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People always seem to conflate the experience of something with a theory about something...
Assuming that Bill & Janet are not lying, they clearly had an experience of seeing someone sitting on their sofa reciting bible quotes
Assuming that Bill & Janet are not lying, they clearly have a theory that this experience involved Jesus Christ showing up ...
2
The version of the Cosmological Argument you present is a caricature that no significant philosopher ever defended. This isn't your fault. The version you describe is basically the version that is presented in most modern books and classrooms; it is what most modern philosophy professors think is the cosmological argument, but it isn't a serious argument ...
2
The above answers are all good and informative, but none of them seems to answer the question--at least not the question as I understand it. Here is how logicism helped the empricists:
Both rationalists and empiricists agree that deductive logic is a sound basis for reasoning about anything. Where they differ is in whether the human mind comes with a special ...
1
Supernatural claims have evidence against them from the outset of the claim these days. We have seen the history of many similar claims never having been proven. Ever since Thales and the birth of science, deity based explanations for things have been shrinking. Science has never been overturned by a supernatural explanation, whereas the reverse happens ...
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‘Good’ science treats all claims equally: if the claim can be proven to be correct then our understanding of science is enlarged or refined to accommodate it. The vast majority of observations fit in with existing knowledge and will receive little scrutiny, while those that don’t fit are scrutinised carefully to see what can be learned.
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Theories are human-crafted descriptions which are approximations of reality. Reality is under no obligation to change in any way based on our descriptions of it.
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The possibility that something causes itself should be excluded as a cause would need to exist first before it could cause anything. This would apply also to the notion of creation.
The idea that A causes B is essentially ordinary physical causality, which is irrelevant here.
Thus, the notion of cause should be further specified as A causes B to exist, i.e., ...
1
There are many recorded cases where the logic of this example applies. One famous case, which became known as "the ladies of the Trianon" involved two ladies who claimed to have somehow visited the gardens of the Trianon, Versailles in the time of Marie Anotinette. In 1911 they published their account as An Adventure under the pseudonyms of ...
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