Autobahn To Damascus

From a one-time teammate at Debunking Christianity:

http://ultimateobject.blogspot.com/2011/11/autobahn-to-damascus.html

A pilgrim's regress

"A Pilgrim's Regress: George John Romanes and the Search for Rational Faith" by Tim McGrew.

On a wing and a prayer

 BYRON SAID:

Here's my problem with prayer. From the human perspective, it either appears to work, or it doesn't. And there are religious explanations for both. And those religious explanations are subject to interpretation. So really, no matter what does or does not happen, there is a nice religious explanation for it, so you really need to have no expectation either way, because the religious system works well enough in its explanation that it can make prayer seem to work sufficiently well enough either way, in hindsight. Prayer just seems more like something religious people do, rather than something from which they actually expect results.

i) Well, that oversimplifies the issue. I expect prayer to affect the future (or even the past) some of the time. Due to prayer, some things will happen (or not happen), which would not obtain absent prayer.

ii) However, it’s unpredictable because:

a) God doesn’t answer every prayer

b) Not every answer will be evident to the supplicant.

iii) That doesn’t mean the outcome makes no apparent difference one way or another. For some answers to prayer will be evident. But not necessarily for every supplicant.

And keep in mind that these aren’t makeshift caveats. These caveats apply even if prayer is still efficacious on occasion.

They that wait upon the Lord

Byron Smith responded to me. I’ll going to focus on his key contentions:

The answers for why prayer is “answered” or “unanswered” cover every conceivable possibility without actually requiring any unambiguous or visible activity on the part of the deity. Isn't that a trifle bit convenient?

i) Answered prayer and unanswered prayer are evidentially asymmetrical. Evidence that something never happened doesn’t cancel out evidence that something else did happen. If it rains today, but not tomorrow, the nonoccurrence of rain tomorrow in no way counts against the occurrence of rain today, as if we have to balance one against the other.

Likewise, indetectible answers to prayer don’t count against detectable answers to prayer.

ii) While answered prayer has evidential value, that’s a fringe benefit of prayer. That’s not what prayer is for.

iii) There’s a strangely self-absorbed quality to your objections, as if the only relevant evidence for Christianity is limited to the confines of your personal experience.

But what about the experience of other Christians? Why does that count for nothing? Most of what you and I believe about most things in life is dependent on the testimony of others.

So if, say, you have no tangible experience of answered prayer, yet many other Christians bear witness to answered prayer, or other instances of special providence in their lives, how does your inexperience cancel out their experience?

Sure, you can say this is merely their claim to encounter God in one way or another. Still, how are you in any position to treat their testimony as untrustworthy in each and every case?

When in doubt

Here's a copy of a letter I sent to a Baptist pastor recently who's suffered a lapse of faith. Not having heard back from him, I'll post it here:

Hi Byron,

I read the letter you posted at your blog. A few impressions: