(September 28, 2017 at 8:28 am)SteveII Wrote:(September 28, 2017 at 8:18 am)Harry Nevis Wrote: Why is that? We've been given no real reason to accept the bible as fact, so we're not rejecting anything. And if the acceptance and rejection are both infinite, what does that say about your god?
I posted this before:
People come to the place where they are willing to believe in God/supernatural for all kinds of reasons. Most are wired with something. Some are raised that way, some have events happen in their life (bad and good things), some encounter people who's testimony is compelling, and some read and find the person/message of Christ compelling (or a combination of any of these or something else I haven't thought of).
Why is it not pure faith? Well there are good rational reasons to believe. As we have been discussing, the NT events certainly compelled the witnesses of those events to believe (miracles and such) and continue to be compelling to those that accept the evidence for them as true. Another category of rational reasons are the Natural Theology Arguments.
a. God is the best explanation why anything at all exists.
b. God is the best explanation of the origin of the universe.
c. God is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life.
d. God is the best explanation of intentional states of consciousness.
e. God is the best explanation of objective moral values and duties.
(December 30, 2016 at 12:03 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote: I'm frequently confronted by theists who declare that God is the best explanation for some phenomena. I end up having to explain to them that while God is an explanation or hypothesis for that phenomena, by the standards we judge hypotheses / explanations, it is not a particularly good one. The Goddidit explanation has great scope, meaning the number of facts it can accommodate is broad -- he's omnipotent so that makes sense -- but it doesn't fare as well on other traits which we look for in a good explanation or hypothesis. The following is a list of them, for comparison purposes. (i.e. I finally found a good list of them.)
Quote:Philosophers of science have proposed a number of comparative approaches [to evaluating hypotheses], usually involving some combination of the following criteria:
Likelihood. The probability of the evidence occurring given the hypothesis in question.
Prior probability or plausibility. Our degree of belief in the hypothesis prior to observing the evidence, or assuming we had not observed it.
Predictive power. The degree to which the hypothesis determines which potential observations are possible (or probable) and which are impossible (or improbable).
Falsifiability. The degree to which the hypothesis "risks" being falsified by new evidence.
Parsimony. The degree to which the hypothesis observes the principle of Occam's razor: "Do not multiply entities needlessly."11
Other criteria often cited include explanatory power, track record, scope, coherence and elegance.
http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl/
What you assert as being the "best" explanation has few of the hallmarks that make even a good explanation. In terms of the quality of these explanations, they are basically on a par with the explanations of "it just happened" or "it just is." There are no properties of your god which are constrained by anything but the human imagination. In order for any of your natural theology arguments to be remotely compelling, you'd need to show that your hypothetical god exists anywhere but in the imagination of its proponents. This you cannot do, which is why you resort to characterizing your imaginary but poor solutions to these questions as "the best explanation." It's nothing but spin. Mere propaganda. Your explanations suck as explanations and there is no rationally compelling reason to accept them, any more than it makes rational sense to accept, "it just happened" as an explanation..
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