What one thing would disprove Christianity to you?

[Angrboda]

Plenty of people in history have been crucified, that doesn't prove much. That he is risen, that's another kettle of fish.


For my part, I'm of the opinion that given our nature, and our cognitive biases as ordinary human beings, anybody sufficiently deep within the gravity well of any particular massive star is going to find it difficult to reverse course and achieve escape velocity. A single event isn't going to do it, nor should it. Our belief systems would be horribly ineffective if a single contrary fact upset them like apple carts. (This is perhaps the dirty underbelly of epistemological holism.) Conservatism is only a vice if it consistently results in error. And things like perseverance of belief and cognitive dissonance mechanisms will insure that one lone fact won't be enough to fundamentally upset any reasonable person's apple cart.

Perhaps this is a reflection of an older epistemology, that in which authorities and credibility were the most reliable ways to locate truth and wisdom. In an age before science and modern epistemology what other rule would you use as your guide? "Great men have great ideas. Wise men know truth." What else would you base your search for truth upon? Knowing what we now know about human psychology, we recognize that these aren't robust and reliable principles. Yet they still influence many. A story often told, Francis Galton was something of an elitist, and he despised the common man with their common opinions. One day, he decided to conduct an experiment. He went to a county fair, and brought a large pig, for which he set up a contest to see who could guess the correct weight of the pig. The result was that, as expected, individual guesses ranged widely to and fro. However, the average of all the guesses taken together converged on the true weight of the pig.

In a like way, the truth of general questions is better settled by social groups, not individuals. Social groups, with cultural and social norms, have a much more robust and reliable process for moving toward greater truth than an individual does. Intelligence in individuals is the primary determinant of the reliability of the individual's opinions, but even this is sabotaged regularly by the inherent processes of cognitive bias and ignorance (not unintelligence). Moving from a very smart persons beliefs, one to the next, it's impossible to predict whether that next belief in the smart person isn't just completely biased bullshit. This happens in groups, too, but the group process and averaging smooths out these unpredictabilities. So in my overall epistemological view, truth is the property of social groups, not individuals.

So, in some sense, I think the question itself is an artifact of an unreliable epistemic - that the vicissitudes of beliefs of individuals, in the specific, is worth focusing on.

Beyond that, it also seems rather hypocritical. Any scientist who abandoned a hypothesis over one fact or the merest blush of trouble would be a bad scientist. This question seems to imply that such behavior would be reasonable to expect in a theist, that they could change their worldview over one experience, when we would not consider this laudable in secular individuals, and such cheaply won allegiances would likely rather be viewed as a sign of a character flaw.

I'm reminded of listening to the ranting and raving of people who have tried the psychedelic drug DMT. The voluminous and vapid metaphysical twaddle pouring from the mouths of such people should serve as adequate caution against placing too much weight on the subjective impact of a personal experience. I have chronic mental illness. If I believed every stray firing of bad neurons in my brain, then I'd be a basket case. Perseverance of belief is not necessarily an error, it is a stabilizing mechanism, and one that, without it, our species would not likely prosper. But I understand, people discover falsifiability and think that's a gold standard to build the world upon, and thus it's implied that someone who can't point to a falsifying observation is being unreasonable (despite that this view itself is an instance of the liar's paradox, and a similar trap to that which deals a death blow to logical positivism). I see every bit as much dogmatism and unthinking allegiance to ideology among the non-religious as the religious (not implying that the truths are equivalent, just that it's inconsistent and hypocritical to fault that in the methods of the religious that you do not fault in yourself when you behave similarly).

And I sense that I've toggled over into rambling, so I'll just end this without summary point. For what it's worth.