I watched the first part of a video titled “a Christian trying to defend her belief in God”. I didn’t watch the whole thing because I disliked the approach of the interviewer. Still, it was interesting to see how the girl based her belief in her specific god on two things (1) she takes the gospels as true eye witness accounts (even though all serious scholars of the New Testament that I know of reject that assumption) (2) when she feels this “proof” is somehow under threat, she falls back on faith. You have to have faith that it is actual proof.
When I visited the video page (created on Mar 23, 2016), it had almost 8K views, 870👍, 273👎 and 10,080 comments. The most recent comments where in support of her position:
So, there is a text. The text is proof that your god is real. If you doubt the veracity of the text that makes the claim, you have to follow another claim in that very same text that says: have faith that this text is real.
It should be obvious to everybody that this is circular reasoning. Anybody can write a text with the preface: the following should be taken on faith. But it seems not obvious to everybody. A lot of “people of faith” seem blind to this truth. Ironically, the same people accuse non-believers to be blind to the “obvious truth” that there must be a creator/designer god: “just look around you!” - they say. “If you don’t see it, you’re blind.” (Why would this supposedly good god make me blind?)
I guess that the only way out of this, is to accept the findings of psychology about our fundamental inability as humans to see the world as it is. Evolutionary we developed with specific adaptive filters and biases. Only by a commitment to finding the truth through logical and scientific research can we overcome our biases. But again that is not an option to a lot of believers, specifically believers with holy books that contradict the idea that we are evolved creatures. Those same scriptures that tell that it is a good thing to take their messages on faith, also tell that there can’t be biases that evolved in the course of millions of years, because, you know, god created humans, therefore evolution is false.
Stalemate continues.
