a common atheist fallacy

[mererdog]

14 minutes ago, Geordon said:

I am both a man of faith (Buddhist, Hekatean, Druid) and a man of science.  I do believe, but not in "your" (monotheistic) manner.  I also do not try to convince others to believe the same way that I do, unlike many Christians

The question is whether or not believing in God would represent a fundamental change in worldview for you.

Edited May 30, 2018 by mererdog

[Geordon]

7 hours ago, mererdog said:

It is an objective, verifiable fact that my uncle's cancer got better after he prayed to God. But what is this fact evidence of?

 

13 minutes ago, Geordon said:

To your question about "what is this evidence of?" the answer is "nothing"  The fact that his cancer got better is only fact that his cancer got better.  That's it.

 

 

3 minutes ago, mererdog said:

If this were true, medical science would not exist. When patient gets well, it is evidence that (one or more of) the treatment they were given was effective. In this case, he got chemo, surgury, and also prayed. I tend to think the medical stuff was more important than the religious stuff. My uncle disagrees.

 

Emphasis mine, and statement in italic added

 

Faulty supposition: "If this were true, medical science would not exist."  Science is based on, essentially, one question:  "Why is that?"  Medical science exists to learn, among other things, why and how disease processes work and how to make them stop causing disease to return the body to health.  (Did that come out clearly?)

 

The only way to determine which treatments helped your uncle physically recover would be to take  samples of the cancer tissue and apply one treatment to each of them, and then take one additional sample and apply no treatment.  This is science.

[Geordon]

7 minutes ago, mererdog said:

The question is whether or not believing in God would represent a fundamental change in worldview for you.

You're trying to change the goalpost.  I decline to address that attempt other than to call it out.

[Key]

4 hours ago, mererdog said:

I still don't get you. 

What people say and what is true do not always coincide. When someone says that there is a way for them to accept something, they may be wrong. It is a claim like any other, inviting the same level of scrutiny as any other. To simply take it at face value would be unfair, in the sense that it is an uneven application of a principle. Special pleading, if you will. I was trained to see that as a sign of flawed thinking. Specifically, I was trained to see it as a sign that emotional attachment to a position was overshadowing critical analysis.

Sigh.

Let me think on this a bit more to better simplify the question.

[Jonathan H. B. Lobl]

At this point, I'm confused.  Are we talking about being fair?  Or are we talking about evidence?  It's getting obscure.  

[Key]

2 minutes ago, Jonathan H. B. Lobl said:

At this point, I'm confused.  Are we talking about being fair?  Or are we talking about evidence?  It's getting obscure.  

Yes, understandable. Was talking about evidence but got diverted to being fair in relation to evidence, then to about being fair.

In talking about viewpoints, things are bound to get obscure from time to time, I find, at least in here.

[Jonathan H. B. Lobl]

5 minutes ago, Key said:

Yes, understandable. Was talking about evidence but got diverted to being fair in relation to evidence, then to about being fair.

In talking about viewpoints, things are bound to get obscure from time to time, I find, at least in here.

 

 

The obscurity in this case is coming from abstraction.  So, a quick review of how we got here.  From my own biased perspective.

 

I said that there was no objective, verifiable evidence for God.

 

Dan challenged me.  He said he had such evidence.

 

I asked Dan to produce said evidence.

 

Said evidence turned out to be -- surprise -- Scripture.

 

I rejected this as objective, verifiable evidence.

 

Dan insisted that the Bible was objective, verifiable evidence, for the believer.

 

This was rejected by me -- and others -- as subjective evidence and not useful.

 

This was when things started getting confusing.  meredog went off on a speculative pleading about the nature of God.  Strange for an atheist, but that's meredog.  Things got intense and I dropped out for a while.

 

Now, I'm lost.    The thread is a tangle and I'm not understanding any of it.  

[Dan56]

24 minutes ago, Jonathan H. B. Lobl said:

I asked Dan to produce said evidence.

 

Said evidence turned out to be -- surprise -- Scripture.

 

I rejected this as objective, verifiable evidence. 

 

Dan insisted that the Bible was objective, verifiable evidence, for the believer.

 

I suspect that a few thousand years from now, that if someone presented a copy of our constitution as evidence that our republic was once formed and existed, some people would reject it because it lacked objective verifiable evidence.. Evidence, no matter how compelling, can be rejected by anyone who doesn't want to believe or accept it.. You could tell someone that if they jumped into the Grand Canyon, they would plunge to their death, but they wouldn't believe it unless they experienced it for themselves. Sometimes you don't need direct evidence to believe something, you just need to put height and gravity together, then the realization that you'll die if you jump off a cliff is supported by more than just subjective evidence. That was my point with scripture, when you put its historical, archeological, and prophetic accuracy together,, combined with 35 witnesses who recorded it all in detail,  and no contradicting verifiable evidence to prove it false, then you have a pretty good case for factual events. 

[mererdog]

12 hours ago, Geordon said:

The only way to determine which treatments helped your uncle physically recover would be to take  samples of the cancer tissue and apply one treatment to each of them, and then take one additional sample and apply no treatment. 

That would not answer the question. Tissue samples do not react the way a body does. What effectively kills cancer in a dish will not always kill it in a person, at least not without also killing the person. This is why they do human trials. They examine patient outcomes, and use that evidence to determine what is effective. And while no single patient's outcome provides enough evidence to conclusively determine anything, each outcome provides helpful evidence. 

Edited May 31, 2018 by mererdog

[mererdog]

12 hours ago, Geordon said:

You're trying to change the goalpost.  I decline to address that attempt other than to call it out.

I am not moving the goalpost. You just don't like where it is. If we are to claim that it is the evidence that determines our beliefs, we are claiming that other factors are not involved. We are claiming that we are open to the truth, no matter what the truth is. I do not believe that is true. Belief has an emotional component.

[Jonathan H. B. Lobl]

7 hours ago, Dan56 said:

 

I suspect that a few thousand years from now, that if someone presented a copy of our constitution as evidence that our republic was once formed and existed, some people would reject it because it lacked objective verifiable evidence.. Evidence, no matter how compelling, can be rejected by anyone who doesn't want to believe or accept it.. You could tell someone that if they jumped into the Grand Canyon, they would plunge to their death, but they wouldn't believe it unless they experienced it for themselves. Sometimes you don't need direct evidence to believe something, you just need to put height and gravity together, then the realization that you'll die if you jump off a cliff is supported by more than just subjective evidence. That was my point with scripture, when you put its historical, archeological, and prophetic accuracy together,, combined with 35 witnesses who recorded it all in detail,  and no contradicting verifiable evidence to prove it false, then you have a pretty good case for factual events. 

 

 

When was the Exodus?  Under which Egyptian Pharoh?  Why is there no historic mention of the ten plagues?  Or the Egyptian army being drowned?

 

It never happened.

 

 

[mererdog]

8 hours ago, Jonathan H. B. Lobl said:

meredog went off on a speculative pleading about the nature of God. 

I've been talking about the nature of belief, not the nature of God. People's beliefs about the nature of God, and why they have those beliefs, was just an "in" to the subject.

[Geordon]

1 hour ago, mererdog said:

Belief has an emotional component.

 

That's why it's called "faith" rather than "fact."

 

[Dan56]

3 hours ago, Jonathan H. B. Lobl said:

When was the Exodus?  Under which Egyptian Pharoh?  Why is there no historic mention of the ten plagues?  Or the Egyptian army being drowned? 

 

It never happened.

 

http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/answers/exodus_egypt.php

 

https://worldnewsdailyreport.com/red-sea-archaeologists-discover-remains-of-egyptian-army-from-the-biblical-exodus/

 

 

[Key]

2 hours ago, Dan56 said:

 

http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/answers/exodus_egypt.php

 

https://worldnewsdailyreport.com/red-sea-archaeologists-discover-remains-of-egyptian-army-from-the-biblical-exodus/

 

 

I don't know that I could take the second link seriously, Dan, when seeing the tabloid like headlines of other stories on the site.

[Jonathan H. B. Lobl]

6 hours ago, Geordon said:

 

That's why it's called "faith" rather than "fact."

 

 

It's even worse, when faith is more important than fact.  When faith over rides fact.  

 

[Jonathan H. B. Lobl]

4 hours ago, Dan56 said:

 

http://www.biblicalchronologist.org/answers/exodus_egypt.php

 

https://worldnewsdailyreport.com/red-sea-archaeologists-discover-remains-of-egyptian-army-from-the-biblical-exodus/

 

 

 

 

Your historian also has much to say about Noah's Flood.  You have been explicit that this was a regional occurence.  

[Jonathan H. B. Lobl]

7 hours ago, mererdog said:

I've been talking about the nature of belief, not the nature of God. People's beliefs about the nature of God, and why they have those beliefs, was just an "in" to the subject.

 

 

That is not how it came across.  Please be more careful.

 

 

[mererdog]

21 hours ago, Jonathan H. B. Lobl said:

Please be more careful.

You misunderstood because you misinterpreted the evidence. While you might not misinterpret different evidence, or the same evidence presented differently, that isn't really something I can know. So how would I go about being "more careful?"

[mererdog]

Fun stuff: Riding through Kansas for the first time, today, I keep seeing billboards that feature a picture of an infant and the words "There is evidence for God." Coincidence, kismet, dharma?