Why religious people should renounce their faith

Evidence is subjective, there's no way around this.

Question: if evidence is subjective and believers of different faiths are all susceptible to being convinced by evidence supporting their own religions only, doesn't that bring you right back to the initial argument of the OP? In other words, you'd be forced to conclude that you have no better reason for accepting your own religion than any other and would therefore be rationally compelled to withhold commitment to any specific faith.

If you want to introduce "more" or "less" evidence in this case, it seems to me that you're going to need to employ some objective criterion for evidence.

Then of course the corollary would be the possibility that there is not enough evidence to warrant belief in any supernatural religious claims.
 
It was a puzzling question, basically:

Which one of these gods that you don't believe exist has the best chance of existing?

I don't believe any of them have testable and verifiable evidence so I'm left with which god was the least convoluted. I really don't see any other criteria I could use.

You need to differentiate belief from knowledge. Just like I claim that I believe in God but cannot say that I know he exists, you should consider that there is a non-zero chance that Christ is God. Once you agree to this premise, it is a matter of assigning rough probabilities to these claims. Even if you personally reject any evidence for Christ, the fact that there is any evidence to even consider says something.
 
Question: if evidence is subjective and believers of different faiths are all susceptible to being convinced by evidence supporting their own religions only, doesn't that bring you right back to the initial argument of the OP? In other words, you'd be forced to conclude that you have no better reason for accepting your own religion than any other and would therefore be rationally compelled to withhold commitment to any specific faith.

If you want to introduce "more" or "less" evidence in this case, it seems to me that you're going to need to employ some objective criterion for evidence.

Then of course the corollary would be the possibility that there is not enough evidence to warrant belief in any supernatural religious claims.

Why would believers of different faiths be susceptible to only being convinced by evidence supporting their own religion? Unless you worded this wrong, It seems like they already believe even before they examined the evidence, in which case, they're already not justified.
 
You need to differentiate belief from knowledge. Just like I claim that I believe in God but cannot say that I know he exists, you should consider that there is a non-zero chance that Christ is God. Once you agree to this premise, it is a matter of assigning rough probabilities to these claims. Even if you personally reject any evidence for Christ, the fact that there is any evidence to even consider says something.

How do you assign rough probabilities to these claims? What criteria do you use? The fact that other people believed on faith has no bearing on whether I should believe it.
 
Why would believers of different faiths be susceptible to only being convinced by evidence supporting their own religion? Unless you worded this wrong, It seems like they already believe even before they examined the evidence, in which case, they're already not justified.

I would think that would be an element of evidence being subjective - would it not? If I hold the beliefs that I do because of evidence I consider "good" based on a purely subjective assessment, then presumably my belief in the religion I support was a product of the weight of said evidence.

But if I don't have a way to compare my evidence to the evidence claimed by others, then...
 
How do you assign rough probabilities to these claims? What criteria do you use? The fact that other people believed on faith has no bearing on whether I should believe it.

You shouldn't believe it, but some claims have greater probabilities given the evidence, even if it's evidence that you yourself don't find sufficient to form beliefs with. Unless you accept a non-zero chance, all this is moot.
 
I would think that would be an element of evidence being subjective - would it not? If I hold the beliefs that I do because of evidence I consider "good" based on a purely subjective assessment, then presumably my belief in the religion I support was a product of the weight of said evidence.

But if I don't have a way to compare my evidence to the evidence claimed by others, then...

I'm not sure I follow exactly. Let's put it this way- Have you looked into the Abrahamic religions? If yes, you've examined some evidence. How much evidence you look at, and what it means is only something you can know.
 
You shouldn't believe it, but some claims have greater probabilities given the evidence, even if it's evidence that you yourself don't find sufficient to form beliefs with. Unless you accept a non-zero chance, all this is moot.

Yes I accept a non zero chance, I still don't understand how you calculated the probability of some supernatural claims over the others. Can you explain please.
 
Yes I accept a non zero chance, I still don't understand how you calculated the probability of some supernatural claims over the others. Can you explain please.

There is more evidence for Christ than others. Even if you believe (not know) that the evidence is "wrong", the more evidence there is, the greater the probabilities that it's true.

This doesn't have to be precise, I simply believe that the case for Christ has more evidence than random people claiming divinity.
 
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. You should not be making truth claims about Christ either way, and no matter how low you assign this probability, there are other such claims with even less probability.


As for your very last paragraph, there's two ways to look at this. One is practically, that is, given your perspective it makes sense for you to live as an atheist. The other is philosophically, which is what we are speaking about here, where you should not claim that the probability of Christ's divinity is zero. There is a non-zero chance Christ is God.

There are logical impossibilities which have 0 probability and then you have claims which aren't logical impossibilities which have a non-0 probability.

If we are assessing the probability of the same kind of thing, e.g. the divinity of a religious figure, we begin with the prior probability. Int his case all cases of the same kind will have the same prior probability. Then to assign a value to the probability for the event actually occurring we need evidence, in this case the evidence is witnesses' testimony. Since all the claims of the same kind, with the same prior probabilities, are also back up by the same kind of evidence, testimony, they will have the same probability. The only way to increase the probability of one over the others is through a different kind of evidence that isn't testimony.
 
There is more evidence for Christ than others. Even if you believe (not know) that the evidence is "wrong", the more evidence there is, the greater the probabilities that it's true.

This doesn't have to be precise, I simply believe that the case for Christ has more evidence than random people claiming divinity.

Not if the evidence is unverifiable, this is just a form of Argumentum ad Populum.
 
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If you believe in a religion because you were born into it
No.

because you accept the testimony of the those who claim to have witnessed the miracles for said religion
Check.

because it makes sense to you
Check.

because you feel something in your heart that assures you of the truth of your religion
Check.

then, if there are reasons that undercut the evidence on which you base your belief, you should thus renounce your faith and become agnostic.
There are many other reasons I believe in Christianity.

Until you have other reasons apart from the ones mentioned above you should remain agnostic and suspend judgement, that is until you acquire evidence to make up your mind rationally for the position the evidence point to.
Okay.
 
“Faith comes and goes. It rises and falls like the tides of an invisible ocean. If it is presumptuous to think that faith will stay with you forever, it is just as presumptuous to think that unbelief will.”
Flannery O'Connor
 
Our imbecilic interlocutor is a bit too dense to get this, but he fails to understand that human beings are not rational, and that rationality barely even matters, and could not describe, rationally, why he values "rationality" or any other of his values, or why rationality has some necessary connection to the doctrine of the "scientific truth or falsity" of one dogma or another.
 
If you have to witness miracles and see divine intervention then there is no reason to have any faith because you seen it or heard of it. Faith is the substance of things hoped for the evidence of thing you cannot see.

If I wasn't born to a Christian family I know I'd most likely be in jail on drugs or dead. Believing in the Christian faith is the best thing to happen to me.
 
There are logical impossibilities which have 0 probability and then you have claims which aren't logical impossibilities which have a non-0 probability.

If we are assessing the probability of the same kind of thing, e.g. the divinity of a religious figure, we begin with the prior probability. Int his case all cases of the same kind will have the same prior probability. Then to assign a value to the probability for the event actually occurring we need evidence, in this case the evidence is witnesses' testimony. Since all the claims of the same kind, with the same prior probabilities, are also back up by the same kind of evidence, testimony, they will have the same probability. The only way to increase the probability of one over the others is through a different kind of evidence that isn't testimony.

Here is my claim- If we have two incidents with unknown probability, one of which has x "amount" of evidence (even if just testimony), the other has less than x amount of evidence, without being certain that the evidence is not "correct", I would not assign the exact same probability to both events.

If you agree there is a non-zero chance that Christ is God, it simply doesn't make sense for all such claims to all have the exact same probability, no matter how low.
 
Not if the evidence is unverifiable, this is just a form of Argumentum ad Populum.

The evidence is not unverifiable, it is extremely verified, the evidence is not conclusive.

I think it may be better to leave this argument in disagreement, it seems we simply don't see eye-to-eye here.
 
The evidence is not unverifiable, it is extremely verified, the evidence is not conclusive.

I think it may be better to leave this argument in disagreement, it seems we simply don't see eye-to-eye here.

It's empirically unverifiable, it's just the testimony of supernatural events of ancient people that cannot be recreated or studied. If the evidence cannot be tested then it's Argumentum ad Populum.
 
It's empirically unverifiable, it's just the testimony of supernatural events of ancient people that cannot be recreated or studied. If the evidence cannot be tested then it's Argumentum ad Populum.

Ad Populum refers to belief based on the amount of people that believe it. I'm not telling you you should believe, I'm saying the probability of one is greater than the other based on the amount of evidence.
 
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