I thank you for your candid response here, and I greatly appreciate you sharing your deep struggles with your faith. It’s rare to see a Christian do this, especially so openly with another who has left the faith.

Thank you so much for your time talking to me, this seems a good place to conclude our discussion for now. I’m sure I’ll be talking to you in the future.

Thanks again

Your honesty is refreshing. I, too, have wrestled long and hard with the idea that the Holy Spirit didn't guide the Church into all truth (Jn. 16.13) from the get-go. From the very beginning the Church had false teachers infiltrating its ranks (2 Pet. 2.1; 2 Cor. 11.13, 26, et al). God didn't stop it. It had people believing the wrong things, and God didn't stop it. It wasn't long before the Church was a hobo stew of teachings. The ones that were recognized as authoritative were the apostles who knew Jesus, people who wrote with first-hand, Luke (who wrote with 2nd-hand knowledge from 1st-hand sources) and Paul. Everything else was rejected, but there were lots of "everything else"s. I want the Lord to keep His word pure, and it frustrates me that He didn't do that.

I have also spent countless hours in prayer asking God to reveal Himself to me (which He does through the Bible, but that's not what I'm specifically asking), to take me deeper into the knowledge of Him, and to use me as an agent of truth—wherever that leads. Yet God has never spoken to me. When I study the Bible, there is no sense of a "Helper" leading me to the right thoughts about it. I do my best to study deeply and follow the evidence wherever it leads, to dissect the text well, and to be as objective as possible. But so have many. You've seen on reddit: Ask a Christian a question and you'll get 15 different answers from 15 different people. It frustrates me that it's this way. Can't God keep His message pure?

I have dealt with those frustrations in various ways. I know that God does speak to me through His word. Never through prayer (that I know); never through thoughts in my head (that I know; I'm not sure I'd trust them anyway. As you've said and I've also said: How could anyone know whether or not they are from God? Lots of wackos have "thoughts" they claim came from God.)

I want to be an agent of truth. I don't want to believe something I know to be false (I'm not sure anyone does). I do my best in study, but where's the Spirit? (shrugging my shoulders). You wouldn't believe the Bible notes I have. I keep them online for other people to access, and they are massive. But where's the Spirit of God?

What about the deeper knowledge of God? I do think I understand more and better all the time from my study, my life experiences, things I read, and conversations I have, but so does everyone else in Christendom, and when I post on reddit I often get blazed by the Christians as much as by the atheists as being an idiot who doesn't know anything (we live in a harsh and critical world, for sure). Again, where's the Spirit to clue each of us in who else is telling the truth? (shrugging my shoulders)

I'm being very open and vulnerable with you right now. But I'm always seeking to be a person of honesty, integrity, and an agent of truth. It's never about winning an argument, but rather getting at what the truth is. I know I'm different from many people that way. I'm not concerned with holding to a party line, maintaining a specific doctrinal position, or sticking with tradition. I want the truth, no holds barred.

So, God doesn't do things the way I think He should. So what's new. I'm not ready to be Da Boss anyway. I have heard plenty of stories where God has spoken to people (especially Muslims; you can Google it) in visions lately. Not to me, and I have to be content with that I'm not one of the "chosen." That's OK. I don't want pride to be an issue. I don't have to be the Big Cheese, either. Not Da Boss, not the Big Cheese. Just me: I work in my corner of the world in my own little room. I need to be OK with that. God is the chooser, not me.

So how can I tell who has a message from God and who doesn't? I've learned to trust the authors of the Bible; I find them reliable reporters. I'm very suspicious of human perception and claims. People need to be vetted, verified, their message pored over, their lifestyle examined, the way they handle themselves. It's just like all the liars on the news and the Internet. I get sick of it. But that's the world we live in: liars everywhere, and unfortunately in the Church, too. I need to do the best I can to separate the wheat from the weeds, the truthful ones from the hypocrites and liars, and the real from the false. It's a lot of work. I wish the Holy Spirit helped out more than He does, but it's His show, not mine.

There's my two cents. I can't be more honest than this, but hopefully you've sensed that I've been honest all along. That's what I try to be.

> I don't see any realistic way to arrive at "proof" that Moses, Gideon, or anyone else had a credible revelation experience except by accepting the text on other criteria, since their original evidence is unavailable to us except by report. I think this is what you are also saying.

Yes, that is what I’m saying, but it’s more than that. You’re acknowledging that not only is there no “proof” that these are revelation, but that there isn’t even anything better than “these authors are genuinely reliable, and they had their reasons for belief, so you ought to believe too”.

> So when we read the biblical text, we ask all the other necessary questions: Is the writer reliable? Does he tell the truth about history? Does what he says comport with reality about other things? Is there integrity and benefit in what he is saying? ... If I can observe that the author is a person of morality, integrity, honesty, and accuracy, I then have reason to invest trust in the author about claims I can't verify.

We could have all these factors you mention AND the claimant can still be wrong that they are receiving revelation. I’m looking for targeted criteria that can solve this issue.

> And since there is consistency across the Bible that God gave evidences of His revelation to people across the generations to confirm the messages, and people across the generations were convinced by that evidence, then to be a naysayer is just being ornery.

No, I don’t think so. If you are saying God has done this for every generation, as the Bible presents, my question still stands, why does he not continue to do this? I’m trying to remain humble before God, and not be unduly demanding—but really, what gives? Why does he work with people all throughout redemption history according to their own plausibility structures, but not us?

You mentioned in your last comment about how people were rebellious against his messages in the past too, and I agree with you. But here’s the thing, for a response to be [i]rebellious[/i] that would mean that they truly understood it to be from God in their own conception and rejected it. I don’t think that is what I’m doing. I’m saying I don’t see sufficient evidence to affirm that this is revelation. In the same way, as I see it, in order for me to be engaged in rebellion, God would have to have revealed himself to me in a way that works with my plausibility structure (as he did with people in the past) such that I actually do believe it, but am choosing not to follow it.

> If intelligent, skeptical people were convinced, and we have a reliable record in our hands, on what basis or evidence do I discredit all of it?

You said yourself, you believe it is revelation for other reasons than the claims contained in it itself. Perhaps it has always been like that. Perhaps people have always come to believe it for not the best of reasons, but as a consequence of other beliefs and commitments. To me, it just really strains credulity to think that for every book of the Bible, every prophet, and every claim they made there was always a group examining them with good evidentiary standards, with the utmost integrity, with no ulterior motives or wishful thinking—such that we can be confident of absolutely everything it says.

> Then the question turns to you: On what evidence do you base your skepticism

On the evidence of human nature, that it seems ubiquitous in all human cultures and societies that we make claims of divine revelation in one form or another.

Even when I was a Christian, I believed that the overwhelming majority of these claims by humans are mistaken or in bad faith. Yet those who hold these alternative claims of divine revelation also have their own reasons for believing them. When I began to examine these reasons more closely, I found that they were not of substantial difference from my own reasons for believing the Bible. (Like the factors we have been discussing)

I realized I had a big problem on my hands, because if I reject these other claims of revelation and accept my own tradition’s—yet the reasoning is basically the same, then I am not being consistent, and am in fact engaging in special pleading. In other words, if I accept the apostle Paul, but not Joseph Smith on ultimately arbitrary grounds, then I am not acting with integrity. Consequently, if I call bullshit on JS, I must do it with Paul too.

That is of course not to say I throw out Paul! He was one of the most influential people on western civilization that has ever lived—but that doesn’t mean his message was revelation from God.

I do not say there is no God. I do not say I know for certain He doesn’t reveal himself to people. I do not even reject miracles outright. I just look at myself and my fellow humans and realize that we have a fundamental flaw in our ability to be taken in by magical and wishful thinking.

Look at all the things people believe in our own age—Q-anon, chem trails, healing crystals, astrology, faith healers, all the cults. And this at a time when good information is available to all people easily. I live just a few miles away from the Scientology world headquarters. I’ve studied it. The guy literally said “I’m going to invent a religion” and people still believe it! Thousands of them.

I just think it’s far more likely that the Bible takes part in this ubiquitous human phenomenon than that it is the one and only truth from God.

> or do you just need evidence there is no chance of ever getting?

I really do take this to heart, and I appreciate you saying it. You might be right. Yet my commitment to skepticism also causes me to be skeptical of myself— thus the search continues. I engage in conversations like this because I really believe it matters. If I didn’t care about the Bible, I wouldn’t bother with all of this.

I don't see any realistic way to arrive at "proof" that Moses, Gideon, or anyone else had a credible revelation experience except by accepting the text on other criteria, since their original evidence is unavailable to us except by report. I think this is what you are also saying.

So when we read the biblical text, we ask all the other necessary questions: Is the writer reliable? Does he tell the truth about history? Does what he says comport with reality about other things? Is there integrity and benefit in what he is saying?

If I can observe that the author is a person of morality, integrity, honesty, and accuracy, I then have reason to invest trust in the author about claims I can't verify.

And since there is consistency across the Bible that God gave evidences of His revelation to people across the generations to confirm the messages, and people across the generations were convinced by that evidence, then to be a naysayer is just being ornery. If intelligent, skeptical people were convinced, and we have a reliable record in our hands, on what basis or evidence do I discredit all of it?

Then the question turns to you: On what evidence do you base your skepticism, or do you just need evidence there is no chance of ever getting? (A position that could cause us to reject most historical claims as well—the idea that I will reject everything without "good grounds.") I agree that skepticism can be very healthy, but too much skepticism just becomes meaningless, and renders most things meaningless in its wake.

I could, for instance, question whether you exist. Maybe I'm conversing with ChatGPT. Even you coming to introduce yourself to me wouldn't wash, because you could have hacked into the system and studied the conversation. If I want to be rational, I'd say of course you exist; if I want to be skeptical to the extreme, I'm not sure there's anything you could do to convince me.

> It seems you expect that somehow a confirmation that happened 2500 years ago should still have verifiable evidentiary content about the occurrence of the miracle.

No, absolutely not. It has been my point from the beginning of this thread that the “confirmation” of the original audience is useless to us now. It has been your position that the confirmation of the original audience has some sort of benefit to us today. Am I misreading you?

My argument is not that their confirmation should have “evidentiary” value for me today, but that the stories of the “signs” and the “reception” of the signs are moot unless it can be demonstrated on good grounds that they actually happened. Otherwise, anyone could write a book of “revelation” and have *in the story* that their revelation was miraculously confirmed. We don’t have to imagine hypotheticals. This is precisely the case with Mormonism. You have a Prophet, miracle claims, and original hearers who believe it. That is all you need. I see no good reason (but I am still open) to believe that Moses is any different.

It seems we are still just left with, “you need to trust those original hearers, they had their reasons” that just doesn’t work for me.

We can come back to some of your other points later.

> these are internal to the stories themselves

Of course they are. I don't think there's any other choice. The stories we have can't be outside of the stories we have.

> these stories offer nothing for me NOW

Remember that the Bible was written TO them, not to us. Now, even though it was written to them, it was still written FOR us. It seems you expect that somehow a confirmation that happened 2500 years ago should still have verifiable evidentiary content about the occurrence of the miracle. That doesn't seem realistic to me as a criteria. To me that's like asking, "Did Abraham Lincoln hear JW Booth coming? Prove it to me."

The point is that there were criteria to verify it was a legitimate word from the Lord.

> say that God no longer does this type of thing

I agree with that in general, not being a Pentecostal. But there are prophecies that in the Last Days such phenomena will kick up again (Joel 2.28-32).

> So I cannot ever expect God to do something like this for me, to prove to me these texts are revelation from Him.

I would say that my belief in God and the Bible came from other things first (convinced of theism, the reality of Christ, His death and resurrection, my need to be redeemed from my sin, etc.) Those are the foundation that give me the basis for believing the criteria for His revelation.

> It makes no sense to me why God would stop this sort of thing

I, too, wish God had kept it up, but I can also see (at least through biblical history) that the more obvious God was, the more rebellious people were against Him. Weird, but that's how the Bible portrays it.

> every sermon I have heard on the Gideon story has said that he was in the wrong for asking for a sign from God.

I agree, but God did it for him anyway. The way the story is presented is that Gideon was challenging God from like spite, not trying to confirm or verify. Gideon, like almost everyone in the book of Judges, was a negative example.

> these signs are not even that useful as the Pharoh’s magicians could sort of do them too

Right. That's why they're only mostly TPs. Nothing really PROVES; people even question science that way. Certainly so in historical studies.

The point is that these things are told to us to show us that this is how God works, even though most of the time we're not told the details. The impression we are being given is that God verified His message to those to whom He spoke it. For us, it's "do we believe the record left for us?" I guess it's the same with anything historical. We know the historical records on the pyramids are slanted to exalt the king. So do we believe them? The historical records we have of Alexander the Great are written centuries after Alex. Do we believe them? Why?

The point is that God verified His message. It's left to us to determine whether or not the record is reliable, and beyond that, who is God and how does He relate to us?

> It would have been more convincing if God gave Moses the ability to answer anyone’s sign request that was doubting, rather than having a set group of signs to do.

That still wouldn't convince you 2500 years later.

Ok. I agree with you that supernatural experiences like those texts talk about would be the closest we could get to finding TP’s, though I think there are still big problems.

1. these are internal to the stories themselves which we are trying to determine as revelation or not. In other words, these stories offer nothing for me NOW, except to presume that “it must have been convincing to them back then, so I should take their word for it”. But this of course completely depends on the historical truthfulness of Moses actually doing these things; however if I come to think the whole narrative is true anyway, than I may as well just believe that Moses was hearing from God directly from his own testimony of the burning bush, the miraculous signs would just be superfluous. This is why I say that, substantively, the Torah and the Book of Mormon are on equal footing. We only more easily doubt the BoM because we’re closer to it historically; and the Torah only enjoys the status of revelation because it’s very old and has more people who believe it.

2. Moreover, nearly all Christians (except maybe Pentecostals) say that God no longer does this type of thing. So I cannot ever expect God to do something like this for me, to prove to me these texts are revelation from Him. It makes no sense to me why God would stop this sort of thing, if he has in the past, all throughout the Bible it says “so and so said to God…. Or God said to so and so, etc etc” so nonchalantly and “matter-of-factly” it’s so mundane there isn’t even an attempt to explain it, and in the age apostles they apparently did signs and wonders to confirm the message—-but in our time, you can be certain, God doesn’t do this sort of thing anymore. In fact every sermon I have heard on the Gideon story has said that he was in the wrong for asking for a sign from God. This strikes me as one of those things that is just “all too convenient” for Christians. It keeps all the miraculous stuff safely in the past, yet at the same time insists that one can completely trust everything in the text because of the miraculous. This is circular. “Why should I believe this is revelation?”, “because the prophet performed miracles” “and how do I know these miracles happened?”, “why, it’s here in the divinely revealed book, so you know it’s certain”

3. As you referenced, even in the Moses story itself, these signs are not even that useful as the Pharoh’s magicians could sort of do them too. In fact, I’m not aware of a time in the rest of the story where doubting Israelites come to Moses and he does the signs to convince them. And anyway, why would these signs be convincing to prove that Moses has revelation? I think something like the Gideon story is much better as he, the doubter/questioner asks of God a specific request. It would have been more convincing if God gave Moses the ability to answer anyone’s sign request that was doubting, rather than having a set group of signs to do.

The most likely candidate for true positives is a specific prophetic prediction (or request) and the exact fulfillment of that request in a brief time, such as we see in Exodus 4.1-17; Judges 6.36-40; Josh. 6.20.

No, we don’t have to set the bar that high yet.

Do we have any criteria that produce TP’s *more often than not* TN’s, FP’s or FN’s ?

I don’t know of any criteria we’ve discussed yet that produces results that even have the *potential* of being ONLY TP’s


TP = true positive
FP = false positive
FN = false negative

You mean such that result in 100% certainty and there are no other possible explanations?