The Tension of Faith

I don't believe that, and I don't think Ringo does, either. If you fill in more specifics it may become something I'd accept, but as written I reject it. I think several factors are involved. First, certainly there is an absence of evidence. Second, it's religion, with all the malarkey that goes with it. Third, the Christian God is associated with a large number of very imaginary or impossible claims, the number depending upon how much of the Bible you take literally. The first part about belief requiring no evidence is precisely what I believe, and I can't make sense of the last part. This is the "50 million Frenchmen can't be wrong" fallacy. What you want is strong evidence for what you believe, not a lot of other people who believe the same thing. Following the evidence can be a lonely endeavor but leads one closer to things that are likely to be true, while belonging to a community of like believers can be very comforting but doesn't create a lot of impetus for seeking out what's true about the real world.My advice: for the spiritual, seek out religion; for the real world, seek out science; for reconciliation of conflicts between the two realms, not a problem for most people who aren't evangelicals.--Percy

The fact that the impossible has a probability of zero is intrinsic to the maths I am using. It wouldn't work if I assumed otherwise.Of course, given the subject matter, we can't utilize Frequentist Probability. History only happened once, after all.

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In the frequentist interpretation, probabilities are discussed only when dealing with well-defined random experiments (or random samples).[1] The set of all possible outcomes of a random experiment is called the sample space of the experiment. An event is defined as a particular subset of the sample space to be considered.

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Since we are talking about using evidence to build our confidence in a hypothesis, we must use Bayesian probability-esque interpretations of probability instead.There are two significant points to be aware of, that you have not addressed1) This is the probability of our knowledge being correct. Tentativity of conclusions means we can never attain 100% certainty even if we psychologically are 100% certain. Since there is always some degree in error in our conclusions - since we are fallible and subjective beings - we can't say something has a probability of 1 or 0. The best anyone has ever done here is 'I think therefore I am' {unless we're referring to logical impossibilities or tautologies}. Everything else can be mistaken. These error bars introduce uncertainty and thus we can't say something we are investigating has a 0 probability or a probability of 1.2) Odds. Odds are a perfectly acceptable way of writing probabilities. A probability of 50% is 1:1. Odds = (P / (1 - P)). 0.5/0.5 or 1:1. 20% odds is 0.2/0.8 or 1:4. 80% is 0.8/0.2 - 4:1. There simply isn't a sensible way of representing 1 or 0 as odds. You end up with divisions by zero and stuff and it implies, from a pragmatic evidential perspective, the requirement for infinite evidence, which seems either impossible or at least incoherent.So unless you can present infinite evidence (which you obviously can't) or assert absolute infallibility (which you obviously can't) your objection cannot stand. The probability (from our fallible perspective) a claimed witness is a witness can never be zero. The probability that a witness is honest can never be zero. The probability a witness is not saliently mistaken can never be zero. I suggested a path to do just this in my last post.

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1. The conditions describe in {A} are the case - You tried this attack but were unable to support it. You acknowledged that even being asked to support it is absurd.
2. The maths is wrong - certainly possible. Please show the error.
3. The definition of evidence is faulty - I recommend this one. It would lead us down an interesting path of discussion. If this is wrong, then what is right? Is there any objective way of determining what counts as evidence? If evidence is subjective, as you have hinted at before, then it seems you lose the overall argument. If it is objective, how can we determine what is evidence?

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You continue to push variations of the them of 1, but it gets us nowhere. You've conceded that 2 is probably not the case. I suggest 3. Your call.

That's not an argument Phat, it's just another statement of belief. Phat you're priceless :-) Of course you are. Why would it matter how many people believed something? The history of our civilisation is absolutely stuffed full of things millions of people believed that were wrong.And the reverse is true too, many of our most influencial historic discoveries were made by a single person. You can name lots of them. Loads of people believed all sorts of things about disease before people like Pasteur came along. My mum still believes some of them.You can even include Jesus Christ in that list, was what he said any less or more true when only a dozen people believed in him?Truths about the world don't depend on how many people know about them.In the scientific world it's slightly different these days, things have got very complex and consensus among experts about things that can't be simply proven is important. The important thing is that data is shared and results can be tested and repeated - evidence based, not beliefs.

You have to give up this ridiculous absurdity. You are saying that you would never believe anything anyone told you about what they claim to have witnessed or experienced that you yourself haven't experienced, or what they were told about what others have seen or experienced. If that were true you'd be reduced to the level of brain-dead. Most of what you think you know came to you through people telling you about it. Probably 99.9999%A of what you think you know about science came this way, and some of it can sound pretty impossible at first too. Most of our knowledge of anything comes from secondary sources. This is what formal education gives us, hardly any direct experience, all knowledge from books. This is why John IS giving us evidence, and why your dismissal of it is just pulling the rug out from under yourself and making it impossible for you ever to know if miracles are real.In other words, in reality you have just about NO evidence of the direct sort you think you need to believe in the reality of something. YOU are defining John's descriptions as "impossible," but the whole point of his presenting descriptions is to show that they aren't impossible, that they characterize the ministry of Jesus Christ. That way you define out any possibility of ever learning anything you've never personally experienced, but if you did that with everything you think you know you would, as I said, be as good as brain dead.Yes you consider miracles to be impossible, but again that is just a personal prejudice that makes it utterly impossible for you ever to find out whether they are possible or not. One-time historical events perfomed with the purpose of validating Christ's claim to deity are not going to be repeated, so you've cut yourself off from the knowledge so many of us have who recognize John as honest and his revelations therefore true.Calling them "stories" is nothing but arrogant prejudice based on your own personal bias, Percy. You are free to disbelieve it all, but as objective argument you have no leg to stand on, it's just your own imagination dictating something you are not in a position to know. And at the cost of distorting our normal judgments of people's honesty too.Amazing but I guess this is one of the ways God keeps some people away from His revelation, in just another example of how Pascal was right about the Bible's being open to some but closed to others.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I choose this one from your Message 971: --Percy

Actually, no. You didn't quote enough. Here's the quote again, this time with more history that includes what you said that I was responding to: You can see from this longer quote that you were talking about evidence of miracles specifically, not evidence in general, and that's what I was responding to.For some reason you reintroduce miracles into the discussion in the last sentence of the paragraph: I'll know miracles are real when there's evidence that miracles are real. Things that are true about the real world are established using the scientific method, so you need evidence of miracles rather than stories about eyewitnesses who claimed they saw miracles. And the reason I mention the scientific method in the religion threads is because you believe your faith is supported by evidence, and evidence is studied using the scientific method.One big red flag raised by your views is that you only accept Christian miracles. You discount miracles from all other religions.Using a definition of faith that doesn't include evidence, accepting miracles as an article of faith seems fine.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Fix garbled last sentence.

I'm afraid that what you are saying just doesn't make sense. Modulous isn't saying, nor am I for that matter, that what is written in the Gospels about miracles causes us to KNOW that miracles happened. However, the fact that someone wrote the Gospels with the intent of having them believed is evidence, no matter how weak or strong that evidence is.

It's definately evidence that someone - we don't know who - wrote something. It's not evidence of a miracle. At best, it's evidence of a claim of a miracle.But it really doesn't matter, even if we agreed that it was evidence it's of no value whatsoever in supporting a claim that miracles happened. Which is the entire point of the discussion - despite the dozens of pages of faux erudite bullshit preceding.

I don't think anyone thought you or Modulous was saying that. Tangle has already addressed this, but I'll add a bit more. A propagandist writes his lies (the Trump era provides us a cornucopia of examples of propagandist lies) with the intent of having them believed, but I don't think we would call the lies' evidence of anything. Someone else repeats the lies, fully and honestly believing them true, but we would not call repeating the lies evidence of anything.Why isn't it enough to have faith that the miracles really happened? Why do you also need to believe there is evidence?--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

I think the issue is more an issue of intent rather than evidence. It would be nice to see some evidence of the intentions and motivations of the writers.That is the best evidence we will likely get.Who were the stories attempting to influence?What specifically was the goal of influence?Why were the stories adopted and carried down through Church History?

I didn't say that absence of evidence = probability of zero. If you find a dead body in the living room without a mark on it, the probability that it died in a train wreck is low. The probability that God did it is even lower because there really are trains.

You picked a fine time to take an interest in evidence.

Intentions and credibility go far in determining whether I believe the messenger who delivers the message.Evidence for the message may be absent. Anybody can make a sign with a proclamation on it.If the intentions and honesty and credibility of the writer of that sign are shown, I might be more likely to believe the truth and value of the sign.

That seems to be backwards. How can you know the intentions and honesty of the messenger without knowing whether the message is true or false? What other evidence of the messenger's character do you have?

This gets back to Modulous argument as I understand it.If the messenger believes that the message is true and has great value, that belief alone is evidence of the possible truth and value of the message.Look at Paul. Did he get blinded? Did he experience a great change in his life? Did he have integrity? It certainly appears that his message has survived the test of time. If, on the other hand he was selling messages out of the back trunk of his camel, they likely would have long ago been ignored.UNLESS...others used his message for their own dishonest gain.Which gets us back to the integrity of the messengers.