the hypothesis "resurrection is impossible". If a single person is resurrected the hypothesis is falsified.

We have somewhere upward of 7 billion trials (amongst humans alone!) raising the probability for this statement being true. This makes it a better evidenced claim than that the sun will rise tomorrow. Admittedly not all of these trials are documented, but the British government (for example) has multi-millions of accurate documentations of these deaths that did not result in resurrections for anyone who cares to challenge the claim - the evidence is publicly available.

So we have my well evidence claim, vs your non-evidenced claim.

Ragwortshire wrote:

Thommo wrote:I don't find this "soft evidence" at all compelling I have to say - which is because I don't accept it for either side of the argument, which is where you and I differ.

Very well put. I also think this is one point where the difference is rather fundamental. Though I do accept that if I accept this sort of soft evidence as a factor in belief, then it ought to be for both sides equally.

Then you should be considering these kinds of things a whole lot more carefully. The claim that the universe obeys natural laws and nothing else is very well evidence by your so called soft evidence, as is the claim resurrection is impossible and a thousand other things which conflict with your belief.

I do not believe you are meeting your standard here.

chairman bill wrote:Resurrections are possible, and happen many times a day on operating tables or otherwise in the company of crash-carts & people delivering CPR (though less successful than some might think). From the evidence concerning such resurrections (the process of which is quite well known to medical science), we can conclude in certain circumstances a body can be 'dead' for some time & still be successfully reanimated, albeit with varying degrees of brain damage, from apparently none at all, to quite a considerable amount, rendering the patient permanently bereft of higher brain function.

It is important to note that it is possible to provide data demonstrating that death has occurred, and a former corpse as proof of the resurrection. In the matter of the alleged Jesus of Nazereth, with have some accounts of his death (unevidenced) & his resurrection (unevidenced). I'd happily accept the possibility of his resurrection, but a little critical thinking suggests a number of qually possible alternative explanations for the accounts. No miracles needed.

Fair point, I never defined resurrection. For the purpose of this conversation I mean where a human has lived for at least one year, been in a brain dead state for 24 hours or more and then returns to a living state of self-sufficiency, without the aid of outside technology.

tytalus wrote:

The contradiction inspires another wtf picture, in this case a nod to Sophie since she liked the last one. You may need to take a few deep breaths.

That's . . . TERRIBLE! I liked that llama!

Thanks for that, though. I think that was just what I needed to dispel me of the Skippy myth, although I must say, Skippy is a nice idea.

Thommo wrote:So your contention is that other than "a god" (any god) and natural laws there are other things that could determine the behaviour of the universe - like what?

That's pretty much it - I am certainly not denying that natural laws exist! (Though to be precise, at the moment I do believe that God himself is not subject to them.) So yes; I will suggest other methods by which the behaviour of the universe could be determined. Of course I am not suggesting that any of these actually happen in our universe - merely that they are ways that could, in principle, be in effect in some possible universe.

Firstly, one could go back to old pagan-ish ideas - it would be possible for the behaviour of a universe to be determined by conscious "spirits" which were not gods (in the sense of not having created the universe). Secondly, the behaviour of the universe could be determined in a random fashion, according to some completely arbitrary probabilistic principle. Perhaps (although this is an offhand idea which I do not really expect to be coherent) we could be even more fanciful and imagine a universe in which every single particle has free will, so that the whole universe has literally complete freedom to behave in any way at all.

And of course, any combination of these possibilities with each other and with natural laws, would also be a possible method for determining the behaviour of the universe.

There is, however, and even more fundamental point to be made: Why does the behaviour of the universe need to be determined by anything at all? Why couldn't it just behave in an arbitrary fashion, obeying no laws - not even probabilistic ones - short of listing, at every point in time, the position and properties of every single particle?

Thommo wrote:

Ragwortshire wrote:Similarly for resurrections - just stating that God doesn't exist doesn't mean there can't be some other being which occasionally raises people from the dead, or even some sort of method accessible by humans for raising people from the dead. (I don't personally believe either of these, but while we're on the level of whether or not the universe obeys natural laws at all, then they are possible at least in principle.)

Incidentally, how does one prove that resurrections are impossible? That would be of course be hard evidence against my beliefs, if it were shown by rational argument to be the case.

Well, it really depends on whether you have a constantly shifting standard of evidence.

I am well aware of the danger of applying double standards here, and I do wish to avoid doing so (along with committing resulting fallacies) as rigorously as I can. This implies two things: Firstly, if at any point in this discussion I wish to establish soft evidence B for a proposition A, then I also accept the necessity of proving, by your standard of rigorous argument, both that B hold, and that A implies B.

Secondly, if you establish soft evidence for a belief, then I will consider it as evenly as I can alongside my existing beliefs. I will actually outline one immediate result of this later on in this post.

Thommo wrote:By your standards I could just say that it's not impossible and therefore reasonable to believe it, but by my much stronger standard (which you seem to be challenging me on for some reason rather than accepting it by your own standard, which seems to be shifting the goalposts I have to say), then we need more.

...

Whenever someone dies and is not resurrected, this therefore raises the probability of the hypothesis "resurrection is impossible". If a single person is resurrected the hypothesis is falsified.

Let's be clear here: What you have outlined above is precisely soft evidence for the impossibility of resurrections. Your argument is of the form "Resurrection being impossible implies that person X did not rise from the dead. Person X did not, in fact, rise from the dead." A is the statement "Resurrection is impossible", B is "Person X did not rise from the dead. A implies B, therefore B is soft evidence for A. (I have left out your arguments from probability because I intend to deal with them separately.)

Now this is a lot of soft evidence - as you say, seven billion instances of it. You are absolutely right to claim that this is, by my own standards, a pretty good belief to hold. So, as I promised, I shall consider this belief in comparison with my existing ones, and see what the result is!

Having another belief for comparison, the next step according to my algorithm is to see whether a hybrid between the two is possible. Is it possible to simply add the belief that resurrection is impossible, and leave it at that? Well, no, because my beliefs included "Jesus was raised from the dead" - so simply adding the new belief would make the belief system contradictory. (Assuming, of course, that it wasn't contradictory already!)

What other options remain to me, then? Well, I could always simply throw out the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead. However, let's suppose that I have soft evidence for that as well (after all, if I don't, there's no reason for me to believe it anyway). Is there yet another way in which I could come up with a new belief system, for which there was just as much soft evidence as if I simply added "Resurrection is impossible", but which is not contradictory? Yes: I could reformulate the new belief as "No more than one resurrection has ever taken place". This still has all of the soft evidence the old version had, but the contradiction is removed.

[EDIT: Well, that's not quite true. Firstly the reformulation ought to be "has never taken place or ever will take place", so that I'm not just talking about the past. And secondly there is less soft evidence by the measure of one person, because if I have, say, 7 billion and one recorded deaths and no resurrections, I can only take "At least 7 billion people have died and not risen from the dead" as my soft evidence. My reformulation doesn't, after all, imply that 7 billion and one people have died and not risen from the dead.

So there is a question here of whether the soft evidence for Jesus rising from the dead is sufficient to outweigh this discrepancy of one person. I *hope* this will prove to be *almost* the same question as whether there is any soft evidence for Jesus rising from the dead at all.]

The only remaining question to be answered is whether the new belief is actually independent of the others. If it turned out not to be, then of course there is no need to include it at all.

Thommo wrote:Fortunately, we have that more. If resurrection is not impossible, then it's possible. This means that for each person X who dies there is some finite probability p such that X is resurrected.

This is quite a subtle statement, but in fact I am quite convinced that it must be false. For example, suppose we were to discover a method of resurrection which relied explicitly on a knowledge of say, quantum mechanics. Then resurrection would not be impossible, but for anyone born before the year 1700 or so, the probability of that person being resurrected would be zero. Alternatively, if the method required eating dodo eggs before dying, then the probability after 1900 would be zero.

Now this is not to say that the probability of resurrection being impossible does not rise with each successive instance of a person failing to rise from the dead - it does, if I have my maths correct - but this is also equally true (again assuming correct maths) of any sort of soft evidence for anything, assuming certain discreteness conditions.

Ragwortshire wrote:

Let me state it again if it wasn't clear enough already: I do not know whether or not God exists. By the dictionary definitions of both terms, I'm an agnostic Christian theist.

I haven't (yet) been able to read all of the posts to this thread in the past few days, but I am a little confused (and to be honest, a little annoyed) by the above statement. I thought you've been saying all along that you have faith in God. How can you have faith in God and yet not know whether or not God exists? Wouldn't that be like saying that you're feeding your fish even though you don't know whether or not your fish exists?

Is this view of yourself as an agnostic theist the view that you've had of yourself all along in this thread? Or is this something new? If it's something new, that's fine. I understand changing perspectives. I still find that I go back and forth on whether or not I believe that God (well, a "Skippy-type" God) exists. Mostly, I don't believe. But I have moments (or even days) when I sort of do. Or at least when I really want to believe that God exists and when I really try to believe that God exists. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I'm not able to maintain such a belief for very long.

So if you're saying that sometimes you believe in the existence of God, and sometimes, you don't. I have no problem with that. However, if you're saying that all along, you've been consistent in claiming that you don't know whether or not God exists, that leaves me with a lot of questions.

This whole discussion is beginning to remind me of a movie which I really like called Lars and the Real Girl.

Sophie wrote:

Ragwortshire wrote:Let me state it again if it wasn't clear enough already: I do not know whether or not God exists. By the dictionary definitions of both terms, I'm an agnostic Christian theist.

I haven't (yet) been able to read all of the posts to this thread in the past few days, but I am a little confused (and to be honest, a little annoyed) by the above statement. I thought you've been saying all along that you have faith in God. How can you have faith in God and yet not know whether or not God exists? Wouldn't that be like saying that you're feeding your fish even though you don't know whether or not your fish exists?

Is this view of yourself as an agnostic theist the view that you've had of yourself all along in this thread? Or is this something new? If it's something new, that's fine. I understand changing perspectives. I still find that I go back and forth on whether or not I believe that God (well, a "Skippy-type" God) exists. Mostly, I don't believe. But I have moments (or even days) when I sort of do. Or at least when I really want to believe that God exists and when I really try to believe that God exists. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I'm not able to maintain such a belief for very long.

So if you're saying that sometimes you believe in the existence of God, and sometimes, you don't. I have no problem with that. However, if you're saying that all along, you've been consistent in claiming that you don't know whether or not God exists, that leaves me with a lot of questions.

That's a good question! To be honest, I never really thought about the whole question of knowing or not knowing until I watched a video by Evid3nc3 on the subject (which was, um, somewhere in the middle of our discussion I guess? Sometime after I joined RatSkep, at any rate). After watching that video I came to the conclusion that no, I could not actually say that I knew that God exists - at least not in the sense of rational knowledge. I'm not sure if this really counts as changing my mind on something, since I didn't really have strong feelings on the matter beforehand AFAIR.

It isn't a case of sometimes believing and sometimes not believing - of course I have doubts sometimes, but I wouldn't say it's gone as far as actually not believing for as long as I can remember. Rather it's a case of admitting that I don't know, but nevertheless realising that I believe. And I guess it would be dishonest of me to claim that I know exactly how that is supposed to work - but hopefully this current discussion may provide me with either something of an answer, or a good reason to conclude that it can't possibly work at all.

This may or may not have been partial motivation for me arguing so strongly that it was possible to love God without knowing of his existence; I can't really recall at this point. After all, I do feel, emotionally, that I love God, despite professing this lack of rational knowledge.

Ragwortshire wrote:Firstly, one could go back to old pagan-ish ideas - it would be possible for the behaviour of a universe to be determined by conscious "spirits" which were not gods (in the sense of not having created the universe). Secondly, the behaviour of the universe could be determined in a random fashion, according to some completely arbitrary probabilistic principle. Perhaps (although this is an offhand idea which I do not really expect to be coherent) we could be even more fanciful and imagine a universe in which every single particle has free will, so that the whole universe has literally complete freedom to behave in any way at all.

So your alternative suggestions are relabelled god (remember that it was any god, not just a creator god, I took pains to point that out) and relabelled natural laws (quantum mechanical laws are probabilistic, there's no prohibition in the definition of natural laws on randomness).

Ragwortshire wrote:There is, however, and even more fundamental point to be made: Why does the behaviour of the universe need to be determined by anything at all? Why couldn't it just behave in an arbitrary fashion, obeying no laws - not even probabilistic ones - short of listing, at every point in time, the position and properties of every single particle?

Interesting question. Is disproved by observational reality and so isn't a possible alternative answer to my question, but a nice hypothetical.

Ragwortshire wrote:What other options remain to me, then? Well, I could always simply throw out the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead. However, let's suppose that I have soft evidence for that as well (after all, if I don't, there's no reason for me to believe it anyway).

No, sorry, I can't just suppose that. I think you need to show us this soft evidence for the resurrection of Jesus that matches the evidence that resurrection is impossible. Without it, as you rightly say - your reason evaporates like a mirage.

Ragwortshire wrote: Is there yet another way in which I could come up with a new belief system, for which there was just as much soft evidence as if I simply added "Resurrection is impossible", but which is not contradictory? Yes: I could reformulate the new belief as "No more than one resurrection has ever taken place". This still has all of the soft evidence the old version had, but the contradiction is removed.

That's the creationist method again, it's logically invalid, as you've been told.

Ragwortshire wrote:

Thommo wrote:Fortunately, we have that more. If resurrection is not impossible, then it's possible. This means that for each person X who dies there is some finite probability p such that X is resurrected.

This is quite a subtle statement, but in fact I am quite convinced that it must be false. For example, suppose we were to discover a method of resurrection which relied explicitly on a knowledge of say, quantum mechanics. Then resurrection would not be impossible, but for anyone born before the year 1700 or so, the probability of that person being resurrected would be zero. Alternatively, if the method required eating dodo eggs before dying, then the probability after 1900 would be zero.

I addressed this point by defining resurrection, when chairman bill brought it to my attention that I hadn't. This objection doesn't apply.

Ragwortshire wrote:Now this is not to say that the probability of resurrection being impossible does not rise with each successive instance of a person failing to rise from the dead - it does, if I have my maths correct - but this is also equally true (again assuming correct maths) of any sort of soft evidence for anything, assuming certain discreteness conditions.

You're going to need to demonstrate those discreteness conditions apply to the case of infinitely many gods (I rather suspect they don't).

Cito di Pense wrote:... For several hours after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow ...

What, you can measure a few hours growth of hair & nails? Who's done this? Or are you referring to the shrinking of tissue, exposing more hair & nails, so giving the appearance of growth?

Thommo wrote:... I never defined resurrection. For the purpose of this conversation I mean where a human has lived for at least one year, been in a brain dead state for 24 hours or more and then returns to a living state of self-sufficiency, without the aid of outside technology.

The amount of brain degeneration would leave the corpse incapable of being reanimated, leaving aside the effects on other tissues. The biochemical changes following death are quite complex, but once you've gone beyond a certain stage (a matter of minutes in most cases, though this certainly varies across environmental conditions), those changes lead irrevocably to a state of permanent death. There is simply no coming back. Frankenstein's monster is a scientific impossibility, and so is zombie Jesus.

chairman bill wrote:The amount of brain degeneration would leave the corpse incapable of being reanimated, leaving aside the effects on other tissues. The biochemical changes following death are quite complex, but once you've gone beyond a certain stage (a matter of minutes in most cases, though this certainly varies across environmental conditions), those changes lead irrevocably to a state of permanent death. There is simply no coming back. Frankenstein's monster is a scientific impossibility, and so is zombie Jesus.

Exactly!

chairman bill wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:... For several hours after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow ...

What, you can measure a few hours growth of hair & nails? Who's done this? Or are you referring to the shrinking of tissue, exposing more hair & nails, so giving the appearance of growth?

Not like Cito to make such a school-boy error.

chairman bill wrote:
The amount of brain degeneration would leave the corpse incapable of being reanimated, leaving aside the effects on other tissues. The biochemical changes following death are quite complex, but once you've gone beyond a certain stage (a matter of minutes in most cases, though this certainly varies across environmental conditions), those changes lead irrevocably to a state of permanent death. There is simply no coming back. Frankenstein's monster is a scientific impossibility, and so is zombie Jesus.

I think it's fair to rule out someone coming back after three days when you've had pallor, algor, livor and rigor mortis not to mention the early stages of decomposition. At least, not without magic.

Ragwortshire wrote:

Sophie wrote:

Ragwortshire wrote:Let me state it again if it wasn't clear enough already: I do not know whether or not God exists. By the dictionary definitions of both terms, I'm an agnostic Christian theist.

I haven't (yet) been able to read all of the posts to this thread in the past few days, but I am a little confused (and to be honest, a little annoyed) by the above statement. I thought you've been saying all along that you have faith in God. How can you have faith in God and yet not know whether or not God exists? Wouldn't that be like saying that you're feeding your fish even though you don't know whether or not your fish exists?

Is this view of yourself as an agnostic theist the view that you've had of yourself all along in this thread? Or is this something new? If it's something new, that's fine. I understand changing perspectives. I still find that I go back and forth on whether or not I believe that God (well, a "Skippy-type" God) exists. Mostly, I don't believe. But I have moments (or even days) when I sort of do. Or at least when I really want to believe that God exists and when I really try to believe that God exists. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I'm not able to maintain such a belief for very long.

So if you're saying that sometimes you believe in the existence of God, and sometimes, you don't. I have no problem with that. However, if you're saying that all along, you've been consistent in claiming that you don't know whether or not God exists, that leaves me with a lot of questions.

That's a good question! To be honest, I never really thought about the whole question of knowing or not knowing until I watched a video by Evid3nc3 on the subject (which was, um, somewhere in the middle of our discussion I guess? Sometime after I joined RatSkep, at any rate). After watching that video I came to the conclusion that no, I could not actually say that I knew that God exists - at least not in the sense of rational knowledge. I'm not sure if this really counts as changing my mind on something, since I didn't really have strong feelings on the matter beforehand AFAIR.

It isn't a case of sometimes believing and sometimes not believing - of course I have doubts sometimes, but I wouldn't say it's gone as far as actually not believing for as long as I can remember. Rather it's a case of admitting that I don't know, but nevertheless realising that I believe. And I guess it would be dishonest of me to claim that I know exactly how that is supposed to work - but hopefully this current discussion may provide me with either something of an answer, or a good reason to conclude that it can't possibly work at all.

This may or may not have been partial motivation for me arguing so strongly that it was possible to love God without knowing of his existence; I can't really recall at this point. After all, I do feel, emotionally, that I love God, despite professing this lack of rational knowledge.

That doesn't really make sense to me because you've talked about your faith. What is the difference, then, between believing in the existence of God and having faith that God exists? You seem to be saying that you have faith in God, and yet, you are are agnostic in regard to the existence of God. I don't see how those two things can be reconciled unless when you refer to your faith, you just mean that think that God might exist. I guess I thought that when you referred to your faith, you meant something more than that. I thought it meant that you trusted God. And to me, you can't trust God without first knowing that God exists.

Fideists have faith in God but are agnostic intellectually about his existence? I'm thinking of Martin Gardner here really??? I never see this thread without feeling guilt I am no longer participating fully - as soon as i finish the formal debvate I promise to become properly involved again.

j x

jerome wrote:Fideists have faith in God but are agnostic intellectually about his existence? I'm thinking of Martin Gardner here really??? I never see this thread without feeling guilt I am no longer participating fully - as soon as i finish the formal debvate I promise to become properly involved again.

j x

Good. I think we need you here.

tytalus wrote:

I have, in fact, altered my beliefs many times over the years for a wide variety of reasons, but I do not see what evidence I could possibly provide, on this forum, for this fact. If you can suggest evidence which I could provide but have not actually provided, then by all means, go for it!

So is it safe to say that none of the discussion here has produced any change? Because you could readily point to it if so. For my part I am an ex-xian, change noted; I also made a recent change to my views on abortion as a result of a thread on this forum, admittedly a slight one but still a change. You might understand why, after various skeptics have savaged your various apologetics over the course of this thread, that I would be dubious about these rules of yours.

This of course is a good question. Firstly, whether I have changed my views in the course of this thread is quite ambiguous in itself. There is no fundamental belief I can point to as having been discarded or changed beyond recognition. However, some have changed a little. For example, when I first posted on this thread, I would have said that I believed in an omniscient, omnipotent, loving God. Now I would say I believe in a loving God who created the universe with no external constraints - so he could have created it in any way he wanted, which is a weaker analogue of omnipotence - and with full knowledge of everything he created or could possibly have created - which is a weaker analogue of omniscience. Of course this is not the whole story, because I might still hold full omnipotence and omniscience as being implications of my beliefs. (Note that I do still intend to defend these concepts as best I can - even if they are not implied by my beliefs, they are certainly very closely related to them!)

Also, on more minor matters my beliefs have changed more definitely. The most prominent case of this is that when I first posted on this thread, I really did think that the free will defence alone was sufficient to resolve the Problem of Evil. Now I am rather of the opinion that this theodicy is indeed, in itself, too weak.

So perhaps the most major change is not one of beliefs, but of method. On coming to this thread I was pretty much in the latter part of step 3 of my algorithm - in the process of justifying, on the basis of soft evidence (or at least something like it), things like the resurrection, the truth of the gospels, etc. Now I am really back at step 2, trying to determine if the whole idea of God is consistent with reality at all!

Still, all of these "changes" might seem to be incredibly minor and inconsequential. Why haven't I simply discarded large swathes of my fundamental beliefs, since I do admit that the most comprehensive apologetic I have posted so far, namely my original Free Will defence, turned out to be sufficiently flawed that I could no longer hold it? Well, for one thing, I am of the opinion that my apologetics were a bit rubbish - that is, they didn't use the full available strength of the concepts involved. I think a stronger defence is possible, and moreover, I think that this stronger defence follows rather naturally from considering why my original one failed.

Could this process go on forever, with me simply raising additional defences each time the previous one was shown to be fallacious? Well, for one thing, even I would realise at some point that this was simply stalling for time. More than that, if a new defence really is stronger, then it ought to prompt a stronger formulation of the problem - which might be genuinely more persuasive than the original. In other words, it might actually give rise to an alternative belief in itself, which might have more going for it than those I currently hold.

tytalus wrote:Edit: I suppose it's best to address what you would 'doubtless remember.' Do you remember everything that happens to you? Do you remember everything you owe to everyone?

Indeed it is best to address it, since otherwise your analysis has a large hole in it - much like the hole that would exist in my memory, if I really did owe you $10,000!

Of course I do not remember everything I owe everyone - but I remember every instance in which I have borrowed $10,000 from someone! This would be like someone forgetting that they had ever received a student loan - or like Bertie Ahern (the former Irish Taoiseach) forgetting from whom he received donations of tens of thousands of pounds. It was incredible when Bertie Ahern said it, and it is equally incredible in this instance.

Nor is there any definite event in my past which could have caused me to undergo the substantial memory loss required for me to forget such an important alleged fact.

tytalus wrote:Why is your memory or intuition better than mine, in this hypothetical? I can pretend to be just as certain, after all.

I don't have access to your memories. On the other hand, if you really did remember me borrowing $10,000 from you, then you would be perfectly justified in believing that I owed you the sum - but I would still have no reason to entertain the idea.

tytalus wrote:What if it's been a couple of decades? What if it was recorded and no one told you? All possible.

I borrowed money from you when I was three years old? Do I really need to drag the whole concept of whether a three year old has sufficient responsibility to borrow $10,000, into this? And similarly the whole idea of owing money without ever having known about it is incredibly dubious.

That, I think, is enough analysis of your claim. Your objections to it being totally inconsistent with reality seem to me to be on the same level as doubting the evidence of one's senses, doubting that scientific measurements are within their margins of error, etc. The best that may be said about these is that they are theoretically possible - but if we are to take them as valid objections to a rational argument, then we really will end up with Descartes at the start of his meditations, knowing literally nothing at all!

Sophie wrote:

Ragwortshire wrote:It isn't a case of sometimes believing and sometimes not believing - of course I have doubts sometimes, but I wouldn't say it's gone as far as actually not believing for as long as I can remember. Rather it's a case of admitting that I don't know, but nevertheless realising that I believe. And I guess it would be dishonest of me to claim that I know exactly how that is supposed to work - but hopefully this current discussion may provide me with either something of an answer, or a good reason to conclude that it can't possibly work at all.

This may or may not have been partial motivation for me arguing so strongly that it was possible to love God without knowing of his existence; I can't really recall at this point. After all, I do feel, emotionally, that I love God, despite professing this lack of rational knowledge.

That doesn't really make sense to me because you've talked about your faith. What is the difference, then, between believing in the existence of God and having faith that God exists? You seem to be saying that you have faith in God, and yet, you are are agnostic in regard to the existence of God. I don't see how those two things can be reconciled unless when you refer to your faith, you just mean that think that God might exist. I guess I thought that when you referred to your faith, you meant something more than that. I thought it meant that you trusted God. And to me, you can't trust God without first knowing that God exists.

Faith, I guess, has more than one possible meaning. For example, one often refers to the overall body of beliefs held by (most) Christians as "the Christian faith" - or indeed to the body of beliefs held by Catholics as "the Catholic faith". On the other hand I would also use it, depending on the context, to refer to this idea of trust in someone, for example God.

How can one trust in someone without knowing that they exist? I guess I would say the same thing as I did for love - by trusting in individual human beings, and perhaps more generally by trusting in humanity as a whole. Or maybe one can be more concrete and say that the difference is that faith involves believing in a good/benevolent/loving God, rather than just an arbitrary God. Trust is also quite closely related to the Christian virtue of hope, which is separate from faith, so it's possible faith ought to refer more to belief itself, than to the trust which may follow from it.

chairman bill wrote:

Cito di Pense wrote:... For several hours after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow ...

What, you can measure a few hours growth of hair & nails? Who's done this? Or are you referring to the shrinking of tissue, exposing more hair & nails, so giving the appearance of growth?

I thought the punch line would have broadcast this as a joke (which plays on the superstition about hair and fingernails).

Eventually a corpse reaches room temperature for whatever room it's in, barring any microscopic changes in temperature locally from the metabolic activity of bacteria. Just coincidence? I think not! Anyway, it's one of the reasons I give for why I should not believe. Just sayin'.

Your mileage may vary, but in contrast to automobile advertisements, when the chips are down, I go for parsimony.

Brevity is the soul of parsimony. Levity is the soul of wit.