[legacynl]

(If you're an atheist) You shouldn't debate theology with religious people. The whole idea of religion is that they 'believe' despite their experiences, facts, reasoning and logic. There's literally nothing to gain from using logic and reasoning to debate religious people.

edit: also the article is sarcastic. You shouldn't retreat into yourself just because you cannot agree on something. Talk about something else.

[NateEag]

Some religious people believe because of their experiences.

See the (very rare, statistically) experiencers of spontaneous remissions the Catholic Church declares miraculous healings, such as Dafne Gutierrez:

https://catholic-miracles.com/miracle/charbel-makhlouf-dafne...

I'm not personally sure that's a supernatural event, but if I'd had my eyes deteriorating for years, undergone multiple failed surgeries to stave off blindness, become fully blind, had doctors tell me I was irrepairably blind, and lived without eyesight for years, then had it come back within two days of praying to a Catholic saint for healing...

Well, I doubt I'd still be agnostic after that.

[legacynl]

> Well, I doubt I'd still be agnostic after that.

To me that doesn't follow logically. What if instead of praying to some saint, they found their lucky underwear that they lost when they were a child, and wore that for the first time again? Would that proof that the lucky underwear was somehow instrumental in fixing their eyes?

Apparently the body was able to heal her own eyes, and it would have happened if she prayed to the saint or not.

[NateEag]

> Would that proof that the lucky underwear was somehow instrumental in fixing their eyes?

No, obviously not, as there's no reason to believe the underwear are sentient.

Rapidly getting what you ask for, when experts have generally agreed it's impossible, would be very striking.

> Apparently the body was able to heal her own eyes

There's no more evidence for that claim than there is for the claim that a saint did it.

Indeed, the fact that medical personnel say "This does not happen" is arguably evidence against the "it was a natural coincidence" interpretation.

I don't mean to suggest that anyone experiencing such a healing should or would necessarily become religious.

I'm just saying that personally, given my other life experiences this far, I probably would ratchet my probability of there being some unnatural power capable of intervening in the universe from ~55% to 90%, if I experienced sudden, dramatic healing of incurable blindness promptly after praying for it.

And, returning to my original point, there are people out there who asked for something vanishingly rare to the point that some experts label it impossible, then get it quite rapidly after praying for it.

That's a fairly reasonable reason to believe in a personal God of some sort, even if it's not the only plausible explanation.

[hootz]

How can there be nothing to gain, when discussions around the subject helped convince me about atheism? I was born catholic and my family is catholic. If no one talked about it, I'd probably still be going to mass every sunday.