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PaperclipPerfector
13hr ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
One of the major atheist YouTubers, Joe Schmid, has announced his conversion to Catholicism.
What prepared the ground for him was apparently the cumulative weight of theistic arguments, and what pushed him to Catholicism were miracles.
Scott Alexander has investigated one of them more exhaustively than anyone could expect of him. I looked only into one other so far, the Zeitoun Apparitions, which I found genuinely baffling in a way not explainable by some tricks of the sun. That said, I'm surprised how easily a man I thought of as lucid and careful in his thinking jumped from miracles to theism, and from there to Catholicism.
One problem is miracles that don't support Catholicism. Schmid would need to wage a war against the wrong kind of miracles with the zeal matching any militant atheist. A move absent from atheist arsenal, dismissing some miracle claims as work of demons, is tempting for a Catholic but must be withheld because any competing religions can throw it back at them.
We could also expect Catholics to lead by points when it comes to miracle claims you can't just laugh off, given both their numbers and unique institutionalization of miracle investigation in Catholicism.
An even greater barrier is what you could call Divine Identification Problem.
"Beloved, believe not every spirit..." - Even if you are directly contacted by something higher, there’s no trustworthy way, from mere human perspective, to check its credentials, whether it is God or even genuinely stands for God. God could give you overwhelming evidence of supernatural intelligence and might without giving you overwhelming evidence of divinity.
(That raises the question whether the swamp of skepticism that I personally am growing weary of is escapable even in principle, but let's leave it for another time)
Of course, miracles should shift our priors, though the final credence of specific religion would depend on how inherently plausible we find it. In other words, how strong are our objections to its teachings.
Joe acknowledged some serious challenges, like the problem of evil and the doctrine of eternal damnation. Part of his response here was roughly “yes, it is a challenge, BUT look at evidence I have on the other side of the scale” which I found deeply unsatisfying given how easy this reasoning is to flip. Most disappointingly, he even brings up noetic effects of sin – which in my eyes is a meme-tier argument, uncompelling to the point of unintentional hilarity. Your reason, senses, heart suggest something against the true religion? So much the worse for the former!
Notably, Schmid is a reconvert, after spending a decade in atheism. There appears to be something psychologically interesting happening here. I've read many testimonies, and it seems like many (most, all?) former believers who were brought up in faith carry a permanent trace of it in their minds even after getting thoroughly blasted with atheistic rhetoric. As if a part of them still believes and fears disapproval of the God they turned their backs on. Some report still fearing hell at times. This kind of experience is totally alien to me, so I'll leave it at that.
Since his announcement last week, Schmid has dropped 7 hour "cumulative case for God" and 10 hour "miracles PROVE Catholicism videos, threatening a third one of comparable length today, all of which I will make sure to listen to as background to my Minecraft sessions at a later date, though it might take a while (my tastes are very…singular)
Has anyone here ever experienced a miracle? I've experienced some profoundly weird shit, but no miracles.
It's one of those "coincidence that felt too perfect" that most people probably don't consider miracles, but after having atrociously bad romantic success, to the point I thought I must be asexual because I felt 0 interest in any of the men I tried to date, I began what Catholics call a "novena" (nine days of prayer) for my future spouse, if I had one.
As I wrapped up the prayer at the end of day 9, my cell phone rang. It was my coworker who worked the night shift, he needed help with something. I assisted him and then we got to talking on our company chat for hours and hours and... 10 years later we are married, have four kids and still say goofy things like how lucky we are to have found each other. We have arguments that the other is "the best." Sure, I was primed by my prayer to look for a spouse, but also consider that my husband had no such priming and we have had a very high compatibility - more than seems possible from random chance.
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If someone has been a philosopher for decades at the PHD level, they are probably not going to be convinced by the one specific formulation of the argument from causality or whatever. They have seen the argument go back and forth so many times, what might seem foolproof will get some kind of rebuttal that seems half plausible within a year. I think that's also why Schmid described himself as an agnostic, instead of an atheist, after he started exploring philosophy.
Given that, if anything was going to break the stalemate, it wasn't going to be a philosophical argument.
There is the problem of "miracles might be evidence against Naturalism, but not evidence for a specific religion." (I'm not quoting you or pseudo quoting you, just using quotation marks as a way to organize the sentence.)
There are all sorts of miracle claims ranging from "coincidence that felt too perfect" to "I didn't have a leg and now I do" to "thousands of people miles apart saw the same unexplained phenomena." I think there are some miracles we would expect God to do even outside of a specific religious tradition. Things like healing, or coincidences that lead someone into closer relationship with Him, even if it doesn't take them all the way to the One True Religion.
Vindicatory miracles, miracles that vindicate specific truth claims, is a whole subject of inquiry. What would you expect to see different in these in comparison to general miracles of healing and safety? I think at the least, they would need to be public and come with a message of some kind. A miracle that is only intelligible to one person cannot be vindicatory. A miracle that does not come with an obvious message would likewise not vindicate any particular truth claim. This article goes into the distinction between an "ordinary miracle" and a "vindicatory miracle."
I think agnostics and atheists assume that there must be numerous "vindicatory miracles" that can draw people to any number of religions. But if that is the case, I would like for them to put in the work to show this. Most of the time there is an appeal to a general mysticism or healing ministry, which I wouldn't consider vindicatory in the same way Lanciano or Fatima were.
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Did you mean to post this in the culture war thread? Seems not quite "fun"
I was hesitant where to post it, but quickly dismissed the culture war thread as this has nothing to do with politics.
This one seemed as the closest match, and hey, I personally do find philosophy and the connected blogosphere as one of the major sources of my entertainment
Culture war is often explicitly politics-related, but it's also something a little different from politics, and I think a lot of people would consider atheism/religion (or perhaps atheism/Christianity specifically) as one of the OG culture wars in the internet forum sphere.
I actually wonder now who/when/where the first internet flame war about the existence of God/god took place, and if it's still accessible somewhere, or if it's been lost forever to the sands of time. Most likely the latter. Likely no way of provably knowing that any given one was the first one, anyway, unless it could be traced to the very first instance of some message board technology such that one can be sure no earlier example could have technologically existed.
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