If enough people have experiences with fairies I’m not going to say well, they’re all mistaken, possibly mentally ill, Their parents must have liked fairies so now they think they see them. Or they just don’t know what they’re talking about. Just as you can’t discount millions of people on a continuous basis who have experiences with God, every day.
You can’t just chalk it up to this or that. The theory that it is just so ingrained into them from their parents, they feel something is there. Again how can you be sure without interviewing every christian on the planet? Lets continue, some of them may be mentally ill, or heck people do hallucinate. But you can’t dismiss millions of people like that. Not all of these people are somehow mistaken.
Posted: May 12th 2010
Mike the Infidel www
“You can’t just chalk it up to this or that. The theory that it is just so ingrained into them from their parents, they feel something is there. Again how can you be sure without interviewing every christian on the planet?”
Ask someone who was born and raised atheist if they’ve ever “experienced God.” They’ll never attribute anything weird to a deity. It only happens if you’re taught to. So yes, it does appear to be something their upbringing convinces them is true.
Posted: June 8th 2010
Reed Braden www
If I were to accept the argument that, “Well, 2.1 billion people believe in Jesus, so Jesus must have been real,” will you also be so kind as to concede the argument that since the other 4.7 billion people on the planet don’t believe in Jesus or don’t believe he was divine, he never existed or if he did, was just a man?
The mistake you make in setting up your argument is that your religion isn’t the only one. There are 1.5 billion Muslims and 1 billion Hindus, and those populations are growing faster while the Christian numbers are slowing down from their heyday in the 50s and 60s. To use the fact that Christianity is currently the world’s #1 religion by adherents as an argument for its credibility is to set yourself up for extreme disappointment in a few years when Islam becomes the new dominant world religion. Are you going to stay true to the Argument from Popularity when that happens and buy yourself a turban/burqa?
Posted: May 22nd 2010
George Locke
When people say they’ve “experienced God”, generally what they mean is that they’ve had some insight, solace, or even just a funny feeling, and they “know” that God is responsible. But how do they know, really? On what basis do they differentiate chance and autosuggestion from the divine hand?
It doesn’t matter how many people have these experiences because these experiences are not evidence.
Posted: May 21st 2010
logicel
Accepting things as true simply because they are popular is never a good reason, but an easy one. It is called peer pressure. Human psychology shows that we have the capacity within our wonky brains to embrace non-evidential beliefs. Doing this is as easy as pie. We can all do it. The prevalent belief in god shows just how collectively gullible we can be.
What is astounding is that despite this pesky inclination of ours, we were able to devise modern science, whose method is our best hope to not be roped in by our tricky brains and their emergent properties like the mind and emotions. Extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims, please.
In addition, your approach is simply a logical fallacy, called argumentum ad populum.
There was once and still are in some parts of the world, wide-spread belief in fairies. Since argumentum ad populum is your support for non-evidential beliefs, than include blood-letting (many at one time thought that was the way to go to help sick people) as being true, not to mention the zillion and conflicting religious beliefs existing at present other than your own. Which one of those are true? Oh, the one in which you happen to be born in! What a coincidence.
Posted: May 15th 2010
bitbutter www
If millions of people claimed to have seen fairies, but I had not, and no evidence of fairies had ever been produced under controlled conditions, I would conclude that fairy believers were probably mistaken. I would reassess this view if I became aware of more persuasive evidence for fairies.
Millions of people claim to have experienced God. Apologists insist that it’s very unlikely that all these people were mistaken.
But what do these experiences actually consist of? Are there specific qualities to these experiences that establish beyond reasonable doubt that the creator of the universe was responsible for them? I don’t think so.
I think that a large class of 'religious experiences’ are based on a simple feeling of euphoria. Christians attribute this euphoria to the biblical character God, but it could just as validly be associated with Allah, the Flying Spaghetti Monster or something more mundane like a coincidental fluctuation in electro-chemical brain activity.
I don’t doubt that the experiences that get called 'religious experiences’ really exist, but in my view they’re incorrectly attributed to invisible beings.
Posted: May 15th 2010
SmartLX www
The probability that millions of people may have similarly mistaken experiences which they attribute to God, and are brought about by religious services and messages designed to generate such feelings, is not as low as you make out. Millions of such experiences also have less significance among the billions of Christians so far and the sheer amount of total time spent praying and worshipping.
And then this probability has to compare favourably with the idea of an all-powerful God choosing only this roundabout, deniable way to reveal His existence.
Posted: May 15th 2010