Suppose Christian parents scrimp and save to send their kid to college. In his freshman year, during Christmas break, he comes home and pounces on the faith he was raised in. Perhaps he read A Manual for Creating Atheists, and quizzes his hapless parents with Philosophy 101 objections:
How do you know the Bible is true? Can you prove that the world didn't spring into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past?
The average Christian parents will be dumbfounded. But let's consider some responses:
1. Why are we spending tens of thousands of dollars a year to make our son dumber than when he started college? Surely there's a cheaper way to raise dumb children.
2. What makes an artificial thought-experiment the benchmark?
3. If the hypothetical is true, then the college is an illusion. It didn't exist 6 minutes ago. If the hypothetical is true, we have no parental duties to "our son" since we're not actually related to each other. We were created ex nihilo 5 minutes ago (and counting).
4. Assuming for argument's sake that we take the thought-experiment seriously, that doesn't disprove God's existence. To the contrary, it's a theistic proof. What would it take for world to spring into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that "remembered" a wholly unreal past?
It would take a supernatural Creator with immense intelligence and power to fabricate that illusion. Consider the ability to implant coherent false memories in the population? Each person's memories about their own life would be false, yet they'd be internally consistent as well as consistent with everyone else's memories. And the evidence for the antiquity of the world would be false, even though all the prima facie evidence would be consistent with the antiquity of the world.
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