The Rich Man and Lazarus

Over at Parchment and Pen, Michael Patton wonders why some people believe and others don't. He hews pretty close to the standard Christian answer that people know there's a God but don't admit it because they don't want to admit to God's authority (actually, it's educated Christians who know there isn't really a God but don't admit to it).

Moses and the Prophets

I was interested in his discussion of the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, in which the Rich Man ignores Lazarus, the beggar at his gate. The Rich Man ends up in Hell, while Lazarus ends up in Heaven. The Rich Man wants Lazarus to visit his brothers and warn them, but Abraham (who's in charge of Heaven and Hell in this story, in a sort of Jewish version of St Peter's role, I suppose) tells the Rich Man that "If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead." Patton says this illustrates that "we have a much bigger problem than the lack of evidence".

Well, maybe we do, but we certainly do have the problem of lack of evidence, and the Abraham of the parable is either irrational or encouraging the Rich Man's brothers to be so. People rising from the dead is strong evidence in a way that merely writing books is not, because many worldviews have books which advocate them and they can't all be right, and because the fact that your opponents write books isn't very surprising to a whole load of views. Resurrections, on the other hand, are very surprising to views which don't predict them.

This, then, is how you should pray

I was listening to the Christian philosopher Tim Mawson on a podcast recently. He thinks atheists should pray to God to reveal himself, which seems fair enough: I'd like to try it if I can think of what would be a fair positive and negative result. Any ideas?

Pre-commitment

Crucially, Mawson agrees beforehand that a negative result is evidence against Christianity, which makes him more rational than Abraham. As I mentioned previously, I've been following Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a fun bit of creative writing which explores what would've happened if Harry Potter had been educated in science and rationality before the Hogwarts people turned up. Mawson's attitude is a bit like the alternate Harry Potter getting everyone to agree on the significance of possible outcomes before doing an experiment at the beginning of this chapter of the story.

Edited: Speaking of Hell, there ended up being a lively discussion on Hell on one of my previous posts, which you might also be interested in.