A Catholic's "Proof"
Offline My best friend has been a Catholic since I've known him. About a month ago he was facing legal action for some dumb stuff he did when he was younger, and it came back to bite him in January this year. He said if the results of said legal action went a certain way, he would start going to church ever Sunday. Needless to say, he ended up going to church every Sunday. Since then, he's been telling me stories that PROVE God's existence, stories like the old woman with stigmata in Ohio (whom he went to see about a week and a half ago) who met with thousands of Catholics in a field to get a vision of Mary with a message from Jesus. There have also been three sister in Spain who apparently do amazing then while praying. According to the teachings of my friend's church, when these three girls pray, they tilt their heads all the way back and face the sky, their pupils get completely dilated, and they link arms to walk around the city, dodging stones and obstacles that they can't see because they're heads are facing straight up to the sky. I'm an atheist and I can come up with an explanation to almost anything, but I need a little assistance developing possible explanations to these things.
Anyone have any input?
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You might want to check out this thread http://www.rationalresponders.com/forum/13235 this guy also presented these catholic miracles as proof. Most were severley debunked. The most important thing to remember is proof. If your friend can't provide any sort of believeable evidence, let along un-biased scientific evidence, there's no reason to believe a word. He might as well be going on about alien abductions. Though that's actually more believable.
Psalm 14:1 "the fool hath said in his heart there is a God"-From a 1763 misprinted edition of the bible
Argument from Sadism: Theist presents argument in a wall of text with no punctuation and wrong spelling. Atheist cannot read and is forced to concede.
Not having an explanation doesn't make me believe or doesn't mean he's won the battle. I told him with something like this, I'd need to SEE these occurrences, and after seeing them and making my own observations, I'd want to see the medical research into these things.
Tell the woman with the stigmata, that you will convert immediately if she will show stigmata under the following conditions:
1. She must (supervised by a female illusionist) strip completely and thoroughly wash
2. Get dressed (again under supervision) in clothing provided by you.
3. Produce stigmata, while restrained to prevent incisions or chemical combinations from being made surreptitiously.
4. She must be observed and video-taped from multiple angles as the stigmata appear.
5. A professional stage magician must be present to supervise.
Somehow I really doubt she will agree to this, because your soul is less important to her than her ability to fool the rubes and take in cash "donations."
Being open-minded isn't the same thing as being vacant.
Sounds to me like the proper conditions for a JREF $1,000,000 challenge test.
The Regular Expressions of Humanistic Jones: Where one software Engineer will show the world that God is nothing more than an undefined pointer.
Congratulate him for seeing evidence of people with bizarre abilities then ask him how any of this has anything to do with God, Jesus or the Roman Catholic church.
Lazy is a word we use when someone isn't doing what we want them to do.
- Dr. Joy Brown
I talked to him from 10:30 last night until 4:40 in the morning, and after much debate, he was able to admit that there are flaws in the church and in his belief systems, but just like how there are some things that will never be 100% fact because we don't have the technology available to weed out that pesky 5% of doubt, the 5% of doubt is proof in another explanation that "cannot be reached by science," where apparently God lies (according to my friend).
The psych major in me finds these views incredibly fascinating despite them being tragically misguided.
These are the same mechanisms that fascinate me. The justification of effort, the persistent desire for external validation (and magical validation at that) and essentially "wanting to know you're on the right team" is even stronger with religions than it is with soccer hooligans. It's behaviour that must have significance to group bonding, but then gets out of control with a large enough population. The correlation (or comorbidity) with perfectionism is also amazing. Religious people are like people who read self-help books. They like lists with rules that "perfect" their morality. Ultimately, when they can't live up to the perfect rules, there's a cycle of self-reproachment and pessimism, which can only be cured with further attempts at self-help strategies. Religion and addiction also seem to follow similar paths, as B.F. Skinner suggested with his superstitious pigeons.
It's fascinating stuff.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
On the percentage thing, put it to him this way. If I have an object that I am indirectly studying and I have concluded with 95% certainty that it is red does that mean that the 5% I am not certain is 5% proof that it is blue? Given the number of other colors it could be, can that 5% meaningfully evidence anything other than a 5% chance that the object is simply not red?
Just because a scientific concept is only 95% proven does not suddenly mean that the Christian God lives in that extra 5%. Maybe Vishnu, Thor, Zeus, or Baal lives there. Maybe that 5% is the realm of a new theory we will find later. If we do close that last 5% what happens to god then?
The Regular Expressions of Humanistic Jones: Where one software Engineer will show the world that God is nothing more than an undefined pointer.
Probably the same thing that happened when we found out that god didn't dwell in the fire, or in the wind, or above the clouds. The same thing that happened when we found out the earth wasn't the center of the universe, when we found out that it took a bit more than six days for it to all come about etc.
Unfortunately, they will find some other dark and dusty crevice in which to wedge their god. Since their will likely always be gaps in our knowledge there will always be a place for their superstitions.
LC >;-}>
Christianity: A disgusting middle eastern blood cult, based in human sacrifice, with sacraments of cannibalism and vampirism, whose highest icon is of a near naked man hanging in torment from a device of torture.
I agree, it's totally incredible to listen to them justify deluded concepts of impossibilities. When all else fails they reach for "God can do anything." The reading between the lines of holy books to find justification for the action. Lack of grounding in reality is found in most of them. In many of my conversations with believers I try to find out if there was perhaps something that occured in their life of significant emotional impact, called a significant emotional event. Usually there is such a reason. They turned to Jesus as they got divorced, gave up addictions, or unspecified emotional trauma. The use of Jesus seems to be a substitute for the other behavior or a diversion from the event. These types of believers make the least sense when you talk with them, they resort to the Jesus is just so wonderful. Even if you hit them over the head with a philosophical 2 X 4 they aren't fazed at all.
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"I guess it's time to ask if you live under high voltage power transmission lines which have been shown to cause stimulation of the fantasy centers of the brain due to electromagnetic waves?" - Me
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks please. Cash and in small bills." - Robert A Heinlein.
At some point one has to allow for the possibility that certain people will simply never respond to rational argument and one clue to that mentality is an inordinate dependency on using apparently "fantastic" phenomena to justify and inform their chosen faith in what is, after all, a "fantasy-based" system. They operate a kind of flawed logic which runs along the lines of "the more crazily weird and incomprehensible the event, the more it justifies my certainty in the truth as defined by the religion it advertises". This of course is the antithesis to a rational response which would insert an "apparently" before the "crazily weird" bit, and would then set about finding a physical explanation for the phenomenon.
And that's what makes these people almost impossible to reason with. They have, whether they realise it or not, made the choice of not allowing reality to intrude on their feelings. That's why your friend is impressed by tales of silly stunts dressed up as "proofs" of something that by its definition abhors proof. That's why he retains the false notion that "5%" of proof can be witheld for the purposes of invalidating the rest (though not when applied to his favourite stunts apparently). That's why he sees causality where none exists.
We, all of us, protect our feelings and feed them at the expense of our rational intellect when it suits us. Most of us do so for the purposes of being entertained, where the expression "suspend reality" is used often to denote a completely normal mental prerequisite to enjoying a film, play, book etc. The religious person, and especially the one who believes in supernatural miracles of the sort described, has simply adopted this suspension of reality as a lifestyle. They are as unwilling to be told they are wrong as the child wants to be informed that the film set in outer space that he is absorbed in is really being performed by actors on a soundstage somewhere near Los Angeles. For the purpose of consuming and absorbing the experience, the reality, even if it is understood, is not allowed impinge.
You win the argument, but by no means can win the mind of a deluded person. Unless you can present them with something as exciting, and that carries as easy a route to self-validation as religion does (indeed is designed to do) then the person who has decided that it feels better to believe a delusion will simply carry on doing so, and pointless "miracles" will still be presented by them as evidence enough that their delusion is right.
I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy
Besides the fact that it's a valid observation (the 12-step program capitalizes on that mechanism by introducing a "higher power" to an addict) the funny thing about you saying it is that it's often applied by theists to someone like me, who's an outright antitheist. People ask me, "did something happen to you that made you lose your faith?" The answer, naturally, is that I never had any faith - the trauma just made me crankier!
But who hasn't had some kind of trauma? I don't know of anyone who's never experienced something bad enough to really shake a person up. That might just be who I chose to make my friends, though.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
I've gotten that quite alot. It's a tricky one for me,since there was something that acted as a catalyst to me leaving me faith. I didn't just decide god sucked and stop believing though.I did a lot of reading and arrived at my current position through thinking. Theists tend to skip all that though, and just go" see!!!you're just atheist because you're mad at god!"
Psalm 14:1 "the fool hath said in his heart there is a God"-From a 1763 misprinted edition of the bible
Argument from Sadism: Theist presents argument in a wall of text with no punctuation and wrong spelling. Atheist cannot read and is forced to concede.
I said precisely this, and he told me when science closes the gap, he'll drop the church, but he has "faith" science will never close the gap, so god will continue to live somewhere in that five percent.
O.K. ...let me get this straight....
In a world full of pain & Suffering....commandments being broken by the shitloads...genocide...mass murder...reality television...
An invisible omnipotent creator wants to prove his existance by making some broad in Ohio bleed from her palms, and three hags in Spain dodge some rocks. Well that does it...I'm convinced.
www.RichWoodsBlog.com
Funny how the 95% thing never gets turned around. You may have 95% proof, your religious friend has 0% proof.
As you said, in any case it does not mean that the missing 5% contains the christian god. In fact, given the flaws in the bible and how ridiculous and/or disturbing the rest is I would say it is 0%
I may be only 99.9% sure that there is no god, but I am 100% sure that it is not the christian god (or the god of any other religion I've heard of). If there is a god that influenced the bible he either decieved people to be so portrayed or he was incorectly depicted, either way it is not the god they believe in, therefore the christian god does not exist.
Zen-atheist wielding Occam's katana.
Jesus said, "Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division." - Luke 12:51
Which is mind-bending in its weirdness, since it's very difficult to be angry at something you don't believe exists.
Saint Will: no gyration without funkstification.
fabulae! nil satis firmi video quam ob rem accipere hunc mi expediat metum. - Terence
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"I guess it's time to ask if you live under high voltage power transmission lines which have been shown to cause stimulation of the fantasy centers of the brain due to electromagnetic waves?" - Me
"God is omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, - it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks please. Cash and in small bills." - Robert A Heinlein.