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[Bite Me]

What methodology can be used to determine your god is the right one? What tests can be done to validate your methodology?
No more walls of text please.

[jimwalton]

> No more walls of text please.

I just assumed you wanted a real answer and not the Internet soundbite version that doesn't give the answer.

> What methodology can be used to determine your god is the right one? What tests can be done to validate your methodology?

How do you expect me to answer a question like that in 5 sentences or less? There are many ways I have determined my God is the right one. I won't elaborate on them to keep this short.

1. There are many logical arguments for the existence of God that are far stronger than their refutations: cosmological, ontological, teleological, analogical, axiological, linguistics, other minds, and arguments from consciousness.

2. God makes sense of the existence of abstract entities.

3. God makes sense of the origin of the universe.

4. God makes sense of the complex order in the universe.

5. God makes sense of objective moral values in the world.

6. The resurrection of Jesus. The established facts surrounding the resurrection, and the inferences that can be made from subsidiary arguments and evidences are more plausible than alternative explanations.

7. The credibility of the Bible: The historical evidences, its trueness to life, its value for life, and its spiritual power.

8. The testimonies of other people whom I respect. It's tough to deny when you can see people change right before your eyes from one kind of person to another, qualitatively different, kind of person.

9. My experiences of God. I am convinced God exists wholly apart from arguments. They are properly basic beliefs, just like my belief in and experience of the external world and the existence of minds besides my own, such as yours.

10. Christianity is the best explanation for life as I see it.

11. Christianity squares with the way the world is and the way people are. It tells an honest and accurate story of humanity and life.

12. Christianity makes sense with what I see of conscience, morality, beauty, and purpose.

13. As far as other religions, I don't find the worldviews of Hinduism, Islam, or Buddhism either consistent, true to life, or fundamentally true.

So I follow the evidence where it leads and I have settled quite contentedly in Christianity. On the basis of so many thoughts and angles, logic and evidences, I became convinced that God exists and that Christianity is true.

[Bite Me]

Is there any demonstrable way to validate a god against reality?

[jimwalton]

God is not my toy to do a dance for me on request. God is not a magic show for me to do a cool trick for you to prove his existence and actions. God is not my slave to do my bidding to validate himself to you.

God has demonstrably validated Himself against reality. The arguments from science (fine tuning and design) are convincingly stronger than the arguments for time + chance. There are superficial areas of conflict between theism and science; there is deep agreement between science and theistic belief. Science fits much better with theism than with naturalism. On the other hand, there is a superficial agreement between science and naturalism. One can't rationally accept both naturalism and current evolutionary theory, because they are both self-defeating. (If reason is the result of natural selection, it can't be counted on to be true.) There is deep discord between science and naturalism. Therefore theism is the more logical conclusion. God is validated against reality.

In addition, an examination of history and it theological interpretations given in the Bible are an interpretive reality that validates God as well.

The experiences of billions of people validate a God against reality also, but now we're getting into the list I made that you may or may not be ignoring or disparaging with your question.

[Jet Ski]

Wow, thank you for such a deeply personal and honest response. You never know what kind of person is sitting there behind their computer screen on the other side of the world.

So, based on your very vivid account, I assume that during your phase of seeking the truth you also looked at other religions and their holy books but found them less convincing?

And today, is there any faith contributing to your 100% of confidence, or is it really just purely based on objective evidence?

[jimwalton]

Yeah, I did. Hinduism says suffering isn't real but rather an illusion. You couldn't convince me of that for a minute, not only on the basis of my suffering but also in what I see in the world around me. Hinduism also says that point of life is to earn your way to coming in a better form of life—an (what seems to be) endless cycle of (illusory) suffering until we dissolve into Nirvana. In Hinduism truth is relative and morals are denying oneself all forms of material, emotion, and even spiritual rewards and property. To me that is not morality. Morality, instead, is active goodness combined with passive restraint. To me the idea of earning one's way into God's favor is simply a losing proposition, especially if there are no good people on the earth, if evil isn't real, and if morality is denial of self. The whole system (and there's more, I'm just not writing it all) doesn't make sense to me.

Islam troubles me. There is no country on earth where large numbers of Muslims live in peace with non-Muslims. Essential to Islam is the question of how to crush and suppress unbelievers. The Kafir have no human or civil rights. Any non-Muslim can be killed, sold into slavery, sexually abused, raped, mistreated, dismembered, or mutilated—all sanctioned by the Qur'an. "Kafir" occurs over 400 times in the Qur'an. 75% of the Sira describes all manner of jihad and political domination; 40% of the Hadith is the struggle of dealing with the Kafir. This is no successor to the NT, which teaches to love our neighbors, to preach good news, and to be people of forgiveness and grace.

Muhammad troubles me. The more I find out about his life, he seems more like, so it seems to me, a half-crazed scoundrel than a moral and spiritual leader. I don't like what I see in Muhammad.

God is not personal in Islam. How can God not be personal when he created us and we are?

The Qur'an is not the story of Muhammed or the story of Jesus. It is an agglomeration of rather unrelated sayings from which some theological teachings are gleaned.

I found Hinduism and Islam very unsatisfying intellectually, emotionally, and as far as correspondence to reality.

> And today, is there any faith contributing to your 100% of confidence, or is it really just purely based on objective evidence?

I've come to learn that I'm an evidentialist. I put stock in evidence. I'm a "show me the money" kind of guy. But faith is not contrary to evidence. In the Bible, faith is evidentiary. I define Biblical faith as "making an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make that assumption reasonable." In my opinion, belief is always a choice, and is always based on evidence. When you sit down in a chair, you didn’t think twice about sitting down. You believe that the chair will hold you. Faith? Yes. You've sat in chairs hundreds of times, but you can't be absolutely sure it will hold you this time. Things do break on occasion. But you make an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable for you to make that assumption, and you sit down. That's faith, and it was a conscious choice based on a reasonable body of evidence.

Almost all of life works this way because we can never know what lies ahead. Every time you turn a door knob you are expressing faith, because 10,000 times you've turned a door knob, and it opened the door. So you turn the knob and move forward. Does it always work that way? No. Sometimes you turn the knob and the door doesn't open. But you make an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable for you to make that assumption, and you walk forward in faith.

We know chairs hold people. That's past experience and learning. We know turning door knobs open doors. We know that when we turn a key a car starts. But every time we turn a car key, we do it because we believe it will start. The evidence is compelling, and it was a conscious choice. We don't know for sure that the car will start, and unfortunately sometimes it doesn't. Then we use our knowledge to try to figure out what to do about it. We dial our phone (as an act of faith, assuming it will work and help us reach another person), and try to get help.

You'll notice in the Bible that evidence precedes faith. There is no "close your eyes and jump off a cliff" and good luck to ya! God appears to Moses in a burning bush before He expects him to believe. He gave signs to take back to Pharaoh and the Israelite people, so they could see the signs before they were expected to believe. So also through the whole OT. In the NT, Jesus started off with turning water into wine, healing some people, casting out demons, and then he taught them about faith. And they couldn't possibly understand the resurrection until there was some evidence to go on. The whole Bible is God revealing himself to us all—and I mean actually, not through some exercise of faith.

My faith in God is a conscious choice because I find the evidence compelling. It's an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable for me to make that assumption. When you read the Bible, people came to Jesus to be healed because they had heard about other people who had been healed. They had seen other people whom Jesus had healed. People had heard him teach. Their faith was based on evidence. Jesus kept giving them new information, and they gained new knowledge from it. Based on that knowledge, they acted with more faith. People came to him to make requests. See how it works? My belief in God is based on my knowledge of the credibility of those writings, the logic of the teaching, and the historical evidence behind it all. The resurrection, for instance, has evidences that give it credibility that motivate me to believe in it. My faith in the resurrection is an assumption of truth based on enough evidence that makes it reasonable to hold that assumption. Jesus could have just ascended to heaven, the disciples figured out that he had prophesied it, and went around telling people He rose. But that's not what happened. He walked around and let them touch him, talk to him, eat with him, and THEN he said, "Believe that I have risen from the dead." The same is true for my belief in the existence of God, my belief that the Bible is God's word, and my understanding of how life works.

I would contend that faith is never blind. It's never a matter of "faith over facts and evidence."

[Jet Ski]

As always, thank you for taking the time for such an extensive response. I hope you don't come to regret it if I'm going to ask many questions about it I'll probably just tag them with numbers in square brackets to make it a bit clearer.

> Hinduism says suffering isn't real but rather an illusion. You couldn't convince me of that for a minute, not only on the basis of my suffering but also in what I see in the world around me.

[1] So, in your opinion, what's up with the almost one billion Hindus who do believe that (and everything else you mentioned), or with the 1.5 billion Muslims who believe the Koran is the true word of God?

I agree that Islam is definitely not a "religion of peace", and I can't blame you for recoiling from it (if one would phrase it that way, I only learned the word 'recoil' a few days ago - you know what I mean). [2] But what makes you think the truth should make sense or even appeal to you? Quantum Mechanics for example doesn't make any sense whatsoever and most physicists hate the indeterminacy of it (especially Einstein did) - but they still think it's real because of the overwhelming evidence for it.

> In my opinion, belief is always a choice, and is always based on evidence.

[3] So in your opinion, "belief" is not the same as "being convinced by something"? Because you certainly can't choose what convinces you and what doesn't (I would say).

I don't think your analogy of faith in everyday life, like having faith in chairs and doors, holds. I don't make a conscious choice to have faith in the robustness of a chair every time I sit down on one. Virtually all of the time, I just sit down without even thinking about the possibility that it could break under my weight. And I don't think anyone else does, except maybe for someone with OCD.

[4] Do you think that's a valid objection to your analogy?

Besides that, it sounds like your saying faith is "pretending to know something with 100% certainty, although you know you don't". [5] Is that really what you mean or did I misunderstand something?

Related question: [6] Why would you ever need faith if you already have good evidence? See this quote of yours:

> He walked around and let them touch him, talk to him, eat with him, and THEN he said, "Believe that I have risen from the dead."

Why would Jesus need to tell them that? If they already saw and touched and ate with him, they certainly believed it already, didn't they?

Looking forward to your answer.

[jimwalton]

> [1] what's up with the almost one billion Hindus who do believe that?

Obviously, there are many religions on the Earth. They can't all be right, because they contradict each other. Philosophically (and theologically) it's possible that NONE of them are right, but it's impossible that they are all right. Logically speaking, it's likely that 1 is right and the rest are not, or that none are right. The Hindus, imho, are mistaken about the nature of truth. Islam, same thing. I, obviously, have come to conclusion that they are false. They, obviously, have come to a different conclusion. We can't both be right. Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity contradict each other.

> [2] But what makes you think the truth should make sense or even appeal to you?

Human knowing and the perception of truth are always personal, i.e., related to "my" particular consciousness. It cannot be otherwise. "Knowing" something is just a description of the human struggle to discern a coherent pattern of clues that we conclude is reality. The only way to decide truth is how it makes sense to me. Hopefully between humans there arises enough consensus about such clues and patterns that we can conclude with some confidence that such-and-such thing can be considered to be "true."

> Quantum Mechanics for example doesn't make any sense whatsoever and most physicists hate the indeterminacy of it (especially Einstein did) - but they still think it's real because of the overwhelming evidence for it.

Agreed. Truth is not in the appeal but in the evidence and subsequent consensus based on repeatability, correspondence to reality, and reason.

> [3] So in your opinion, "belief" is not the same as "being convinced by something"?

"Belief" has many different nuances. At some times we believe it because our gut tells us to, sometimes we believe because we've been convinced, and sometimes we believe because the evidence is irrefutable.

> Because you certainly can't choose what convinces you and what doesn't (I would say).

Some things you can, and some things you can't. Two reports about President Trump have come out in the past two days, one from respected author and journalist Bob Woodward and the other from an anonymous insider publishing in the NYT. Trump, in all his bluster, says they're based on lies and they are a picture of failure. So I have to weigh the evidences and personalities, among other things, and decide what I believe it true. But there are other things I can't choose. I just can't "choose" to start thinking the Earth is flat. So it depends what it is.

> I don't make a conscious choice to have faith in the robustness of a chair every time I sit down on one.

Of course you don't, but you do make a subconscious one. Your consciousness knows enough about chairs from experience that you don't even consciously think about it. But it's true that you don't know for certain that it will hold you. You flop believing that it will. You don't know anything for certain until it's in the past. The future is always up for grabs. And yet we would use the terminology and say, "I know that chair will hold me." "I know the sun will come up tomorrow (bet your bottom dollar)."

> it sounds like your saying faith is "pretending to know something with 100% certainty, although you know you don't". [5] Is that really what you mean or did I misunderstand something?

No. I'm saying that faith is taking an action based on an assumption grounded in evidence and reason.

> [6] Why would you ever need faith if you already have good evidence?

First, because faith is an understanding about an action in the future. If it's in the past, it doesn't take faith. We still have to decide whether or not to believe it (my Trump/Woodward example), but it's a done deal. Something is true or it is not.

> Why would Jesus need to tell them that? If they already saw and touched and ate with him, they certainly believed it already, didn't they?

Yes, Jesus didn't SAY that. I was speaking rhetorically. My point is that he didn't just disappear and expect them to believe blindly and without evidence that he had come back from the dead. He showed them material evidence of his resurrection. The former would have been blind faith; the latter was evidentiary faith—how the Bible defines faith. And then they no longer had to choose what convinced them and what doesn't. The irrefutable evidence was standing in front of them. And that's what they wrote about and preached about in the subsequent years. We, in contrast, have to choose whether we believe that hard evidence and their testimony about it. But ours is not a blind faith or unreasoned. It's a cold case, for sure, but we have to consider the evidences and decide what we believe about it.

[Jet Ski]

I want examine the issue of "belief" and "faith" a bit further because I think it's a crucial one.

> "Belief" has many different nuances. At some times we believe it because our gut tells us to, sometimes we believe because we've been convinced, and sometimes we believe because the evidence is irrefutable.

If you use "belief" to mean these different things, I would ask you to explicitly mention which one you're talking about in any different case to avoid confusion. Is your confidence in Christianity comprised of a mixture of these different kinds of beliefs, and if so, how much of it would you attribute to each of them? And what exactly is the difference between "been convinced" and "because the evidence is irrefutable" (how can you be convinced without good evidence)?

> So I have to weigh the evidences and personalities, among other things, and decide what I believe it true.

I'm not sure if it's just the way you framed it that I take issue with. Isn't weighing the evidence exactly what gives you a certain amount of confidence in one thing or the other? Why would you then, on top of that, decide what you think is true? Doesn't the evidence decide it for you?

> The future is always up for grabs. And yet we would use the terminology and say, "I know that chair will hold me." "I know the sun will come up tomorrow (bet your bottom dollar)."

That's why I think we should replace "I know that.." with something like "I am x% certain that..", at least in this conversation, in order to make clear what exactly we mean. In my opinion a lot of confusion stems from using words like "know" and "believe" too loosely and inconsistently.

> No. I'm saying that faith is taking an action based on an assumption grounded in evidence and reason.

Okay. We can go with that definition, although you'd probably agree that that's not what most people mean by "faith". They mean "believing something in the absence of good evidence". Do you make any use of that kind of "blind faith"?

[jimwalton]

> I would ask you to explicitly mention which one you're talking about in any different case to avoid confusion.

Sure. Thanks for asking. When the Bible uses "belief," (and therefore when I use belief), I am speaking of belief based on the evidence presented, not just a gut feeling or blind acceptance.

> Is your confidence in Christianity comprised of a mixture of these different kinds of beliefs, and if so, how much of it would you attribute to each of them?

When I use "belief," it's an assumption of truth based on enough evidence to make it reasonable to make that assumption. That's 100% of what I"m going with here. That's generally what "faith" means when it is used in the Bible. (Occasionally it is also used to speak of our theological beliefs ["the faith"].)

> Why would you then, on top of that, decide what you think is true? Doesn't the evidence decide it for you?

In a sense, yes, but we all make decisions about what evidence we accept. The illustration I gave was about our current political situation. There is so much mud flying around, we have to make decisions about what evidence we accept, what weight we give to it, and to what position we will end up subscribing. Trump-haters and Trump-lovers alike choose to reject certain evidence and to accept others. So in those cases the evidence doesn't decide for us. We choose which evidences we accept.

> That's why I think we should replace "I know that.." with something like "I am x% certain that..", at least in this conversation, in order to make clear what exactly we mean.

But then we should use that terminology for ALL of conversations, not just religious ones. Religion is not in a separate category of epistemology.

> We can go with that definition, although you'd probably agree that that's not what most people mean by "faith". They mean "believing something in the absence of good evidence". Do you make any use of that kind of "blind faith"?

"Faith" in the Bible NEVER means being something in the absence of good evidence. In the Bible faith is evidentiary. There is no such thing as blind faith in the Bible.