If you want to start a thread about why I don’t believe in the current version of Catholicism, feel free to do that. However, I’d like to stay at least sort-of on task in this thread.
Um, isn’t this thread supposed to be kinda about that?
That is, isn’t the lack of video supposed to be a “candidate reason” for the lack of belief in Catholicism? Of course, it is not a real reason, but finding a real one should be related to the topic.
Also, this question is concerned with explanation for your strange standard of evidence.
That is, if you are demanding evidence from Catholicism which you do not demand from atomic theory, and explain that it’s OK, because Catholicism “doesn’t seem to help me engage with reality” and the like, I think it is important to find out what you mean by those vague claims.
Let’s sum this up: you want to discredit the notion that video evidence is somehow better than ancient texts right?
Wrong. If I wanted to discredit something expressed in that way, I would ask if you really trust movie “Passion of Christ” more than the Bible, or movies and cartoons about Asterix and Obelix more than Caesar’s writings.
Of course, it should be noted that there are ways to extract some truths even from stories about Asterix (let’s say, if we see a story about Sphinx losing its nose, we can correctly conclude that Sphinx really has lost its nose).
You want to suggest that they’re similar if we apply the same skepticism to both. In that case, I’ll agree that they both fail to be sufficient evidence to prove an outrageous claim. Do you believe in Bigfoot or the Lochness monster? There are grainy videos of that stuff too, just like Zeitoun. Do you believe Satyha Sai Baba is a god? There are color, close-up videos of him healing people and performing other miracles. I don’t believe these things either.
Actually, you conflate two different things here. I don’t know and I don’t care if Sai Baba did perform any healings. I know he is not a god.
But, what’s strange to me, is that the ancient world is full of reports of things far more fantastic than Zeitoun, Bigfoot, or Satyha Sai Baba. The ancient world’s testimony would lead one to believe the world is over-brimming with the miraculous and stupendous! Shouldn’t we expect to see some more miracles now that far more people have the ability to record them? You’ve failed to answer the essential question here.
“The ancient world”? Are we suddenly supposed to prove the truth of fairy tales and Greek mythology?
Also, for some reason I see no examples here…
Good evidence should be a reasonably reliable report of reality. The 4 R’s.
Then you can only find out if evidence is good, if you already know what “reality” is. And if you already know that, you no longer need that evidence.
In practice that is going to work like we saw: if evidence supports something you like, it’s proclaimed to be good, if it supports something you do not - it’s proclaimed to be bad.
That is, it is not used to find out what reality is, only to rationalise your beliefs.
Of course something like that could be faked with computer graphics, but who in Hollywood is going to commit their resources to a pious fraud in support of the Catholic Church?
Good point.
A claim is outrageous in so far as it is not reciprocated by the common experience of humanity.
I would have expected something else - that just looks “surprising”, not “outrageous”…
Anyway, in that case claims of miracles are not outrageous, but many claims of Physics are.
In order to truly flesh out what I mean by an “outrageous claim” I would have to spend a considerable amount of time carefully defining it, because I am sensing you are the punctilious sort.
That’s “Philosophy” subforum. It is our job to help you to find out how your beliefs fit together.
Bring it into a lab and test it. I support that 100%. I’m not sure how they could fake that “miracle” but there are ways to determine it.
How comes you are not volunteering?
You said faking that miracle is easy - do it!
Or admit that you do not know what you are talking about.
I have made rational decisions in the past many times, and I’m not aware of a reason why I should believe I would suddenly act unreasonably if I were to see excellent evidence for Catholicism like I described.
Then you must be rather unimaginative, as such reasons are easy to find. You might act unreasonably out of fear (I think it is not impossible that someone might go insane after seeing such a miracle - by the way, that might be why you do not see them). Or you might act unreasonably because you really really really want Catholicism to be false.
Let’s find out! It’s easily testable, and I’m perfectly willing to be tested. Go ahead an perform this miracle and we’ll see what I do.
You mean, after you replicate the miracle of St. Januarius?
Yes, I know, that’s a common trick of atheists: “Try to persuade me while I’ll be as stubborn as I can be. When you fail, I’ll pretend that it shows my stubbornness is reasonable, your evidence is weak - and anything else I need to rationalise my rejection of your beliefs.”. Sorry, not playing.
After all, you already gave enough evidence to demonstrate that you do not really care about evidence as much, as you seem to claim. All that is left is to find out what you do care about.
