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0 pointsEnsorceled2y ago0 comments

> It sounds like maybe some people are taking this as a challenge from me to atheists.

Not at all, I'm engaging in good faith here.

> This seems a bit strange to me... so the Romans believed in supernatural beings, and the Christians also believed in supernatural beings (and of course so did the Greeks, and the Persians, and the Babylonians, and the Egyptians, and...); but instead of this being evidence that there were supernatural beings of some sort (with some people maybe being closer to the truth of the matter than the others), you decided this was evidence that there weren't supernatural beings?

This is a common misinterpretation. Rather it made me rethink why I thought Zeus was a myth and my God was real and that led to me realizing there was no evidence that God was real, I had been taking it on faith.

If there is one thing the explosion of popularity for fantasy stories has shown us is that it is really easy for people to invent the supernatural.

> If the entire world were atheists except Christians, wouldn't that be far stronger evidence against the supernatural? The fact that the Romans believed in the supernatural and the afterlife is evidence -- weak evidence, I grant, but evidence nonetheless -- that the supernatural and the afterlife exist.

Many people believe that vaccines cause autism. There is no evidence that it does and I don't lend the theory any credence. Lots of people believing in something says very little.

But at a basic level, religion has numerous aspects that make it useful, good and bad, to people in general and people in power in particular. Christianity has long been used to manipulate and control for instance; but it also provided community, a common moral code (again, good and bad), shared joy in weddings and births, solace in grief and purpose.

> What would satisfy your requirements for a "verifiable miracle"?

In an age where everyone has a very high quality video camera in their pocket the sasquatch, the loch ness monster and other such things have mostly disappeared but miracles have not appeared.

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gwd2y ago

> Not at all, I'm engaging in good faith here.

OK, I think I see what you were getting at. The first thing you should do is ask, "Is there actually any reason to believe this?" I sort of took that as a given, because I went through that process in high school: "Is this something my parents believe, or is this something I believe?"

And that's certainly useful, but the problem is that you can find evidence for all sorts of things. It's simply not accurate, for instance, to say that "there's no evidence that [vaccines cause autism]". There is scientifically robust evidence against it; but there are tens of thousands of personally compelling "anecdata points" in favor of it. To wit: there are tens of thousands of people who had the experience that their child was given a vaccine, and within a month or so they noticed symptoms of autism. "X happened and then Y happened, so Y may have caused X" isn't a logical certainty, but it's certainly valid Bayesian operation to say that "there's a non-zero probability that Y caused X". If you eat something new and then you get sick, you would certainly do well to consider the possibility that the new thing you ate may have been the thing to make you sick; genes of people who did otherwise would quickly have died out in favor of people who do.

To believe in the scientific consensus over and against your own personally compelling anecdata point (and that of dozens of other people you've met online) takes a kind of faith in the unseen power of statistics (and the reliability of the all-too-well-seen scientific and medical establishments) which many people simply don't have.

There are loads of situations where there's implicit confirmation bias which makes non-things seem like evidence. Hence why it's important to move on to the second question: How would I know if this belief of mine were wrong?

> In an age where everyone has a very high quality video camera in their pocket the sasquatch, the loch ness monster and other such things have mostly disappeared but miracles have not appeared.

Really? I haven't looked, but I kind of assume that if I searched for "faith healing" on YouTube I'd see loads of videos of "miracles". Would this sort of thing count? If not, what kind of video would count?

(To be clear, my basic stance towards these would be skeptical as well.)