Board index ‹ Faith and Knowledge

[Jet Ski]

I'm currently trying to reason a christian friend of mine into becoming an atheist. I already got him to admit that he doesn't have any objective evidence for his believes whatsoever, and that it's very much possible to convince yourself of something you want to be true, but that's actually false. But now it seems I'm running against a wall called "I just know it's true. God is making me feel so amazing and he gives me so much love and meaning, you can't even begin to imagine it." What can I do to show him that it's all just a powerful illusion? Are there any non-believers who once were in the same situation as he is and somehow managed to let it go?
I'm really thankful for every suggestion or advice.

[jimwalton]

The problem with your conversation is that Christians DO have objective evidence for what we believe. Your friend has missed an important aspect of Christianity. It is a historical and evidentiary belief system. We don't have to say, "I just accept it by faith," or "I just know it's true." In the Bible God always gave people evidence before He expected them to believe. Jesus did the same thing. And for the resurrection, instead of just disappearing and expecting people to accept it by faith ("I just know it's true"), he actually appeared and let people see him and talk to him. As Christians we don't have to go by feelings or blind faith, but instead by the evidence of history.

[Jet Ski]

The problem is that now God hasn't publicly revealed himself for almost 2000 years, and all that's left is an old book that tells about the evidence. A book that is very much open to many different interpretations, and a book that is only one of many, all claiming a similar thing and all contradicting each other. So it's unconvincing evidence and we don't even know which unconvincing evidence to choose. How are we supposed to make sense of that, and why should we investigate it at all if in every other domain of life science has proven to be the best method available for determining what is most likely true?

[jimwalton]

Thanks for the reply and the comments. In one sense you are right that God hasn't publicly revealed himself for almost 2000 years, but in another sense you are ignoring the evidence from science (the astounding fine tuning and worthy arguments of design) as well as people's immediate experiences of God. If experience is invalid, then science and reason go down the hole, but if experience is valid, then religious experience also counts.

You're right that the book is 2000-3300 years old, but that doesn't invalidate its truths. We can still read Plato and Pythagoras. Age doesn't doesn't disqualify truth—only falseness does. The evidence for the Bible lies in analyzing its historical veracity, sliding it up against archaeology and historical criticism, as well as assessing its theological claims for compatibility with the human condition. On those bases I find the evidence convincing.

We make sense of religious truth in a different way than scientific truth, just as there are other disciplines (jurisprudence, literature, art, music, philosophy, etc.) not in the scientific arena. While we can hold Scripture up to the light of science, theology, like philosophy, is not scientifically verifiable. We need to be careful not the use the wrong measure in determining truth, just as we don't use Fahrenheit to measure miles per gallon. Science has not and cannot prove the Bible or theology incorrect. There are different ways to determine different facets of truth. Science is one of them, and a good one for what it does, but not the only way to determine truth.

[Jet Ski]

Thanks for the reply to my reply. I really want to address all of your points there, and you seem to be up for a more in-depth discussion. If so you should know that English is not my native language, so please point out any grammatical or spelling errors that could alter the meaning of what you think I was trying to say, and just let me know if something I write makes no sense (I will probably confuse 'than' and 'then', 'their' and 'there', 'here' and 'hear' ...)

I'm also sure that it will get pretty messy pretty quickly if we try to address all of each other's points in one message. We would basically end up having multiple discussions in parallel which can become confusing. Therefore I'd like to discuss one point at a time until we come to an agreement or agree to disagree and move on. I'm not trying to avoid anything you've said, it's just easier and more productive that way.

We should make a list to keep track of every argument or point raised which we have yet to discuss. Here is what I found so far (you can of course update the list if you think I missed something or misrepresented you):

- scientific evidence for Christianity (fine tuning, design etc.)
- the validity of people's immediate experience of God, and immediate experience in general, as a way to find the objective truth
- the validity of the Bible as evidence for historic events
- different ways of making sense of things / finding the truth, and their respective advantages and disadvantages

Lastly you should know that I'm very much biased against religion being a valid basis for one's believes, but nevertheless I'm in honest search of the truth and always open to changing my mind if I hear a good argument (in fact, I'm probably incapable of not being convinced by a good argument.)
​
The thing I want to address first is the Bible and its reliability as a source of knowledge.

Of course truths are true regardless of how old they are or when they were discovered. The age of the Bible is only important because over the millenia it has been copied and translated and copied and translated from translations of translations and so on. That is a process very prone to error, don't you think? Not only because humans make mistakes, but because it's possible that some people willingly changed a few words, a sentence here or there or even added or removed a whole paragraph to make it fit there personal interpretation of the events. Perhaps they even made something up entirely to make it a better, more appealing story in their eyes. Do you agree that all of this could be the case?

[jimwalton]

Sounds great. I'm always glad to discuss. You're right that when there are multiple topics on the table, the discussion gets messy and too large to manage well. We can discuss what you wish when you wish.

You should know that, in contrast to you, I'm very much deeply convinced of the truth of Christianity and that it gives us truth that is the foundation for all truth. Just putting all the cards on the table.

You first want to discuss the Bible and its reliability as a source of knowledge. Glad to.

> The age of the Bible is only important because over the millenia it has been copied and translated and copied and translated from translations of translations and so on. That is a process very prone to error, don't you think?

Much work has been done on the accuracy of the copying of the Bible. The result from those studies have been that we can be confident that the version of the Bible we hold in our hands is so accurate as to be considered virtually identical to the autographs (the original writings themselves). First of all, for a millennia the earliest copy of the Old Testament we had was the Masoretic text, circa AD 970. Suddenly in 1946 the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, with copies or pieces from every Old Testament book except Esther, written in about 150 BC. By studying and comparing the documents we are able to see that discrepancies in the texts 1000 years apart are so minimal as to be almost miraculous. The painstaking work of scribes through the years yielded a minimum of errors.

Secondly, the abundance of NT manuscripts and fragments (over 5800) give us so much material to work with, with known dates, comparing and criticizing, that we can establish a better than 98% accuracy rendering of the NT text. Almost all of the discrepancies are discernible spelling errors and obvious scribal mistakes that are easily sorted out. Of all the discrepancies, less than 50 amount to anything, and even of those 50 not one of them affects any theology—what we believe. Therefore, we can be confident that we have an accurate text.

> Not only because humans make mistakes, but because it's possible that some people willingly changed a few words, a sentence here or there or even added or removed a whole paragraph to make it fit there personal interpretation of the events.

Because of the abundance of manuscripts, we know this editing was not the case. There are several other pieces of this pie you need to recognize.

1. Manuscripts, like our books, could and did last for centuries. We are not to think these things appeared and then were gone. They were around for so long there was a continuity of content.

2. There were so many manuscripts that it would be impossible to change a few words, a sentence here or there, or even a whole paragraph that would affect all of them. There were many copies, spread out over the Roman Empire. A change in one would not create change in any of the others. So as we examine those manuscripts, we can see where one may have entered an edit that was not part of the original, and we can know what the original said.

There are scholars who work on this material continually. We have great confidence in the authenticity of the text in our hands.

> Perhaps they even made something up entirely to make it a better, more appealing story in their eyes.

There's no evidence of this. The texts both corroborate and support each other in their similarities and differences. There is no evidence that anyone made anything up to make it a better, more appealing story.

I'll be glad to hear your reply and to keep discussing.

[Bite Me]

Is your god belief reasonably falsifiable?

[jimwalton]

Of course it is. I substantiate the existence of God and my belief in Him based on logical reasoning, historical evidences, and personal experiences of myself and others. If you want to falsify the belief, you need to posit a stronger logical case, convincing rebuttal to the historical evidence, and demonstrable reasons that my (and billions of others) experiences are illegitimate. It's all a matter of reasoning and evidence.

[Bite Me]

What evidence did you use to conclude that miracles have happened?

Can people with different religions experience things that are very similar to what your religion offers?

[jimwalton]

The miracles of the Bible are more like a rainbow in the sky than they are like pottery hidden in the soil. There is no lasting effect and no possible proof for later generations to find. If it's true that Jesus walked on the water, what artifact do you expect an archaeologist to dig up, or writings from anyone other than the twelve who saw it? In our courts of law, if twelve witnesses confirmed an event, a jury would give strength to that unanimity of testimony. But more to the point is: Does the lack of lasting evidence prove it didn't happen?

The way science generally works is that a hypothesis is stated and an experiment is designed to test the hypothesis. Depending on the hypothesis, specimens are gathered or facts are measured and repeated and documented. Through trial and error the technique and instrumentation necessary are refined to give the information sought, and patterns are established to help eliminate spurious ideas (or specimens) and measuring mistakes. How is any of this possible in the event of a spontaneous miracle?

Suppose I were hiking a trail in Vermont with some friends, and the three of us saw a fisher (Pekania pennanti) cross the path in front of us. He was there and gone so quickly that none of us were able to take a picture. When we go back to the house eager to tell our story, other family members may want to see the evidence. We have none, but we each saw it and testify to it. Does that mean we didn't see one?

What enduring evidence does one expect of the feeding of the 5,000, walking on the water, or Jesus healing a lame man? Certainly nothing an archaeologist can find, and obviously not a phenomenon a scientist can test and confirm. Asking for scientific proof of Jesus's miracles is like asking a doctor to use a stethoscope to verify that I had a bout with hiccups last week.

Much more important to the discussion of miracles is the identity claims that Jesus made. Jesus claimed that the miracles he performed were signs of his deity. If there is no such thing as God, we would expect miracles to be a ridiculous imaginative mistake that people make based on wishful thinking or legend building. But if God is a real being, miracles are no problem. Indubitably, the Creator God, having been the designer and creator of the laws of physics, has the freedom and power to use those laws or supersede them at His desire and to serve His purposes. If there is such a being as God, and if Jesus was His incarnation on earth, it would not at all be improbable for God to empower Him to do miraculous signs. The question is more properly focused on the identity of Jesus than on the rationality of miracles by His hand.

Alvin Plantinga asks what the problem is in believing in miracles—why should anyone object to it? "Why can't the causal continuum be rent by the interference of supernatural, transcendent powers? Why are miracles necessarily incompatible with modern science? They are only incompatible if it can be proved that nature is a closed continuum of cause and effect, and closed to intervention or interference on the part of beings outside that continuum, including God himself." In no way does the predictable character of nature exclude the possibility of miraculous events. Science cannot prove that the universe is all there is, meaning that our universe is verifiably a closed causal system. "Natural laws offer no threat to special divine action."

The only way to show that miracles are impossible is to disprove the existence of God, a task that is both logically and scientifically impossible.

As far as Jesus's miracles are concerned:

* The records of the Gospel writers were still within the lifetime of the people who had been there. Such reporting could easily still be confirmed or debunked. If the tales were easily able to be discredited, it would have made them all look like fools.

* Jesus’s miracles were one of the major evidences to convince them that He was who he claimed to be. His healing of people, the Transfiguration, and His resurrection were a large part of what motivated them to accept that He was God. Their faith was based in part on the miraculous signs they saw Him perform.

* The inclusion of verifiable historical data in the miracle stories lends credibility to the entire narrative. When Peter drew his sword and chopped off Malchus’s ear in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus heals the man on the spot (John 18.10). The verifiable data is given: His name is Malchus, he works for Caiaphas, and it was his ear that was injured. These details are given so the story could be verified as historically accurate. The authors obviously intended their accounts of the miracles to be interpreted as historical events, and for people to find out for themselves if the stories were true.

* Josephus, in a text considered to be historically reliable, mentions “Jesus, a wise man. For he was one who did surprising deeds.”

* A bowl recently discovered in Alexandria, Egypt, dates from about 125 BC to the first century AD. The engraving reads (in Greek) "dia chrstou o goistais," translated by the excavation team as “through Christ the magician.” It is speculated that a first-century magician used it in the work he was doing to invoke the name of Jesus, showing from an extra-biblical source that Jesus was known for His miracles.

* The Paris Magical Papyrus, dated to about AD 300, describes an elaborate exorcism ritual that begins with, “I beseech you by the god of the Hebrews,” and then lists a number of mystical names, of which Jesu is the first one listed. The papyrus then continues with numerous other references to biblical events and persons, some of which are undecipherable. It is yet another evidence from an extra-biblical source that Jesus was known as a worker of wonders, a successful exorcist, and called “the god of the Hebrews.”

* The cultural milieu of Jesus’s life speaks to the truthfulness of the record. The era of 1st-century Palestine was not one characterized by superstition and gullibility. Jews were educated people, and Romans and Greeks were skeptics. That the Gospels record that people swarmed around Jesus, both requesting and experiencing miracles, is evidence of their veracity. What is also often recorded is that the people were skeptical of Jesus’s ability to do miracles until they saw with their own eyes and were convinced. What is lacking is corroborative writing other than the written record of Jesus’s miracles is in the Bible itself.

* Jesus’s enemies even admitted that He performed miracles (Matthew 12.22-24; 14.54-57; John 3.2).

* Alternative interpretations of the miracles (mass hallucinations, mythical creations of biased authors, etc.) lack credibility upon examination. There is no such thing as mass hallucination, and the historical nature of the narratives, along with the intent of the authors to have been recording history speaks strongly against alternative interpretations.

* The resurrection of Jesus is immensely compelling. It's the one miracle was can diagnose for material evidence, sociological effects, and reason.

As far as miracles in general, I think David Hume's definition is inadequate ("A suspension of nature"). The Cambridge Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (pg. 208) defines a miracle as "An event (ultimately) caused by God that cannot be accounted for by the natural powers of natural substances alone. Conceived of this way, miracles don’t violate the laws of nature but rather involve the occurrence of events which cannot be explained by the powers of nature alone." That’s an acceptable definition, but I would tentatively define miracle as "a supernatural exception to the regularity and predictability of the universe, and therefore it is not a common (this term needs to be interpreted) occurrence." Maybe the laws of nature speak of naturally recurring events, and miracles speak of supernaturally nonrecurring events. After all, the laws of nature are not really laws, but rather more accurately forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak and strong field forces) and constructs (velocity, mass, energy, acceleration). Einstein’s theory of relativity lets us know that velocity makes a difference in reality and can come into play in ways we are still deciphering. It’s quite possible that God has forces as yet unknown to us, and can manipulate velocity, as well as other forces, to initiate relative states.

Secondly, we should realize that science cannot prove that miracles are impossible. After all, science can only speak to what is within the purview of scientific observation and the study of nature. Anything outside of that ballpark is outside of its scope. Science can’t prove to us whether entities exist outside of nature, and whether or not those entities could possibly have an influence in our natural world. Since a miracle, by any definition, is a once only, nonrecurring event, it is outside the scope of science (which can only observe and test recurring sequences) and naturalistic evidence. Miracles can only be proven in two ways: (1) that they can be shown to be logically consistent with the physical world—the way things are, or (2) by enough corroborating, credible eyewitnesses to substantiate the claim being made.

There is no philosophical argument or scientific experiment that conclusively disproves the possibility of miracles. Scientifically speaking, the odds of certain miracles occurring (such as the resurrection) may be infinity to one, but theologically speaking they are x:x (unknown to unknown). Miracles are outside of the scope of probability calculations. But realistically, the question is not so much “Can they occur?” but “Do they occur?” Anyone will admit that scientists exclude the miraculous from their scientific work, which they are entitled to do. But that’s because if a scientist tried to offer a miraculous explanation for something, he or she would no longer be doing science, but something else, like theology or philosophy. Miracles are inadmissible as scientific evidence because they are unpredictable, not able to be compared with a control group, and unrepeatable for confirmatory studies.

Ultimately you are asking the wrong question of the wrong discipline. Science can really only work in a uniform environment that is predictable, repeatable, and (in this situation) controllable (a control group and an experimental group). Evidentiary demands require some sort of material remains that allow a phenomenon to be studied, but this requirement is outside of the sphere of what we mean by “miracle.” Miracles are not predictable (so the situation can’t be intentionally studied before the event), reproducible (so the situation can’t be tested again to confirm hypotheses), nor controllable (cannot isolate causal mechanisms).

Science is appropriate when dealing with repeatable (reproducible) phenomena that can be studied under controlled conditions and give confirmatory results. One time events that were not predictable and don’t leave behind any material evidence can’t possibly fall under that category. Suppose you had a sneezing fit a few weeks back. I want you to quantify it and analyze it, or better yet, prove to me that it happened. That’s not possible, Should I then assume you never sneeze, never sneezed, and that you’re wrong until you can prove it? What evidence do you have that you had a sneezing fit? Or walked around the mall last month? Or saw a catamount? We have to use the proper measure for the proper category. And science is not the proper measure for understanding or proving miracles. Even in the area of astronomy, for instance, where some phenomena are one-time only events, to study them scientifically requires multiple repeatable examples that can be observed and compared/contrasted. Again, miracles don’t fall into this category.

In short, the bottom line is that knowledge is not one-dimensional. The methods of evidentiary scientific study are not applicable to much of our knowledge, including the occasion of miracles. Attempting to extend scientific evidence as the grounds of all knowledge is doomed to failure in many arenas, not just this one. To presume that anything remaining outside of science’s scope fails to qualify as knowledge is not justified by science or any other argument, and is, in fact, self-contradictory.

Can anyone prove that a once-only nonrecurring event is a miracle from God or not? No, because either way it’s an interpretation of what one has seen or experienced. We all decide based on what we determine to be consistent with our understanding of the world and the evidences on which we build those understandings.

Let’s talk a little bit about Newtonian physics and miracles. People’s main problem with miracles is that they mess with what people know about science, while at the same time requiring them (if accepted) to subscribe to metaphysical realities like spirits and spiritual forces. But if we are honest philosophers and scientists, we have to be open to reputable questions (as any scientist would ask): Why can’t the causal continuum be interfered with by supernatural and transcendent powers? Why are miracles necessarily incompatible with modern science? A little probing will reveal that they are not. They are only incompatible if it can be proved that nature is a closed continuum of cause and effect, and closed to any intervention from outside that continuum. Classical (Newtonian) science is nowhere near sufficient for anti-interventionism. Newton himself believed that the laws he observed reflected the nature of what God had created. According to Newton, natural law describes how the world works when, or provided that, the world is a closed system, subject to no meddling. The Newtonian laws of physics only apply to isolated or closed systems, but there is nothing in them to say there is or can be no God who can intervene in such a system to make change to the matter or energy in question. Furthermore, it is not part of Newtonian mechanics or classical science generally to declare that the material universe is a closed system— because that claim isn’t scientific, but theological, philosophical, or metaphysical. The laws don’t tell us how things have to go, or even how they always go, but only how they go when no outside agency acts on them.

Interestingly, quantum mechanics offers even less of a problem for special divine action than classical science, since quantum mechanics is characterized by (among other things) indeterminism: a spectrum of probabilities to the possible outcomes. Quantum mechanics doesn’t by necessity prohibit any answers to prayer, raising the dead, or walking on the water.

Looking at miracles even another way, it’s absurd to think that everything must be subject to scientific proof and evidence, and miracles are in that category as well. We are wrong even to think that miracles should be or can be subject to scientific inquiry. There are thousands of things we know that are not subject to scientific proof (as critics want miracles to be): I like apple pie, I forgive you, I felt chilly yesterday, I saw a beautiful sunset five days ago, Bill is my friend, that wasn’t fair, I’m in love with Denise, I’m afraid of heights, my favorite movie is “Gladiator,” I feel at peace with myself. There are millions of these. We’re just in the wrong arena to think that we can use science to prove these things. There are also things that exist, that are coherent, but not scientific: peace, justice, love, memory, reason, values, to name a few. There are disciplines that have nothing to do with science, but they are still legitimate ways to know things: jurisprudence, economics, history, literature, politics, art, philosophy, logic, and theology. As it turns out, probably most of what we know is not subject to scientific verification, nor can it be considered scientific knowledge. Miracles also fall into this category. It is both illogical and unreasonable to apply scientific reason or necessity to the possibility or veracity of miracles. While we can bring some scientific thinking to bear as we evaluate them, they are just as much outside of the purview of science as “I forgive you.”