henry quirk wrote:"a very powerful, telling relation to the evidence"
Indeed! Care to pony some up? George Burns, perhaps, over coffee?
#
You've got coffee? Count me in.
Seriously, though...that's one of the interesting things about the Atheist/Theist debate: both sides show total bafflement about the other side's response to the available evidence. The problem, I think, is not that there is *no* evidence, nor that all sides have access to *complete* evidence; but that such evidence as there is, is, for most people,
equivocal.
By that, I mean that the evidence is such that each side can interpret it according to its lights. The willingness to see the evidence AS evidence is crucial. So, for example, the Atheist looks at the natural world and says, "I see only pitiless, blind chance." The Theist looks at precisely the same natural world, and says, "How can you not see the gracious provision of God?" Or again, the Atheist says, "I have no experience of God." The Theist then says, "But I do." Yet even then, the problem remains that the Theist's personal experience, no matter how compelling it may be as proof to him, is not available to the Atheist, who would have to have *his own* experience before it could constitute any evidence
for him.
Evidence, then, is determined by the willingness of the recipient to consider it on its merits AS EVIDENCE. For Newton, a falling apple constituted evidence for gravity, we are (apocryphally) told; but had any other person been sitting under that tree -- John Doe or Joe Lunchbucket, if you will -- the apple would not have constituted evidence for anything more than the inadvisability of sitting under trees. Newton's aptitude for considering the falling of the apple
as evidence for something made all the difference between an important scientific discovery and a mere headache.
So we choose what evidence we are prepared to see.
I submit to you, Henry, that all this is not by accident. I submit to you that God wants those who wish to know Him to know Him, and those who are uninterested in such a relationship with God to find nothing at all. For God, I believe, is the kind of God who loves a sincere inquirer, and thus obliges all who come to know Him to be -- first of all -- sincere in their searching. He seems not to have much interest in being known to those who want to see Him merely as a sort of external fact to which they stand in no particular relation.
God does not delight to make himself the mere subject of academic study, just as He cares nothing for cynical challenges, if such there be. He seems to want to provoke a genuine relationship; and openness to Him will, of course, be the first requirement of any such relationship. So we must decide what we will accept
as evidence, and our answer will determine what is there for us to see.
