Tom Sawyer

I'd have to agree that some guy coming along and levitating me for a few seconds falls short of proof of God. I weigh 200 pounds (I'm going on a diet next week, don't bug me about it ). The amount of power that would be required to levitate a 200 pound object 10 feet in the air for 10 seconds and then hide/move itself falls far short of the amount of power I postulate would be required to create the universe.

Someone manipulating the space/time continuum (if that's a real concept and not just something out of Star Trek) demonstrates a level of power that, while perhaps not at the level of omnipotence, puts that being at a level I would consider to be a god, if not the God. If at the same time, if that being does so in a matter to allow me to alter a life-defining moment to let me choose a more positive path for my future, that suggests to me a being that uses it's power to help me, in the sense that a generally accepted definition of God does.

Taken together, those two events would be sufficient to change me to a deist rather than an atheist. It would likely change me a Christian as well, since that's the only worldview I have any familiarity with that involves a benevolent deity. If the being were to say, "Hi, my name's Vishnu, good luck with your second chance at life here and be sure to keep track of your karma," I'd look into reading up on Hinduism.

Mageth

What peteyh said. <img src="graemlins/notworthy.gif" border="0" alt="[Not Worthy]" />

RJS

Just for the record, the line of questioning had to do with the "minimum" event that would cause conversion. I realize that God can do more than levitate someone, but we were trying to avoid the obviously all-powerful scenarios.

I guess I just dont hang with any human that can levitate someone, not to mention appear and disappear in front of me.

Psycho Economist

It is possible.

For better or worse if you play the part of a believer, and start regularly affirming belief, and doing things that a believer would do... something will give. Maybe you'll give up going through the motions (as many of us here would do), but there's also a decent chance that your lack of belief will give way. You'll go through a thought process every time you do something belief-affirming (e.g. Mailing a letter to the North Pole; Getting your picture taken with the guy in the mall wearing the red crushed velvet suit; Leaving milk and cookies out on Christmas Eve), in the extreme you may even ask yourself, "Why am i doing this?" and you can choose at that point to stop short, or moderate your attitude a little.

That's cognitive dissonance in action.

And that, at the risk of sounding like an alarmist, is why the guys at Focus on the Family want prayer in school and "Under God" in the pledge of allegiance. If they can be peer-pressured or implicitly asked to go through the motions of Christianity, they'll be that much easier to convert later on...

Edited to restore xeren's original emphasis.

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: Psycho Economist ]

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: Psycho Economist ]</p>

xeren

Well, Keith, I never said that all people see the same evidence the same way.

Wouldn't you agree that a person who believes the evidence for Christ's resurrection is compelling, can't simply "choose" not to believe in God?

Yes, a person who has found no compelling evidence can still "choose" to believe in God, if she thinks that believing in things she has no proof for is okay. But a person who does not think it sane to believe in things he has no evidence for cannot "choose" to believe in god.

So basically it comes down to how stringent your criteria for accepting a fact claim are- if you have loose criteria, i guess, yeah, you could choose to believe whatever the hell you want to believe. But the whole point of my thread was that someone with stringent criteria for accepting fact claims(e.g. the scientific method) cannot choose what he believes, he can only run fact claims through his criteria and see whether it comes out a belief or a non-belief.

Why should people like us be punished for that?

Psycho Economist

whoops... replied instead of editing previous post.

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: Psycho Economist ]</p>

Keith Russell

xeren:

I'm not sure what you mean by 'punished'.

I choose to be rational. I choose to do the mental work (and it is work, and takes a great deal of time and effort) necessary to ensure (to the best of my ability and the availablity of the relevant evidence) that all of my beliefs are non-contradictory, and firmly supported only by independently verifiable evidence.

Once I have chosen to be rational, I could still (through laziness or evasion) decide to exempt some of my beliefs from this process. (And I could choose to try to convince myself that I am still rational.)

No, a rational person cannot 'choose' to believe anything, and still be able to honestly claim to be rational. (But both rationality and integrity are still choices--options that one does not have to choose.)

I am rational because I choose to be, and I choose to be because I want to be.

And, having made that choice, I have to continually act on it; continually police my mind to make sure that I am living up to that choice. Any abrogation of that duty (which would also be the result of a choice) would negate my any claim I might have to rationality--whether i choose to acknowledge that or not.

I believe I could have chosen otherwise, and the fact that I didn't want to does not eliminate that belief, IMO.

Keith.

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: Keith Russell ]</p>

Tom Sawyer

RJS,

OK, you raise a really good point here - namely, what level of power and nature of event that it causes would be required to classify a being as divine? From the conversation so far, it appears that level would fall somewhere between being able to levitate a regular sized guy for no apparent reason and causing a temporal shift with heavy moral and life-defining implications associated.

I have no idea where inbetween the two situations it would have to fall to be classified as divine. I think that would depend mainly on the individual that it happened with. For a lot of people, having someone levitate them and disappear would be a sign of a divine being. Personally, I'd see it as a bit of a hokey trick and couldn't fit it into my view of what a god would be. I don't know how I'd define it, but it wouldn't be in a divine way.

There's a quote from Sherlock Holmes that comes to mind, "When you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable must be the truth." I find the notion of a being that pops in, levitates me and then vanishes to be an impossible thing to actually happen. If, however, it did happen, then the list of things that could potentially do something like that becomes a list of improbable things, rather than impossible ones. I could speculate gods, aliens, time travellers, secret government technology, etc. All of these are potential candidates for being able to do something like this, if something like this could actually be done and there are many things on this list that are not divine.

Now if I found myself not only transported back in time, but also in my body at the age I was then and in a situation to correct a major error from my past, then that's something different. I don't know much about quantum mechanics, but I've heard that theoretically, time travel is possible with it, so it may be a possibility that it was some random quantum fluctuation. If I finish typing this post and then find myself coming into work this morning remembering the whole day that I'd just lived through (it's the evening now), then this might be a possibility since this was an average day and although something like that would be strange and I'd probably associate some kind of divine interaction with it, it wouldn't necessarily be the case.

This is because I would consider it a real waste of divine ability to have people go and relive normal days for no reason and I generally associate godly interactions with moral/ethical connotations attached. Also, the stock market went down today and I don't know of any individual stocks that went up and no sports games have started yet, so I wouldn't even be able to make any cash off of it so whatever did it would pretty much just be wasting my time. When you add the aspect of being brought back to alter a life-changing event for the better, though, that's the sort of thing I'd expect a God to do and any non-divine entity or random quantum event to not do. I would take that as pretty much absolute confirmation of divine interaction. I would see it as improbable that a God did it, but it would be the only explanation left to me and I would be forced to accept it.

So, personally, I'd fall towards the higher end of the continuum mentioned above to characterize something as a divine event. Exactly what the break point would be, I can't really say. But since even the lower end of the continuum is never going to happen, it's kind of a moot point anyways.

xeren

Punished= being sent to hell for not being able to force ourselves to believe. Sorry, i wasn't clear on that, i was just refering back to my original post.

<strong> Keith, you said it yourself, a rational person cannot choose to believe something against the evidence he has come upon, without becoming irrational.

Therefore: A rational person, in order to stay rational, cannot choose to believe something they do not have evidence for.

I don't see why you disagree with me then, if you agree with me on that point, except that you said multiple times that you choose to be rational. I agree with you on this too. I choose to (attempt to) be rational as well.

But choosing to be rational is not the same as choosing your beliefs.

Choosing to be rational amounts to making an effort to create a set of criteria by which to judge fact claims, and like i said in a post above, fact claims are tested by those criteria you have choosen. You believe those fact claims when they pass through those criteria you have set up for testing belief.

What i'm trying to get at, is that rational people, first decide how they can most effectively learn the truth about the world, and then they judge new fact claims based on that.

It seems to me that irrational people first choose what they feel like believing, then create their truth-judging criteria to support the things they already believe.

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: xeren ]</p>

xeren

oops double post

[ October 16, 2002: Message edited by: xeren ]</p>