The obligatory question of Christian vs. Atheist debates: what would make you change your mind?
If you watch enough debates on YouTube, you're virtually guaranteed to hear a version of this question asked by the moderator or an audience member: what would it take to make you change your mind re: your religious belief, or your disbelief? Answers to this often surprise.
What say you, Shipmates?
What say you, Shipmates?
Comments
If they were to dig up the bones of Jesus of Nazareth and prove beyond any reasonable doubt that they were his. That's one answer.
That wouldn't bother me too much as I've for a long time not been utterly dependent on a resuscitative resurrection.
Whatever our understandings of the accounts of the resurrection of Christ they don't appear to indicate a purely 'resuscitative' phenomenon - if we can put it that way. Sure, it was a physical resurrection if the Gospel accounts are to be believed - or interpreted that way. But Christ's 'resurrection body' appears to have been able to do things you or I can't.
It's clear the Gospel writers don't want us to think of the resurrected Christ as a ghost - he eats fish, is able to be handled etc. And there's a big emphasis on the empty tomb.
Whatever is going on it doesn't appear to be a 'normal' resuscitation - if there is such a thing. It's all above my pay-grade but in traditional orthodox / Orthodox understandings then it is a bodily resurrection but in a 'glorified' sense.
😉
Regarding debate, I avoid the formalized competitions for approval points like the plague. I loathe them. And often come to loathe debate disciples, who show up in discussion boards and discuss topics like this, armed with their high-school-debate-team motivations and tactics, looking "to find a small man and lick 'im!"* as if that were some path to truth.
*see Ken Burns's "The Civil War."
Why do you think some people see and experience so much that it is overwhelming while others see and experience nothing and in some cases see their faith fade away to nothing?
I'm not sure exactly how or why this works, but with regard to conspiracies I suspect this is taken to be stronger evidence of an even deeper and more widespread conspiracy.
Which I thought was an interesting thought experiment with regard to religion. Maybe facts which counter religious beliefs just make stronger believers. And also possibly some new non-believers.
To what extent would I keep demanding more proof? Dunno. Don't expect to find out with Gamma G's example, though.
If I say, I have an invisible goblin on my shoulder and you say - no you don’t and look I can put my hand directly on your shoulder, I can reply but it just jumped over your hand. Each time you come up with another challenge I come up with another reason, and in doing that I elaborate my belief system and each time it becomes more entrenched and complex.
Conspiracy theories are different. Researchers into the psychology of conspiracy theories have come to think that people who subscribe to them suffer from some degree of narcissistic personality disorder. Certainly if you've met anyone who subscribes to a conspiracy theory, they tend to be quite arrogant, although not always gratingly so. The conspiracy theorist often takes a degree of pride in thinking differently "from everyone else." Conspiracy theories are also built on entirely spurious claims that are easily debunked.
Religious belief operates in a different area. Forcing post-Enlightenment standards of belief and evidence onto a system that is pre-Enlightenment is a bit like demanding a chess player to play by the rules of checkers. They're different games.
It's not. Everyone has a degree of confidence that a given set of beliefs are true. If you're near or at the bottom of the scale for all the ones that propose the existence of a God or gods you probably consider yourself an atheist. If you are higher up on one of those confidence scales you'll identify as a believer in the religion associated with that set of beliefs.
And your position can vary.
Well quite. And there have been mass sightings, mass experiencings, of phenomenon one would classify as supernatural. Those are waved away as being mass hysteria or some other group disorder. Neither 'side' of the 'debate' has a monopoly or superior claim to rationality.
Of course we do. There is no supernatural historical event and none are needed to explain anything in nature, which is everything.
Then, I guess you will have to read it.
Lewis was raised in a naturalist (read humanist) family. He considered the Jesus story as myth. He eventually came into contact with JRR Tolkien who encouraged him to examine deeper questions science could not answer. Eventually he concluded there is a God, and if there is a God, the story of Jesus made sense.
Beyond that I cannot go further since it has been over fifty years since I read it.
If I posted 'Lossky makes that point ...' or 'Bedyaev argues differently ...' or 'Coleridge made a telling observation along those lines' without elaborating then I'm sure you and other Shipmates would want to know more.
Simply citing a book you read 50 years ago without indicating which particular point Lewis was making doesn't cut it, I'm afraid.
What - you can simultaneously hold the belief that God exists, and that God does not exist, and be happy in that state? And not in some quantum superposition, "my belief vector is a linear combination of God-exists and God-doesn't-exist vectors" sense, but in an actual believing mutually contradictory statements sense?
I understand oscillating back and forth between them, but not holding them (theism and atheism) simultaneously.
It's definitely thought provoking! For a little while in the immediate aftermath of my own falling away from faith, I found Christian v. Atheist debates to be helpful, though I did get my fill of them and move on. Occasionally, though, I'll listen to another one, and it's almost a certainty that this question will be asked. I'm not trying to win anything in here by asking, I assure you. Honestly curious, and glad to hear others' takes.
I've read all three of Shelby Foote's "The Civil War,' volumes, and watched Ken Burns' docu a couple of times at least. As a Pennsylvanian transplanted to Mississippi, I thought I'd better have as full a picture as possible before moving (since some down here are still fighting it).
Unfortunately this doesn't keep both sides from claiming the other is irrational.
And of course that sort of thing isn't possible, historically/scientifically speaking, unless we invent a time machine.
Acquiring a belief system, with all its feel good benefits, certainties, when it's up and running, is another thing entirely.
The closest I've ever come to mystical experience happened as I was walking past the memorial to John Wesley's conversion experience at the Barbican. For a few minutes I had no doubts at all: I was fully convinced that Jesus is alive and that death has no lasting dominion. I hadn't thought of any new evidence or lost my appreciation of the arguments against. I just wasn't second guessing my own reasoning any more.
The state didn't last more than a few minutes.
There are times when I'm feeling low when the problem of evil seems nearly overwhelming and it seems that authentic Christianity is being squeezed between secular indifference and right-wing populism, and other times when I'm more hopeful and those just don't matter. I think I am more likely to be rational when not feeling low but I wouldn't be able to tell.
I think what would make me give up on Christianity would be if I were convinced any Christian belief (not just right-wing fundamentalism) made believers less loving. But that's not the sort of proposition that's amenable to scientific proof or disproof.
I was thinking what would happen if Jesus's bones turned up tomorrow and could be verified in some way as belonging to him.
I wasn't thinking of a time-machine but some other means that would put it beyond any shadow of doubt. I'm not speculating as to what means that might be. But just suppose the unanimous scholarly consensus and scientific tests all pointed to the bones being Christ's.
I can simultaneously hold the belief that God exists and fully affirm that belief, and hold the belief that God does not exist and fully affirm that belief. I can do that because I am not a robot capable of only holding binary value-judgments in mind. It is not a pleasant state, no, but that doesn't matter. I also don't enter this state regularly but it has certainly happened, sometimes for seemingly no reason. The life of faith is nuanced and wonderful, and part of that wonder comes from the vastness of experience it contains.
It just shows, in that impossible example, that looking for a materialist miracle is meaninglessly inappropriate.
I'm not concerned about that, because I can imagine no way of proving identity for a man who has been ... not dead, but certainly physically unavailable?... for 2000 years, and who leaves no direct descendants, no reputable relics (I mean, yeah, holy prepuce, I don't think that's at all likely after all these years) and no known collateral descendants either--and if he did, 2000 years is such a long period that the chances mathematically would be that we ALL would be descended from them! So DNA is worthless. You're left with what, circumstantial evidence? Well, there were a helluva lot of crucifixion victims in those days in those places, and nothing particularly unusual about his own suffering, physically, so as to mark him out. I suppose you might find a scroll buried with a likely-looking victim, but there were plenty of liars and discreditors around then, too--and in the 2000 years that have passed. No, I really don't see how you'd ID the man, even if you turned up his bones. Unless he were wearing them, and spoke for himself.
I'm not talking about 'how' it could be proven but imagine if it could.
If I were to say, 'Imagine I could miraculously tele-transport to Australia....' would you go along with that for sake of argument or would you start asking whether it was the Starship Enterprise version or one from a different sci-fi series?
Why is everyone so literal? 😉
1. Corinthians 15.
42 So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable;
43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
Om on the spectrum. Which is quite metaphoric. I can only imagine that it could on an overwhelming, global, personal scale in the affirmative of the supernatural. I don't need to imagine, and cannot, how a material miracle could prove the negative, especially to any believer. None is necessary. Or possible. Reason alone negates, if used before belief. Bulldozes it. And doesn't even have to do that. Reason is natural and only reveals the natural. It doesn't have to dance up the garden path and come back again. Belief isn't arrived at by reason and cannot be departed from by it. That's not reason's lack.
Keep reading what he said until you get it. And there is no mention of our spirits. Only our bodies.
Well, look at it from my point of view. Why should I stress myself out about an imaginary possibility that by all the signs is actually an IMpossibility? I mean, I suppose we can imagine a voice booming from heaven, "I didn't mean a word of it," but really.
I just can't take it seriously. Sorry!
I don't read this as saying that only our spirits will be resurrected and not our bodies, but that our bodies will be resurrected out of a spiritual stuff. That is, our nature will be changed and what we call flesh will be turned into spirit.
I don't think Paul believed that the spirit was immaterial. If he was in keeping with Stoic understanding of 'pneuma' that were then standard, he would have thought that spirit was something more akin to the most rarified, highest form of matter. So the spiritual body will still be a material object, possessed of all of those qualities that distinguish a material body, but will be a purified form, so to speak.
It's all in there
Only to you. Although @Lamb Chopped is on the way. Substituting nature for body doesn't work either,
1. Corinthians 15.
42 So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The nature that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable;
43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural nature, it is raised a spiritual nature.
Although the nature of the body that has the human nature will be transcended too.
My two penny worth ..... if being human means that we have both a body and a spirit, then we are not properly human without one of those elements. So if we are to have eternal life as humans, it must involve both. Isnt that what Paul means in Rom 8? "23 Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption to sonship, the redemption of our bodies."
I do not recognise your quotation.