Philosophy Fridays: Is Believing God Acted, Without Evidence, Justified?

[Rey Reynoso]

Every now and then, on a Friday, I'll step into the deep waters of Philosophy, ramble on about some idea and maybe even interact with something I might be reading. Most of the time, a real philosopher could probably read my drivel and offer a corrective—but for now I'll speak from ignorance. After all, it is Friday; what better way to have fun than with philosophy. In this post I'll follow up a previous questionwith answering this question: "Can you be justified in believing God acted in history if you lack evidence or even an argument for the best inference of the evidence?”

The rest is at the Bible Archive which expands on these points:

• People don't normally need evidence or arguments to be justified in most beliefs.

• The slogan “extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence” doesn’t make sense on several levels:.

1. Extraordinary is arbitrarily defined.
2. Extraordinary is a moving goal post.
3. It forces us to ignore almost any event.
4. Extraordinary is hard to apply to God

[Damian]

Just a random (and perhaps totally unrelated!) thought; if faith is assent to propositions based on the testimony of others, then virtually all the knowledge of every person (including secular minds) is the product of faith.  Everything we learn in school is based on the testimony of the teacher, the text book author, etc.  Yet the secular mind is opposed to testimony from a Being who is "The Good".

"Extraordinary events" - Such as the "Big Bang", truly that must be considered an "extraordinary event".  Most secularists will assume the correctness of this theory based on the testimony of a scientist and his/her "observations" of events that he/she did not actually observe.