Week 3, How can we be sure of our faith?
A fair bit to write about this and I'm adding a little bonus at the end...


Part 1: The video
Gumbel again gets going with a nice little anecdote about how he met the woman who would be his wife at university and how exciting relationships are.
I'm sure you can all see what's coming.
"Relationships are great, and Christianity is a relationship with God" I'm paraphrasing here but that was the gist of the anecdote.


Gumbel tells us that he knows we can receive eternal life and that Christians can be confident on it because of the Bible, and that faith is based on facts not feelings, what these facts are however goes unmentioned (see my previous posts for exactly what I think of Jesus's existence). We're told that God reveals himself to those who have faith, my first thought about this is Ray Comfort's argument that "If you sincerely hit your knees and ask God to reveal himself he will do". When you do this and he doesn't however the usual response is "You weren't sincere enough". So it can be boiled down to if you already believe in him then you will see God everywhere. Although this argument can be equally applied to any religion.


The Bible verse Revelation 3:20 is read and a reference to the painter Holman Hunt and how he left off the handle on the outside of the door when he painted The Light of the World. Hunt's reasoning was that the handle was on the inside and you have to let Jesus into your life, he won't force himself in.

Looking back to a previous presentation Gumbel asks "How do we know that Jesus was resurrected?" in a spectacular fit of circular reasoning he says "We know he raised from the dead because God raised him from the dead". Sitting there totally stunned by the logical fallacy, reading through my notes there is a blank patch where I just stopped to consider if I actually just heard that.


Back to the relationship we are told that Gumbel knows he was married because he has his marriage certificate, if someone came to you with only a marriage certificate and claimed to be married you might believe him, if the name of the wife was Angelina Jolie and they were married on the Moon you would want a little more evidence though. The marriage certificate alone is insufficient evidence to claim that he is currently married, he has more evidence than that though, he can introduce us to his wife and to the witnesses at the marriage, now honestly answer me if you can do the same with Jesus?


Moving on to what faith is, Gumbel defines faith a trust, in a way it is. You have faith that when you are driving along someone isn't going to come off the other side of the road and smash into you head first. Well is it really the same? or do we have evidence that people won't do this since it has not happened in our experience and we can put ourself in their position and recognise that if they do smash into us it would be bad for both parties so they won't, can faith that something won't happen based on experience, and the faith that something exists based on a religious experience? I have never doubted the strength of religious experiences, but whether these experiences are supernatural or purely psychological (such as the placebo effect) is the right question to ask.


Gumbel asserts that people's characters are changed when they become Christians and they become better people, my only thought being that the same can be said for all religions. Gumbel asserts that Christianity is a step of faith based on evidence, and that Jesus is here tonight.
And with that the video ends.
The leader of the group shares with us the stories of Nicky Cruz, David Wilkerson and the Mau-Maus, a nice little story I suggest everyone look up, my only question is could the same be achieved with purely secular means?


Part 2: The discussion:
Mary leads the discussion group again first considering what faith is, my definition is believing something without evidence, however I thought stating this would not be best.
The definition that most people agree to is any religious belief is classed as faith. I ask how they can differentiate their faith from that of the other religions. They answer that when they pray God answers them. An example is given that they thank God for everything when something goes right in their life (my thoughts on this are if you thank God for success you should blame him for failure, but this is kept to myself) Jane (another pseudonym, I'm running out of female biblical names now) says that she prayed before her driving test and thanked him when she passed, of course the systematic failure of prayer is well documented. I add that "If you pray for help before an exam, that's technically cheating" another member justifies it as "using the resources available" the inner monologue starts up with "if you can just pray why revise?" but this is kept internal.
Mary then asks if people are changed for the better when they join Christianity, among the many thoughts I have on the matter; which denomination, how do we judge better etc. The best response seemed to be "can any religion change your character?" The question goes unanswered.
The assertion that other religions aren't relationships is brought up, and that with the facts we have their faith is not based on feelings. I ask if your faith is based on the relationship, are relationships not based on feelings? The question is dodged, again...
Unfortunately this was a shorter session so we were signalled that we were out of time and after thanking Mary and everyone else I head off.

BONUS! Is there anybody there?
It seems the local CU are in overdrive this week, due to being on a busy course I cannot attend the majority of these events however this one seemed interesting.

As I sat down in the coffee shop I begin to read a booklet called "Has science disproved God", being initially open minded I am thoroughly disappointed by the blatant straw men and false dichotomies (one example being that Naturalism is the belief that only matter and chance exist).
It starts with the fine tuning 'argument', if we changed law X by amount Y everything would change and life would be impossible...
Well this argument assumes that the laws could be different, and can be summed up by the statement "If things were different, things would be different". Well great deduction there Sherlock! (I am well known for my immense sarcasm at times), the booklet then says that scientists thought of the multiverse in an attempt to explain this without using God since science is biased against God, all of you should know this is rubbish.
What the Argument from Fine Tuning/Design/Anthropic Principle/Teleological Argument fails to note is that about 95% of the universe is dark matter/dark energy the problem with the fine tuning should be obvious know, that 5% includes all the stars, gas clouds, galaxies etc. The Carl Sagan quote that "The cosmos is all there is, all there was and all there ever will be" is mentioned and used as evidence that science is biased against supernatural claims.
Science is biased against supernatural claims since there is no evidence that anything supernatural exists. Since the universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space. So by definition anything outside the universe is outside everything that exists, therefore does not exist. The problem with the fine tuning argument is that the universe is not fine tuned at all, there are places of the universe that will kill us INSTANTLY, there are predators, pathogens and particles that can easily kill us, we are on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy that will obviously be catastrophic, the sun will die out and expand engulfing the Earth, sticking to Earth the majority of it is uninhabitable, we have to modify the environment so we can survive there. There is so much more I could type but I will leave you to find the many other objections yourselves.

The video begins, with low expectations after the booklet my hopes are not high.
The usual things are mentioned, how free will cannot be explained if we are "Just genetic survival machines" and therefore must have come from a God, blatant argument from ignorance.
It is said again that we cannot be just meat machines since we have thoughts, and no computers today have thoughts therefore we must be more than just matter and energy. If we are determined by solely our genes we cannot have free will etc.
We are not determined only by our genes, we are the sum of our experiences, we know how memory works, we know that our thoughts are affected by our memories and our thoughts inform our actions. This fact is somehow omitted. The false dichotomy of either A: We are determined solely by our genes, or B: There is more to the brain than just matter and energy, is set up now.
The question is then asked, one I saw coming a LONG time ago, of where do we get out morals? And that right and wrong/good and evil have to come from a God so atheists cannot say anything is right or wrong.
Can't we? My morals come from a variety of things, mainly an understanding of the consequences of my actions but also from the empathy I feel to all other human beings. The example of Oskar Schindler is used, how he risked his life to save Jews at the hands of the Nazi's and how this could not be explained by evolution or genetics alone. I make the case that this could be down to empathy again. You can see when other people, and indeed other organisms, are suffering, you know how it feels to suffer maybe not as much as they do but you can imagine. You know that if you were in that position you would want help. I compare this to me getting up and punching someone, other people would get up to stop me because they know/can imagine how bad it feels to be punched. The speaker asks whether the Nazi's felt empathy for the Jews, I referenced the Milgram Experiment about how people will submit to authority (just following orders), which I recommend everyone reads about.

It is stated that emergence is a problem for evolution, particularly the emergence of conscience/the mind. It depends on how we define those terms, the mind is just a term for what the brain does, and conscience is our own perception of what our brain does. We know that if we knock out certain parts of the brain certain functions of the mind/conscience will be affected. for instance in a stroke, the part of the brain that is affected shuts down in a way, Jill Bolte Taylor explains it much better than me here.


In the booklet there is the statement that "Science explains what/how but religion explains why". To me this one of the most ridiculous statements ever, it is just a word game. Both are attempting to answer questions about what is. There is either something there or there isn't, if there is something there then there is something you can examine. I'm not saying that things we can't examine do not exist but burden of proof lays with the claimant, if I claim X exists then I have to be able to provide evidence, it is similar to the Dragon in my garage. After a discussion with the speaker, which is just us going around in circles about morality, I thank him for the talk and head home.

Thank you for reading guys, let me know what you think in the comments.
I would like to leave you with this.