hyporational comments on Questions on Theism - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (188)
Thanks for the post, that must have been hard given your beliefs.
At first, please do note that it's a long leap from believing in miracles/magic to believing in the christian god.
It's not an assumption but an observation. You wouldn't call them miracles unless they were a gross deviation from your normal experience.
Did you know that the lifetime prevalence of psychosis exceeds 3%? That's a lot of people out of touch with reality willing to claim all sorts of stuff. This is just one example of a naturalistic explanation yet you can see that it could cover many of those claims.
This doesn't mean that someone else couldn't :)
I bet they're mostly events that never happened, people just claim they did. This doesn't require lying, although that happens too.
Interestingly only the first two of those seem like good arguments to me.
Think about the definition of "psychosis". From a supernaturalist point of view, "psychosis" and similar things like the classic "mass hysteria" sound like a fake explanation, i.e., a term the materialist can slap on the phenomenon that makes it seem "scientific".
I thought about that, but a christian who isn't an outright supernaturalist otherwise would presumably accept that psychotic people exist, which should make them think a little harder about why certain religious experiences should be excluded from the definition.
I'd bet the overwhelming majority of people who believe in miracles also accept that psychosis exists.