“What would it take to convince you of God’s existence?”
I suspect that one of two things was going on. They may have not really cared to talk about the supernatural but were intending to use that extreme case as a springboard to talk about evidence and belief in general. Alternatively, if they thought the topic as phrased was apt, likely they were not sufficiently deft at dealing with and unpacking unhelpful terms like “God”.
no one else at the meetup seemed interested in an evidential approach
You should have abandoned sharing your list (hard to do after putting effort into it) and discussed why an evidential approach was better than their approaches at a philosophical level. If you don’t have a separate long mental list of why it is, then even if it is the right approach, you shouldn’t feel too superior over people using the wrong approach who can’t justify their philosophical approach because you can’t justify yours either, you just know how to use it.
You should have abandoned sharing your list (hard to do after putting effort into it) and discussed why an evidential approach was better than their approaches at a philosophical level.
Eh, I’m fine with analytic philosophy. It seems like an essential toolset. The only sense in which an evidential approach seemed superior to me was that it felt less like cheating. I’ve encountered dozens of definitions of “God”, and it’s easy to pick a definition such that the entity necessarily exists or necessarily doesn’t exist. Doing that and stopping there is cheating, I think, because it’s not the sensus fidelium regarding what and who God is. Plainly Catholicism does use (by habit, not dogma) a small set of definitions of necessarily existing entities, but it’s far from obvious that they are (or can be) the same entity, and quite dubious that those entities have much in common with Yahweh.
I suspect that one of two things was going on. They may have not really cared to talk about the supernatural but were intending to use that extreme case as a springboard to talk about evidence and belief in general. Alternatively, if they thought the topic as phrased was apt, likely they were not sufficiently deft at dealing with and unpacking unhelpful terms like “God”.
You should have abandoned sharing your list (hard to do after putting effort into it) and discussed why an evidential approach was better than their approaches at a philosophical level. If you don’t have a separate long mental list of why it is, then even if it is the right approach, you shouldn’t feel too superior over people using the wrong approach who can’t justify their philosophical approach because you can’t justify yours either, you just know how to use it.
Eh, I’m fine with analytic philosophy. It seems like an essential toolset. The only sense in which an evidential approach seemed superior to me was that it felt less like cheating. I’ve encountered dozens of definitions of “God”, and it’s easy to pick a definition such that the entity necessarily exists or necessarily doesn’t exist. Doing that and stopping there is cheating, I think, because it’s not the sensus fidelium regarding what and who God is. Plainly Catholicism does use (by habit, not dogma) a small set of definitions of necessarily existing entities, but it’s far from obvious that they are (or can be) the same entity, and quite dubious that those entities have much in common with Yahweh.