How would you respond to this common argument from atheist?

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Bradski said:
Oh, come on…

The guy is in a roomful of doctors. He’s undoubtedly plugged into a heart monitor and everyone would have known the instant his heart stopped of its own accord.

Now what honestly do you think they all would have done? Declare him dead straight away? Shrug their shoulders and carry on with what they were doing? They IMMEDIATELY would have started CPR while making a very fast decision as to the best action (shot of adrenalin, defibrillation etc).

So his heart had stopped beating but it had not stopped pumping. The guy confirms this himself:

"My next recollection was looking up at a doctor doing chest compressions.” planetzion.wordpress.com/tag/dr-sam-parnia/

His brain wasn’t starved of oxygen. He wasn’t dead. He had a vivid dream, almost certainly exacerbated by the drugs he had been given.

Try to be a little bit more skeptical, Humble. It will serve you well.
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Plus there was the tiny little detail of a device that was set to go off as soon as he was in cardiac arrest and bleeped every 3 minutes for when he was still in cardiac arrest . The guy floated out of his body , saw the device , heard it bleep twice and then they so was all confirmed as really happening by the lead researcher and the staff in that room .

Please brad tell us how an hallucination or dream brings back objectively verifiable info .
I would love to see you explain that .

Brad it seems like your skepticism is extreme when it goes against your atheism and drops when the evidence favors ur atheism

Yep sure sounds like free thinking to me 😉
 
PRmerger said:
Not sure what you mean?
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What…? PR, for heaven’s sake…why is this taking so long. Let me try another tack.

If you were to list the ten most convincing prices of evidence for God (Kalam, miracles, whatever), which comes in at number 11?

Then you can tell me why it isn’t as convincing as the first ten. If you say they are equally as convincing, then run down the list of however many you want until you get to one that isn’t as convincing.

If you say that they are all equally convincing, then we will really have something to discuss.
 
humble_catholic said:
Please brad tell us how an hallucination or dream brings back objectively verifiable info .
I would love to see you explain that .
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No problem.

It seems that you believe that when your heart stops you immediately lose consciousness. That ain’t necessarily so. If you are standing up, you will almost certainly fall down. That’s nature’s way of telling you to ‘Assume the position!’. The position in this case being horizontal. It’s easier to pump blood to the brain when you are horizontal.

If you are already horizontal and under sedation, then not much will happen if you are immediately given CPR. It’s like your heart was already plumbed into a bypass pump and then started immediately your heart stopped. I dare say you might feel some discomfort, but you would still be in the land of the living. The heart is ONLY a pump. If something else takes its place, then there’s no immediate proble it happens all the time in heart surgery.

So you are ASSUMING that the guy lost total consciousness. If the CPR started immediately he went into cardiac arrest (and it most certainly should have), then his medical condition, apart from a heart that wasn’t beating of its own accord) wouldn’t have changed. Just like when they physically stop the heart in cardiac ops and start the manual pump.

Sound reasonable?
 
Bradski said:
What…? PR, for heaven’s sake…why is this taking so long. Let me try another tack.

If you were to list the ten most convincing prices of evidence for God (Kalam, miracles, whatever), which comes in at number 11?

Then you can tell me why it isn’t as convincing as the first ten. If you say they are equally as convincing, then run down the list of however many you want until you get to one that isn’t as convincing.

If you say that they are all equally convincing, then we will really have something to discuss.
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Emmm…I’ve already given you 2:
  • there is the music of Bach, therefore there is a God.
  • I just feel it in my bones.
And, just for good measure, here’s some others–

Some people are moved to belief in God by an encounter with a holy person.

I get it. I really do.

And I know a person who became a Believer, convinced, on the spot!, by seeing the birth of his daughter.

I get that, too.

And, there are some who walk into Mass, Adoration, a magnificent Cathedral, and that’s enough to convince them, or, at least to compel them to investigate further.

These are not touchy-feely arguments, BTW. These are simply arguments that some are moved by. But most are not.

I get both.
 
Bradski said:
So any given atheist posting here. Are you prevarcating? There’s no ‘Gotcha’ coming. It may be worth discussing but no more than that.
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PRmerger said:
Not sure what you mean?
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Ok. Now I understand that you meant you had no “gotcha” coming.

I thought initially that you were making some veiled reference to me preparing a “gotcha”, and that was confusing to me.
 
PRmerger said:
Emmm…I’ve already given you 2:
  • there is the music of Bach, therefore there is a God.
  • I just feel it in my bones.
And, just for good measure, here’s some others–

Some people are moved to belief in God by an encounter with a holy person.

I get it. I really do.

And I know a person who became a Believer, convinced, on the spot!, by seeing the birth of his daughter.

I get that, too.

And, there are some who walk into Mass, Adoration, a magnificent Cathedral, and that’s enough to convince them, or, at least to compel them to investigate further.

These are not touchy-feely arguments, BTW. These are simply arguments that some are moved by. But most are not.

I get both.
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Oh, and here’s one more–

any argument by a Believer that is presented with mockery or uncharity =a bad argument.
 
I don’t buy the argument there Bach, so there must be a God.

But if you said, “There’s Mozart, so there must be a God,” I’d buy it.

youtube.com/watch?v=6KUDs8KJc_c

There no explanation for why this music is so sublime than that it points to the sublime truth of the Eucharist. Or someone can try to give me another reason?
 
Bradski said:
No problem.

It seems that you believe that when your heart stops you immediately lose consciousness. That ain’t necessarily so. If you are standing up, you will almost certainly fall down. That’s nature’s way of telling you to ‘Assume the position!’. The position in this case being horizontal. It’s easier to pump blood to the brain when you are horizontal.

If you are already horizontal and under sedation, then not much will happen if you are immediately given CPR. It’s like your heart was already plumbed into a bypass pump and then started immediately your heart stopped. I dare say you might feel some discomfort, but you would still be in the land of the living. The heart is ONLY a pump. If something else takes its place, then there’s no immediate proble it happens all the time in heart surgery.

So you are ASSUMING that the guy lost total consciousness. If the CPR started immediately he went into cardiac arrest (and it most certainly should have), then his medical condition, apart from a heart that wasn’t beating of its own accord) wouldn’t have changed. Just like when they physically stop the heart in cardiac ops and start the manual pump.

Sound reasonable?
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Brad the only problem was that the device didn’t stop bleeping until he was out of cardiac arrest and as parnia said after 30 seconds the brain becomes non functional .

You also conveniently dodged another extremely important point here and that is he had a veridical nde in which he didn’t hallucinate it dream but saw objectively verifiable information .
Brad I know veridical ndes make it tough on your worldview but hopefully you can take an unbiased step back and look at this nde in an objective manner .

Cause veridical ndes open the door to an even more rare but more devastating evidence against atheism and those are shared death experiences and my favorites peak in Darien ndes.

Maybe when you ate less dogmatically against ndes one day you will be able to look at them

As for now you have a very dogmatic atheist/materialist worldview that just won’t allow these experiences to happen . In this worldview they can never be anything but dreams or hallucinations no matter what the evidences Tell you .

Aware part 2 has started and is 1% done and if they get the 3 to 5 hits on the digital signs placed in the ceiling you will start to see atheists concert in droves , except for the more dogmatic religious atheists who will never change no matter what .

In my next post I will post a link to a blog which is following the progress of aware 2
One if the most important studied in human history being run by agnostic doctor Sam parnia who 5 years ago on the skeptiko interview said that ndes were in his opinion nothing more then hallucinations of the dying brain

He no longer believes that now 😉
 
Bradski said:
And going back to the amount of weight for each piece of evidence, I have also been asked which is the most compelling piece of evidence (or, as I would put it, least weak). It seems to vary with me because, as in the case of this thread, someone will say that music is evidence or a shroud or an NDE. In each case, that particular piece of evidence is moved immediately to the top of the pile. But it still forms part of the whole (and detracts from it remarkably in those cases).
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So the weight of the argument of the Shroud is for a while for you at the top, but you discard it. And then it detracts because you have disregarded it.
Here are facts. Jesus Christ walked this Earth. A long time ago, two millennia ago. This is indisputable today. He had a private life before he embarked on his mission. Then, for some reason, led a mission where he went from town to town preaching about the Kingdom of God. According to the gospels, he entered Jerusalem and was put to death. This is confirmed by an independent source, Josephus.
He was put to death on the cross, suffering enormously. This cannot be disputed.
Jesus had fulfilled previous written prophecies, i.e. he fulfilled scripture with his death and suffering on the cross.
You can see for yourself the suffering he had to endure, and see that the gospel narratives are true when you look upon the Shroud. And what about the resurrection? Just how was that image created?
 
aclausen said:
Other matters of antiquity are treated with similar caution unless multiple independent sources can be found. We can talk with some certainty about events like the Peloponnesian War, Alexander the Great, or Augustus Caesar because there were multiple accounts that do not appear to have been constructed from the same writer.
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It’s been some days that I asked aclausen to back up his claim.

I wonder if he has been feverishly working on this.

So far, though…nothing.

(I get that we are all busy with real life, but it’s quite curious indeed that when he was asked to give examples that prove that there are “multiple accounts” and “multiple independent sources” of these events of antiquity…there is the ringing, clanging sound of…SILENCE.)

And please note that I am asking for nothing more, and nothing less, than documentation equal to or surpassing what we have for evidence for the reliability of the NT texts.

Re: the NT manuscripts–we have 18 manuscripts that come from the 2nd century.

I would like some sort of documentation of Thucidydes’ manuscripts that date to within 2 centuries of his writings.

For, of course, we have no fragments whatsoever of anything actually written (by their hand) by T nor of the NT writers. The closest is 1st century for the NT.

Waiting for something similar to back up aclausen’s claim.

And, of course, we would need 3 other authors with similar criteria.

🍿
 
Bradski said:
Does it work the other way? Are there multiple arguments against, for example, Hinduism, that a Christian could list? Is there a Top Ten Arguments against Hinduism?
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I think there’s just one good one:

If Christianity is true, that necessarily means that Hinduism is false.

Now, of course, anything that Hinduism professes that is consonant with Christianity (i.e. it is a good thing to clothe the naked, feed the poor), is good and true.

But it also means that anything that Hinduism professes that contravenes the kerygma, must be false.
 
Prayer is the best answer I can give to such an argument:

**
My God,
I believe, I adore, I hope and I love Thee!
I beg pardon for those who do not believe,
do not adore, do not hope,
and do not love Thee.

Amen.**

Prayer taught by the Angel of Peace of the three children during his first apparition at Fatima, Portugal in 1916.
 
Solmyr said:
But as I already said, I don’t care about the past. God is supposed to be “alive” today, whatever that means. There is no need to go back 2000 years. Establish God’s existence here and now, if you can - without referring to faith.
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There is a need to go back 2000 years because that is when the big event happened. Since the Ascension occurred 2000 years ago, Jesus is with the Father. This is the same for us as for his apostles who knew him in the flesh. He promised that he will return. He did not leave us completely alone; he is still present for us in the Eucharist. He has also gifted us to his mother and her to us. She is active in maintaining lines of communication.
 
tp3192000 said:
There is a need to go back 2000 years because that is when the big event happened. Since the Ascension occurred 2000 years ago, Jesus is with the Father. This is the same for us as for his apostles who knew him in the flesh. He promised that he will return. He did not leave us completely alone; he is still present for us in the Eucharist. He has also gifted us to his mother and her to us. She is active in maintaining lines of communication.
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👍
😃
 
PRmerger said:
It’s been some days that I asked aclausen to back up his claim.

I wonder if he has been feverishly working on this.

So far, though…nothing.

(I get that we are all busy with real life, but it’s quite curious indeed that when he was asked to give examples that prove that there are “multiple accounts” and “multiple independent sources” of these events of antiquity…there is the ringing, clanging sound of…SILENCE.)

And please note that I am asking for nothing more, and nothing less, than documentation equal to or surpassing what we have for evidence for the reliability of the NT texts.

Re: the NT manuscripts–we have 18 manuscripts that come from the 2nd century.

I would like some sort of documentation of Thucidydes’ manuscripts that date to within 2 centuries of his writings.

For, of course, we have no fragments whatsoever of anything actually written (by their hand) by T nor of the NT writers. The closest is 1st century for the NT.

Waiting for something similar to back up aclausen’s claim.

And, of course, we would need 3 other authors with similar criteria.

🍿
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I had cataract surgery, so using a computer was out.

As I said, even for verifiable events, historians take a significantly critical view. Since the Gospels by and large appear to be based on as yet undiscovered documents, and by and large, as I recall, three of the gospels appear to be based of an as yet undiscovered source document, leaving the Gospel of John as the odd man out.

But frankly, I would take any document, even claiming accounts only a few decades old, that talked about miraculous healings and resurrections with a grain of salt. Is there any reason to believe that Faith Healers can heal, psychics can foretell the future, past life regressors can actually see past lives? Even for historical figures far more recent than Jesus all sorts of claims have been made that are obviously not true.

That Jesus Christ existed I have no doubt. That the Peloponessian Wars happened I have no doubt. But even Thucydides references Homer on occasion, which obviously puts some parts of his narrative into question.

The proper position for any research into any historical event, near in time or distant, is to measure the claims critically, and not just accept claims simply because someone said them. After all, I don’t actually think Kim Jong-Un has cured AIDS, have doubts that Nicolas Chauvin existed, or that Constantine saw a cross in the sky.
 
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