Ep 300: Dialogue | Street Knowledge | Michael | God Exists/False Prophecy

Recorded: 22 July 2018 Published: 22 July 2018 Released: 29 November 2018 Watch video of talk here: https://youtu.be/bWOkfEBnOF4 The tables get turned in this one, with Michael asking me what I believe in after we talked for a few minutes about his beliefs. How do we talk with other people about their beliefs while being honest about our own? Michael believes God exists because of an experience he had where he prayed for God to reveal himself, and then a song played that was just the song he felt he needed at that moment in his life. He attributes this to God, so we talk about that, as well as the possibility that such an experience is due to mere coincidence, and how we might distinguish between these two possibilities. Michael shows a high degree of doxastic closure, so we also discuss what might change his mind. After talking about what be believes for a few minutes, he then asks me if I believe in God. So I get to answer some of his questions related to my non-belief in God, which deals with the authority of the Bible and alleged false prophecies. Notes on our conversation: I made a mistake at one point in the conversation by interpreting him as saying that an event is never due to coincidence. He didn’t quite say that. Rather, he identified a method for determining whether or not an event is due to coincidence. I should have explored more what that method is, and how he applied it in determining that his experience was not coincidence. How do we distinguish between coincidence and a divine event? What characteristics does a divine event have that a coincidence doesn’t? When asked how he knows that something isn’t a coincidence, he appealed to his knowledge of Scripture. So it seems like the Bible is an important part of his foundation, and exploring why he has this as his foundation would have been interesting. What is it about the Bible that he sees as authoritative? How does he know that it is a solid foundation upon which to build knowledge? **MISSED OPPORTUNITY**: I feel like I ended the interview at a bad place, right where he appealed to faith. When he said, “If you have a faith like mine in God, you would easily see that it is real”, I should have asked him what it is about his faith that allows him to distinguish truth. I find that when I review my interviews a lot of times, I find a point in the dialogue where I could have dug deeper, and this was definitely one of those missed opportunities. His comment at the end would have been a perfect segue-way into discussing the reliability of faith. One thing I love about this interview was the opportunity to be asked questions myself, and for him to probe the reasons why I do not believe in God. I appreciated that, but also how, after explaining some of my views, it came back around to the all-important “how”. How did he arrive at his interpretation of Scripture? A lot of times Street Epistemology deals with how faith works as an epistemology. But here I got to experiment with how literary interpretation works as an epistemology—how someone handles the Bible, and whether or not the methods they used to arrive at their conclusion are reliable. A lot of the instructional material in this interview on how to conduct Street Epistemology came from The Complete Street Epistemology Guide, which you can find at the Street Epistemology website: https://streetepistemology.com/publications/the_complete_se_guide Link to Raul's 'Street Knowledge' YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRzxNyqE-FHUq7DozWh8sgg Raul on Twitter: twitter.com/strknowledge Music provided by Chet Hovatter.