are we talking about the "will to believe" article posted earlier? Just to make sure I'm clear. I read about half of that but haven't finished it yet, so I should probably do that, but just to be sure...

I don't know enough about Epistemology to argue this but I don't think we can just dismiss it out of hand so easily. Your certainty seems to be Psychological in that you can't meet Epistemic criteria (by your own admission), so you just believe. I think that this is very pertinent to our discussion.


Well exactly, it doesn't matter at all how historically accurate I consider the bible to be, it only matters from a point of view of it being divinely inspired and to believe that, you first have to believe that god exists.

I thought that you said that your belief came before your knowledge of Christianity and that what you then learned confirmed your own independent interpretation of your experiences as being that of being Christ active in your life. Now you're saying that the bible is more authoritative than your own interpretation?

You've really latched onto this idea of coherency but you should know that I don't consider that it adds any weight at all to your viewpoint. A delusion that is coherent with the rest of one's beliefs is still a delusion. It's not possible to know what James would have made of our inroads into the identification and study of Cognitive biases but as I said, I think that they're a game changer. Knowing how often, and why, our minds trick us makes relying on our own perceptions a much less authoritative than in James' theories.

However, I still don't really get what saying that your beliefs are not 'obviously false' is doing for your viewpoint but for the sake of the discussion

I haven't said that you are irrational, I'm still trying to figure out why you think that your justifications are rational, i.e. what your rationale is.

But the evidence is all around me, how can I not see it for what it is? What do I need to do to accept Jesus christ into my life?

Then perhaps you shouldn't use the word 'easy', it has entirely different connotations I think. Religious theories are definitely not parsimonious, we have to jump through some complex mental hoops to get to a belief in a deity so if you find it easy, it makes me wonder why, what's different about how your mind works or your world view that makes believing in god easy for you?

One does not simply accept atheism (imagine that in Sean Bean's voice), there's nothing to accept. Atheism is lack of belief, not an alternate belief system.

No, I would ask you why you were an atheist and can you explain your reasons to me? I've said throughout this conversation that my own views are irrelevant to why you hold yours.

No, I am basing what I say on his lectures on religious experiences from 1910.

The bolded is what I tried to express earlier, and that which I found most problematic, and what I thought you were doing is trying to claim that "blue" didn't exist, so to speak.

Your objections here seem very reasonable and thought out as far as I can see, I don't disagree.

I can only say that I am certain I believe, not that I am certain that what I believe is accurate. This paradigm of epistemic vs psychological doesn't fit well with everything. If I have some pain, I can say I am certain I am in pain, but that it may not mean that pain exists in reality. I can't say this when it comes to a belief in God.

If you don't believe that the accounts of what Christ did led people to believe in him as God, actually provide more reasons to believe he could actually be God, then that is certainly your right, but I disagree. I don't see a reason to discredit these accounts any more than other historical accounts, especially from that era. If we ignore these accounts, we should likewise ignore many other historical accounts.

I'm saying that they are coherent. It doesn't matter for practical reasons which came first, as long as they agree with each other. If they did not agree with each other, it would be more difficult to reconcile. You don't think it's easier to reject Santa than Christ?

Coherence is what this is all about. If your views are logically coherent, then you can rationally hold them. You can't hold certainty, yours could likewise be a delusion, but it's not as important as that you can believe them rationally.

Evidence is up to interpretation. Where the deist can see God, the atheist can see chance. To accept Christ, you need to believe in Christ.

The spiritual component makes it "easier" or more coherent. Ignoring this is not without it's problems, even if you don't believe it.

Just a figure of speech. If I denounced God...

They are irrelevant in a sense, but it's not irrelevant to your interpretation of my interpretation, and what makes it difficult for you to accept mine as viable.

I'd be happy to ignore all historical accounts on this subject because I don't think that they add any weight at all to claims of divinity and I would have thought you would to since they seem to pose problems for your viewpoint. I think you would discount claims of the same divine nature made in a different context, for example, all the claims made in the Qu'ran, do they add any credibility for you to the idea that Allah is real? If you say no then your acceptance of biblical claims because it's the bible is special pleading. If you say yes then you need to explain how that is but you're a Christian and not a Muslim?


Coherency doesn't make something bullet proof nor rational, you seem to have retreated behind this magic word but it's possible to hold completely incorrect and completely irrational but coherent beliefs so it makes little difference to me. I also think it makes little difference to you, and I only have your word for it at this point that your viewpoint is currently coherent because we haven't examined your worldview in enough detail for me to know that for myself. You might be wrong. Was there ever a point where the visions/voices were incompatible with your world view?


By accept, you mean believe, so really that reads 'to believe in Christ, you need to believe in Christ'.

I chose to believe in Christ. Why? Because he is real. And how do you that he is real? Because I chose to believe in him. I can't be the only person who thinks this is begging the question again?

The Quran shares Christian foundations, so I do accept that some of their history is correct, as do scholars. I have not studied the Quran with the depth I have studied the bible, so I cannot make a statement of whether or not I would be satisfied with it, coherently speaking, if I believed that Allah had revealed himself to me.

I don't see what you find so problematic in accepting the history of Christ, and that this history does not contradict the claims that he could be divine. All I'm saying is that it still fits, so I don't need to reject my spiritual experience, like I would that off Santa.

Of course I could be wrong, but so could your own worldview, which you neither can prove is correct. You base it on what you consider rational, through your interpretation of things.

When I became aware of these spiritual revelations, I had to decide which worldview to accept, one with God, or one without God. This is an oversimplification, of course, but I had to reevaluate.

You can believe Christ is real and not accept him. Satan knew Christ was real when he rejected him. "You believe that there is one God. You do well. Even the demons believe..." James 2:19. There is more to accepting Christ than simply believing. They don't need to be mutually exclusive, but it doesn't follow that they are one and the same.

I think the actual conclusion is that communication is impossible without consent, agreement or consensus and to some extent, trust.

When we look at the sky, even though I can’t transfer my experience to your mind and you can’t transfer your experience to my mind, we can agree to term the experience of the same stimulus as blue. Likewise, if you want to communicate your experience of the color of the Caribbean, you can point to the sky and say “it’s like that.” So even though we can’t transfer “what it is like” experiences in an absolute sense, we can in a relative sense. That is, I can say “what it is like” to experience the color of the sky is “what it is like” to experience of the color of the Caribbean. From there and grounded in precedent, I can trust that both experiences (the color of the sky and the color of the Caribbean) would be perceived as identical to you as well. So we can communicate just fine, if we can agree on what our arbitrary terms denote and trust one another to honestly depict our experiences.

It kind of depends on the version of noncognitivism in play. If we are talking full-blown logical positivist "that is nonsense", then you would probably want to say that such a statement attempts to mean something, but because it attempts to use a meaningless idea ("God") that it fails to successfully do so. Thus, in ordinary usages it has a different function than making a statement about the speaker's beliefs, although in specialized uses it might just fail to mean anyhting.

A criticism of noncognitive accounts of moral talk is that the truth-value of such statements do not work properly in imbedded contexts. Presumably the same criticism would apply here.

Yes. Do you find this difficult to accept? Some written accounts provide stronger evidence for historical claims than others.

I made this claim: written records of a public miracle at least marginally increase the likelihood of that miracle having actually taken place. The reason why is because we would typically expect a public miracle to be noticed and some record of it to exist. If you disagree with me you'll have to give me some reason to think that if a public miracle actually did occur that we are not more likely to have a written record of it than if it did not occur.

This claim is not affected by whether it is more likely that people are not telling the truth about some loved miracle-worker.

That's not what I asked, I'm not talking about 'ordinary' history. If you consider that the mention in the bible of Jesus doing miraculous things, i.e. using divine powers, makes it more likely that he actually did miraculous, divine things, then presumably you afford the same credibility to other claims of divinity that have been recorded in historical tracts, such as the Qu'ran?

So, simple question, do you consider that the record of divine claims in the QU'ran makes those divine claims more likely to be true?


So when you first began to have these experiences, they didn't form part of a coherent world view? That came later?

I'm not sure the bolded really makes a difference in practical terms. Unlike Satan and demons who couldn't exist without actually 'knowing' in the epistemic sense that Christ is real, you can't know Christ like that, you had to believe first. So, given that there isn't actually anyone who can accept Christ without first believing that he's real, and generally only those who want to accept him would believe him real I think that they are pretty much synonymous. For me, accepting Christ is the same as believing in Christ so from my point of view, it's begging the question to 'to believe in Christ, you need to believe in Christ', or they're just the same thing.

I agree to the extent that consent, agreement and trust will make it easier to communicate. However, you can't have consent, agreement and trust without communication, so they can't be precursors.

I find it difficult to understand. Why is the bible a a stronger account of something that can only have been possible if god exists? It's the nature of what's being claimed that makes it different to me. Jesus may have existed, that's perfectly acceptable, but he can't have turned water into wine unless he's really the son of god, as the bible claims, and the bible isn't any stronger evidence of that than anything else for me.

Similarly, the Qu'ran claims that Mohammed didn't know the contents of the Qu'ran, and that the Qu'ran is actually a miracle of Allah. Does that become a stronger claim because it's written in the Qu'ran? What criteria are you applying to judge what is and isn't a strong account?


I have no good reason to believe that miracles, as a result of divine powers being exercised, are actually possible. For example, Jesus is recorded as having performed faith healings. There are plenty of publicly performed faith healings happening today in the USA. Do you afford them more likelihood of actually being miracles because those present believe them to be?

I think that the biblical accounts are explained in other ways, perhaps they are exaggerations of real events, outright lies (i.e. it never actually happened), mass delusions or hysteria, propaganda efforts, deliberate tricks (Jesus was in on it or was maybe just an unknowing stooge), or even a mixture of all those things and more, the list isn't exhaustive.

I don't understand how this is not a factor. Witness testimony is very much affected by the relationship of the witness to the subject. At the point that Jesus was performing miracles, Christianity was a small but growing cult. There is plenty of evidence to show that the behaviour of members of small cults of personality can be anything but rational. It's not at all unreasonable to suggest that one or more of those members was instrumental in inflating the reputation that Jesus was developing. That sort of thing is very common.

Imagine two identical universes with the only distinction that in one of these universes there exists a story of a public miracle.

Is the public miracle more likely to have happened in the universe where the story doesn't exist or more likely in the universe where it does?

Note that this does not mean that the miracle is more likely to have actually happened than it is to have not happened only that if there is a report of it there is a slightly greater chance than if there was no report at all.

Here's the claim. Jesus turned water into wine. Now, in order to determine whether the Bible serves as evidence for this claim (however small), I ask, is it more likely if Jesus actually turned the water into wine that the Bible says he does than if Jesus didn't. The answer seems to me clearly yes. After all, this is an unusual event and so more likely to be noted and written down by people who heard about it. If it didn't happen, well, I've been to a lot of dinner parties, and generally speaking people don't make up stories about people turning water into wine (note I am not saying that it is more likely that Jesus actually turned water into wine than that this is just made up).

Huh? Frankly, you don't seem to understand my claim, because you keep bringing up examples that don't really get at the issue.


Yes.

Great. Also, irrelevant. I am not claiming that the best explanation for the biblical accounts is that Jesus performed miracles.

This is because you are mixing up the claim that the Bible makes it likely that Jesus performed miracles with the claim that the Bible makes it more likely that Jesus performed miracles (i.e. is evidence for the claim that Jesus performed miracles). I am only claiming the latter, but you keep trying to argue against the former.

Ok, the reasons for my resistance to the idea are beginning to become more clear to me.

I think the only difference that a record of something happening actually makes is to whether or not people believe that it happened. I don't think it adds anything to whether or not the thing actually happened and I think I only need one instance of something that was believed to have happened, because of it being publicly witnessed, but didn't actually happen, to show that. For that you can use the milk drinking Hindu statues if you like, a miracle that was eventually shown to be a misinterpretation of what was really happening.

So this is an issue of credulity for me and the question in it's current form is meaningless in the paradigm I'm using. I interpret it this way: Does this claim of something having happened make that thing more likely to have happened in a universe where the story doesn't exist or more likely in the universe where it does, or is it more likely to make people believe that it happened in a universe where the story doesn't exist or more likely in the universe where it does, regardless or not of whether it actually happened?

At first I was thinking that it made a difference that we're discussing miracles because they are not proven to happen and would require the existence of the divine, but now I'm not even sure if that matters for my argument.

I don't think it makes it 'more likely' either that Jesus actually performed miracles. I think it makes it more likely that people believe that he really might have and adds no weight at all to whether or not he really did. It adds nothing to the credibility of miraculous claims that they are made.

That's where I'm at right now. I get that there might be a nuance that I'm failing to grasp.

That is the claim that you have to defend. The following sentences do not defend this claim. Instead, they defend a different claim, that the Bible makes it more likely that people believe that Jesus performed miracles. However, since all I'm interested in is the first claim, let's stop getting distracted by the second one.

Is the idea that an account of a publicly witnessed event 'at least marginally increases the likelihood of that [event] having actually taken place' applicable equally to any such account, or are there criteria such as the number of witnesses or the source of the account?

I'm asking because if the answer is 'yes, it applies equally to all such accounts' (including biblical miracles and spoon bending), it seems that it's not actually useful and 'more likely' isn't doing anywhere near as much work as NR would like it to in terms of it supporting his beliefs. It's just logically accepting that we can't rule it out, but then that could apply to almost anything for which there's a claim and we wouldn't necessarily afford them all the same level of credibility.

I'm not that familiar with the Quran to make a blanket statement, since I'm not entirely sure what it claims. I know of a few things that make it more questionable than the bible.

The NT is more reliable because it was written when eye witnesses were still alive, whereas the Quran was written 600 years later. The Quran also includes many unreliable documents from the apocrypha, and goes as far as to claim that Christ was never crucified.

It's not a stretch to accept the NT as being more historically reliable.

I'm not saying that, only that the bible further corroborated my belief.

Salvation is more than believing in Christ, there is also the confessing part (action) that need not be present when merely believing.

Okay, but why does that pose a special or unique problem for James?

The Qu'ran is considered to be a miracle of Allah, because it was revealed miraculously to Mohammed. We know this because it says so in the Qu'ran itself. There are also further miracles contained within the Qu'ran.

I'm not sure why you mention the 600 year difference in chronology, is there some age criteria that I'm not aware of for taking some accounts more seriously than others? I'm going to assume that since they're both over 1000 years old that there are not in this case, so by the standards that you appear to applying to the bible, you should also then accept that the miracles being recorded in the Qu'ran at least marginally increases the likelihood of those miracles having actually taken place. Yes?

If the miracles in the Qu'ran have an equal chance of having happened, does that present any conflicts or challenges to your coherent world view? You said that you made the easiest choice but I'm assuming that it was somewhat informed and you made you at least learned and thought about the world's largest religion after Christianity?

So was there never a time when you didn't hold these beliefs? You've always held them? It seems likely that there must have been a point, given that you said that you had a choice between believing in god and not believing in god, when your beliefs weren't coherent?


Are you saying the for Jesus to have died for my sins and for me to actually benefit from that, I not only have to believe that Jesus is real but also make a conscious decision to 'accept' him? So Jesus can only save those who make a decision about it?

Not every document is equally reliable. For starters, the dates that these events were recorded play a strong part in their credibility. If we were to investigate incidents that happened in the last 50 years, we could find eye witnesses accounts, whereas we cannot do this with incidents that happened 500 years ago. When speaking of the death of Christ, it is infinitely more plausible that Christ died, given the dates of the accounts and number of accounts of the incident, which is why it is historically accepted that Christ was in fact killed. Note that this has nothing to do with his divinity, but only that he died.

For a document to be written several hundred years after this, and suggest he was not killed, it is not that difficult to see why it is not as reliable. If this book contains claims such as these, I'm comfortable in claiming it is not AS reliable as the bible, specifically the NT.

I think they could be coherent in several frameworks. If I discount any spiritual revelations as delusional, and reject God exists, then that could be seen as coherent. If I instead believe the spiritual revelations as being from God, and accept that God exists, this is also coherent. From my perspective, the latter is easier to believe.

Yes. Christ said you must be born again.

Yes, I am positing a general principle which says that records of public events usually make it more likely that such an event occurred. There might be exceptions. As a general principle it would apply to all such cases. Obviously the character of the record affects how much more likely it makes it that the event actually occurred.

Well, I'm not interested in how much work "more likely" is doing for Naked_Rectitude. I am interested in your false claim that the Bible doesn't make it more likely that Jesus performed miracles.

That being said, your first sentence is ambiguous as I don't know if you mean that it applies equally or that it applies equally. It applies to all cases (as do all criteria), but it doesn't apply with the same force to all cases.

For that I refer to my earlier post.