(August 7, 2015 at 4:41 pm)lkingpinl Wrote:(August 7, 2015 at 4:37 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: The point is that you can tell that your husband loves you from the same things that other people could use to determine that he loves you, by seeing his actions. That is, there is actual, real evidence that he loves you. Anyone who is present can see how he treats you. It is not something hidden or mysterious or nonexistent. It is real behaviors that anyone could see if they were in the right place at the right time. You judge that he loves you based on such things, that other people could see if they were present. And, if it were needed (though it hardly matters whether anyone else believes he loves you or not), you could point to his behaviors and thus provide evidence of his love. It is not a matter of blind faith, it is a matter about which you have evidence. That is what distinguishes the example of your husband's love for you from the case regarding the existence of God. You don't have anything real to show for God, but you do have real things to point to for your husband's love.
While you are right Pyrrho, I think her counter point would be just as valid. You don't personally know CL outside of this forum. her husband dies and she makes the claim that her husband loved her. Can you accept her claim? Do you think she has reasonable reasons to make the claim? It's kind of a rough analogy, but it certainly has some merit, IMO.
You are right, I do not know her. So it may well be that her husband does not really love her. For all I know, she has no husband. She may not even be a woman, either, as I have never seen her. One can make up almost anything online.
That said, I have no reason to suppose that she is making any of that up. There is nothing extraordinary about the claim that she is a woman and is married and her husband loves her. It is all perfectly ordinary, and so one tends to just take someone's word for such things. Of course, if it were a matter of particular importance to me one way or another, I would want to look into the matter to see the evidence for myself. But it is of no importance to me to do so. So, as a matter of polite policy, one pretends that such things are true, even though none of us really know it at all, as we have not seen the evidence. All we have is her word on it.
This is following the general rule that how unusual a claim is determines how much evidence one generally requires for it. If she were to claim something surprising, like that she is Michele Obama, then we would naturally be a bit more skeptical of her claim. Of course, there is nothing stopping Michele Obama from posting here and pretending to be a white woman who is a Catholic, so we could not be certain that she was not Michele Obama. But probably none of us would seriously believe her if she made such a claim without providing any evidence. At least, none of the reasonable ones would believe such a story without some evidence beyond her mere claim to be Michele Obama.
The case would be even greater if she were to claim something impossible. Like if she claimed to be the Roman Emperor Claudius, who has returned to life and is now posting here. Then we (at least the reasonable ones) would simply not believe her, and regard her story as false.
None of this makes her claim that her husband loves her anything like the claim that God exists and Catholicism is true. We know that people commonly do have husbands and we know that there is commonly evidence regarding the husband's feelings toward his spouse. So it is very likely that, if she is really a woman and married and believes her husband loves her, that there is actual evidence of his love for her. Of course, I have not seen it in this particular case, but I have seen evidence of a like nature, and so I know it is at least very possible that her husband loves her, and that she had good reason to believe that her husband loves her.
That greatly contrasts with the God situation. No one has ever put forth good evidence on that. What we have are a bunch of fallacious arguments, slipshod and falsified evidence, and we have that for contradictory religions. And being contradictory, we know that, at most, one religion is true, though obviously they can all be false (which, in fact, is what is most reasonable to believe, but I digress). So we don't have any examples of anyone having good reason to believe in a god or religion, so we have good reason to believe that anyone who claims to have such evidence is mistaken or lying. (Most of the time, I suspect that the person is mistaken, though there have been plenty of religious frauds that have been detected, too.)
In this specific case, the types of evidence that were mentioned for the god belief are exactly the same types of evidence that every other religion has in its favor. And since we know absolutely that they cannot all be true, we know the evidence is not good enough, and cannot be good enough. So, regardless of the situation with her husband, we know that there is not adequate evidence for the god claim.
"A wise man ... proportions his belief to the evidence."
— David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section X, Part I.
