(January 29, 2015 at 12:03 pm)SteveII Wrote: Tonus, it is a cumulative case including that God is not philosophically irrational, evidence of Jesus, how the basic Christian worldview makes sense of what we 1) see, 2) feel, and 3) experience, and the available personal relationship with God. I have seen the undeniable life-changing effect that God has on people in real life.Note what the cumulative case is based on: things that "make sense" and are not "philosophically irrational." I find that vague and reliant on a pretty heavy dose of confirmation bias. Which is why it works for other religions as well.
I was a Christian for many years and am well aware of the extent to which people will credit god for things that happen in their lives. And mostly it's just a form of convenient interpretation. When things go well, god has blessed them. When something extraordinarily good happens, god has performed a miracle! When things don't go well, god is letting them face a test. If things go catastrophically bad, god had some purpose for putting them through it. And so on. When anything can be evidence of god's influence on your life, then everything becomes evidence. And now you have overwhelming evidence that god exists!
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould