The AntiChris

AJ113

You appear to be confusing the sincerity of a claimant with the validity of the claim.

You ask:

What if your young child tells you that he can't go to sleep at night because there are scary monsters under his bed which only appear when the lights are switched off? Do you respect the sincerity of his claim, or do you seek to assure him that these monsters do not really exist and that he has nothing to be scared of?

You make great play of respecting the sincerity of others and I agree. However, to blindly accept the sincere claims of others, no matter how implausible they are, isn't showing respect to them. In fact, it is patronising and condescending in the extreme.

Chris

DMB

I am irresistibly reminded of Hamlet:
The weakness in my view of all god arguments based on evidence is that we have this apparently omnipotent, omnipresent entity, who is also apparently interested in getting us to believe in him/her/it but who relies on the testimony of a few human witnesses, constrained as they are by space, by time and by faculties. Can't this unbelievably powerful entity do any better? It's unimpressive to say the least.

Are the Croats now god's chosen people?

If god really is omni-everything, why not make its presence perceivable to everyone, everywhere, all the time? Otherwise it's a bit like lotteries. Someone wins them but it's never you.

Since god clearly doesn't make its presence felt in this way, I conclude that either: <ol type="a">[*]god isn't very omni after all; or[*]god isn't interested in whether most people believe or not; or[*]god isn't there in the first place.[/list=a]

Theli

AJ113...

Doesn't this make you kind of gullible?
Let's state the question the other way around...
What claim of obsevation would you interpret as a lie? As you are aware that people lie, sometimes for personal gain, sometimes caused by enimosity towards you and sometimes just as a joke.
How do you decide if that person is serious?
Especially if he has a pokerface.

You are a human. And people lie. You cannot take every claim made by all people as true.

I would say that if a person I didn't know made a claim of observation, I would judge his claim completely on the probability of his observation.
I don't have to know someone to assume he is lying.

No?

So, how can you decide that a person is lying to you?
If you can't then you are by definition gullible.

This is a very ineffective way to judge a claim.
Since things that don't exist, or events that never happened doesn't leave any trace behind them, you will have a huge problem proving the claim wrong.
You would still be gullible.
If I told you I spoke to a purple 10m high carrot, how would you tackle such a claim?
Since you cannot find evidence of it's nonexistence, by your own criteria I must be telling the truth.

But what if you never meet that person again?
Or what if you read his claim in a book or heard it on television? How would you reveal his possible lie then?

Yes, I would. Or I would atleast ask him for concrete and indesputable evidence. People close to me may try to trick me to.

AJ113

Then let me clarify: There is no confusion between the sincerity and validity of the claim, but the more confident I am of the person's sincerity, the more this supports the validity.

Young children have not reached a stage where they can reason properly, and so rely on their parents to help them. I think you know that i was not including young children in my explanation.

Well, thanks for the morality lecture but I suggest you go back and read my post.

AJ113

DMB:

My posts regarding Medugorje were directed specifically at Doubting Didymus, who was asking for evidence of such occurrences.

I did not intend to present Medugorje as indisputable proof that God exists, just as an item of interest for DD who was asking specific questions on this type of subject.

AJ113

None. I would only call someone a liar if I knew they were lying.

If he is making the claim as a joke, then it will be obvious shortly after the claim is made, won't it?

If the claim is made deliberately to fool me on a long term basis, then once this fact becomes apparent, I will no longer trust his word on any matter.

You misunderstand. I may have large doubts about the veracity of the claim, but I am not prepared to call anyone a liar on the basis that their claim is improbable. There is a chance that they may be telling the truth.

My friend, if you go through life calling people liars based on nothing but your own assumptions, you are going to make a lot of enemies. A lie is a deliberate falsehood, and I suggest that this should be known as a fact before issuing defamatory statements.

I'm sure very few people would agree with this. If we had a magic sixth sense that allowed us to tell when lies are being told there would be no need for lie detectors or law courts.

Disagree.

Agreed, but neither does it mean that you have to accept the claim as truth. It means that you are not in a position to claim 100 per cent that it did not happen.

See above.

This "lie" thing is eating you up inside, isn't it? Relax, chill. You do not have to prove that it is a lie. In many cases you cannot do so. You simply have to accept that the guy could be telling the truth because you have no evidence to disprove his claim.

If there is no evidence to support his claim, then you do not have to accept the claim as truth, just the possibility that it may be the truth. Does that hurt so much?

You would treat your closest friends and family in this way? I'm stunned.

[ August 11, 2002: Message edited by: AJ113 ]</p>

RogerLeeCooke

I guess my standards of evidence are sufficiently bizarre that no one else applies them. Rather than any one experimental test, I look for converging lines of evidence. Evolution, for example, seems to me to be well-established since it explains so many disparate things in a non-tautological way---the fossil strata, population genetics, homological organs, vestigial organs, and so forth. When it comes to gods, I have to consider the claims made for each god separately. I confess I've never made a deep investigation of Allah or Shiva, but Yahweh and whatever god is alleged to be the father of Jesus did come up frequently in my childhood. This god made very specific claims to be a god of morality who will eventually reward the good and punish the wicked, especially those who belong to rival Christian faiths. I quickly realized that the faith a person has is determined just as certainly as the language the person will speak, by early training. (Exceptions in both cases are rare.) Hence this god was punishing a lot of people for things they couldn't help. From there it wasn't a big step to realize that personality types are mostly inherited. Some people naturally incline toward religion, others don't. To send one to heaven and another to hell on that basis just didn't make sense from any normal meaning of the word morality. I discovered later that Christians use the word morality in a Pickwickian sense, having little to do with its ordinary meaning. I now dismiss the whole thing as not rising to a level of plausibility worth considering.

DMB

AJ113: you posted: But are you seriously putting this stuff forward as evidence, never mind indisputable proof, for the existence of god?

I notice you do not address the more substantive points I made.

Jayhawker Soule

What slippery, slimy, disingenuous diversion this is. At issue is the possibility of gremlins, not the possibility of hallucination and/or psychosis. That you would maneuver from one context to the other is either sloppiness or deceit.

That you are not prepared to acknowledge that he has, in fact, seen a gremlin says volumes.

[ August 11, 2002: Message edited by: ReasonableDoubt ]</p>

The AntiChris

AJ113

You appear to be oblivious to the possibility that one can be totally sincere but mistaken.

I made no assumption as to who you were including in your "explanation" - I was merely suggesting a situation where, despite total sincerity, you'd be likely to not only disbelieve the claim but also to rectify what you consider is a mistaken belief.

The point I was trying to make is illustrated by this from one of your previous posts:

If you genuinely believe that it is "consistent" to ignore one's own experience and ability to reason logically when asessing the validity of a claim, then you are either truly gullible or you really just don't care (hence my doubts about your declaration of "respect" for others).

Chris