(December 4, 2017 at 2:01 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: First I wanna say I appreciate you asking this question without a condescending tone and, I suspect, out of genuine curiosity rather than as ammunition to make fun.
For myself, let me first start off by saying you got #1 right, but I want to further explain what my thought process is on that:
We know the Big Bang caused the birth of the universe when a small singularity expanded into the cosmos as we know them today. But what was the origin of this "small singularity" to begin with? Possibly another sort of explosion... Maybe there are multiple universes out there and it came from them somehow? It is a fair possibility. But if we go back far enough the question still stands: what caused the very first physical thing to exist? It couldn't possibly have materialized itself from nothingness. We know the laws of the natural, physical world calls for physical things to have been the cause of something else... they don't make themselves. So has this physical thing simply always existed and at some point, for some reason, began to form into something else, and then something else, and eventually we have this universe we live in? Well, just as we know the laws of the natural, physical world are contrary to things materializing themselves from nothing, we also know they are contrary to physical things having always existed. Just as physical things are always the cause of something else, they also have a beginning and an end. The 2 kind of go together.
Maybe it was a "special type" of physical thing that isn't bound by the laws of physics and could have materialized itself or always have existed? I suppose... though I find that highly unlikely because for a physical thing to be able to be like that would be contradictory to what we have actually observed about the physical world and its laws. In other words, there is proof against it lol. Which leads us to another proposition: Maybe the very first physical thing to ever have existed was actually put in place by a different type of force altogether - one that isn't physical. One that isn't bound by the laws of this natural, physical world, but that is actually beyond it/above it. Not being bound by these laws means this force could be eternal and could always have existed, it didn't need anything else to have caused its existance, it is non physical and not of this physical world.
When I look at everything and explore other possibilities, this^ is what makes the most logical sense to me. And I honestly don't understand why this proposition is so unlikely in some people's eyes. Or why it is seen as so much more likely that any physical thing could either be eternal, or have materialized itself. What are the other options? We don't have proof of any of these propositions, or of any other anyone else can come up with.
Of course, the notion of a supreme force out there only says something about Deism, not the Christian God specifically. But for the reason above, I would be a deist long before I would be an atheist.
I feel there is more evidence (evidence, NOT proof), of the existance of the Christian God more than any other. So to get back to your list:
2. The life and death of Jesus. (There is plenty of evidence that Jesus existed as a Jewish man from the Middle East when the Romans were in rule, and that He was crucified by one of the Roman leaders of the time - Punctious Pilot.)
3. The rapid fire spread of early Christianity during a time when there was no easy transportation or communication technologies. I feel some extraordinary things must have happened for so many people to be so convinced so quickly.
4. Jesus' close friends who actually lived with him were SO convinced that He was the real deal and not some fraud, that they ALL voluntarily died horrible painful deaths for Him... when they could have just denounced Him and went on with their lives.
5. Morality. With that, I will quote points 1-4 from KingPin back when he was still active here:
...To me, the notion of objective moral laws means there has to be a law giver. I know this doesn't particularly point to the Christian God, but at least it points to one who cares/is involved, which helps support why I believe in more than just Deism.
- Nearly universally across human cultures, arguably, there exists the same basic standards of morality. In addition, there exists in all cultures truly altruistic acts which lead to no genetic benefit.
- The majority of people who explicitly deny the existence of objective morality still act as if objective morality exists.
- There exists a nearly universal human intuition that certain things are objectively right or wrong.
- The majority of philosophers recognize the existence of objective moral facts.
6. There have been multiple things that have happened which I think cannot be explained by science. To me, the most convincing is the miracle of the sun in Fatima.
7. Finally, and most convincing for me personally is that I myself was witness to one of these inexplicable things. I've made it clear before that I don't want to tell the story here because it is sacred to me and I don't want to open it up to ridicule. But something happened in my childhood house in 2006 (I was 20) that both myself and my mother were present for. And because of what it was and what was involved, I can tell you that it was directly related to Christianity.
...And that concludes my "list". The important thing to remember is that it wasn't any one of these things that convinces me. It's all of them together. When I put these all together, it makes logical sense to me that the Christian God is real. And while I know that none of this is "proof", all of these things compiled together serves as sufficient evidence for me to believe that it is more likely that He exists than to believe that He doesn't.
I'll start with #4, as it relates to #1.
5) They seem to have a pretty good handle on mapping behavior to physical markers. Oh, this guys frontal lobe is damaged, they have poor impulse control. This guy has a chemical out of whack, there's a good chance he'll commit suicide. This guy took too many blows to the head, now he's more likely to murder some people. If we are at the mercy of our physical attributes, how can anything be 'moral.' We can literally change who a person is by giving them a pill or banging them on the head. If we are at the mercy of our biology, calling our behavior immoral would be like calling being over 6' tall immoral or being gay immoral.
As for the historical patterns you mention, isn't it just practical. People who behave practically survive. So you pass that stuff along. And you do that for a few a while, and evolution is digging it, and rewarding genetic makeups that sync up with the behavior, and social evolution is building off what the evolutionary impulses are putting out there. And the end result, even with tens of 1,000's of years of philosophy and society all herding people in one direction: You get people who think murder is objectively wrong burning people alive for being witches.
1) The first part of 4 is why I don't worry myself about 1. I'm not well-versed in science. But when I look stuff up, there is a bunch of I don't knows floating around. Sounds like there's a bunch of "Dark matter" and "Dark energy" floating around. It makes up 72% of the universe according to this article I'm looking at but don't understand. And the words that keep popping up next to them are 'mystery' and 'puzzle'. Our opinion of the nature of the universe in the past 100 years has been changing at an absurd rate. It just seems likely, as it's happened with everything else like human behavior, that it's all going to be flipped on it's head when the right piece of unknown information is revealed.
What I'm getting at, is I don't think humans are anywhere near the point where we have to throw in the towel, and start considering Deity as a likely alternative. We've seen the deity card played before, and historically, whether it's weather, seas, volcanoes, crops, sun, moon, disease, etc... it was always embarrassingly premature. Based on this pattern, I think it's expected, once again there will be a non deity related answer.
6-7) First hand accounts are always interesting. I have an uncle who saw a UFO, a step grandmother who saw a demon, and a mother-in-law who sees ghosts. My favorite musician is Billy Corgan, who I also find fascinating as a person, and he just said he saw a person shapeshift. I believe they saw something. I expect there is an explanation. But unfortunately, these things tend to happen in a way that makes them tough to analyze.
2-4) I like Jesus' story. Be nice. Seems like an idea people might get behind and die for. I mean, people got behind the idea of cutting off their balls, and committing suicide so they could hop on a comet in the 1980's.
One thing that was always nice about the Roman Catholic Church, is that intuitively, you'd say "If there's a God and he wants us to behave in a certain way, there'd be some way to communicate. So it makes sense there's the 'correct' religion" which Catholicism lays claim to. But the Catholic church had a few sketchy centuries in there. It also makes you wonder, "If there's a God, and he wants us to behave in a certain way, is he going to put it in the hands of an organization that spends 1000 years just killing people willy nilly?" The thing where the church was behind murdering so many people kind of undercut them as an obvious choice to be dictating God's word.
