Posted on 05/16/2007 6:54:51 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
By what method, under which circumstances, and to what level of confidence?
Blanket statements can give rise to carelessness.
Cheers!
1. Do you consider that to be necessary and sufficient evidence of the truth of your current religio-philosophical holdings, or were you merely dangling them back in Dr. Ecklenberg's face once he mentioned them?
2. Is the statement even true? Given your apparent attempts to "de-proselytize" people who claim to be members of a faith community to which you once belonged, apparently you feel that your current life is NOT equally enjoyable to before, but more so--or you would not be trying to spread your current beliefs.
2.b. BTW, your own testimony to your own fulfillment is just as subjective as the faith experiences of others, which you apparently reject. But you earlier seemed to be saying that equal a priori probabilities among religious experience necessitate the use of the null hypothesis, in order to avoid error. Why do your feelings *against* faith suddenly become exempt? They are just as subjective as the feelings you rail against.
Cheers!
Tell that to the Rev. Al Gore and his Church of Climatology. :-P
Cheers!
There's more to it than that, as I have posted before.
Consider the following site.
It belongs a practicing MD pathologist in Kansas City, who among other opinions, relates the history of a patient who had a near-death experience on the operating table. There are two aspects of the incident which render it immune to the usual skeptical explanations.
1) The patient, when recounting what he went through, expressed surprise at the shape of his own heart, which he had expected to be the shape of a Valentine's heart.
2) The patient accurately described physical details of the operating theater which were out of his physical line of sight had he been awake but unable to move due to anaesthesia.
The site is here.
Lots of *very* interesting stuff if you go back to the homepage.
Cheers!
Well thank you. I actually started a writing project to compile a book of unusual NDEs of children. Got a few stories from folks but not enough to form a book for publication ... I was researching for another novel then and generated the little web offering on stem cells and cloning linked at http://weneedtalk.blogspot.com , but that’s grist for another mill.
Went to the link, but didn’t readily find a link to a home page or the story of the surgical NDE.
Note that some of the main arguments pro- and con- within this thread are also summarized. Cheers!
If you were a woman, I’d say you’re a big tease ... one paragraph, third hand. Piffle on ya, I was all hyped up for a real good story, like the little girl who ‘saw’ the red sneaker outside and on the roof below the operating theater. Now THAT was story!
Thanks for the kind ping.
Cheers!
The sneaker story was from a doctor, an anesthetist who knew the sleeper who did the case.
Truly, we are all different. The spiritual experience of one is not always like the next.
God is like a Master Artist to me and He has many colors on His palette.
Last year, our cousin graduated to heaven. She had been declining with Alzheimer's though she died of something else.
As she declined with the disease, her mind seemed to recall things increasingly further back in her life. Even when she couldn't remember most of the recent events or who we were - she'd recall obscure, tiny details from her youth very clearly (according to her sister.)
I'm curious whether other patients have had this exerience, as if all the knowledge accumulated in one's life rests such that perhaps a disease (or drug) might bring it to active memory.
Do we ever really "forget?"
you: 'Twas waiting for such a remark.
One of the issues that comes up is the ansatz of equal a priori probabilities, that one must 'suspend judgement' in order to avoid bias and presumably maximize one's chances of arriving at a correct interpretation.
Indeed, reasoning a divine revelation would be anthropomorphizing God.
Certainly the prophets didn't question the authenticity of, conjecture about or attempt to rationalize the revelations they received. Nor do we.
That first divine revelation all Christians share - that Jesus Christ is Lord - is absolutely stunning. We don't sit back and wonder whether it was a figment of our imagination, something we ate, etc.
The tests of the spirits I mentioned in post 394 apply to messengers (whether mortal or not) - and what they have to say. They are God's own authentications so that we will know whether to give those spirits any heed at all:
The messenger must display all of the fruits of the Spirit (good tree/good fruit Matt 7, Gal 5): love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control.
The message must agree with the whole of Scripture (Berean test, Acts 17)
I’m so sorry I have not been here to be more involved with this fascinating conversation, but thank you so much for every single ping. I am in participating in prayer with you even if I’m not posting!
I was attempting to demonstrate the *inadequacy* of empirical methods to deal with divine revelation, or with the possibility of anything 'personal' (as opposed to the purely mechanicalor chemical).
The personal involves *getting to know* and/or *trust* -- which may or may not be justified, but which remain 'subjective'.
And the problem which ahayes and coyote *apparently* have is that empiricism is so good at reducing errors (when used as directedTM) that they are unwilling to put it aside as a methodolgy, even where its use is 'inappropriate' (in a square peg, round hole typeof way).
The problem is that given the typical 'rationalistic' (to use the vernacular) approach, none of the claims of the supernatural, from whatever source, pass the smell test. And one cannot bias one's thinking in favor of one holy book or another, and remain consistent.
The thinking seems to be more or less, "Well, at least this way I won't get taken in." And at first blush that seems right. But they forget that there are false negatives as well as false positives.
"OK, then, well, how do you tell the difference between religions?"
You CAN'T -- not in advance of choosing, and even afterwards, you can't get the same type of confidence, nor the same *reproducibility* of results, that one strives for within the sciences.
The confusion on the part of the empiricist at this point is to say "Oh, well. Bullshit alert. Charlatans *always* say, don't question, only believe. But *I* know better, I'll poke holes in everything, because *I* saw through it."
And it is in fact true that there have been, still are, and presumably will continue to be vast numbers of frauds.
But the reason (according to Christianity) that the demand for trust is made, is not for the easier hoodwinking of the already easily deluded, but in order to engender a certain type of relationship between the Creator and a fallen creature.
And the second error made by the empiricists is that in their attempts to avoid 'argument from authority' and 'scholasticism' (both of which *should be* avoided in logical argument and in scientific inquiry), they pass up on useful knowledge about God and Man, in favor of simplified models. And when the simplified models don't hold up to experience, rather than refine the model, they decide that the whole 'concept' of God is incorrect -- because their original models are so *obviously* self-evident, they *can't* be mistaken.
But the simplistic theism is *precisely where* the models go wrong, since many of the assumptions contradict Christian theology.
(And so it goes in a circle -- the skeptic would be 'in good faith' perfectly willing to entertain theology *if* theological concepts could be empirically tested to systematically weed out the good from the bad theology. But since they cannot, and since the methods for systematic inquiry borrowed from the sciences would tend to eliminate most deities and the supernatural equally, the null hypothesis demands that the whole kit and kaboodle get throw n out.)
Cheers!
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