Although I advised you not to go on this programme, my advice was wrong. The show as a whole was really cool, and you yourself did a great job. Kudos.
I was amazed by some of the people who phoned in and talked in such personal, passionate terms about their own faith. That's something that I find inspiring even if their logic is fairly hopeless. The fact that these people have strong faith is not a reason for me to believe the same things they believe, but I do admire them.
I drew the impression that Christianity is making two basically contradictory claims: as monotheists, they hold that God is absolute, and also that anyone who keeps their eyes open can know God and come to faith. At the same time, the faith that they are hoping people will attain is a very specific faith which makes very particular claims about the nature and actions of God. So if someone experiences a strong personal revelation, it's very easy to question, as you did, why that experience should point to the Christian God as opposed to any other supernatural being that any other religions might postulate. On the other hand, the most important "evidence" for the specific Christian claims is that people do have these experiences of the Divine.
I think this ties into the problem of starting from a position of faith. I thought the person who asked you what it would take to convince you had a pretty unanswerable point. If you are absolutely determined in your atheism, then you could always point to another explanation for any miraculous or revelatory incident. (I would on the whole call myself a theist, but personally, if I started hearing voices or seeing impossible occurrences, I'd see a psychiatrist.) Of course, hypothetically an all-powerful God could alter your mind so that you ceased to be determined in your atheism, but I can see why people might worry about free will in that case.
Conversely, all the people who told you to read the Bible have no real case. Because if you don't believe you have no reason in the first place to read the Bible or take it seriously when you do read it! I think Pascal was partly right when he suggested that it is possible to take on a mental and spiritual discipline and train yourself to have faith even if you don't at the start of the process. But I think he, like many other Christians, had little basis for arguing that this self-training process was worth doing. If you think Christianity is wrong in the first place, there is no value at all in trying to convince yourself that Christianity is right!
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I was amazed by some of the people who phoned in and talked in such personal, passionate terms about their own faith. That's something that I find inspiring even if their logic is fairly hopeless. The fact that these people have strong faith is not a reason for me to believe the same things they believe, but I do admire them.
I drew the impression that Christianity is making two basically contradictory claims: as monotheists, they hold that God is absolute, and also that anyone who keeps their eyes open can know God and come to faith. At the same time, the faith that they are hoping people will attain is a very specific faith which makes very particular claims about the nature and actions of God. So if someone experiences a strong personal revelation, it's very easy to question, as you did, why that experience should point to the Christian God as opposed to any other supernatural being that any other religions might postulate. On the other hand, the most important "evidence" for the specific Christian claims is that people do have these experiences of the Divine.
I think this ties into the problem of starting from a position of faith. I thought the person who asked you what it would take to convince you had a pretty unanswerable point. If you are absolutely determined in your atheism, then you could always point to another explanation for any miraculous or revelatory incident. (I would on the whole call myself a theist, but personally, if I started hearing voices or seeing impossible occurrences, I'd see a psychiatrist.) Of course, hypothetically an all-powerful God could alter your mind so that you ceased to be determined in your atheism, but I can see why people might worry about free will in that case.
Conversely, all the people who told you to read the Bible have no real case. Because if you don't believe you have no reason in the first place to read the Bible or take it seriously when you do read it! I think Pascal was partly right when he suggested that it is possible to take on a mental and spiritual discipline and train yourself to have faith even if you don't at the start of the process. But I think he, like many other Christians, had little basis for arguing that this self-training process was worth doing. If you think Christianity is wrong in the first place, there is no value at all in trying to convince yourself that Christianity is right!