Alien,
Part of my approach is to point out that history is not naturalistic, despite the protestations of some here. Just repeating that it is is a bit weak and the sort of thing that Vlad points out to be the case.
You can try to “point that out” if you wish, but you’d be wrong to do so. Of course it’s naturalistic – what else could it be as it deals only with facts and evidence and records and interpretations and any manner of things that are entirely natural? If though you seriously think that history concerns itself with the non-natural/supernatural, then by all means have a go at explaining how it does so.
This incidentally is where you go wrong when you attempt analogies with athletes and the like. For that to work, you’d need to say something more like, “Fred ran the 100m in 12 seconds, then there’s a folk myth that he turned into a shape-shifting lizard, then there are records that he won the 1,500m” or some such. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that, and not
less evidence than we’d need to have any degree of certainty about a supposed event that happened some 150 years before, at a time when any manner of beliefs in spooks were prevalent, that no-one bothered recording at the time, that could readily be explained by natural means etc etc. And when you set the evidence bar as low as that then of course you have no defence against any other tale of the supernatural either.
Really? I'll leave you and him to argue that out.
By all means, but you’ll find his entire argument to be, “I experienced it” nonetheless.
Why? Though I posted (some months ago) the Bayesian probability calculation, there has been very little uptake. It might have been when you were away.
Sounds like more WLC wrongheadedness to me, but by all means provide a link if you’d like to.
How would I deny the legitimacy of the Mo flying to heaven? Firstly, I would question whether the Quran actually says he did that. I may be wrong, but I thought some Muslims (not sure how many) thought that was not what the text means. As for anyone claiming the universe is 6000 years old, I would point out that, assuming they are YECers, that this is not what the bible teaches anyway.
Back to Mo for a mo. If the Quran does actually claim he went for that ride, I would not attack that particular claim directly. If there is a God and he is the Muslim God then he could take Mo for such a trip, but there is a God and he is not the Muslim God so there is no good reason for thinking he would take Mo for such a ride (that I know of).
You’re missing it. If you think that something was factually true because a book you think to be holy says so, what defence do you have against the claims of any other books that other think to be holy with just as much conviction and faith as you do? That’s what happens when you set the bar so low for your beliefs – pretty much any other claim of equal provenance makes it over too.
Are they all true then and, if not, why not?
There are times when we experience things which we cannot prove to others.
But how then would you establish that you actually “know” them, rather than are mistaken for any number of reasons? You might for example be convinced that a god has been speaking to you, when all along your speaker cables were just picking up junk radio signals and playing them. It's the
attribution of cause that's the problem, not the fact of the "experience".
This is, yet again, about the difference between being able to know something and being able to demonstrate something.
No it isn’t, at least not until you’ve been able to provide a method to show beyond reasonable doubt that you do in fact “know” it in the first place, rather than just
believe it – with all the risks of misattribution etc that involves.
It is stuff which has been discussed a number of times on this board. Let me bring up the example of Fred walking through the forest on his own and seeing the light through the trees in a particular way. He sees it. He knows he saw it, but he cannot demonstrate that he saw it to anyone (unless he recorded it on his camera, say).
But that’s not a problem – there’s any number of reasons that might explain the light. The moment though he insists that this light was in fact, say, the ghost of Pocahontas then the problems begin.
Now, as I have said from time to time, I am loathe to try to use personal experience as evidence for other people to be convinced by since it has the problem you have raised. However, if it is consistent with other stuff known to be true, then it could be used as evidence, perhaps. For example, if someone had looked through some more objective evidence and come to the conclusion that this was good evidence (and there being insufficient good evidence against), then it may be OK to accept that personal stuff someone is speaking of (unless there is good reason not to). Maybe. Possibly.
In what way would, say, a claim about a resurrection be consistent with
anything we know about the way the universe actually works? If on the other hand the claim was just, say, “Jesus liked his fish and chips of a Friday” then there’s be no particular reason to doubt it and it would be accepted – at least provisionally.
It might be that God deals directly with a person and, say, give them an awareness that they are indeed a forgiven, child of God (them having repented and stuff). How would they convince other people of it? I don't know. Perhaps they can't. How would they know that their conviction was a correct conviction? If it is, then it should match up with facts obtainable elsewhere, I would suggest.
More to the point, how would they convince themselves without first troubling to eliminate every other possible explanation?
I think you do a disservice. I don't read all his posts, but the ones I have read have repeatedly pointed out that some of the arguments put forward by those of an atheist ilk make a number of critical assumptions and doesn't get much response (at least not in the posts I have read).
No, so far as know he’s never once – not ever ever ever – answered a question, despite demanding countless answers from others. His only effort in the direction you suggest rests on his misunderstanding of philosophical materialism, which he’s had corrected many times but he returns to it nonetheless. Essentially his schtick is “I experienced it so it’s true for you too” but he’s never shown any awareness of the problems that gives him.
