#635 | “In the suffering is the affirmation that our worldview is true” -Jon Noyes How much suffering? What would non-suffering affirm? Is there a falsifiable formulation of this notion? Would not suffering affirm the veracity of any God that promised believers would suffer?
#633 | Greg: “That [a positive result] increases our confidence that God had a hand in it.” < This is said in the context of praying for specific outcomes. But it seems the converse, that God did not have a hand in it, is not accepted. Does not the 1st inference require the 2nd?
#597 | Greg makes the unsubstantiated claim that the incoherency of disbelief is leading to many coming to Jesus while I might claim the inverse. Is there not clear evidence that would clear this up? Are such claims on either side of any real value? How about anecdotes?
#592 | If a righteous soul such as Abraham or Lot had gone to God after hearing his command to slay the Amalekite infants, suggesting such an order was inconsistent with his claim to be loving, would/could God have relented? What could ever be evidence God was not loving?
#579 | 2 Thess 2:10 says the damned “perish because they have no love for the truth”. This is entirely testable with cognitive science. I live in Japan and would be happy to test whether Japanese reject Christianity due to a hatred of the truth. Who will work with me on this?
#541 | When it comes to Christian miracles, there seems to be an odd inversely correlated X and Y, with X being the degree to which the alleged miracle is extraordinary and Y being the degree of the immediacy of the claim to scrutiny. Why would this be?
In other words, the more the alleged miracle can be scientifically scrutinized, the less remarkable it is, and the more remarkable it is, the more distant it is from scientific scrutiny.
#540 | How can Christians explain away apparent atrocities in the Bible without a coherent and rigorous standard to index? They will claim the throwing of children from the top of a mountain no actual God would command but will defend a God who asked grown men to hack infants into pieces.
#485 | Greg correctly claims that if Christianity “can be falsifiable, it can also be verifiable.“ He continues “that’s what we’re all about here in apologetics.“ Is there a list of testable Christian claims that can be falsified or verified? Or do apologists avoid compiling such a list?
#458 | Is it God or the Devil who creates this quite apparent inverse correlation between the immensity of a miracle claim and our ability to properly vet that claim? Why this insulating distance from science for the most spectacular miracle claims, removing falsifiability?
#455 | Does it make any sense to claim prayers for earthly concerns work, but to then insist that answered prayer cannot be evidenced and is unfalsifiable? Why is the allegedly loving, biblical, prayer-answering God evidentially identical to a world in which God does not care?
#387 | Apologists thoughout history seized the unexplained, and inserted their God as the explanation. In contrast, apologists now cite the burgeoning naturalistic explanations as evidence of the amazing forethought of their God. Is there anything possible within this logical space that would count against God? Why does it appear that unfalsifiability is a major goal of Christian apologetics?
#328 | Claiming “God’s ways are not our ways” insulates Christianity from examination to a high degree, but are there at least ways of an alleged God that can be shown to be clearly unrighteous such as asking that children be thrown off cliffs or hacked into pieces?
#325 | What alternative story of God’s dealings with humans could ever be identified as logically incoherent given that the entire logical space of possible stories is encompassed by biblical claims of God’s “infinite”, love, wrath, mercy, patience, and justice?
#266 | Most religions categorize apparent logical contradictions in their theology/scriptures as either “resolved” or “God’s mysterious ways”, never giving honest space to the category of “falsification”. Does not Christianity do the same?
#260 | Alan claims he would reject Christianity if clearly presented the “bones of Jesus”, boasting in this the Bible is respectably falsifiable. What would a proper bone presentation entail? Is this any more honest than claiming “bones of Dracula” would falsify Dracula’s immortality?
#234 | What degree and type of evidence would move you from 1) excusing as somehow illusory apparent broken promises by God to answer to 2) concluding God did indeed break his promise to answer prayer…or is imaginary? (Relevant to whatever promise John 15:7 contains.)
If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.
#208 | As with the ill-defined unfalsifiable claims of New Age “energies”, don’t the many alleged powers of the Holy Spirit dogmatically pulpited likewise lack the definitional rigor & falsifiability that would prevent them from dissipating into meaninglessness under scrutiny?
#194 | Greg says that many of the claims of Christianity can be tested. What is the most significant promise to Christians that can be statistically confirmed such as answered prayer, increased longevity or greater persecution for actual Christians?
#012 | Greg claims some stop believing in God after unanswered prayers. Is this not inconsistent with Romans 1? And with recent advances in cognitive science, can’t we assess the veracity of Romans 1? Or is the “suppression of the truth” untestable for some reason?
STR Asked... 