It is a very interesting quest you have taken on. As an atheist, I am always interested in hearing good arguments in favour of God.
Why don’t you start by answering: Why are you a theist? You have looked at all the evidence available to you, and arrived at a posterior where P(God exists) >> P(God does not exist). Explain your reasoning to us. If your reasoning is good enough for you, why would it not be good enough for me?
“Explain your reasoning to us. If your reasoning is good enough for you, why would it not be good enough for me?”
Christians will sometimes ask me this, trying to get me to explain why I no longer think that Christianity is true.
And it has a very good answer. There really are good reasons why my reasoning is good enough for me, and would not be good enough for them. Basically, they want me to give a few short arguments which they will, quite rightly, dismiss as unconvincing. I fully understand why they dismiss them as unconvincing. It is because “a few short arguments,” no matter what they are, will in fact be unconvincing. I understand that, because I would have dismissed them as unconvincing myself in the past, and I fully understand why I would have done that, and it would have been quite reasonable.
But my reasoning is good enough for me, because I have thought about these things for years, considering not just a few short arguments, but many, many many arguments, and replies to replies, and replies to replies to replies, and so on. So I understand how things stand overall, and this “how things stand overall” cannot be communicated in a few short arguments.
In that way, to the degree that “If your reasoning is good enough...” is rhetorical, and implies that if you are not convinced, they should not be convinced either, it is a fallacy.
This is very poorly formulated. But there are 2 foundations in my logic. First is, that I am leaning towards presuppositionalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presuppositional_apologetics). The only way to build a ‘map’, first of all, is to take a list of presuppositions for granted. I am also interested in that (see my post on http://lesswrong.com/lw/nsm/open_thread_jul_25_jul_31_2016/). The idea is that a school could have a non-contradicting collection of self-referential statement that covers the epistemology and axiology and another school have another distinct collection. And due to the expensiveness of computation and lack of information, both maps are equally good and predicting what should and should not happen (“and also what is actually happening and why”, what scientist, not rationalist, cares about).
The other part is, the basis of this post, personal experience. All of my personal life experience, up until this point, “arrived at a posterior where P(God exists) >> P(God does not exist)” exactly in the same way Eve arrived at hers in this OP.
Now I do realize that is very crude and not at all solid, not even presentable. But since you asked, there you go.
It is a very interesting quest you have taken on. As an atheist, I am always interested in hearing good arguments in favour of God.
Why don’t you start by answering: Why are you a theist? You have looked at all the evidence available to you, and arrived at a posterior where P(God exists) >> P(God does not exist). Explain your reasoning to us. If your reasoning is good enough for you, why would it not be good enough for me?
“Explain your reasoning to us. If your reasoning is good enough for you, why would it not be good enough for me?”
Christians will sometimes ask me this, trying to get me to explain why I no longer think that Christianity is true.
And it has a very good answer. There really are good reasons why my reasoning is good enough for me, and would not be good enough for them. Basically, they want me to give a few short arguments which they will, quite rightly, dismiss as unconvincing. I fully understand why they dismiss them as unconvincing. It is because “a few short arguments,” no matter what they are, will in fact be unconvincing. I understand that, because I would have dismissed them as unconvincing myself in the past, and I fully understand why I would have done that, and it would have been quite reasonable.
But my reasoning is good enough for me, because I have thought about these things for years, considering not just a few short arguments, but many, many many arguments, and replies to replies, and replies to replies to replies, and so on. So I understand how things stand overall, and this “how things stand overall” cannot be communicated in a few short arguments.
In that way, to the degree that “If your reasoning is good enough...” is rhetorical, and implies that if you are not convinced, they should not be convinced either, it is a fallacy.
This is very poorly formulated. But there are 2 foundations in my logic. First is, that I am leaning towards presuppositionalism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presuppositional_apologetics). The only way to build a ‘map’, first of all, is to take a list of presuppositions for granted. I am also interested in that (see my post on http://lesswrong.com/lw/nsm/open_thread_jul_25_jul_31_2016/). The idea is that a school could have a non-contradicting collection of self-referential statement that covers the epistemology and axiology and another school have another distinct collection. And due to the expensiveness of computation and lack of information, both maps are equally good and predicting what should and should not happen (“and also what is actually happening and why”, what scientist, not rationalist, cares about).
The other part is, the basis of this post, personal experience. All of my personal life experience, up until this point, “arrived at a posterior where P(God exists) >> P(God does not exist)” exactly in the same way Eve arrived at hers in this OP.
Now I do realize that is very crude and not at all solid, not even presentable. But since you asked, there you go.