RE: In your opinion what causes christians to believe in Jesus
May 9, 2025 at 10:24 am
(This post was last modified: May 9, 2025 at 10:25 am by John 6IX Breezy.)
(May 9, 2025 at 10:02 am)Alan V Wrote: No doubt Christians have a lot of unlikely expectations about the world, based on their worldview. However, they depend on social proof (other people agreeing with and supporting them) rather than evidence to support their beliefs. This is unfortunate for them because it cuts them off from so many other people who actually require evidence, as well as from other religious believers with other stories.
In contrast, multiple lines of evidence accumulated over centuries support a materialistic interpretation of the world. While science is open-ended, it has already discarded a wide variety of interpretations in favor of its own perspectives. If you want to change that picture, you have to offer evidence supporting Christian assumptions, and not just more stories of how something might be true.
My point is that evidence is not self-validating—it gains meaning through interpretation, and interpretation always relies on a framework of prior beliefs. This framework of beliefs is what gives coherence and direction to observation. In fact, we can turn this to a formula: Evidence = Observation + Interpretation (with heavy emphasis on interpretation).
This principle applies universally, to Christians, to you, to scientists. I would personally erase the word evidence from my vocabulary entirely.