Monday, November 22, 2010

The growth of Christianity

I'll go ahead and grant that it's rational for Christians to believe that the explosive growth of their religion is best explained by Godly inspiration holds if the following is true (this bit was shamelessly stolen from Cartesian in a thread on Common Sense Atheism).

Given two competing explanations X and Y where Y is purely non-agential and naturalistic, every subject S should accept Y unless she knows that the entities involved in X exist and could/would act in the way described by X.

Christians have some reason to think X exists so it appears that they have reason to accept God as an explanation for the growth of Christianity. However, I see a couple problems with this line of thought.

Given mutually incompatible deities and several instances of events that have the features of X as described above it's plausible that each support the existence of their respective deities. But there can in fact be only one God. So if we attempt to say that a given instance of X truly demonstrates a deity when only one can exist then we're forced to deny that every other instance of X is accurate. Therefore since trusting events with the features of X lead us to mutually incompatible beliefs and no way to choose between them it does not appear that it's a good principle to use.

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