OpenChristian

If you have read about Pascal’s wager, I found it interesting to read about Pascals Mugging

I agree with you about encountering vs inventing. Every named supernatural deity is invented by someone, in that some living person first tells the story of their particular god or writes it down. To the believer though these inventions often are considered to be encounters, the person telling the story of their revelation from their god isn't inventing that they are explaining their encounter with the supernatural.

I suppose that’s the bit that I look at and go, ok one of two things is true here. Either that person writing their particular holy book has had some kind of encounter with the supernatural or they’ve made this up, either intentionally or unintentionally. I think it’s important to be clear that making it up, inventing it, isn’t necessarily some sort of malicious act. My brain makes up wild implausible nonsensical stories every time I fall asleep, we call those dreams. A man in a cave suffering from dehydration and hunger could be telling no lies at all when they tell me about the mystical creature that appeared before them and told them the secrets of the universe, to them it’s a revelation, to me it’s their brain furiously firing off electrical impulses due to not having enough electrolytes.

And at the heart of every religion recorded by man is that question, that claim, this isn't something the author made up, it is real.

And that is the claim that makes me go, ok, prove you didn’t make this up. Prove that this is real and not a dream or an imagination or a flight of fancy.

I’ve yet to find anyone offer compelling proof. Most proof comes in the form of “look at this thing that is good, I have attribute it to my magic deity” while I often can agree that the good thing is good I see no reason to attribute it to the magic deity.

And there are many opportunities magic deities have. I’ve heard many believers attribute healing to their deity of choice, but it’s always some disease that can be healed. What does every single deity have against amputees? Science can’t regrow limbs and they won’t regrow themselves. If an amputee regrew a limb, a thing that doesn’t happen naturally, then I would have some shred of evidence that there’s a supernatural healer at work. And yet over thousands of years and millions upon millions of amputees, no deity has decided one worthy enough to heal.

I should probably say that the weight I give a claim has a direct relationship with the evidence for the claim.

At some unspecified threshold of weight it become likely enough to be something I believe to be true.

Taking your counter argument to its extremes you can’t really prove anything. At any point I could go, what proof do you have and I could wave it away as being a trick, you are nothing more than a brain in a jar and I’ve sent you false sensory inputs to make you believe that proof.

There is a claim, my mother loves me. She cared for me growing up, she sacrificed for me, she proclaims her love for me. I have some evidence for the claim, enough that I believe the claim to be true.

So I believe that, I don’t truly know it, one could argue you never really know how another feels about you. Actions and words can be false in their nature, many a scammed person believed they were loved by another when that wasn’t the case.

Now given a claim of the supernatural, one which is predicated on the idea that “this thing is outside of that which can be measured and tested and you have to believe the claim in the absence of evidence” I find that line of reasoning incomprehensible.

There are many things I could believe, even really nice things, great things, but it doesn’t make them so. I could have believed that my sick old dog would live forever and get better, it would have been nice, but that doesn’t make it true.

So how should we decide what ideas to give weight to. I find the most sensible way is to give weight to claims based on evidence. My dog will not die but be immortal, that would be great, I love my dog dearly. The claim though runs counter to the experience of all dogs though, so it’s a pretty wild claim. I would need some sort of compelling evidence to believe otherwise. And ultimately, as nice as it would have been for my faithful dog to live forever, to get better and continue enjoying his life alongside me, it was not the case. He and I shared a finite time together and the claims of his immortality were given their rightful weight.