The "something can't come from nothing" argument

[idav]

What? BTW I do not continue discussions too long with face palms in them. If you can't make the point, an emoticon can't do it for you. They are arrogant and juvenile and the one who use them usually have the least justification for doing so.

One last time it is not any particular alone that makes this a possible miracle.
All these combined does.

1. No danger was apprehended by the senses.
2. A person who does not wear seat belts suddenly desired to put one.
3. In spite of it being very hard to get, it was struggled with until it was put to together.
4. Soon after a wreck occurred in which the seat belt probably saved their life.

Please see my description of being born again as exhibit two.

Exhibit three. In the six days war a tank battalion on foot for some reason was walking along and one of them stepped on something. It was a mine. They checked their maps and found they were in the middle of a huge mine field and by some miracle they had not exploded one and there was no way they were getting out without massive casualties. Just then a freak wind so strong it blew 4 inches of sand from the area and every single mine was exposed.

There are actually entries in Jewish battle reports like this one that contain the word miracle.

Multiply these few stories by millions.. Are you actually going to gamble everything you have on them all being wrong?

It doesnt seem like your adressing my points. Facepalms are due to frustration which I do in real life often. This expresses emotion but indo try to be patient.

People do things without being consious of it all the time but that is the way the brain works. Anything done by a person is command coming from the brain. Humans are born to try and survive by any means. A precognition would have been to tell the driver to hard stop not to tell the driver to keep driving while you put your seatbelt on. Reminds me of l eoe saying it is a miracle so and so survived a plane crash but what about the many that die in a tragic event like that. Where is the precognition to stop from boarding or letting the pilot know whats wrong with the plane. Odds are people will survive which doesnt make it a miracle especially for the less fortunate.

 

[shawn001]

Psssst...

is nothing more than Pascals Wager....

Too bad its not Occam's Razor.

 

[johnhanks]

That is an interesting take. Let me illustrate it a different way. If a fixed bulls eye was set up 5000 yards away and people started firing arrows at it. There is no natural way a standard bow will get any where in the same realm as the bulls eye. Now if 6 Christians say they got a sign from god before firing and despite the range being several times farther than a bow can shoot they hit dead center. Would it not be reasonable to chalk up all the misses as natural and the impossible but undeniable bull's-eyes as possibly supernatural.

You have (rather unsubtly) rigged your illustration such that the hits can only be other than natural. There is nothing supernatural about putting on a seatbelt because you have a bad feeling about a journey; and nothing supernatural about the seatbelt protecting you if a crash does occur, or about its being quietly unfastened and forgotten on the far more frequent occasions when the journey ends safely.

This gets far worse in other cases. For example if several things must occur like the fine tuning of the universe to support ANY life of any conceivable type they are multiplicative because they require countless things balanced just right. If only one parameter was needed then like a lottery someone had to win but instead what we need is the same guy to win hundreds of times. There are easy ways to eliminate the natural for the possibly supernatural.

The fine tuning argument has been amply debated elsewhere. It can as well be used as an argument for atheism.

 

[1robin]

It doesnt seem like your adressing my points. Facepalms are due to frustration which I do in real life often. This expresses emotion but indo try to be patient.

Then please just say I am not answering your question. A emoticon could have at least a dozen meanings.

People do things without being consious of it all the time but that is the way the brain works. Anything done by a person is command coming from the brain. Humans are born to try and survive by any means. A precognition would have been to tell the driver to hard stop not to tell the driver to keep driving while you put your seatbelt on. Reminds me of l eoe saying it is a miracle so and so survived a plane crash but what about the many that die in a tragic event like that. Where is the precognition to stop from boarding or letting the pilot know whats wrong with the plane. Odds are people will survive which doesnt make it a miracle especially for the less fortunate.

The unconscious BRAIN DOES NOT work by predicting for every extremely unlikely, UNPREDICTABLE, and unknowable events and planning in detail for them for them, and then having them occur.

1. We breath because we have programming in our brain to regulate a necessary function.
2. Out heart beats for the same reason.

We do not have unconscious thoughts that know a plane at 30,000 feet heading straight for our living room and so we go out a dig a fox hole for what seems like no reason.

You are really missing the point.

1. The possible miracle is not surviving crash.
2. The miracle is not putting on a seat belt.
3. The miracle is not having a random or function based, necessary unconscious desire.
4. The miracle is not detecting a danger through our senses and preparing for it.


The miracle is not having any sensory indication of any danger, yet doing exactly what would remedy the situation (even though it was a lot of trouble) without any known reason for doing so. Then having the exact event happen that what was done for no known reason saved the person from. If you can't see the extraordinary quality of that it is because you are trying very hard not to.

If God is not the context everyone would yell it was a miracle this occurred. It is only when a being that introduces personal accountability is in the mix that a miracle is fought like the plague.

 

[fantome profane]

It's funny to me that something is pretty much universally seen as an evil except if it involves God.

Make someone dependent on something only you can provide? Your a drug dealer.
Make someone you're in a relationship with dependent on you? Your an abusive spouse.
If you're a god and you do this? It's a miracle.

Isaiah 5:20 Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; Who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!



It is a fairly common technique used in Christian apologetics.

 

[idav]

4. The miracle is not detecting a danger through our senses and preparing for it.

I've seen others say about the same thing and I have said that is how the brain works. We are not always conscious of the signals the brain is sending us. In fact, there is memory in the brain that triggers us to do things that we don't know why but it is a repressed memory spelling out danger and the brain sends signals accordingly. That is how the brain works. Do you have to think to breath or keep your vital organs functioning, same goes for the brain, it will send signals without us knowing why.

Implicit Memory
Memory that we store and retrieve unconsciously is called implicit memory. Implicit memory aids us in performing tasks that we don't have to think about doing. Examples of these would be typing on a keyboard or riding a bike. Once we learn how to do these tasks, we retain them in our memory and they occur without our conscious retrieval of them. Some supporting evidence of implicit memory is the effect priming has on different tasks. Priming is the subconscious preparation of a subject to a task. For example, when a subject is primed with a word (for instance, table), then presented with a portion of that word (say, tab-) and asked to fill in the rest of that portion, they are more likely to answer with the word with which they were primed than another word. This demonstrates that there is some form of memory that we are not consciously aware of.

Evidence
Some of the evidence we have supporting the difference between implicit and explicit memory comes from studies of subjects with amnesia. A major case study of an amnesiac was done on a subject named Henry Gustav Molaison (better known as HM), who became unable to form new long-term memories after an experimental surgery in the 1950s. One study involving HM required him to draw a figure while looking at its reflection in a mirror. HM showed improvement every time he was presented this task, but when asked if he had done this task before, he would not remember doing it. This study demonstrated that though HM's explicit memory was damaged, his implicit memory remained intact as he retained motor skills previously practiced.
http://mercercognitivepsychology.pbworks.com/w/page/33163236/Implicit%20and%20Explicit%20Memory

 

[1robin]

You have (rather unsubtly) rigged your illustration such that the hits can only be other than natural. There is nothing supernatural about putting on a seatbelt because you have a bad feeling about a journey; and nothing supernatural about the seatbelt protecting you if a crash does occur, or about its being quietly unfastened and forgotten on the far more frequent occasions when the journey ends safely.
The fine tuning argument has been amply debated elsewhere. It can as well be used as an argument for atheism.

Of Course I did because no natural explanation exists for 6 longbows hitting a bull's-eye 5000 yards away and no natural explanation exists for a person who does not wear a seat belt putting one on a minute before a unknowable crash occurred. That was the point.

So far you guys have had the divide and conquer approach. Strip every detail from it's narrative and distort it until it can have a possible natural explanation. You can't or should not being doing that.

Besides that story I gave one of my own about my born again experience and about a three time answered prayer.

Here are two more.

George foreman was a street thug who once said he tried to kill his opponents in the ring. He lost to Ally and went into a depression buts till fought. One night he collapsed with heat exhaustion. His trained could detect no signs of life. In Foreman the thug's words he went to hell, yet cried out to God to save him. He popped up from the floor and ran around the dressing room yelling Christ saved him.. He is now a lovable Teddy bear and does constant charity work. Even in his 40's and way over weight he told God if he won the title back he would thank him in the ring. He lost almost the whole fight but one thunderous right hand dropped his opponent. Foreman dropped straight to his knees and thanked God.

Johnny Cash was the original rebel drug addict. He once drove his car drunk into a state park to go fishing. He forgot to turn it off and it caught the grass and then the woods on fire killing an entire species of rare bird. When he was tried, he said I don't give a ***** about your yellow buzzards just tell me what the fine is. Since then he was saved and became one of the most beloved singers of Gospel music there was.



My explanation is supernatural intervention and Occam would be proud. Yours will probably be to dissect every single detail of every claim, strip it of context, consider it alone and make a thousand irrational, illogical, and improbable natural excuses for each one but Occam would not approve and I can't even guess at the motivation to go through so much trouble to dismiss the only possible eternal hope for man.

One more bonus. How did a man who hated Christians with a passion and killed them in what he saw as working for God leave on a journey in that condition and arrive with the exact opposite attitude?





.

 

[1robin]

I've seen others say about the same thing and I have said that is how the brain works. We are not always conscious of the signals the brain is sending us. In fact, there is memory in the brain that triggers us to do things that we don't know why but it is a repressed memory spelling out danger and the brain sends signals accordingly. That is how the brain works. Do you have to think to breath or keep your vital organs functioning, same goes for the brain, it will send signals without us knowing why.

They are as wrong as this is. The brain does not respond to what it is not aware of. If it did 3000 people would have been running out of the WTC 10 minutes before the cowards crashed into it. It can do things like breathing, heart beats, or a million other things it is pre-programmed to do. But it cannot predict the future beyond sensory input. Brains function on two known inputs sensory, and programming. Neither explain this. BTW there is no natural explanation for the programming either. No known source for information other than mind is known. Simple patters yes, information no.

 

[idav]

They are as wrong as this is. The brain does not respond to what it is not aware of. If it did 3000 people would have been running out of the WTC 10 minutes before the cowards crashed into it. It can do things like breathing, heart beats, or a million other things it is pre-programmed to do. But it cannot predict the future beyond sensory input. Brains function on two known inputs sensory, and programming. Neither explain this. BTW there is no natural explanation for the programming either. No known source for information other than mind is known. Simple patters yes, information no.

I think your starting to see my point. They are not wrong, they test peoples memories and brain trauma to confirm this, the article provided such an example but there are others. There are instances when trauma is repressed but we still have the fear in memory and respond without knowing it and we don't know why we respond like that without further investigation. Putting on a seatbelt could be the speed of the car, the vision of how the traffic looks, maybe the driver was swerving but there is no way to tell what triggered it but the trigger can and would be unconscious if you don't know why your doing it. Heck just a moving car is enough to trigger the seat belt, there is no miracle there.

Repressed memory[edit]

Main article: Repressed memory
Perhaps one of the most controversial and well-known of the psychological effects trauma can have on patients is repressed memory. The theory/reality of repressed memory is the idea that an event is so traumatic, that the memory was not forgotten in the traditional sense, or kept secret in shame or fear, but removed from the conscious mind, still present in the long-term memory but hidden from the patient's knowledge.[9] Sigmund Freud originated the concept of repression and it has developed and changed since his original work.[10] In the eyes of critics of repressed memory, it is synonymous with false memory; however its proponents will argue that these people truly did have traumatic experiences.
Memory and trauma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

As I had stated previously people wouldn't be boarding planes they don't know will crash if there were any real precognition.

At the beginning I also mentioned instinct which all animals have. This is "pre-programmed" if you want to call it that but it is simply biological information passed down from parents. DNA is where the info comes from which comes from the parents. Humans are animals too.

 

[shawn001]

Why Everyone Believes in Magic (Even You)


"Even the most die-hard skeptics among us believe in magic. Humans can't help it: though we try to be logical, irrational beliefs — many of which we aren't even conscious of — are hardwired in our psyches. But rather than hold us back, the unavoidable habits of mind that make us think luck and supernatural forces are real, that objects and symbols have power, and that humans have souls and destinies are part of what has made our species so evolutionarily successful. Believing in magic is good for us... "


"Mind power

Psychology research shows most people wrongly assume their thoughts can become reality — even people who say they don't believe in telekinesis or ESP. "If you think about something and then it happens, you feel a little bit responsible for it," Hutson said. It's an irrational feeling. Why do we feel it?

"It's a byproduct of how we understand causality," he said. "If there are two events, A and B, if A happens before B, if there are no other obvious causes of B, and if A and B are conceptually related, then we assume A caused B."

"Consider kicking a soccer ball: if you move your leg just before the ball goes flying, you naturally assume that your leg caused the ball's motion. We apply the same logical steps even if event A is merely a thought. "If you think about something before it happens and your thought is somehow related to the event, then you might consider your thought as a possible influence on the event," Hutson said.

The faulty logic gets reinforced every time you think a positive thought, such as visualizing a successful basketball free throw, and then the thought boosts your confidence, which affects your behavior, and — voila! — the ball swooshes through the net."

"eaning of life

What do religion, anthropomorphism, mysticism and the widespread notion that each of us has a destiny to fulfill have in common? According to Hutson's research, underlying all these forms of magical thinking is the innate sense that everything happens for a reason. And that stems from paranoia, which is a safety mechanism.

"We have a bias to see events as intentional, and to see objects as intentionally designed," Hutson explained. "Part of this is because we're always on the lookout for signs of other intentional beings — people or animals — so we tend to assume that if something happened, it was caused by an agent. If we don't see any biological agent, like a person or animal, then we might assume that there's some sort of invisible agent: God or the universe in general with a mind of its own. So the reason we have a bias to assume things are intentional is that typically it's safer to spot another agent in your environment than to miss another agent."

Or, in the words of the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie, "It's better to mistake a boulder for a bear than a bear for a boulder..."

Why Everyone Believes in Magic (Even You) | Belief in Magic Explained | Magical Thinking | LiveScience

 

[shawn001]

Of Course I did because no natural explanation exists for 6 longbows hitting a bull's-eye 5000 yards away and no natural explanation exists for a person who does not wear a seat belt putting one on a minute before a unknowable crash occurred. That was the point.

So far you guys have had the divide and conquer approach. Strip every detail from it's narrative and distort it until it can have a possible natural explanation. You can't or should not being doing that.

Besides that story I gave one of my own about my born again experience and about a three time answered prayer.

Here are two more.

George foreman was a street thug who once said he tried to kill his opponents in the ring. He lost to Ally and went into a depression buts till fought. One night he collapsed with heat exhaustion. His trained could detect no signs of life. In Foreman the thug's words he went to hell, yet cried out to God to save him. He popped up from the floor and ran around the dressing room yelling Christ saved him.. He is now a lovable Teddy bear and does constant charity work. Even in his 40's and way over weight he told God if he won the title back he would thank him in the ring. He lost almost the whole fight but one thunderous right hand dropped his opponent. Foreman dropped straight to his knees and thanked God.

Johnny Cash was the original rebel drug addict. He once drove his car drunk into a state park to go fishing. He forgot to turn it off and it caught the grass and then the woods on fire killing an entire species of rare bird. When he was tried, he said I don't give a ***** about your yellow buzzards just tell me what the fine is. Since then he was saved and became one of the most beloved singers of Gospel music there was.



My explanation is supernatural intervention and Occam would be proud. Yours will probably be to dissect every single detail of every claim, strip it of context, consider it alone and make a thousand irrational, illogical, and improbable natural excuses for each one but Occam would not approve and I can't even guess at the motivation to go through so much trouble to dismiss the only possible eternal hope for man.

One more bonus. How did a man who hated Christians with a passion and killed them in what he saw as working for God leave on a journey in that condition and arrive with the exact opposite attitude?





.

Where are the links to this anecdotal evidence you keep posting?


"Math Explains Likely Long Shots, Miracles and Winning the Lottery [Excerpt]

Why you should not be surprised when long shots, miracles and other extraordinary events occur—even when the same six winning lottery numbers come up in two successive drawings

Math Explains Likely Long Shots, Miracles and Winning the Lottery - Scientific American

 

[johnhanks]

Of Course I did because no natural explanation exists for 6 longbows hitting a bull's-eye 5000 yards away and no natural explanation exists for a person who does not wear a seat belt putting one on a minute before a unknowable crash occurred. That was the point.

No natural explanation? Really? Robin, you are indulging in your favourite pastime of selecting the evidence to suit your argument. Consider the following facts.

1. Sometimes people experience a premonition of a life-threatening event, and as a result take steps which mitigate or avoid it.
2. Sometimes people experience a premonition of a life-threatening event, take steps to mitigate or avoid it, but find that the event does not in fact occur.
3. Sometimes people are involved in a life-threatening event of which they have had no premonition at all.

According to you, we should treat 1 as conclusive evidence of divine intervention, while ignoring 2 and 3 completely.
Let's take a less selective look at the evidence. If such presentiments of disaster do come from god, has he got it wrong in instance 2, or is he just being mischievous? And why, if god is capable of forewarning us of mishaps, does he allow 3 to happen? (The only serious car crash I've been involved in - in the southern US, as it happened - occurred with no premonition whatever; and if you think that's because I'm an undeserving atheist, my Christian church-attending wife experienced no premonition either.*)

Put on your blinkers and see only no.1 above, and yes, you'll conclude that something supernatural is happening. Look at all three together and - my word, it's exactly what you'd expect if the "premonitions" arose from entirely natural causes and had no real premonitory power whatsoever.

* See? I can do anecdotes too.

 

[1robin]

I think your starting to see my point. They are not wrong, they test peoples memories and brain trauma to confirm this, the article provided such an example but there are others. There are instances when trauma is repressed but we still have the fear in memory and respond without knowing it and we don't know why we respond like that without further investigation. Putting on a seatbelt could be the speed of the car, the vision of how the traffic looks, maybe the driver was swerving but there is no way to tell what triggered it but the trigger can and would be unconscious if you don't know why your doing it. Heck just a moving car is enough to trigger the seat belt, there is no miracle there.

You lost me here. We are not discussing repressed memory from a trauma. The person who posted did not mention any speed issues, and traffic conditions, or any other thing you mentioned, yet without asking them you use them as an excuse to dismiss. Is it any wonder you do not believe the bible? Anything that makes God more likely is denied even if the only counter claim is about something that isn't impossible, and even that condition is violated at times. The other day a person told me that Paul's experience on the road to Damascus was a epileptic fit. cognitive dissonance is among the most powerful forces in the universe. There is no neutrality concerning God.

As I had stated previously people wouldn't be boarding planes they don't know will crash if there were any real precognition.

Good grief that would only apply if everyone had perfect precognition. Miracles are exceptions not he rule and very rare ones. Having said that here are all kinds of stories of people not boarding planes that crashed.

At the beginning I also mentioned instinct which all animals have. This is "pre-programmed" if you want to call it that but it is simply biological information passed down from parents. DNA is where the info comes from which comes from the parents. Humans are animals too.

Instinct has nothing to do with predicting a drunk driver will hit you in a few minutes. DNA is where the info is stored, mind is the only known source of information. Since drunk driving accidents have only existed for a hundred years or so do you have some evolutionary hyper accelerator or something. Not that instincts could ever explain this given all the evolution there ever could be.

This is simply a case where a miracle is inconvenient and so any and every denial at any cost is appealed to.

 

[1robin]

Where are the links to this anecdotal evidence you keep posting?

For which perfectly relevant claim? Foreman and Cash have their personal testimonies on several utube videos and have written about it extensively and have obviously radically changed lives.

"Math Explains Likely Long Shots, Miracles and Winning the Lottery [Excerpt]Math explains a guy winning a lottery. It does not explain the same guy winning it a dozen times. If that happens every human who ever lived would think some mind is altering probability and investigations by the dozens would be involved. However when the universe gets far more improbable results many more times in a row to even have a universe where any life can survive you don't blink an eye. You make up explanations that require more faith given less evidence than my faith ever did.

Why you should not be surprised when long shots, miracles and other extraordinary events occur—even when the same six winning lottery numbers come up in two successive drawings

Oh I don't know (by the way this proves exactly what I said about) because the multiplicative odds of that occurring are billions to one. Just to show the comparison just one parameter to have a structured universe at all is 1 in billions of trillions, and there are dozens maybe hundreds more that are necessary like that.

Math Explains Likely Long Shots, Miracles and Winning the Lottery - Scientific American

I have a math degree and took many statistical and probabilistic classes and know well what they are reasonable explanations for and what I am talking about is so far beyond that realm it can't even be seen from it.

BTW math causes nothing to happen. Math is a descriptor not a pre-scripter. 2 + 2 never caused anything to occur. Your making some kind of watered down sharpshooter fallacy but that only works when there is only one shot taken. If multiple shots all hit the mark the sharpshooter fallacy becomes a fallacy it's self.

 

[1robin]

No natural explanation? Really? Robin, you are indulging in your favourite pastime of selecting the evidence to suit your argument. Consider the following facts.

That is impossible since the evidence came from someone else's story. I could not have altered their evidence to suite me. Next.

[*]Sometimes people experience a premonition of a life-threatening event, and as a result take steps which mitigate or avoid it.

Yes and since no known natural explanation exists for this then a supernatural one is all that is left unless you pull a science of the gaps argument.

[*]Sometimes people experience a premonition of a life-threatening event, take steps to mitigate or avoid it, but find that the event does not in fact occur.

I do not think these would technically be premonitions. These would be more along the line of my fear at 7 of riding a roller coaster, or a person afraid of flying, or could be as the bible says an example of a demon acting as an angel of light and making a fearful prediction. The bible says they can do this (and those idiots that talk with the dead, palm readers, fortune tellers, wigi boards are examples), what they can not do is do so with 100% accuracy. The bible says spirits will come claiming all manner of things but only those that come true perfectly are from God.

[*]Sometimes people are involved in a life-threatening event of which they have had no premonition at all.
[/LIST]

Duh. This is not evidence for anything for or against my claims. Miracles are the extreme exceptions, not the norm.

According to you, we should treat 1 as conclusive evidence of divine intervention, while ignoring 2

We should treat 1 and 2 as evidence for the supernatural (both the good and bad side of it) and ignore 3, in this context.

Let's take a less selective look at the evidence. If such presentiments of disaster do come from god, has he got it wrong in instance 2, or is he just being mischievous? And why, if god is capable of forewarning us of mishaps, does he allow 3 to happen? (The only serious car crash I've been involved in - in the southern US, as it happened - occurred with no premonition whatever; and if you think that's because I'm an undeserving atheist, my Christian church-attending wife experienced no premonition either.*)

I have already answered the first two. Since God did not ever promise to forewarn us of any disaster then you have no reason to find him deficient. I have never had a premonition where I avoided any major accident. Yet I have been told to tell people things that made no sense to me and I almost refused but went ahead with it. My words left them sobbing with relief and hugging me. I have also had a few prayers answered, been born again, and once was knocked off my feet by the holy spirit and lay in my kitchen floor for a half hour in perfect contentment. However forget all that. There are hundreds of millions of claims to BIBLICAL SUPERNATURAL EVENTS. Are you going to wager they are all wrong. If only one is right your world view is sunk if you lack faith.

Here is a story your reminds me of. A famous ministers father died and one of his non-believing parishioners asked him if it did not shake his faith. The preacher answered as far as he knew Moses died, Adam died, Noah died, and Christ died. God never promised to warn us of every negative event. According to his purposes the evidence strongly suggests he has warned a great many however.

Put on your blinkers and see only no.1 above, and yes, you'll conclude that something supernatural is happening. Look at all three together and - my word, it's exactly what you'd expect if the "premonitions" arose from entirely natural causes and had no real premonitory power whatsoever.

Put on my blinkers. Your bad at sarcasm. I think you meant blinders. Since I took on all three there is no evidence of either blinkers or blinders. There is some very involved math and philosophy that ruins your attempt here but I will let you digest this while I consider if I want to get into it.

* See? I can do anecdotes too.

For your side I think it is mandatory and probably taught at seminars.

 

[SkepticThinker]

You lost me here. We are not discussing repressed memory from a trauma. The person who posted did not mention any speed issues, and traffic conditions, or any other thing you mentioned, yet without asking them you use them as an excuse to dismiss. Is it any wonder you do not believe the bible? Anything that makes God more likely is denied even if the only counter claim is about something that isn't impossible, and even that condition is violated at times. The other day a person told me that Paul's experience on the road to Damascus was a epileptic fit. cognitive dissonance is among the most powerful forces in the universe. There is no neutrality concerning God.

How do premonitions make the specific god you believe in more likely to exist?

And once again, I said Paul's problems (assuming the story is even true to begin with) could have had something to do with epilepsy or ANY OTHER NUMBER OF KNOWN MEDICAL CAUSES of temporary blindness. So yeah, I'm going with the available explanations that fit the symptoms rather than jumping to some supernatural cause we don't even know exists. Silly me.

 

[1robin]

How do premonitions make the specific god you believe in more likely to exist?

I guess any explanation will do as long as it is not the pestering everyone's is accountable one I believe in. It does not prove it was my God. It does strongly suggest the supernatural and all deity type God's, and Allah who likes to sit and watch 99% of the time. My God is the most likely candidate but I am sure there are others that can be considered but then we get into evidences for specific God's and mine towers over all others.

And once again, I said Paul's problems (assuming the story is even true to begin with) could have had something to do with epilepsy or ANY OTHER NUMBER OF KNOWN MEDICAL CAUSES of temporary blindness. So yeah, I'm going with the available explanations that fit the symptoms rather than jumping to some supernatural cause we don't even know exists. Silly me.

And again I am saying that what he experienced is extremely rare even among those few medical issues but the clincher is that another party was involved with the biblical narrative of the event. Not to mention the people who were with him. It is as silly not to jump to a supernatural cause instead on a whole slew of independent and very improbable series of medical ones and additional complicity of others involved. Occam would hang himself based on your response. In fact it is even worse than what I implied.

 

[SkepticThinker]

I guess any explanation will do as long as it is not the pestering everyone's is accountable one I believe in. It does not prove it was my God. It does strongly suggest the supernatural and all deity type God's, and Allah who likes to sit and watch 99% of the time. My God is the most likely candidate but I am sure there are others that can be considered but then we get into evidences for specific God's and mine towers over all others.

Explanations that already exist are preferable to made up ones, I'd say.

Why is your god the mostly likely candidate?
Why is any god a likely candidate?

And again I am saying that what he experienced is extremely rare even among those few medical issues but the clincher is that another party was involved with the biblical narrative of the event. Not to mention the people who were with him. It is as silly not to jump to a supernatural cause instead on a whole slew of independent and very improbable series of medical ones and additional complicity of others involved. Occam would hang himself based on your response. In fact it is even worse than what I implied.

You're saying that what he supposedly experienced is extremely rare, and so its occurrence must be explained by invoking the supernatural? How about first demonstrating that the supernatural exists at all, before jumping to it as an explanation? Because the problem is that it doesn't end up being an explanation at all, rather it just adds more mystery to the situation. Rare things do actually happen. My stepfather has an extremely rare skin condition, that less than 1% of the world's population suffers from. Do I go with the medical explanation, or do I assume the supernatural is involved in some way? Never mind that you're ignoring the fact that epilepsy is not extremely rare.

Anyway, it's a story in a very old book that we can't even verify ever occurred at all.

 

[idav]

You lost me here. We are not discussing repressed memory from a trauma.

The point is these unconscious things affect our actions without us being conscious of it. You seem to not want to differentiate between something subconscious affecting our action vs some spirit or whatever affecting our actions. How are we to tell the difference? We only have evidence for one type and that is the unconscious thoughts that occur all the time. It doesn't matter what they mentioned or what they thought they are aware of. Our brains are aware of much more than we are conscious of.

 

[Thief]

At this 'point'...let's apply the current line of thought directly to ....God.

Now consider.....something from.....Nothing.....