I don’t define anything out of existence… I just don’t accept that alleged miracles are evidence of the divine. They are far more likely to be evidence of something more banal like being mistaken, imagination, or the apocryphal nature of passing stories through a culture (to name a few). Miracles aren’t logically impossible, but they are logically unlikely, and the only reason one would choose them as an explanation is if one already supposed the existence of a deity… which is why they are poor evidence of a deity. It becomes circular reasoning.
You say “the only reason one would choose them as an explanation is if one already supposed the existence of a deity”, but what if an event is genuinely impossible under every natural explanation available, not merely improbable? At that point, is the divine explanation circular, or is it simply the only explanation left?
There is no such thing as “genuinely impossible under every natural explanation available”. If something happened, then it was demonstrably possible. Our ability to tie to it an explanation, natural or otherwise, is a function of our abilities, not the nature of the universe. “I can’t imagine how it could have happened given everything I know about the world” is a very different position than “It doesn’t fit with what I know, so God must have done it”. The latter requires that we already put some credence into the notion of god. Otherwise, it’s just an event we don’t know how to explain.
Forgive me, I have not followed the entire thread, so might have missed something.
You are right in what you say here and we can’t really go back to a time before God was already supposed.
This issue of miracles, or signs of God’s existence, along with any and all anecdotal evidence, can’t be used to prove, or disprove the existence of God anyway, even if we imagine God isn’t already presupposed. Simply because humans are imperfect, unreliable and often mistaken in what they conclude, or believe about an experience (I will call this human frailty). Or in other words, people aren’t reliable witnesses.
So we have to look elsewhere to examine the question. Also we should consider that people, intelligent people, who sometimes conclude from an experience that they have experienced God, are also aware of these short comings. But have knowledge that it was God, which is more compelling. But they just can’t convey that knowledge, language and conceptual understanding is insufficient to convey it.
So we have to consider that people who have experienced God, have special knowledge which is inaccessible to other people. Now I would suggest that people are unable to generate, or fake this sort of experience. So we need to look into what is involved in epiphany and revelation which causes people to have a conviction that what they have experienced is real. We need to examine what is going on in these experiences and whether there is an alternative, benign, biological explanation.
We don’t have to do that. Somehow here you make a logical leap from “Simply because humans are imperfect, unreliable and often mistaken in what they conclude” to the above.
Here’s the problem with this line of reasoning, and it applies to spiritual epiphany as well as other alleged miracles.
It’s obviously preferable to have a clear and unambiguous explanation for things, but its unreasonable to expect one will always be available. In the times when it isn’t available, which I hope we can agree are going to occur, we must still draw the best conclusions available to us. Conclusions that require God only make sense if we presuppose God. This is true if we are speaking about tales of loafs and fishes, or if we are speaking of entirely private spiritual experiences. I could offer up multiple possible explanations of either thing that didn’t require a god, but I don’t know what really happened. What I know about loaves and fishes is that 1) the world appears to be a place where loafs and fishes don’t multiply (I guess fishes do over time, but you know), and 2) these sorts of stories about things that don’t seem possible pop up all the time in different cultures offered as the proof of the divinity of some god or other. Those are the only two things I really need to know to draw a fair conclusion. The same is true with personal spiritual experience, and the same is true with UFO sightings. You don’t need have a definitive “mundane” explanation to draw conclusions about the non-mundane explanations.
There is no such thing as “genuinely impossible under every natural explanation available”.
But then said
Our ability to tie to it an explanation, natural or otherwise, is a function of our abilities, not the nature of the universe.
So which it it? Is natural the only possible explanation, or are natural and "otherwise", both possible explanations? Or does your phrasing not contradict, and I am just misunderstanding your phrasing?
All explanations are possible. Explanations are things people do. We can do natural explanations or other explanations. Our ability to make up explanations is independent from the facts of a matter.
Whatever the facts of the matter are, they are logically not impossible, because they are the facts. We can explain it however we want, as natural or otherwise. There is no event that can’t be in principle explained using a natural explanation or any other type of explanation. Is that clearer?
I don’t really care to get caught up in “naturalism”. There are explanations that presuppose God, and there are explanations that don’t. If the reason to believe in God is because of miracles, and miracles only seem divine if we presuppose God, then you have a circular argument. You need to start with good reason to believe in God before proposing a god based explanation makes any sense (not even saying it’s probable, just that it makes any sense at all).
If I say that something strange happened because is was caused by a wizard, unless we believe that wizards are likely real, it’s just a nonsense explanation. We can’t say “Wizards obviously exist… how else could this weird thing have happened?”.
but in this argument, I am addressing a very specific, traditional and commonly used notion of god.
Ask anyone on the street for a common definition of God. Most will respond God is the supreme being that intentionally caused the universe and life to exist. But apparently that isn’t the God you claim almost certainly doesn’t exist. Its some other gods.
A good reason, independent of the alleged miracles, to think that an interventionist, knowable god is likely to be true. I can’t imagine what that might be, but I also can’t imagine the inverse for wizards. Nonetheless, I could in principle be convinced of either… I just think it’s incredibly unlikely that I would be.
Are your feelings hurt that I’m not arguing against the god you want me to? Seriously, what’s your problem? I presented an argument and made the terms of my argument clear. If those terms aren’t acceptable to you, then move on. My argument has nothing to do with you. I don’t have to care about your conception of god, which is lucky, because I don’t. So what are you trying to achieve here?
Is “I can’t imagine what that might be” the same as “I’ve worked through the standard natural theology arguments and found them wanting,” or is it closer to “I haven’t actually looked at them yet”?
The evidence provided by people who claim to have experienced God often includes accounts of an experience of being lifted up by God, or angelic beings. What they are describing is a process of being taken out of themselves and experiencing something via a God like being. This would necessarily be unrelatable and therefore inaccessible to people conducting an intellectual analysis.
This doesn’t allow for what I said above. The person has had an experience which is “out of this world” and God is a suitable mythical being that fits the experience. The fact that the mythical being exists in the minds of people doesn’t alter the experience, or the unknown cause of it. That experience is existential, rather than a culturally induced experience.
If you are making a philosophical analysis of people’s experiences and beliefs of God, these experiences should be considered.
I think somewhere in between “worked through” and “haven’t looked”. I am aware of most of these arguments, and am widely speaking unimpressed. Most don’t describe an interventionist god whose will is knowable, which is entirely unlike the God I learned about in Sunday school… the God that every religious person I know believes in. So those arguments, be they cosmological, ontological or teleological, to me are just philosophical speculations, not really revelatory of the gods people really worship. I sit somewhere within a triangle of being agnostic or apathetic toward them, and suspicious of the fact that they seem a lot like motivated reasoning to me.
If you are asserting that an experience doesn’t belong in the realm of sense, then it is literally nonsense. You can’t have it both ways. Either it’s open to intelligent analysis, or it’s by definition unintelligible. I choose to treat these experiences as intelligible, and analyse them accordingly. If you seek to make them immune, then you turn them into nonsense. You have no grounds to claim “That experience is existential, rather than a culturally induced experience.” Asserting something isn’t the same as demonstrating it to be the case.
This is the problem with trying to decide about things like entities beyond the world we know, using rational thought. It can’t arrive at a definitive conclusion.
You mean intellectual sense, presumably. Or if you mean the senses of the body, well they are sensing things in the world we know. But during the process of revelation the person experiences other things, things which can’t easily be understood, or related to other people in this world. The bible and other religious texts and traditions are filled with descriptions of these kind of events and theologians have terminology and language which considers such events.
Well I have had such an experience and I have no way of describing accurately, or in a way that other people can understand, what I experienced. In this experience, I witnessed time, as in different periods of my life, laid out beneath me, side by side, like a succession of rooms. An experience of being outside my personal time, but transcendentally aware of it.
Now it is possible that it was a hallucination, but I witnessed during that experience a transcendence of my personal time. It might have been something similar to the experience of having your life flash before you on the point of death. Something which has happened to me twice. I don’t know what’s going on in experiences like this and I’m agnostic, I don’t have a belief in God. But I have witnessed and understood many things which suggest to me that things like this are real.
Is your objection that those arguments only get you to an impersonal first cause, or that they don’t get you to the specific personal God of Christian revelation? Because those seem like different gaps to me.
They only ostensibly get you to an abstract idea… first cause in many cases, depends on the specific apologetic. The failure to get to a Christian god is an example of the larger failure. It also fails to get to a Muslim god, a Hindi god, etc. It fails to get you to any of the gods that real people actually worship in the world. It fails to get you to a being who has a knowable will, and whom we might assume has opinions on how we live our lives. Any god that doesn’t have either of these things isn’t a god so much as an idea.
The experience is obviously real. How you interpret the experience is something entirely different. While obviously such an experience had a large personal effect on you, and was different than the other daily experiences you have in life, it doesn’t imply that whatever the reason it occurred is otherworldly. There is no reason to believe that you actually transcended time, just because it felt like you did.
I mean, on occasion I experience deja-vu. It’s really, exceedingly compelling, and seems exactly like I’m re-living the same moment of my life. The fact that something seems a certain way isn’t, in itself, good evidence that it is that way. Even though, like with my deja-vu, it really, really seems like it’s true. The way something seems is sometime misleading.
I’m not clear exactly what you take from your experience, but I don’t see any reason to believe that it was categorically different from my deja-vu. I could interpret it as 1) evidence that I can, on random occasions, experience time in a non-linear way, or 2) my brain sometimes processes my experience of time in a way that feels like I’m re-experiencing something. Given all of the ways I know brains can mess things up, the latter seems like a much more obvious answer than trying to rewrite the laws of thermodynamics.
Déjà vu, which I experience too, is well understood in terms of neuroscience.
I agree with what you say about weird things that the brain does. But I struggle to understand how this would include what I experienced. The experience included my being lifted up out of myself by a being who seemed to me at the time to be Jesus and a feeling of rising up above the world very rapidly, but as the world I saw below me receded, it wasn’t a physical landscape as we know, but a temporal landscape, where time, changes in time, and points in time formed a landscape. I know it might just have been something similar to a kind of psychotic episode, or something. But why would it take that form? (I have never had any kind of mental illness, or psychotic episode).
I see what you are saying. So then I guess the better question would be: Do the arguments fail to get you to any personal God, or do they fail to get you to the right one?