“Well respected doctors”? Yeah, right. Try “quacks” instead. No, I’m not willing to spend significant amounts of time and money and travel to another continent just to visit some conference of religious frauds.
No, because there’s plenty of actual evidence that the Titanic sank. None at all for miracles.
Everything, pretty much. Religious claims are overwhelmingly false; much worse than random guessing, even. As I said, it’s a hallmark of religion that it’s wrong.
No, it’s the equivalent of “let’s take a look at the record”. Religion has a history of being wrong about everything it claims.
No; pain is a subjective experience. It can go away on its own, too.
No, from a logical standpoint that’s a complete nonstarter. If we can’t even start evaluating religions without accepting other stuff that has never been proven, then you are simply unable to make your case. This is not stuff that can be taken for granted in an argument.
Again, that’s not a convincing argument. People sometimes see things they can’t explain. Does that prove the events are supernatural and inexplicable, beyond the realm of science? No. It means the people who witnessed them didn’t know what was happening at the time.
I assure you science can explain things falling off shelves and short circuits in radios.
Leaving aside the fact that it does not debunk atheism, he asked you about evaluating claims from different religions.
Atheists don’t claim total faith in the knowledge of man.
I don’t think you understand gambling very well either. It is true that every medical procedure involves some risk. That doesn’t mean it’s “just a gamble.” Probabilities and outcomes can be prepared for and handled in a rational way.
Who can guarantee anything?
Which is bad, but better than walking around on a broken leg.
People go to doctors for medical treatment, not religious advice. Do you think atheist doctors are in the habit of telling people “You’re fucked - sorry” while Christian doctors tell patients “Just pray and your broken leg will heal?” That doesn’t sound like medicine to me.
Wow, I hope I never have you for a lawyer. lol Testimony is certainly accepted as evidence in a court of law.
Historians accept many of the events of the Titanic sinking as fact going solely by the testimony of survivors. Why should I believe what the survivors reported?
BTW, your magician analogy fails because it is a well known art form using sleight of hand or props to create visual illusions. Yet I’m to believe a well respected doctor would put his career on the line to make up lies about a divine healing. Yea ok.
Yeah. Almost any use of “atheist” in this thread (and every one of GEEPERS’ posts) could be changed to “person who doesn’t take the Bible literally.” I don’t see any distinction drawn between those two very different groups of people.
So, because modern medicine isn’t absolutely perfect in everything it does, god is better? First, prayer doesn’t work, and yes, I have a cite: Study shows that praying for heart patients is not more effective than not praying for them. The study also says that if you tell a heart patient that they are being prayed for, that thing actually get worse. Why don’t you go ask some of these people how well prayer worked for them. Oh wait, you can’t, they all died because they never received any actual treatment.
That’s what faith healers do all the time. And “well respected doctors” don’t claim to be using “divine healing” any more than they claim to be using orgone or witchcraft or the healing crystals of Atlantis.
Unfortunately, any measurable defintion of success in this world shows no difference in outcomes between “hard work, dedication, talent” and “hard work, dedication, talent and trust in God.” So there should be no reason to be surprised that many people feel no reason to add an extraneous step.
Well, GEEPERS is right about one thing. The testimony of people who claim to have been healed by faith is evidence. It isn’t good, persuasive, or noteworthy evidence, but it is evidence in some sense.
Firstly, because we have tons of empirical evidence that a ship called “Titanic” existed, crashed into an iceberg, and sank on its voyage to New York. For instance, we can and have looked at the actual wreckage of the ship.
Second, because so long as we can verify that a given person was in fact a Titanic survivor (say, by finding some record of that person’s having been rescued from the site of the sinking, and that person having been on the ship to begin with), we can test that person’s account of events against other things we know about the event and verify their story. If the survivor says, “We ran around trying to find a lifeboat, found one, got in it, and floated around shivering for several hours before the Carpathia showed up,” we are more likely to accept that story than if the survivor says, “As soon as the ship crashed, I sprouted Pterodactyl wings and flew to sunny Bermuda.” The latter person’s extraordinary claims will be subject to some pretty close scrutiny.
In other words, the word of survivors is taken only insofar as it matches what we already know about the event; we don’t just accept anyone’s account of anything, no matter what it is.
“My cancer went into remission because the same magical being which created the universe communicates with me psychically and cares deeply about my health, although not deeply enough to spare me the cancer in the first place,” is just as extraordinary a claim as my mutant pterodactyl hypothetical. Moreso, in fact.
This alone tells me you are deeply confused. Atheism is the lack of belief in God, not the supernatural in general. Atheists can be consistent and believe in ghosts and a supernatural realm.
Many don’t, but I do know of a few that do.
On a side note, people claim to experience alien abductions - do you believe they happen? People have claimed (up until the 1930’s from my research) that vampires attack them. Do vampires exist?
Aggghhh!! Geepers, I am so ashamed of being an atheist, I am going to commit suicide immediately upon hitting the “reply” button, but before I do I just want you to know that you are right about everything, not just the issues raised in this thread, and I am wrong about everything, and always have been, always will be.
Is this a satisfactory response from a lifelong (well, except for the final few minutes left to me) atheist? Or must I have gone further?
You’ve caught him. Seriously, though - taking it for granted that atheists aren’t going to agree with you about god any more than you are going to agree with them that there’s none - what do you expect atheists to agree with you about? Can you offer some sample statements?
Nope, not all atheists do ‘boldly proclaim’ this. Again, you are confused as to what the term ‘atheist’ actually means.
You do realize that these things were not initially discounted - they were investigated and the evidence does support them. As to these ‘mythical atheists’ that you are referring to and what their methods are, I cannot say. It seems reasonable that the burden of proof is on the person making the claim. After all, if I claimed to be big foot, the burden would not be on you to disprove my claim, or do you disagree?
In any event, so you do believe in alien abduction, vampires, fairies, time travelers, and psychotic mad men dressed up in Bunny suits? All of these things have people testifying that they exist.
Your stance seems to be that this alone is enough to give them credence, so the inference is that you believe these things, correct?
Normally, yes. On the other hand, if you consider the fact that sometimes stuff falls off shelves, radios have short circuits, and people claim to see ghosts sometimes, your claim about being Bigfoot becomes much more credible.
I said objects were flying across the room. Does objects fall off the shelf and then shoot midair in a horizontal motion? Gee I thought gravity made objects fall down vertically.
