Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2024 6:29 pm
Alexiev wrote: ↑Fri Mar 08, 2024 4:43 pm
There's plenty of "rational" evidence for the existence of God, but no
objective evidence.
That's pretty obviously untrue. If, for example, we look at the natural world with dispassionate eyes, there's a ton of it. In fact, it's hard to believe anything else...as witnessed by the fact that all ancient societies have, without exception, assumed the existence of some "god" or "gods." So the burden is really on the skeptic to show that all that apparent design is misleading.
Richard Dawkins, no friend to Theism, for sure, makes this case himself:
“I think that when you consider the beauty of the world and you wonder how it came to be what it is, you are naturally overwhelmed with a feeling of awe, a feeling of admiration and you almost feel a desire to worship something. I feel this, I recognise that other scientists such as Carl Sagan feel this, Einstein felt it. We, all of us, share a kind of religious reverence for the beauties of the universe, for the complexity of life. For the sheer magnitude of the cosmos, the sheer magnitude of geological time. And it’s tempting to translate that feeling of awe and worship into a desire to worship some particular thing, a person, an agent. You want to attribute it to a maker, to a creator. What science has now achieved is an emancipation from that impulse to attribute these things to a creator..."
Nevertheless, Dawkins stubbornly insists, we all must, at all costs, NOT take this impulse seriously, must fight off any suspicion of a creator, and must bend all mental effort toward believing in the far-less-plausible...namely, that what you are seeing is a collision of the most fortuitous and astronomically unlikely coincidences, and that everything that is so manifestly ordered in this universe simply popped into existence spontaneously. But that's very likely because Dawkins made up his mind at the ripe old age of 17.
So Dawkins admits the existence of objective evidence, but demands that you ignore it. Which you can, if you choose, of course: but it's clearly far from the truth that there's no objective evidence for God.
When I characterize your posts as "silly", I am simply stating my opinion of them.
And perhaps expressing your trouble in following the argument, unless you're trying to be merely obscurantist. Your responses often fail to recognize the main point: and its certainly not for any lack of clarity or directness on my part.
For instance, you haven't even tried to explain
what you would regard, even in theory, as acceptable evidence for the existence of God; which means either that you failed to understand, or you realized you had no answer and dodged. Either way, it's a cop out.
Ok. You've roped me in to this silly argument.
There are several definitions of "objective" 1
) (of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts. Contrasted with subjective.
This is not what we are discussing.
The relevant definitons are:
: of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality independent of the mind
objective reality
… our reveries … are significantly and repeatedly shaped by our transactions with the objective world.
—Marvin Reznikoff
compare SUBJECTIVE sense 3a
b
: involving or deriving from sense perception or experience with actual objects, conditions, or phenomena
objective awareness
objective data
c
of a symptom of disease : perceptible to persons other than the affected individual
objective arthritis
Clearly, religious observations are not a) "perceptible to all observers", "in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual
thought", "deriving from sense perception or experience with actual objects". Since God is (supposedly) incorporeal, He doesn't exist in the "objective" world of (you guessed it) physical objects.
The "feeling of awe" that Dawson (he should have stuck to genetics) mentions is, by any definition, subjective rather than objective. No reasonable person suggests there is no "evidence" of supernatural forces. There's plenty of evidence, including, but not limited to: eye witness accounts of people rising from the dead, performing miracles, and professing their personal religious experiences. None of this evidence constitutes "proof".
There's lots of evidence for the existence of sasquatch, too. There are eyewitness reports, films, quasi-historical stories, etc., etc. But I don't believe sasquatches roam the forests of my home state of Oregon. I have good reasons for my lack of faith, just as I have good reasons for failing to accept the evidence for the existence of God. Eyewitness accounts are (see the definition above) subjective. Objective evidence for sasquatch would include actual animals, skeletal remains, etc. In other words: objects. Dawson is not claiming there is
objective evidence of the supernatural. If there was, it wouldn't be supernatural. It would be natural.
With regard to your challenge: it shows your lack of understanding of the nature of proof and the nature of evidence. I accept lots of evidence for the existence of God (although I certainly don't think the feeling of awe Dawson references is such evidence). What I don't think is that the evidence rises to the level of proof, or even of "persuasive evidence". To answer your question: I hope (although I'm not sure) that if God appeared to me in a burning bush and said, "I am that I am" his appearance would be sufficiently impressive as to persuade me (although it would not be "objective"). Is there "evidence" that Jesus rose from the dead? Of course there is. There are all those eyewitness accounts related in the New Testament. Is there "evidence" that Orpheus descended to Hades and returned alive? Of course there is. There are all those Greek stories. There's probably even evidence of Q anon. That doesn't mean I have to accept all evidence as indicative of the truth.