Statistically, it's extraordinary. But if the Christian God exists (the point at issue), it's not extraordinary to claim that God has raised Jesus from the dead. Unusual? Yes. Extraordinary? No.
Would you agree with me that the resurrection is a miracle (if it happened)? If so, you concede it is an extraordinary event. If it was an ordinary event, it would not be a miracle.
If you do not agree the resurrection is a miracle (if it happened), then you have no rationale for believing in God.
Really? What about my memory about what I had for breakfast this morning? I believe I had toast with jam, but there is absolutely no evidence supporting my memory. No one saw me. There are no traces left of my dinner in my stomach, intenstinal tract, or stool. Nor is there any on the kitchen counter. There is no bread left in the house (my wife eats an awful lot of bread), and no one has kept track of bread or jam usage. All the dishes have been cleaned. In short, there is no possible way, even in principle, to provide evidence that I ate breakfast this morning (let alone what I had). So if we go by your rule, it is irrational for me to believe that I had toast and jam for breakfast.
And what about my a priori beliefs, such as my belief that necessarily, if All men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal? There's no evidence for this proposition. Indeed, there can't be any. What evidence can point to a necessary truth? At most, evidence leads us to contingent truth claims, not necessary ones. Yet I think I'm rational in holding my belief that this proposition is necessarily true. (There are no possible worlds in which it is untrue.)
Concerning your breakfast example, you list the very ways in which we can determine your breakfast, despite your memory loss, yet discount them all for some reason, merely say they vanish without a trace without any reason for it. Why wouldn't there be any trace of it in your body or stool?
Even still, you can look at your grocery bill, confirm the purchase of bread and jam, and thereby the quantity and ask if any of your family had bread and jam and approximately how much. If there is a difference between what you purchased and what your family ate, it is reasonable to conclude you had the remainder.
Besides, it's a moot point. We normally take things at face value without conclusive evidence. With evidence, yes, but not conclusively. But there are unimportant things that are not worth the effort of verifying.
If I told you my name is Tom, it is an unimportant issue. You are readily willing to believe my name is Tom. You don't ask to see my birth certificate, even though my name could very well be Frank.
But the issue of God is an important one because it is an extraordinary claim. Thus it requires extraordinary evidence in order to conclusively prove it. It's not a trivial matter like what my name is because my name is an ordinary claim.
It's evidence for me. Not for you. Just as my memory belief what I had for breakfast this morning is "evidence" for me but not for you.
Of course it isn't evidence for me. I wouldn't expect to go to court to defend myself and use "faith". Would you? If not, why?
It's only useful to a point. As I said, evidence and argument can clear up misapprehensions or confusions, but evidence has limited use in religious discussions. It's not because the evidence is competely absent but because, by the nature of the case, even if the evidence is quite strong, it's not so strong as to compel consent. It's possible to rationally withhold belief even in the face of very strong arguments. I won't go into probability calculus, but suffice to say that on the evidence, very little of what we think we know is very likely at all.
So basically you're saying you have evidence, but not conclusive evidence?
Well, beyond "faith"...what other evidence do you have? What evidence could you possibly have of a supernatural world which is by definition unknown?
Only if I'm involved in a dispute with an atheist about the truth (or falsity) of theism vs. atheism. In that case, then yes, I've got to shoulder some burden of proof. But I'm not involved in that project.
You've got to shoulder some burden of proof as soon as you start claiming your God exists or that another belief system is wrong if you presuppose your own is correct.
So probably we should distinguish between atheists and religious skeptics, then (at least for purposes of this discussion). That way, we can call the atheist the person who makes the positive claim that there is no god of any sort, whereas the skeptic is the one who withholds belief in a god (even though that sounds more like agnosticism to me).
Agnostics maintain they cannot possibly know. That's not necessarily what an atheist thinks is the case.
What you are describing is a small fraction of hardcore atheists. Even Richard Dawkins himself doesn't say "God does not exist", but "God probably does not exist". And you don't get to be much more of an influential atheist than Richard Dawkins.
Atheists maintain the probability is so small and the evidence in favour of God is so weak that we believe God probably does not exist.
That's the difference. There is no positive claim (except on those who claim there definitely is no God). Those people are subject to a burden of proof as well as you -rightly- state, they are making a positive claim.
Ah. Well I think there must be something else going on with the label "extraordinary." The word also involves "unexpected given what we have reason on balance to believe about the world." Thus if you think that the natural laws are inviolate, any claim of miracle would count as extraordinary. But if you think there is a God, even though miracles might be rare (statistically extraordinary), they are not extraordinary in that other sense (I can't think of a handly label for this sort of extraordinariness). The problem is that even non-miraculous actions are bewilderingly unlikely. At the time it occurred, it was extremely unlikely that I should have traveled overseas to teach English. It was extraordinary from a statistical point of view. Yet there seems to be nothing problematic in the claim that it happened. So what's the difference with the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead? Well, the difference isn't the question of statistical extraordinariness so much as the fact that, given the way in which the world is comprised (i.e., it's godless), the claim of miracle is simply extraordinary. It is utterly out of accord with the way the world is (by your lights). But (and this is the point at issue) the Christian holds that there is a god and that this god can (and does) violate what you call the laws of nature (what the Christian calls God's usual way of acting in the world). That God would do this is not extraordinary, not unexpected.
So, perhaps the problem is with the word "extraordinary." If it's just a matter of statistics, it's not really an objection to the resurrection. Every historical action is just as unique as the resurrection. The real problem is that the resurrection violates what the skeptic takes to be inviolate laws. So any claim of miracle is irrational right from the get-go. But of course, those laws are inviolate if and only if atheism is true. So we're back to question begging.
Any supposed miracle - if it really did happen - is an extraordinary event. Just because the event is from God does not make it ordinary because it is well within God's supposed powers. It makes it extraordinary because God does not normally come to Earth and create miracles in an objective way that anyone - especially non-Christians including theists and atheists - can attribute to the Christian God.
When a baby is born, you probably see that as a miracle from God (I'm assuming here, hopefully correctly). But I don't recognize it as a miracle from God because I know the biology behind it and I know exactly how that baby got there. A Pagan also wouldn't attribute that birth to God.
Judging from your other posts you seem to favour an outlook that stipulates "What's true for me may not be true for you". Correct me if I'm wrong. The problem with this is it is not
objective. Genetics is true for me and true for you. Gravity is true for me and true for you. These are truths. Once you start claiming
subjective truths, then the onus is on you to either provide evidence to make that truth objective or to - at the very least - show how from your perception what you believe is true. And that alone still doesn't make your belief true. But it at least demonstrates your rationale which I think is the closest we're going to get to any real answer lol.
Who is "we" and "us"? Certainly not me. (And to forestall the obvious retort about "seeing" God, let me just qualify that as "perceive".)
Fair enough. But how exactly do you "perceive" God? How do you know that influence comes from your God and not someone else's God? How do you know what you are "perceiving" isn't the powerful human mind at work creating a very real experience?
I've had very real dreams that feel like I'm in them. For example if in my dream I jump off a building, it will very realistically feel like I'm plunging off a building and I'm in freefall and I will wake up frantically when I hit the ground. That experience seems very real. It's a powerful delusion. How do you discount this possibility?
