Arguments for theism without logical fallacies?

[Justin108]

Can ANY argument be made in support of theism that does not rely on a logical fallacy?


A few popular logical fallacies used to support theism include ad populum, appeal to ignorance, appeal to authority, appeal to emotion, begging the question, false dilemma, false dichotomy, non-sequitur, special pleading, tautology, tu quoque, ad baculum, circular reasoning, confirmation bias, excluded middle, proving non-existence, etc.

[Justin108]

You mean besides the ad hoc "he lied" or "she's deluded"? The gospel of John, which purports to have been written by a disciple of Jesus, relates a story of Jesus walking on water across the Sea of Galilee (found also in the gospel of Peter's interpretor Mark). What plausible alternative explanation would you offer for this supernatural claim?

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Simply that it was a bs claim. I can see a number of benifits from making a new religion. Crowd control is usually my go-to reason.

And if that answer does not satisfy you then please explain to me why the creators of the lost gospels lied? Or why the greeks lied about Hercules and Achilles? Or why the Muslims lied about Muhammad? Or do you suppose all of these stories are true aswell?

In other words what you appear to be doing is taking a method designed to work out how our world usually operates, and turning it into a theory of how our world always operates.

I know I can never know how the world ALWAYS operates. But whenever a claim is made that the world operated in an unusual manner then I would require more than just the claim. If my friend tells me he landed heads for 100 flips in a row on coin-tossing. While this would not break any laws of physics, this would still make me wonder how true a claim it is simply because of how unusual it is.

You then consider any reported observations of different behaviour (revelations/miracles/'supernatural') to be so unlikely that even ad hoc accusations of lies or delusion seem more likely to you.

That is because it IS more likely. Statistics would agree with me on this.

Perhaps you think we should arbitrarily assign an even higher lies/delusion probability to such reports - but I rather suspect that there are more than twenty of them floating around out there In other words unless there is some sound reason to believe that the "laws of nature" are absolute, the mathematics seems to suggest considerably better than even odds that these so-called 'super-natural' things do occasionally happen.

No matter how statistically unlikely it is that all of these people were lying, it is STILL more likely that they were lying than for the laws of nature to have broken.

But if you would like to talk statistics; what are the odds of someone walking on water? Surely the odds of that is WAY less than the odds of the author lying about it.

Edit: Remember, whether we're talking about formal education, the media or general scientific knowledge, we all get a great deal of our information from other people's experience.

The reason that reasonable people accept such knowledge as valid - for example, that anthropogenic climate change is occurring or that evolutionary theory is sound, rather than being grand conspiracies against democracy/capitalism/God - is because we consider it improbable that so many scientists (and the media through which we receive their knowledge) are lying or deluded.

The difference is we can test these claims

I think it's perfectly reasonable (in terms of generalisations) to raise the lying/deluded bar a little higher for claims of divine intervention. But you'd have to raise it absurdly high to reasonably dismiss all the reported experiences of people from different times, places and cultures which suggest that reality is not as simple or closed as some folk believe. They might all be false, but a betting man would put his money on some of them being true.

The problem is you're grouping all these claims under one catagory and suppose this adds to it's credibility. The problem is you'd have to split them into contradicting groups: one group talks about evil spirits, the other group talks about Jesus, the other group talks about Shiva and so on. Their claims contradict one another. This contradiction adds to my belief that people are VERY often simply deluded or misunderstanding of what they are witnessing. Many attribute supernaturalism to dreams or coincidence. Many believe in ghosts simply because their house makes a funny noise at night.



All in all - I will simply not believe a claim to an extraordinary event simply on one's say so. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[otseng]

Simply that it was a bs claim.

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[Mithrae]

You mean besides the ad hoc "he lied" or "she's deluded"? The gospel of John, which purports to have been written by a disciple of Jesus, relates a story of Jesus walking on water across the Sea of Galilee (found also in the gospel of Peter's interpretor Mark). What plausible alternative explanation would you offer for this supernatural claim?

Simply that it was a bs claim. I can see a number of benifits from making a new religion. Crowd control is usually my go-to reason.

And if that answer does not satisfy you then please explain to me why the creators of the lost gospels lied? Or why the greeks lied about Hercules and Achilles? Or why the Muslims lied about Muhammad? Or do you suppose all of these stories are true aswell?

I don't necessarily suppose that the one in John is true to begin with, I just wanted to be sure that we're talking about the same thing here - dismissing alleged first-hand reports of 'miracles' or the like as a matter of general principle, rather than specific evidence.

In other words what you appear to be doing is taking a method designed to work out how our world usually operates, and turning it into a theory of how our world always operates.

I know I can never know how the world ALWAYS operates. But whenever a claim is made that the world operated in an unusual manner then I would require more than just the claim. If my friend tells me he landed heads for 100 flips in a row on coin-tossing. While this would not break any laws of physics, this would still make me wonder how true a claim it is simply because of how unusual it is.

You then consider any reported observations of different behaviour (revelations/miracles/'supernatural') to be so unlikely that even ad hoc accusations of lies or delusion seem more likely to you.

That is because it IS more likely. Statistics would agree with me on this.

In any single case it might be more likely, or it might be less likely. That depends on how (un)likely the claimed event is, and on how likely the lies/delusion explanation is. Your friend might be questionable when he says he tossed heads 100 times in a row; someone else might have a friend who's a habitual liar and very questionable; but someone else again might have a friend who for decades has been proven to be honest to a fault. That's why when we're generalising or talking about alleged witnesses about whom we know little, our guess about the lies/delusion probability can only be quite arbitrary. And while we can calculate the probability of tossing heads 100 times in a row, we cannot meaningfully calculate the probability of divine interaction.

Essentially you're just making a generalisation that when it comes to reports of divine interaction one somewhat arbitrary probability is lower than another, entirely arbitrary probability.

Perhaps you think we should arbitrarily assign an even higher lies/delusion probability to such reports - but I rather suspect that there are more than twenty of them floating around out there In other words unless there is some sound reason to believe that the "laws of nature" are absolute, the mathematics seems to suggest considerably better than even odds that these so-called 'super-natural' things do occasionally happen.

No matter how statistically unlikely it is that all of these people were lying, it is STILL more likely that they were lying than for the laws of nature to have broken.

But if you would like to talk statistics; what are the odds of someone walking on water? Surely the odds of that is WAY less than the odds of the author lying about it.

Is it? How are you calculating the odds of divine intervention? Are you factoring in circumstances such as prophecy allegedly pointing towards God's intervention through a messianic figure in roughly this time-frame (Daniel 9)?

But here again for some reason you're referring to the likelihood of "the laws of nature to have broken," rather than the likelihood of something out of the ordinary to have happened. You've distinguished this as being different from something extremely out of the ordinary like 100 heads in a row (for comparison, 40 heads in a row is about a 1 in a trillion chance if my maths is correct). In short you again seem to expressing metaphysical views about these 'laws of nature.' Is that intentional, or rhetorical?

Edit: Remember, whether we're talking about formal education, the media or general scientific knowledge, we all get a great deal of our information from other people's experience.

The reason that reasonable people accept such knowledge as valid - for example, that anthropogenic climate change is occurring or that evolutionary theory is sound, rather than being grand conspiracies against democracy/capitalism/God - is because we consider it improbable that so many scientists (and the media through which we receive their knowledge) are lying or deluded.

The difference is we can test these claims

No, most of them we can't. Unless we were there, we can't personally confirm anything which happened in the past. Unless we've got the appropriate equipment and know-how, we can't personally confirm most claims from science. We simply consider it improbable that so many people are lying or deluded.

I think it's perfectly reasonable (in terms of generalisations) to raise the lying/deluded bar a little higher for claims of divine intervention. But you'd have to raise it absurdly high to reasonably dismiss all the reported experiences of people from different times, places and cultures which suggest that reality is not as simple or closed as some folk believe. They might all be false, but a betting man would put his money on some of them being true.

The problem is you're grouping all these claims under one catagory and suppose this adds to it's credibility. The problem is you'd have to split them into contradicting groups: one group talks about evil spirits, the other group talks about Jesus, the other group talks about Shiva and so on. Their claims contradict one another. This contradiction adds to my belief that people are VERY often simply deluded or misunderstanding of what they are witnessing. Many attribute supernaturalism to dreams or coincidence. Many believe in ghosts simply because their house makes a funny noise at night.

That's why I'm talking only about reports of personal experience; actually seeing a ghost, for example. I'm not sure that the claims from different cultural and religious groups are actually as contradictory as you suggest, though certainly the interpretations of the alleged events may be quite different: So for instance whereas the Israelites would say they witnessed Yahweh tearing down the walls of Jericho, the Canaanites might say they saw Baal's wrath against Jericho's evil, even though they would both have witnessed the same unusual thing (if it occurred). The interpretations would obviously be even more divergent when the witnesses aren't talking about the same event.

However I agree that people are often deluded, misunderstanding or even lying, moreso when it comes to the 'supernatural' than regarding ordinary things. But where simple honest misunderstanding is an insufficient explanation - walking on water could not be passed off as simple misunderstanding, for example - I just can't agree with the assumption that alleged witnesses of such events are all lying or deluded.

It's possible, but very unlikely.

[Justin108]

In any single case it might be more likely, or it might be less likely. That depends on how (un)likely the claimed event is, and on how likely the lies/delusion explanation is. Your friend might be questionable when he says he tossed heads 100 times in a row; someone else might have a friend who's a habitual liar and very questionable; but someone else again might have a friend who for decades has been proven to be honest to a fault. That's why when we're generalising or talking about alleged witnesses about whom we know little, our guess about the lies/delusion probability can only be quite arbitrary. And while we can calculate the probability of tossing heads 100 times in a row, we cannot meaningfully calculate the probability of divine interaction.
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There is just no way you can possibly convince me that the odds of the supernatural occurring is more likely than people lying.

My experience tells me people lie. My experience also tells me that certain things simply do not happen. Maybe they do but it is just so rare that I have never seen it but experience would have me believe that the former is a more likely explanation than the latter. I could be wrong but I do not believe it is unreasonable for me to be a skeptic in this manner.

But here again for some reason you're referring to the likelihood of "the laws of nature to have broken," rather than the likelihood of something out of the ordinary to have happened.

Like I explained with the coin-tossing comparrison - it doesn't have to break a "natural law". It merely has to be very very unlikely for it to grab my skepticism.

You've distinguished this as being different from something extremely out of the ordinary like 100 heads in a row (for comparison, 40 heads in a row is about a 1 in a trillion chance if my maths is correct).

Actually I made no distinction. I compared the two to illustrate that even if the laws of nature as we know it are false, nature still operates in such a fashion to have certain things happen in such a way as to make it 99.9% predictable. If I walked onto the open sea I would be VERY sure that I would sink. IF it is possible to walk on water, it would be insanely unlikely. So the coin tossing is meant to substitute impossibility with high improbability.

In other words, even if it were possible yet highly improbable to walk on water, if someone claimed they did so I still would not believe because it would be so insanely unlikely. Unless of course I witnessed it myself.

No, most of them we can't. Unless we were there, we can't personally confirm anything which happened in the past. Unless we've got the appropriate equipment and know-how, we can't personally confirm most claims from science. We simply consider it improbable that so many people are lying or deluded.

As improbable as it may be, it is still more improbable for nature to operate in a completely different manner as we understand it. I have seen people lie. I have never once seen water turning into wine.

I am however confused about these massive amounts of divine occurrences you keep talking about? Are you talking about the claims in the Bible or claims for divine interaction in modern life?

That's why I'm talking only about reports of personal experience; actually seeing a ghost, for example. I'm not sure that the claims from different cultural and religious groups are actually as contradictory as you suggest, though certainly the interpretations of the alleged events may be quite different: So for instance whereas the Israelites would say they witnessed Yahweh tearing down the walls of Jericho, the Canaanites might say they saw Baal's wrath against Jericho's evil, even though they would both have witnessed the same unusual thing (if it occurred). The interpretations would obviously be even more divergent when the witnesses aren't talking about the same event.

And maybe men saw a meteor shower and believed it to be god sending down fire from the heavens. Maybe people experienced a local flood and believed it to be a global flood. Maybe people witnessed algal bloom and believed it to be the sea turning to blood. What if Moses' vision of Adam and Eve (which I assume is how he came up with genesis because he OBVIOUSLY could not have been there in person) - maybe it was just a dream?

People misunderstand what they see VERY often and cling to an explanation that goes against the way we understand the universe. This is one of the 3 far more likely explanations for these claims:
1. Misinterpretation of events where natural explanations exist.
2. False claims
3. Delusions

However I agree that people are often deluded, misunderstanding or even lying, moreso when it comes to the 'supernatural' than regarding ordinary things. But where simple honest misunderstanding is an insufficient explanation - walking on water could not be passed off as simple misunderstanding, for example - I just can't agree with the assumption that alleged witnesses of such events are all lying or deluded.

How many people witnessed Jesus walking on water?