(January 6, 2023 at 5:28 am)GrandizerII Wrote:(January 5, 2023 at 10:51 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: Yeah, Carl Sagan said the same thing, saying that if the stars in the night sky suddenly rearranged in geometric patterns would be strong evidence for god.
For me, at the very least, strong evidence for God would have to be cumulative. If this is all the fascinating stuff I end up seeing, then it could still be once again aliens playing tricks on us. Hell, probably human tricksters could do just that. Why, in this scenario, is someone playing visual tricks on us with the sky less likely than some actual supernatural being doing actual supernatural stuff with the stars?
Or, it is not likely that evidence for the existence of god will just appear one day because if he did exist there would already be evidence in the past, just like there won't be one day evidence that Earth is flat. There are many fundamental things in nature showing us that god doesn't exist like the impossibility of omnipotence (god can't make a rock he can't lift or make a prison he can't escape).
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
