Well, what do you expect? That's "incontrovertible evidence", isn't it? Isn't that what skeptics claim to need?
Not at all. Skeptics simply need evidence.... they're perfectly capable of judging for themselves the reliability, relevance, and weight to place on any particular piece of evidence. It need not be incontrovertible, although that would be nice.
The problem is that a lot of what is presented as "evidence" is at best not especially convincing.
For example:
What, you want me to accept the testimony of people who reject religion over those who accept it? I've already done that, and have accepted that of the religious side.
That's one of the problems with testimony, as scholars of psychology have long known. Different people will say different things and be
utterly convinced themelves of the truth of what they're saying, even when there's clear ("incontrovertible") evidence that they are, in fact, wrong. The "Did you see the gorilla" experiment is only one member of a long line of such experiments, but I would point it to you.
The further problem with religious "testimony" is that, in general, it's hearsay. You don't have a chance to actually examine St. Paul's beliefs, or even to confirm that he actually wrote all the things attributed to him. We have enough evidence from
other historical writings that people will present all sorts of gibberish in the belief that they're true -- Geoffrey of Monmouth, for example, and his
History of the Kings of Britain is a good example. As far as we can tell, he genuinely believed the fairy tales that he wrote.
I've already given some examples of evidence -- granted, not incontrovertible evidence, but pretty strong evidence -- that the Christian faith as commonly and superficially presented is wrong.
From post #109, this thread:
A simple example: one of the articles of faith in the Christian Church is the Sermon on the Mount (from the Book of Matthew). I quote briefly in part : "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened."
Now, that's pretty explicit -- "everyone that asketh receiveth." Furthermore, those are the words of Christ himself, not a later interpretation by some nutcase Paul-come-lately.
Well, I've asked. And I've not received. In fact, a whole lot of people have asked, and they haven't received either. We could even (if we liked) do a controlled experiment, for example, where we asked God to heal one group of people in a hospital, and didn't ask God to heal another group of people, and see whether we "received" the gift of divine healing. Whups -- we've already done that experiment, and the answer is "they don't."
We could look at the infant mortality rate for clergymen (who can be presumed to "ask" for the health and welfare of their children) versus the general public, and see if clergy "recieve" the gift of having their children not die as often. Or rather, we've done that experiment, too, again with negative results.
So evidence tells me that the statement "everyone that asketh receiveth" is simply untrue, by observation. ...
Now, as far as I could tell, you never actually responded to this argument or evidence. I therefore repeat it and ask what you consider to be wrong. You can't simply write it off by saying "well, it's drkitten's testimony, and I don't accept it," because most of the statements that I make can be independently validated (that's part of what makes good evidence; you can check it for yourself).
Did I misquote from Matthew? You've got access to a Bible, look it up. Your Biblical scholarship may be sufficiently better than mine that you can read the original Greek, and point out that I'm actually misinterpreting the passage, and that it
really says something more like "some people who ask will receive."
Did I misrepresent the child mortality data? The original experiment (and data) are from Francis Galton in the mid 1800s, and perhaps he made some mistakes in how he treated the data (I don't believe so, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise). One can also simply repeat the experiment using data from other times and places; the US Census is great for that. If you can show that Galton's data is wildly out of expectation with what that study should have shown, then Galton's data isn't very credible.
But you can't simply dismiss it out of hand. Or rather, not if you want to retain a shred of credibiliity yourself.
And conversely, what
evidence do you have
for Christianity? We've already established that personal testimony means little or nothing. What else do you have?
