Matt,

That's a good question. I am compelled by the general ambiguity of such issues...that lucid commentary that resolves the difficulties for the layperson to the extent that is possible is rather hard to come by. It has always frustrated me (even in my Christian years) that not everyone is on the same page…and when I read skeptics and believers alike it is no surprise. There is a good lot of the secular web that is crap. And many people suffer under the cruelty of so much deviant information that is hard to pull together coherently. Everyone is coming at it from so many different perspectives and they all have differing degrees of interest and levels of ability to process things objectively. Some people just don’t care how accurate they are and some people are only here for the two seconds it takes them to get whatever they want to hear…then they go off and make a nuance of themselves in the world with misguided opinions. I’m an idealist at heart and when I see that I can masterfully pull together a worldview that transcends the crap of both sides, I am empowered and I see that I can help people that are just starting their journey avoid the pitfalls that I went through a long time ago. I've endured a lot of suffering in my life from believing things that are false.

It really doesn’t seem like religion can last forever since its epistemic pillars are so ill-begotten. Either Jesus will return shortly, or the world will start facing the inevitable…that the delusions of ancient history have out-lived their usefulness. I hope it doesn’t take too many more 9-11 esque events to reinforce this lesson…that there is simply no other way to sort out our differences if people aren’t interested in objective facts that no religion can provide over any other. Otherwise the obvious impasse is unavoidable at a fundamental ideological level. Exclusivist faith vs exclusivist faith with no room for compromise. Are we going to think for ourselves with all the resources we have today? Or will we continue to depend on what people used to believe?

Admittedly a good portion of ARU comes from the extensiveness of my interest in apologetics from my Christian years and my need to sort out these issues for myself…but that time has passed. I’m fairly content for my own needs. What presses me on is my idealistic zeal for thoroughness for sinking my teeth in as far as they will go so that I can relentlessly churn out helpful information that is always on key and a full symphony. Right now it’s just a full fledged hobby. I’m good at it and as long as it isn’t harmful to me in some way or as long as it doesn’t keep me from enjoying my life, I’ll stay at it. It is a little bizarre sometimes to realize I know way too much about basically meaningless things. That’s what a good sense of humor is for. I’m considering going into politics or perhaps being a public speaker and/or a debater. I’m not sure how far I want to go yet. I see myself collectively as a symptom of the whole of the growing pains of the secular world. Of the few that must stand up and confront the majority. It is as my one of my heroes, Richard Carrier would say, “…the quest and fight for truth.” I understand to a Christian a “higher calling” outside of your worldview makes no sense. But a higher calling is merely human. The same emotionally edifying appeal that works in Christianity exists in everyone. There is no monopoly on this any more than there is on ethics. Perhaps if I were India I would be mainly concerned with Hindu unapologetics…but that’s not the game here in the U.S. and thus pursuing this path makes sense in this age, but perhaps not the next. It is the right tool for the right job of what society needs right now.

Thanks for asking,
ARU

This is for those of you that won't look on Ethan's site:

“I never said that doubting the Bible is an extraordinary claim.”

Well you can tell me otherwise all you want, but it is implied and if I present relatively good arguments and evidence that the bible should be in doubt…you are going to hold out for more and give it every benefit of the doubt…I don’t know what else to call this other than denial of the obvious.

“I only said that I regard the Bible as axiomatic. The idea of authority is inescapable; if you do not accept the authority of the Bible you must accept the authority of either some other religious text or of man. In Carrier's case, he accepts the authority of man.”

We all accept the authority of man. It’s inescapable. You have to use your own authority on the truth to decide that God’s authority is better. Do we or do we not have to live with our own judgment calls one way or the other?

“I'm not saying that rejecting the Bible would require "extraordinary evidence," as if just giving me "enough" evidence would somehow push me over the edge.”

Huh?

“The question isn't how much evidence it would take to convince me that Christianity is wrong, it's what kind of evidence it would take.”

Evidence of extraordinary quality….that’s the same thing. Splitting hairs won’t save you.

“Nor does my argument here equally support Islam, Mormonism, etc.; you're missing the point here.”

They might be slightly different, but basically the same. Do they or do they not treat the Koran and the book of Mormon as axiomatic? Would they or would they not demand extraordinary qualitative proof that they were mistaken? And what exactly is the difference? It’s all theism and the Bible isn’t exactly the most philosophical book on the planet to distinguish it apart from the others. Even your AIG articles you cite start with some vague verse and infer something more philosophically sophisticated.

Just because I make a better point doesn’t mean I’ve missed your point. It means I’ve made a more relevant point. Duh. You have a long way to go to justifying that the Bible should be axiomatic. You are straining the gnat only to swallow the camel, here.

“As Dr. Jonathan Sarfati explains in this essay, "We are not merely asking opponents to consider biblical presuppositions as an alternative way of looking at the evidence. Nor are we merely saying that they are ‘nicer’, nor even that they provide a superior framework that better explains the data (although both of these are true as well). Rather, the claim is even stronger: that the biblical framework is the only one that provides the foundation for science, voluntary will, logic and morality..." He also points out here that presuppositions are necessary for us to be able to do any kind of science too.”

All that is required is a plausible reason why experience can be uniform. You have no way to prove that without a god experience can’t be uniform and that rational thought cannot develop. And you have no way to know that God isn’t sending you strong delusion so even in Christian theism, thoughts aren’t guaranteed there either.

“Regarding standard of proof, you're missing my point. Sure, the examples I give are not of extraordinary claims, but they don't have to be.”

Yeah they do. For any of this to get off the ground, your meta-scam has to step into the light somewhere…prove God exists…prove miracles happen…prove anything supernatural takes place objectively…then you start having the probability turn to your side. All of your arguments are a farce if you don’t meet the entry requirements. Even early Christian apologists like Justin Martyr appealed to the pagan magic that we can discredit today to justify belief in the supernatural. There’s no free pass for your worldview. An honest person would at least be an agnostic about Christian claims…with the unfortunate result of that agnosticism disproving the possibility of a loving personal God that should qualify well beyond that. Thus agnosticism quickly dovetails into atheism because simple personal standards have not been met for the sake of the supposed loving relationship that is to transpire for eternity.

“Either way Carrier's argument proves too much,”

Is that some bassawkwards way of never letting your opponents win? By saying they’ve proven their case too well?

“or rather his standard of proof proves too little.”

You have the wrong expectations of it. It’s not meant to prove the resurrection didn’t happen it’s meant to prove that we aren’t justified in believing that it did given the current state of evidence. And that’s par for the course. I’m sorry if that flushes your metaphysical scam down the toilet and I’ve said this like a dozen times already.

“My point is only that you don't need to personally see something in order to believe it, “

And Carrier isn’t asserting that.

“whether it's an extraordinary claim or not. Even if an extraordinary claim does require extraordinary evidence, there is no reason to think that this necessarily has to include personally witnessing the events in question (why is Carrier's experience any more authoritative than the other witnesses?).”

It is more authoritative to him…duh. He’s the one that would have to live his life by the credulity of first century Jews. Don’t you think his life is too valuable to him to squander on tall tales?

“Even if the Resurrection is an extraordinary claim, which I am not convinced it is (especially given that I don't hold Carrier's presuppositions here),”

Right, because you happen to accept a slew of other extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence…this isn’t helping you.

“the answer is easy: we have an extraordinary amount of evidence that the Resurrection occurred.”

No we don’t. Read (or reread) the section of his essay on Crossing the Rubicon.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/rubicon.html

“As Dr. William Lane Craig once pointed out, "The question is not... 'Could God reveal Himself more clearly?' Of course, He could: He could have inscribed the label 'Made by God' on every atom or planted a neon cross in the heavens with the message 'Jesus Saves.'”

Finally, someone with imagination!

“But why should He want to do such a thing?”

I see it’s been wasted on him….

“Although I've found that atheists have a hard time grasping this, it is a fact that in the Christian view it is a matter of relative indifference to God whether people (merely) believe that He exists or not.”

No, I think atheists understand that better than Christians as they are more in touch with the implications of that.

“For what God is interested in is building a love relationship with you, not just getting you to believe that He exists.”

But you can’t have a loving relationship without such a basic ingredient. Would you marry a woman you weren’t sure existed? Probably not.

“According to the Bible, even the demons believe that God exists - and tremble, for they have no saving relationship with Him (James 2:19).”

Um…good for them? We can talk about how retarded demons are for rebelling against an omnipotent deity they know for certain exists and what that does to the coherency of your religion…but that’s not important right now.

“Of course, in order to believe in God, you must believe that God exists.”

Now we are getting somewhere.

“But there is no reason at all to think that if God were to make His existence more manifest, more people would come into a saving relationship with Him.”

No actually there are many good reasons. Jesus himself says that if he’d performed miracles in ancient OT cities, they would have repented. And the obvious…I know I would take God as a proposition seriously if I only knew he existed. And I know plenty of other people like that as well. Therefore you have to pull rank yet again on top of a dozen other biblically scamtaxiomatic propositions and declare a great big conspiracy theory among agnostics and atheists because of our “fallen human nature.” Even though any honest person would see the obvious…that people are more inclined to action when they have good information to go on. Can people show up at your bake sale if they don’t know that it’s going on? This is rudimentary common sense. Pull rank all you want with the Bible…those are just the confines of your God delusion. If I can’t trust my sensibilities now, I can’t trust them to tell me that the Bible is true or that I should become a Christian. Because that would be equally baseless.

“Mere showmanship will not bring about a change of heart..." (God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist, p. 109).”

Like I’ve said repeatedly apparently the homosexuals in Sodom loved magic enough to repent…but as we all know, God hates fags.

“"If you are not an authority on truth…then how can you validate the Bible’s authority?"
As I have said, I am not trying to "prove" the Bible, I accept it as axiomatic. Again, the point I am making is that authority of some type is inescapable; if you do not accept the Bible as an authority, you must accept humans as an authority instead.”

There’s no “instead.” You accept both the authority of the interpretation of the Bible via AIG, and the authority of the bible and your own authority to discern that you can trust both of these. The Bible is not writing responses to me and neither is AIG. That’s you.

“Hence, I don't need to validate the Bible's authority, since its authority speaks for itself. See Ken Ham's essay on the topic of presuppositions and interpretation of the evidence.”

“The Bible’s authority” would be a “brute fact”…and according to Ken Ham, there are no brute facts. Thus the Bible’s authority is a matter of interpretation based on your own authority on truth. Perhaps you were “not aware you had these” assumptions?

"... his worldview just has one proposition added to it…some minor “god” performed one miracle 2,000 years ago."
“This would be a completely ad hoc modification of his theory.”

No actually he says quite plainly in his book, “Sense and Goodness without God” that practically nothing in his philosophy would change if a god showed up and he says specifically that this is a minor miracle in that essay…something you’ve commented on yourself, so it doesn’t make much sense to deny this. You think you understand my hero, Richard Carrier better than me? I’m horrified. I find that to be an extraordinary claim.

“And anyway, Carrier could not maintain naturalism in face of any kind of supernatural.”

It would only introduce the possibility that this god that resurrected Jesus had something to do with other things. It wouldn’t overturn good evidence on other matters and we’d still be bound to exclude naturalistic explanations of basically everything because we have no rule book to go by that says what God will and won’t be doing supernaturally.

“ Webster's defines philosophical naturalism as "a theory denying that an event or object has a supernatural significance; specifically: the doctrine that scientific laws are adequate to account for all phenomena". Naturalism doesn't say "OK, you can have deities, just as long as they're minor ones, and you can have miracles, just as long as they're little ones."

Well perhaps you should reread Carrier’s book, because he does say ~that. His philosophy and worldview are based on multiple independent lines of evidence. They aren’t tied up on one single dubious axiom. It’s not the titanic where when one compartment fills up the whole thing goes down…that’s the protestant Bible, remember? Obviously Gene Roddenberry didn’t consider Star Trek a theistic worldview even with the addition of the character Q. So you are completely mistaken.

“If a minor supernatural event is conceded, then what's to stop there being a more major one?”

It would only mean the possibility existed…it wouldn’t prove anything it didn’t prove. It would only mean less evidence would be needed…or would it? Because once a supernatural force is introduced…you can’t really trust anything now can you? Perhaps instead *everything* would become an extraordinary claim that no amount of extraordinary evidence could overturn since the whole “Cartesian demon” proposition would have that much more merit. Uniform experience would become a principle of the past.

Even if you could prove Jesus rose from the dead, the argument from evil is still quite evident and powerful. One magic trick two thousand years ago really doesn’t touch it in any meaningful way. All this would mean for various miraculous claims today would be that the ones we don’t have direct confirmation on would become “maybes” instead of “probably nots.” We’d still be obligated to judge fact from fiction, lest our worldview degenerate into seeing miracles everywhere in every which way and never connecting the dots of our lives in any sequiter way.

“Are you familiar with mathematical induction?”
Let me apply a similar type of reasoning here:
1. Minor miracle A happened.
2. If minor miracle A happened, then slightly less minor miracle B may happen. If God raised Jesus, then it should be no big deal for Him to also, for example, change eye color or something trivial like that.
3. Repeatedly apply step 2. E.g. if miracle B happened, what is to stop slightly less minor miracle C from happening?
There you have it. You can eventually end up with quite a large miracle. In fact, any minor supernatural event would imply at least the possibility of an infinitely great miracle.”

It could be a one time event as I stated before. None of your “fancy” induction does anything to that. We still have abundant evidence that many extraordinary claims are in fact false and the presence of some extraordinary claims turning out to be true doesn’t necessarily drop the guard down. You still wouldn’t have justified any of the good qualities of Christianity…only the brute ones…that a god exists and did a magic trick once. And he may be a one trick pony for all we know specializing in raising people from the dead. I’m sure people from the 1950’s expect us to have flying cars, but instead we’ll have to impress them with text messaging.

“Yes, there theoretically could be some limit to said deity's power, but the question is where to put it.”

So you *can* think outside the box…great…I was losing faith.

“Remember, at each stage, we are making the miracle less minor in a very trivial way; thus, any limit you place would be arbitrary (obviously within the realm of the logically possible; questions like "can God create a rock so heavy that He can't lift it?" are irrelevant because that is not logically possible any more than it's possible to create a two-sided triangle, so the question is just as meaningless as asking if God can create a one-ended stick).”

I’m not arguing there. Neither is Carrier.

“ I trust you will come up with an objection here and I would be especially interested to know what it is. Again, this doesn't imply that the greatest possible miracle actually occurred, only that the occurrence or possibility of any miracles implies the possibility of greater miracles.”

Right…but it doesn’t prove it. I’ve already brought up my objections even in my original rebuttal to this post. You haven’t done anything to them. Lots of arm flailing but no punch has bothered to connect.

“If there is at least a minor deity, then what's to stop there being a more major one?”

Not disagreeing…but you are taking what is possible and making it probable and that’s your error.

“We can apply a similar type of reasoning here that we applied above.”

"So it is an assumption for him to say that he’s never seen a miracle before or been able to validate that any have occurred?"
This is obviously not what I meant.

Right, you meant a straw man that you could refute and I restated the obviously what Carrier meant that you weren’t addressing. So again…I’m not the one missing the point.

"... [experience is] just the best authority around that we know of. It doesn’t have to be infallible."
There you have it - that's your presupposition here.

Presupposition? Don’t you mean my experience?

What you're saying here is that experience is a higher authority than the Bible.

I’m saying my experience doesn’t suggest that the Bible has the authority some people say it does. Are you a greater authority than the Koran? The book of Mormon? The Hindu Vedas? Or is it your experience that they are not authoritative? Since you accept that God’s ways aren’t your ways, for all you know, the Flying Spaghetti monster is the god that makes logic and truth possible, but chooses to manifest the idea of himself in the form of a parody religion for idiosyncratic reasons. Perhaps the FSM is merely slightly less concerned with the probability of his existence being evident than your fictional god that he allowed to attain popularity. Maybe he’s just too shy to express himself in any other way and thought the other gods would be liked better than his relatively monstrous self. But then things started going really bad…or he just couldn’t take it any more…and started numerous FSM clubs filled with atheists all over, because they are to be the sons and daughters of the future.

“However, how did you come to the conclusion that experience is actually an authority at all, far less the best one?”

I was forced to. Coerced by my brain chemistry. If it errors, I error with it. Nothing guarantees not being born with brain deficiencies, mentally retarded or a vegetable…even if God exists. Can we trust evolution completely? No. Obviously we can’t trust God in that regard either. But that doesn’t mean we can’t trust it *at all*. Can we be rampantly delusional about what the truth is? At least one of is wrong, aren’t we? Lol. You believe in the law of non-contradiction, right?

That’s what self-awareness and consciousness are…the ability to self validate. It just so happens I am able to tell I’m logical and that I exist and that I can think etc. I am more fortunate in that regard than a rock. And this is the same basis you or I could use to find that the Bible is authoritative…and incidentally I don’t find that to be the case. Perhaps there’s some other reason I can get away with thinking rationally without being created by a god…perhaps the same way that that god got away with it in the first place… I’m not saying my authority on truth is the best possible authority (nor did I ever imply such a thing)…or else there’d be no reason to learn for the sake of the future me…I’m only saying its all I got…and I have no choice but to use it if I’m going to continue to exist…and this is the same in any worldview. Sure…I can be wrong, but the same applies to you and gets the conversation no where.

"It certainly can't have been experience, because that would be circular."

Not all logic circles are false…but incidentally yours are. haha

"It is perfectly obvious we all have to start out with Carrier’s observational axioms"
Oh? It's not "obvious" to me at all.

So you knew the Bible was true before you confronted for the first time the knowledge that it was true?

"... we might want to have a better standard than, 'I’m just going with this for no particular reason and that’s why you should, too.'"
“That's not what I say at all (see the previously cited essays and Dr. Jonathan Sarfati's explanation of why my approach here does not constitute circular reasoning).”

Sarfati might beat me in chess, but not in debate on these issues. BTW, I read all the articles you linked to in their entirety and then some and I am already quite familiar with AIG as that was my inroad to Christianity a long time ago.

"Is that somehow worse than a baseless and patently anti-empirical, delusion centered worldview?"
“My worldview is not baseless, anti-empirical, or delusion centered. All I said was that empiricism is not a religiously or philosophically neutral assumption, and that Carrier can't offer us any direct evidence for it.”

Well I take it you accept the empirical method, as you must to explore the historical context of the Bible through the eyes of objectivity but disqualify empiricism philosophically for a naturalist, correct? Again all that is required is a plausible reason why this can be so…so that empiricism can work. Even if we were agnostics about it, that wouldn’t kill a naturalist’s worldview, it would just be a missing puzzle piece. Surely you don’t have all the answers to your worldview, right? And it isn’t any more coherent to assume God himself is exempt from the same philosophical failings we ultimately are subject to. “The God hypothesis” as usual pushes the problem back a mere step and creates more problems than it solves. There are no guarantees in any worldview that make the acquisition of truth absolute…we can only approach it…to the best of my knowledge. Further there is no reason to assume from atheistic “presuppositions” that existence can’t ever be uniform and there is no reason to think evolution would cultivate faculties that were completely disparate from reality. So there is no problem philosophically with non-Christian explanations for these things. For a worldview that supposedly owns logic…you (and AIG) really aren't the greatest of caretakers.

"If human reason isn’t valid, then what good would good reasons be to you?"
“It is valid. However, as explained in the previously-cited essays, non-Christians don't have a good explanation for why this is.”

If it’s valid, why do you not except the best methods for acquiring truth like Carrier does? Why do you allow for a sub-standard worldview?

ARU