Apologists often suggest that enough weak evidence adds up to total proof - 'the plural of anecdote is data' - but to my mind, evidential weakness is qualitative, not quantative; if you sweep all of your rubbish into one big pile, it makes a big pile of rubbish, it doesn't magically transform into gold.
hm my inital thought here is theists seem to arrange the weak evidence rubble pieces in the shape of preconcieved bigger picture more often than not, kinda like a mosaic picture or collage and expect that the end result will be as prestine as a jigsaw puzzle in the end, but upon closer examination the individual rubble pieces are still rubbish
Rubbish would work better than their arguments, as if one had a large enough mass (yes, I know, an unfeasibly large mass), it might then start a fusion process and stellar nucleosynthesis might produce something useful.
I'd bet Cam didn't bother to do anything more than learn the name of 0.001% of the 4,500+ religions. He shouldn't have to since he knows what the "true religion" is so he evangelizes to others and they've never been able to change his mind. That means his beliefs are the truest of the true.™
There's approximately 4,000 deities worshipped today, not even counting prior pantheons. Plus, modern Christianity has approximately 45,000 denominations practiced today, which excludes the various _so-called_ *_heresies_* that were stamped out* in the last two millennia. *Stamped out is just a polite way of saying that hundreds to thousands of people were tortured** and/or executed for daring to worship the same god, differently. **For a religion that is so notoriously opposed to butt stuff, they sure used a lot of arsehole specific torture devices.
This isn't a series of questions, it's a presuppositionalist syllogism phrased in the form of a series of questions, because this smug mofo thinks he's clever.
My favourite "miracle" was a weeping statue in India - which turned out to be a leaking toilet upstairs. The guy who revealed it had to leave the country as he was charged under India's rather offensive blasphemy laws. People were drinking the "tears" by the way - with all the negative health effects you'd expect
I am curious: how does Cameron know that there’s millions of miracle claims? Did he count them? And how many of those “millions” of miracles has Cameron investigated?
As a dentist, I very much deal with the issue of evidence-based treatment on a daily basis. Doing randomized clinical trials in dentistry is extremely difficult for a whole range of reasons, both patient and dentist based. It’s why one can get so many different opinions on what treatment should be done.
"How many claims have I investigated" is a weird question when there's a much easier question just sitting there: "how many claims have been investigated by many experts in their fields and found by consensus to be miraculous?" In other words, why should it be me specifically when there's whole crowds of people whose collective investigation would be much more compelling?
Well, the bar is pretty low. But Cameron here (unlike WLC, probably the most overrated one in the field) isn't really one of the ones who comes across sounding dumb even compared to other apologists.
Question 1: yes and yes. Question 2: the Christian god, no. It would take a lot more than a single miracle. A deity in general? Again, no. It could be a supernatural entity that isn't a god. Question 3: I've looked into only a handful that apologists have brought up as good examples, and they've all been bad. So if the BEST miracles are bad, there's no need for me to look at the rest.
Asking skeptics to personally investigate every miracle claim in order to doubt them is like asking why you don't believe in wendigos if you haven't personally investigated every wendigo story on reddit.
Question #1: I don't have beliefs. Something is true, not true, or unknown. None of that requires belief. Question #2: If something happens that we cannot explain, we might call that a miracle. That does not mean a god of any type exists. It means the means are unknown. Question #3: A worthless question.
It's not about the truth of a given proposition but about your mental states. Broadly speaking, the word is used to describe what you hold to be true (which includes things that are true and things about which you are mistaken).
Those were my answers …. 😡 I would like to add to your second answer that if something un-explainable is happening we do what all good “scientist” so - start researching, do observations, collecting data and start doing analysis, formulating hypothesis and finally publish a theory.
Personal relationships are often based on faith and trust more than hard facts. And it leads us to broken hearts and disappointment. But also great enjoyment and fun.
I think Cameron - while coming off as dishonest - just doesn't understand the stuff he talks about. He has simply memorized it. The syllogisms he presents are so often fallacious, that I think it's reasonable to conclude that he's just not good at this whole philosophy-shtick. His sophistry is accidental. But hey, at least he's not on the level of Jay Dyer.
Question 1 is pointless. What, exactly is a 'hard' atheist as opposed to an ordinary atheist. Question 2 is 'Should my belief ..... blah, blah, blah'. But as an atheist, I don't believe and there is no evidence. Question 3 is 'what is my evidence ... blah, blah, blah'. But it's not *about* my evidence. As the person asking the question, it's about yours. 'Heavy Hitters' when referred to apologists is like referring to over-ripe fruit as edible. Since his first three questions turned out to be drivel, why would anyone listen to three follow-ons with even less credibility?
Just once I wish I could see one titled: "Follow-ups to 3 Actual Responses from Atheists". I do find his second question an interesting one, because I wonder, if we began to find tangible evidence of something that fit the description of a conscious generator of our reality, would it ever be possible to reach a point where we'd classify it as divine in the sense that we think of it? Wouldn't we just endlessly classify it as aspects of our reality that we now have to deal with? In a sense, once something becomes a measurable part of our reality, we have to scrutinize it until we find ourselves living with it as part our world. This leads me to answer simply that "we'll just have to cross that bridge when and if we come to it" and leave it at that.
Here's my answers to these questions. 1) if were not being super pedantic about what it means to have "evidence" then my answer is just: yeah, sure. 2)Nope. Even if you could verify that the miracle happened, that gets you no closer to proving your god cause there's so many other potential answers like a different god, or magic, luck, or even a completely natural phenomenon that while extremely impressive doesn't require an extra dimensional being like the "miracle" of child birth. You still have all of your work ahead of you proving your god did it and not some other source of miracles. 3) Nope. I don't think that studying miracles gets you any closer to proving god for the above stated reasons, especially your god which comes with a lot of other claims that also need proof, but I actually have looked into miracle claims quite a lot and I often find that they are misattributed despite better explanations being available. For example there was once a woman from a church my aunt attends trying to convince me of god because she experienced a miracle, god saved her from a car crash, upon further exploration it turns out she was saved by the seat belt, air bags, paramedics that cut her out of the burning car, and the fact that the car that hit her struck the passenger side killing her younger sister who god decided not to save I guess. The point, most miracles claims that I hear are actually just people interpreting good things happening to them as divine intervention.
1. I don't know if beliefs "ought" to be proportioned to the evidence, but I do know that people believe stuff from a very very early age. The laws of physics and chemistry unfold for us humans through play long before we learn about them formally. I personally remember clearly my astonishment in college when I realized that chemists and physicists think that experiments are replicable - very little in my ramshackle, poverty-stricken life before that seemed to be replicable, from whether cakes burnt or came out raw from the oven, to whether an item of clothing would bleed color in the laundry (this was very long ago). Basically, I think that we all hold beliefs based on general life experience, but holding a belief that we have carefully examined, well, that's more rare. It seems like yes, I'd want to adjust all of my beliefs as I become aware of evidence. But no, I don't think that's particularly common. 2. A miracle and a god are not the same thing. If a miracle happened, and I was convinced it was not a fraud or illusion, I would not immediately assume it came from a god, let alone from a particular named god. Weird things could happen in a universe without a god. As DOAT says, they could be caused by our programmer messing with the code. Or they could be caused by a hitherto undiscovered strand of rogue magic. Or an alien messing with our minds to soften us up for takeover. I went to Catholic school back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and remember one of the nuns confiding that most of the saints in the Catholic hagiography were made up, but that it was the lesson of their made-up lives and the miracles therein that was the important thing, not the actually facticity. As a non-Catholic I found that understandable but it didn't do much to help along my rather desultory efforts to convert. I just couldn't. 3. As for miracle reports, I am not a scholar but I am a reader, and have read about all kinds of miracles that have happened throughout history that don't point to a Catholic god, but to various Buddhist, Native American, Ancient Egyptian, and etc. gods, let alone aliens. My Catholic friends who have reported to me that they prayed for a miracle and got it aren't particularly convincing either. In a natural disaster, if one person survives because they prayed, who is to say how many others died in spite of their prayers? My mother told me many harrowing tales of living in a war-torn country, and when I finally confronted her with the amount of narrow escapes she'd had, saying that it was kind of unbelievable, she pointed out that ALL of her stories had to end with her surviving. Otherwise she wouldn't have been around to tell them. Miraculous survival stories seem identical to me.
The only thing that a genuine miracle would confirm id that a miracle occurred. In order to attribute the miracle to a particular god, it would be necessary to demonstrate that the god did it as a verifiable cause. He is begging the question here since it is like verifying carts exist because horses exist.
I remain open to possibilities, but every single argument, excuse, and claim I’ve heard has had a simple real world explanation. Usually that the “miracle” was a scam. So far Magic is batting a clean zero.
The problem with this line of questioning is that he thinks the question regarding the existence of gods (or more specifically the particular god he believes in,) is such an important question that I should spend every waking minute of every day of my life, examining every miracle claim ever made. It's absurd, and only makes sense to someone who's entire life is wrapped up in religious fervor.
That was kinda silly. Unless we’re deeply involved in a particular field of study such that we need to consciously curb our biases… what is common knowledge about the subject acts as a reasonable expectation. That’s how most of us navigate life without extraordinary difficulty. I don’t need to do a deep dive into all the data about injuries sustained by people running across a busy highway to understand that it’s a bad idea to try. I have a reasonable expectation. A better 3rd question would be the old “what kind of miracle could convince you that a god exists. Given that a miracle must specifically suggest attribution to a god in order to be good evidence by any standard, the verified miracle would have to be some manner of self-described divine revelation… available to everyone… which cannot be misunderstood by anyone, regardless of language, contextual interpretation or any limitation of the capabilities of an observer. I’d probably expect a reality-breaking revelation like that to come from some agent which can break reality. I’d probably put tentative trust in this revelation.
Who here thinks for one second that Cameron would fail to present a verifiable miracle if he had one? A verifiable miracle would rapidly become more famous than any non-verifiable miracle, so the fact that no such miracle has come to our attention is strong evidence that no such thing exists, especially given the number of theistic apologists. Also, if God were willing and able to provide us with verifiable miracles, why would he stop at just one? If he were willing and able to perform one such miracle, it stands to reason that he would be willing and able to do more, given that he is said to want all men to be saved.
Hi Dark, I think you kind of skipped over a glaring flaw with the third question. It assumes that you answered "yes" to the second question, but you actually answered it with "not necessarily."
Did he really go that way? Once again we’re just trying to be polite to theists by entertaining their little stories and he’s like “if you believe we have a unique method to prove god you need to investigate!” It’s like when we say Jesus was a good moral teacher and they’re “checkmate! Liar lunatic or lord! He can’t be good or moral if he was lying or crazy, so you must believe he was lord!” And I’m like “dude I was only being polite he wasn’t a very good teacher at all.”
1. Yes. Beliefs ought to be proportioned by evidence. And no, that's not the ONLY reason to believe things. Ideally it would be, but we live in a big and complicated world in which it simply isn't practical to measure the evidence for each and every thing. Most of the time we believe things just because that's what we were told or it sounds right, and most of the time that's perfectly fine. For big, important things that actually have some degree of conflicting explanations though, you should always go with the evidence. 2. A miracle by definition would be proof of some sort of divinity, but that doesn't mean it's the Christian God. Maybe the miracle happened because a petitioner successfully filled out a Miracle Request Form 197083-B, and received one court-approved miraculous event from the Great Celestial Bureaucracy. IF it happened (which it so far has not, we should note every single time) then it would require SOME explanation, but not THAT explanation. 3. Any idiot can claim any ridiculous thing. It is not my responsibility to refute every single ridiculous claim in the world. If you want me to take YOUR claim seriously, make a serious claim and back it up with serious evidence.
Best is relative... but let's see: Admitted the first one is not that bad. Second is quite bad. The answer is obviously not (necessarily). Third is a horrible. Sad. Really sad.
11:40 Let be honest, even if those "miracles" were real that would have been some pretty lame and boring miracles no? I mean we're talking "creator of the universe" level here - he could teleport the earth into another solar system or create portals to other dimensions. But no, let's have weeping status instead...
Ive grown bored of debating whether a god exists. Tbh, it doesn't matter unless it has a bearing on life. Does believing in god make you a better person? No. Are intercessory prayers effective? No. Can god be used to achieve anything? No. If god shows his power through an extremely rare miracle once in a while, is this any help? Hardly: a brief intervention from a being beyond imaginable power is pretty rubbish, really. A properly powerful god would be undeniably existant. And he just isn't. That only leaves the threat of an afterlife. Afraid of torture in hell? Why? You have no nerve endings so you couldnt feel pain. Just an interminable existence where your ennui outlasts even the universe. God is irrelevant.
Apologists often suggest that enough weak evidence adds up to total proof - 'the plural of anecdote is data' - but to my mind, evidential weakness is qualitative, not quantative; if you sweep all of your rubbish into one big pile, it makes a big pile of rubbish, it doesn't magically transform into gold.
hm my inital thought here is theists seem to arrange the weak evidence rubble pieces in the shape of preconcieved bigger picture more often than not, kinda like a mosaic picture or collage and expect that the end result will be as prestine as a jigsaw puzzle in the end, but upon closer examination the individual rubble pieces are still rubbish
Yes, this is one of my big pet peeves, too. Lots of bad data does not equal 1 really good bit of data.
What the fuck is a theiet please explain @@SolitaryCore-mj2mr
"Here's a long line of zeroes."
"Okay, but they don't add up to one, do they?"
"But look at how many zeroes there are!"
Rubbish would work better than their arguments, as if one had a large enough mass (yes, I know, an unfeasibly large mass), it might then start a fusion process and stellar nucleosynthesis might produce something useful.
I wager Cameron didn't investigate all 4500+ religions of human history before calling them fake. Weird.
I'd bet Cam didn't bother to do anything more than learn the name of 0.001% of the 4,500+ religions. He shouldn't have to since he knows what the "true religion" is so he evangelizes to others and they've never been able to change his mind. That means his beliefs are the truest of the true.™
There's approximately 4,000 deities worshipped today, not even counting prior pantheons.
Plus, modern Christianity has approximately 45,000 denominations practiced today, which excludes the various _so-called_ *_heresies_* that were stamped out* in the last two millennia.
*Stamped out is just a polite way of saying that hundreds to thousands of people were tortured** and/or executed for daring to worship the same god, differently.
**For a religion that is so notoriously opposed to butt stuff, they sure used a lot of arsehole specific torture devices.
This isn't a series of questions, it's a presuppositionalist syllogism phrased in the form of a series of questions, because this smug mofo thinks he's clever.
My favourite "miracle" was a weeping statue in India - which turned out to be a leaking toilet upstairs.
The guy who revealed it had to leave the country as he was charged under India's rather offensive blasphemy laws.
People were drinking the "tears" by the way - with all the negative health effects you'd expect
It's blasphemy to just tell the truth😂! Maybe he should have just quietly fixed the toilet so those Indians wouldn't be drinking their own excrement🤣!
I liked the oil bible where the owner of the bible was also know to buy large quantities of mineral oil in another town.
@@IanM-id8or They'd rather have people drinking their own excrement than know the truth. That's just sad.
I am curious: how does Cameron know that there’s millions of miracle claims? Did he count them? And how many of those “millions” of miracles has Cameron investigated?
Does Cameron believe werewolves exist? Has he investigated all (I won't suggest it's millions) of the reports of werewolves?
And does he know how many of those miracle claims are non-christian?
I predicted to myself that the third claim would involve a shift of the burden of proof. Miraculously, that is exactly what Cameron did.
As a dentist, I very much deal with the issue of evidence-based treatment on a daily basis. Doing randomized clinical trials in dentistry is extremely difficult for a whole range of reasons, both patient and dentist based. It’s why one can get so many different opinions on what treatment should be done.
Thx for a new Video. Always makes my day a bit better
LOL ! D.O.A.T, you broke me down with this thumbnail, you made my day.
I was so worried that no one would appreciate it! ^_^
@@darkofalltrades Thank you. I appreciate good humor in thumbnail form, and you're the best ! Also, I'm staying tuned for your next video ! 😊😊😊😊😊😊😊
"How many claims have I investigated" is a weird question when there's a much easier question just sitting there: "how many claims have been investigated by many experts in their fields and found by consensus to be miraculous?" In other words, why should it be me specifically when there's whole crowds of people whose collective investigation would be much more compelling?
Last one was me missing the new outro nice choice
Capturing Christianity is a heavy hitter?!? Really? ROFL
You mean, like William Lane Craig is an "intellectual"?
Are there any real intellectuals left on the side of christianity?
Well, the bar is pretty low. But Cameron here (unlike WLC, probably the most overrated one in the field) isn't really one of the ones who comes across sounding dumb even compared to other apologists.
That just means he's a featherweight among bantam- and flyweights.
You don't have to investigate miracles the same way you don't have to eat a sh!t sandwich to know how it will taste!
So his best is just shifting the burden of proof
I feel like Cameron is unsure about his faith. He is probably asking these questions for himself and wants to hear from others.
Question 1: yes and yes.
Question 2: the Christian god, no. It would take a lot more than a single miracle. A deity in general? Again, no. It could be a supernatural entity that isn't a god.
Question 3: I've looked into only a handful that apologists have brought up as good examples, and they've all been bad. So if the BEST miracles are bad, there's no need for me to look at the rest.
2:12 LOL no, Cameron’s apologetics are the exact same crap as the “amateurs.
Asking skeptics to personally investigate every miracle claim in order to doubt them is like asking why you don't believe in wendigos if you haven't personally investigated every wendigo story on reddit.
Question #1: I don't have beliefs. Something is true, not true, or unknown. None of that requires belief.
Question #2: If something happens that we cannot explain, we might call that a miracle. That does not mean a god of any type exists. It means the means are unknown.
Question #3: A worthless question.
It's not about the truth of a given proposition but about your mental states. Broadly speaking, the word is used to describe what you hold to be true (which includes things that are true and things about which you are mistaken).
Those were my answers …. 😡
I would like to add to your second answer that if something un-explainable is happening we do what all good “scientist” so - start researching, do observations, collecting data and start doing analysis, formulating hypothesis and finally publish a theory.
Personal relationships are often based on faith and trust more than hard facts. And it leads us to broken hearts and disappointment. But also great enjoyment and fun.
Cameron comes off as honest, but...he actually isn't.
Liked for that Rickroll from left field.
I don't know, it kinda let me down.
I think Cameron - while coming off as dishonest - just doesn't understand the stuff he talks about. He has simply memorized it. The syllogisms he presents are so often fallacious, that I think it's reasonable to conclude that he's just not good at this whole philosophy-shtick. His sophistry is accidental. But hey, at least he's not on the level of Jay Dyer.
Question 1 is pointless. What, exactly is a 'hard' atheist as opposed to an ordinary atheist. Question 2 is 'Should my belief ..... blah, blah, blah'. But as an atheist, I don't believe and there is no evidence. Question 3 is 'what is my evidence ... blah, blah, blah'. But it's not *about* my evidence. As the person asking the question, it's about yours.
'Heavy Hitters' when referred to apologists is like referring to over-ripe fruit as edible. Since his first three questions turned out to be drivel, why would anyone listen to three follow-ons with even less credibility?
"Hard atheist" probably means "atheist believing that no gods exist". Compared to "soft atheist" as "atheist not believing that a god does exist".
Just once I wish I could see one titled: "Follow-ups to 3 Actual Responses from Atheists".
I do find his second question an interesting one, because I wonder, if we began to find tangible evidence of something that fit the description of a conscious generator of our reality, would it ever be possible to reach a point where we'd classify it as divine in the sense that we think of it? Wouldn't we just endlessly classify it as aspects of our reality that we now have to deal with?
In a sense, once something becomes a measurable part of our reality, we have to scrutinize it until we find ourselves living with it as part our world. This leads me to answer simply that "we'll just have to cross that bridge when and if we come to it" and leave it at that.
Here's my answers to these questions.
1) if were not being super pedantic about what it means to have "evidence" then my answer is just: yeah, sure.
2)Nope. Even if you could verify that the miracle happened, that gets you no closer to proving your god cause there's so many other potential answers like a different god, or magic, luck, or even a completely natural phenomenon that while extremely impressive doesn't require an extra dimensional being like the "miracle" of child birth. You still have all of your work ahead of you proving your god did it and not some other source of miracles.
3) Nope. I don't think that studying miracles gets you any closer to proving god for the above stated reasons, especially your god which comes with a lot of other claims that also need proof, but I actually have looked into miracle claims quite a lot and I often find that they are misattributed despite better explanations being available. For example there was once a woman from a church my aunt attends trying to convince me of god because she experienced a miracle, god saved her from a car crash, upon further exploration it turns out she was saved by the seat belt, air bags, paramedics that cut her out of the burning car, and the fact that the car that hit her struck the passenger side killing her younger sister who god decided not to save I guess.
The point, most miracles claims that I hear are actually just people interpreting good things happening to them as divine intervention.
1. I don't know if beliefs "ought" to be proportioned to the evidence, but I do know that people believe stuff from a very very early age. The laws of physics and chemistry unfold for us humans through play long before we learn about them formally. I personally remember clearly my astonishment in college when I realized that chemists and physicists think that experiments are replicable - very little in my ramshackle, poverty-stricken life before that seemed to be replicable, from whether cakes burnt or came out raw from the oven, to whether an item of clothing would bleed color in the laundry (this was very long ago). Basically, I think that we all hold beliefs based on general life experience, but holding a belief that we have carefully examined, well, that's more rare. It seems like yes, I'd want to adjust all of my beliefs as I become aware of evidence. But no, I don't think that's particularly common. 2. A miracle and a god are not the same thing. If a miracle happened, and I was convinced it was not a fraud or illusion, I would not immediately assume it came from a god, let alone from a particular named god. Weird things could happen in a universe without a god. As DOAT says, they could be caused by our programmer messing with the code. Or they could be caused by a hitherto undiscovered strand of rogue magic. Or an alien messing with our minds to soften us up for takeover. I went to Catholic school back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, and remember one of the nuns confiding that most of the saints in the Catholic hagiography were made up, but that it was the lesson of their made-up lives and the miracles therein that was the important thing, not the actually facticity. As a non-Catholic I found that understandable but it didn't do much to help along my rather desultory efforts to convert. I just couldn't. 3. As for miracle reports, I am not a scholar but I am a reader, and have read about all kinds of miracles that have happened throughout history that don't point to a Catholic god, but to various Buddhist, Native American, Ancient Egyptian, and etc. gods, let alone aliens. My Catholic friends who have reported to me that they prayed for a miracle and got it aren't particularly convincing either. In a natural disaster, if one person survives because they prayed, who is to say how many others died in spite of their prayers? My mother told me many harrowing tales of living in a war-torn country, and when I finally confronted her with the amount of narrow escapes she'd had, saying that it was kind of unbelievable, she pointed out that ALL of her stories had to end with her surviving. Otherwise she wouldn't have been around to tell them. Miraculous survival stories seem identical to me.
The only thing that a genuine miracle would confirm id that a miracle occurred. In order to attribute the miracle to a particular god, it would be necessary to demonstrate that the god did it as a verifiable cause. He is begging the question here since it is like verifying carts exist because horses exist.
I remain open to possibilities, but every single argument, excuse, and claim I’ve heard has had a simple real world explanation. Usually that the “miracle” was a scam. So far Magic is batting a clean zero.
The problem with this line of questioning is that he thinks the question regarding the existence of gods (or more specifically the particular god he believes in,) is such an important question that I should spend every waking minute of every day of my life, examining every miracle claim ever made. It's absurd, and only makes sense to someone who's entire life is wrapped up in religious fervor.
That was kinda silly.
Unless we’re deeply involved in a particular field of study such that we need to consciously curb our biases… what is common knowledge about the subject acts as a reasonable expectation.
That’s how most of us navigate life without extraordinary difficulty.
I don’t need to do a deep dive into all the data about injuries sustained by people running across a busy highway to understand that it’s a bad idea to try. I have a reasonable expectation.
A better 3rd question would be the old “what kind of miracle could convince you that a god exists.
Given that a miracle must specifically suggest attribution to a god in order to be good evidence by any standard, the verified miracle would have to be some manner of self-described divine revelation… available to everyone… which cannot be misunderstood by anyone, regardless of language, contextual interpretation or any limitation of the capabilities of an observer. I’d probably expect a reality-breaking revelation like that to come from some agent which can break reality. I’d probably put tentative trust in this revelation.
Who here thinks for one second that Cameron would fail to present a verifiable miracle if he had one? A verifiable miracle would rapidly become more famous than any non-verifiable miracle, so the fact that no such miracle has come to our attention is strong evidence that no such thing exists, especially given the number of theistic apologists. Also, if God were willing and able to provide us with verifiable miracles, why would he stop at just one? If he were willing and able to perform one such miracle, it stands to reason that he would be willing and able to do more, given that he is said to want all men to be saved.
Hi Dark, I think you kind of skipped over a glaring flaw with the third question. It assumes that you answered "yes" to the second question, but you actually answered it with "not necessarily."
More polished? Mythbusters did prove you can polish a turd. Cameron proved it here on YT too.
I've enjoyed looking up dozens of miracle claims. The claims (& evidence) vary between questionable & laughable.
Cameron, honest ? Yeah... No.
Did he really go that way? Once again we’re just trying to be polite to theists by entertaining their little stories and he’s like “if you believe we have a unique method to prove god you need to investigate!”
It’s like when we say Jesus was a good moral teacher and they’re “checkmate! Liar lunatic or lord! He can’t be good or moral if he was lying or crazy, so you must believe he was lord!” And I’m like “dude I was only being polite he wasn’t a very good teacher at all.”
1. Yes. Beliefs ought to be proportioned by evidence. And no, that's not the ONLY reason to believe things. Ideally it would be, but we live in a big and complicated world in which it simply isn't practical to measure the evidence for each and every thing. Most of the time we believe things just because that's what we were told or it sounds right, and most of the time that's perfectly fine. For big, important things that actually have some degree of conflicting explanations though, you should always go with the evidence.
2. A miracle by definition would be proof of some sort of divinity, but that doesn't mean it's the Christian God. Maybe the miracle happened because a petitioner successfully filled out a Miracle Request Form 197083-B, and received one court-approved miraculous event from the Great Celestial Bureaucracy. IF it happened (which it so far has not, we should note every single time) then it would require SOME explanation, but not THAT explanation.
3. Any idiot can claim any ridiculous thing. It is not my responsibility to refute every single ridiculous claim in the world. If you want me to take YOUR claim seriously, make a serious claim and back it up with serious evidence.
Best is relative... but let's see:
Admitted the first one is not that bad.
Second is quite bad. The answer is obviously not (necessarily).
Third is a horrible. Sad. Really sad.
You calling Bertuzzi a heavy hitter demonstrates very clearly that charity is not unique to the religious.
11:40 Let be honest, even if those "miracles" were real that would have been some pretty lame and boring miracles no?
I mean we're talking "creator of the universe" level here - he could teleport the earth into another solar system or create portals to other dimensions. But no, let's have weeping status instead...
Ive grown bored of debating whether a god exists. Tbh, it doesn't matter unless it has a bearing on life. Does believing in god make you a better person? No. Are intercessory prayers effective? No. Can god be used to achieve anything? No. If god shows his power through an extremely rare miracle once in a while, is this any help? Hardly: a brief intervention from a being beyond imaginable power is pretty rubbish, really. A properly powerful god would be undeniably existant. And he just isn't. That only leaves the threat of an afterlife. Afraid of torture in hell? Why? You have no nerve endings so you couldnt feel pain. Just an interminable existence where your ennui outlasts even the universe.
God is irrelevant.