Is faith the answer to cognitive dissonance?

They want to see the Angel Gabriel talking to Mohammed? Why don't they just believe that Mohammed saw him? They want to see the golden plates the Book of Mormon was written on? Why not just believe Joseph Smith?Because apart from any other consideration, dear Faith, if I followed that particular episteme I would end up as an adherent of every faith, and would probably have to stone myself to death while burning myself alive. The very least we can require for a method of identifying the One True Religion is that it should in fact identify one religion as true, rather than all of them.

You just make stuff up as you go along, don't you? The Eleven Witnesses. Here we have some verifiably real people whom we know signed their names and otherwise publicly testified to Smith's story. Compare this with the basis of the rather more important claim in Genesis 1:1. We have that on the authority of an anonymous self-contradictory document which an unevidenced tradition ascribes to a man born 2368 years after the events he's describing, and whose own existence is doubtful --- insofar as he bears many hallmarks of being mythical, such as being able to do magic.If, then, we use your criterion of multiple witnesses for extraordinary claims, we ought to be more certain of Smith's story about the golden plates than we should be of the claim that God created the heavens and the Earth, which we should categorize as extremely dubious. I seem to remember there were character witnesses against Jesus.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

A witness is someone who was there, not just someone who says something. I can find millions of people who'll say that Smith found the golden plates, they're called Mormons. But that doesn't make them witnesses. You seem to be quibbling on the difference between saying they saw him find them, and saying that they saw them. Very well, eleven people, twelve if we count Smith himself, say the plates existed. Is it OK if I say they didn't, or should I believe? I'm just pointing out that it's not really dispositive, is it?

It doesn't work like that, Faith. If I write on a bit of paper: "A million people saw a pig fly", how many eyewitnesses are there to the flight of the pig? Why are there no reports debunking the story of Perseus and Andromeda? If it was false, wouldn't there be plenty of Ethiopians who'd come forward to say so?One reason might be that the myth was invented a long time after the facts that it purports to describe. That would explain why there's nothing contemporary with the myth either debunking or confirming it.

No. we don't. If I write down "A million people saw a pig fly", we do not have to believe it. Well, I think I'm getting rid of the myths along with the other myths. If you want the stories of Christianity to be considered differently, to get special treatment, reason demands that this should be on the basis of some way in which they are actually different and special. The criterion you've proposed doesn't cut it. What I'd need is some reason to believe one set of far-fetched stories about magic, but not all the others. Otherwise, if it looks like a myth and it walks like a myth and it quacks like a myth ...Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.