Miracles and Anti-supernaturalism

[Esquilax]

You mean to say that everything you believe has been verified by the scientific method? Has your wife's love has been demonstrated through instruments or have you used logic to interpret the evidence?

Ah, but that's a red herring; emotions are primarily subjective things, expressed through actions, but immaterial nonetheless. And there's a metric that comes along with accepting any kind of claim, too; my wife saying she loves me comes up against evidence, the same as any other claim. For example, to begin with the claim is relatively mundane, and thus doesn't demand too much credulity. I can also gauge her reactions to being around me, her actions in general, or even hook her up to machines and monitor her brain activity if I really wanted to.

But when you're talking about this god claim, you aren't talking about a subjective thing. You're making a claim about the existence of something that is objective, outside of mere sense perception, and therefore requires actual demonstrable evidence. Besides that, the claim is an extraordinary one, and thus requires evidence at all to afford belief.

That's all we're doing in this argument for God. We have realized certain truths, such as the probability that all actions need causes (inductively speaking), and we let them lead us to conclusions.

Did those conclusions occur to you before or after you read the bible?

And that's leaving off a really important point; you're talking about induction there, and there's a reason that science generally doesn't trust induction. It can lead you wrong a lot. I remind you, there was a time when "realizing certain truths" included that the Earth looked flat, and that led people to the conclusion that it was. Induction and inference are great heuristics that guide us through life pretty well on the whole, but they do come up with false conclusions when applied to larger scale notions, because it is a process that developed through evolution; it's helpful for personal issues, but once we get to the scale of, say, landmasses and planets and universes, it's not equipped to deal with that.

That's why we have a rigorous scientific method, to weed out the false conclusions one might infer.

You're right, this argument is not enough to believe in God. But it is enough to compel us to seek Him, if we are willing. My belief is not confirmed by science, but by experience.

Equally, there are those of us who have sought and found, via our own experience, the opposite. Only one of these propositions can be true: how do we find out?

Well, that's what science is for.

When I developed a relationship with Jesus, my life changed completely. I've seen friends' lives changed too. I've seen bigots become lovers. I've seen drug addicts become leaders. I've seen criminals turned into citizens. I've seen miserable rich people become joyous missionaries.

Ignoring, of course, the bigots and criminals and etc etc that are driven by their religion...

You can tell a tree by its fruit. We know the Spirit of God exists by what He produces within us.

But only if he produces good things within you, right? It doesn't count if the spirit of god produces... say, the Westboro Baptist church?

This changeless being is the first efficient cause, meaning nothing around it/him is changing yet. There is no matter. This is step one, before anything exists at all, in our universe or preceding universes! Therefore anything the being creates would be fully grasped by its/his mind. There is nothing it/he cannot comprehend, because it/he is the first thing that's not nothing. While we have no control over our building blocks, it/he invents the blocks themselves.

And, see, now we're back on pure invention. Fine, I can play that game too: the creator had never created anything before, and since creation is complex and it had no practice, it sucked at it, and created a bad universe. The experience so soured the creator (especially after that whole Adam and Eve thing) that it never tried again.

See how there's exactly as much evidence for what I just wrote as for what you did? How is it that you believe your claim, but you won't believe mine?

And again, there must be a first thing that's not nothing unless we wish to do the irrational--break causal chains or go to infinity.

Why is infinity impossible?

So you can dispute causation or infinity, but it doesn't seem that the "incompetent first efficient cause" objection holds any water.

Only if I'm willing to go along with what you've asserted without evidence above. I am not. Why would I be?

Yet the claim is not vital to my argument. If I can logically demonstrate the existence of a creator, he is obviously creative enough to make us... because here we are. In my effort to prove that a steam engine must have had a designer, I need not track the engineer down and ask for his credentials.

And my point in bringing it up wasn't to trip you up, it was to maybe lead you away from unfounded assertions and toward the path of supporting your claims with data. It seems that this has failed.

Why do you give our creator motives so unlike and beneath our own?

I could ask you the same question in reverse.

If it/he created us, it/he would be similar, yet greater.

Not if he's just doing it for a food source. You haven't discounted that, you just dismissed it. That's not an argument.

It/he must also know love, peace and patience.

Or, those could be emergent properties of conscious entities with free will.

If it/he sought only suffering, the world would be a much more terrible place.

Okay, get your story straight: is the world a good place, or is it a wicked, sinful one?

But since the creator knows both love and torture, which do you think he would choose? Which is more logical--to care for and nurture your creation or to erase all the hard work you put into it?

I don't know, because I'm not the one making any assumptions here. You can't demonstrate that a creator exists, so you can't know anything about its properties, abilities or motives, and yet you're ascribing it all these things, and dismissing the ones that don't line up with your presuppositions about it out of hand. I'm asking why?

Again, you seem very willing to tell us what you believe, but when asked about the information you used to form your beliefs, or even shown how you haven't provided any of that in the first place, instead of telling us you just resort to telling us more of what you believe.

How did you come to these conclusions? What externally verifiable information did you use? If there isn't any, how can any of us be rationally justified in believing you?