Scoobes said:
mrstickball said:
pezus said:
mrstickball said:
What about those that say they've seen proof?
The ultimate problem with religion vs. atheism is empiricism. If you believe that everything must be empirical, then by all means, its impossible to prove gods or a God exists.
But if you don't believe that everything is ultimately empirical, it gives you the case for the possibility of the supernatural which is, by definition the antithesis of empiricism since you cannot validate it through scientific means.
If people like Gervais would one day look into the possibility of an irrational, non-empirical entity that defies the scientific method, you may be surprised. Those that hold to the Christian faith do not do so entirely out of pure blindness. There are people that have seen things - supernatural things - that are far and away from explanation or rationalization, but are certain they happen. Are any of these Christians nuts? Absolutely. Are all of them nuts? No. I know what I've seen and experienced in my life, and some of it defies logic and empiricism, but it still happened. That is why I will hold to what I believe irregardless of what Gervais and others believe. I won't reserve vitriol for them, I will respect what they want to believe in their own minds. |
What did you see that defies logic?
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Instantaneous healing of medically-verifiable broken bones, precognition, physical/visual phenomena, other types of healings, ect. I'd have to think a bit to come up with an exhaustive list of things I've personally seen.
If I expanded the list to family who wouldn't BS, that list to expand significantly to include things like the ability to spontaneously write in ancient languages with perfect prose, spontaneously talk in other languages unknown to speaker, shapeshifting, demonic possessions (far beyond possible psycological diagnosis), prophecy, and so on.
Over the years, if you're in the right circles, you hear and see a lot, and I mean a lot of things inside or outside of specific kinds of churches. I try to throw out the things that are likely to happen naturally (e.g. "God saved me from a wreck because I clipped an extra coupon before I got into the car").
Then you have all the instances of people that have documented, at least among their family, impossible things to happen naturally such as the case of Todd Burpo. I am not saying his claim is absolutely real, but if it indeed is - and only his family knows - then even the first half of his story is far beyond the realm of what science or empiricism can explain.
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The problem with this is that there's a gap between unexplained events such as you're describing and a belief in a particular religion/god.
Every religion and culture claims to have seen supernatural phenomena, but it takes a small leap of faith to attribute something that is currently unexplained to god. The scientific method is a slow, drawn-out process so a lot will be unexplained for a long time, but considerring how wacky we're finding the realms of quantum physics, it wouldn't surprise me if in a few hundred years time we do discover explainations to what you and others have observed.
I suppose my point is no one knows what causes those unexplained phenomena (although honestly, if put to full scrutiny I suspect some would be explained), but religion/god doesn't necessarrily give the answer.
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I would say that you're correct that we don't know what all is out there - with other dimensions, quantumn physics, and the like. That may play a part of it. But alternatively, what if God works supernaturally through such things, and that those realms are merely the conduit of how he works?
Yes, I believe some if not many "Miracles" can be explained by the scientific method - even if its through things we can't verifiy empirically yet. But the key is "many", not all. That is what makes empiricism useless in the argument of supernatural pheonmena. Even if 99% can be explained, you still have that 1% that is impossible to explain via science, which causes the scientific method to be flawed when people like Gervais require it to be able to explain and define God.
I mean, if someone walked up to you - someone you trusted - and said that he heard "God" speak to him, (this God being someone he trusted and believed existed), and God told this person audiably to find a phone directory call a specific business 10,000 miles away, only for the man to do that and find his long-lost daughter visiting that business for the first time in her life. Do you know what the probability of such an event happening is? The likelihood of such an event occurring is impossible - but with God, I've seen such people talk about these kinds of miracles very often.
