If everything is probabilistic, I feel like that should give “belief” more elbow room when hard, empirical evidence is demanded. It levels the playing field.

I also think, going further, that an argument like this can tears a strip off of one of the more forceful criticisms a typical New Atheist (or any atheist for that matter) makes; that is, there is no entryway for the supernatural into the natural, and that the natural laws are never suspended.

If in the quantum real the very concepts of time, space, causality, and necessity all dissolve, the repercussions are far reaching, epistemologically.

Stash win!

Thanks for stopping by!

i see a pattern here,

i appreciate the way you break down my response to throuly reply to my comments… but there’s also a danger in that,

which is misunderstanding.. therefore instead of looking at things by sentence by sentence, or paragraph by paragraph, we need to reflect upon the whole body of the writing in order to understand the point. i believe that this is the greatest mistake we all do as we read the bible.

with that being said, let me be more clear in regards to our response being the same way as us being persecuted vs. others.

i did not mean that when we see someone we love being persecuted, we sit there and do nothing.. by no means… but as i mentioned in the previous comment in regards to Jesus’ example of being persecuted along side of us, we need to follow his footsteps in regards to stepping in the situations and offer ourselves to be sacrificed for the ones we love just as Jesus did…

it can look more like the example i have used in the previous comment (in regards to my friend stepping in front of a gunman b/c his friend’s life was threatened.)

Also by using that one incident regarding Jesus and the merchants in the temple cannot justify your view of Christ as being violent.

Again, we need to look at the life of Jesus and his teachings instead of using one incident to justify our violence towards those who try to harm us. (if that continues, this discussion will go nowhere since we can keep going back and forth using only a small part of scripture to justify our means) (there are also many many verses in the NT where Jesus was NOT violent, like the time when people try to stone Jesus and all he did was running away and hiding, John 8:59)

you mention ‘spiritual’ and physical nature… how do you define ‘spiritual’?

in scripture… there’s no mentioning of the word ‘spiritual’ in the original ancient language of hebrew… there’s no word for ‘spiritual’… it is because EVERYTHING is spiritual… in Jewish culture and even in the early Christian church, whatever you did was spiritual… the very act of feeding the hungry was spiritual, the act of commiting adultery was spiritual…

those who impose physical harm on us is also imposing spiritual harm on us…

and yes you can even say a spiritual weapon can be a physical weapon… however as Paul says in 2 Corithians 10, “The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world.” meaning it might not be the very weapon we use to fight w/…

Jesus defended the adulterer and no one dared to lift a stone at her. Not because Jesus used violent force and weapons against the crowd but used God’s words that is sharper than a double edged sword.

no it’s not common sense… common sense would’ve been Jesus to defend the woman by violence and force… but instead of using common sense, Christ used the word of God which piered the very heart of the pharasees that they could not impose any harm on the woman.

do i think that by me reading scripture while someone’s attacking my family would save them? maybe… maybe not…

or even putting my body b/w the victim and the attacker would save them? maybe…. maybe not…

but then again do i think by me putting my violent force to impose harm on the attacker would save my family? maybe… maybe not..

i believe that this matter is not black and white… , it’s not non-violence vs. violence… therefore we cannot jump to any conclusions regarding ‘how to handle a situation when…’,

b/c we have NO idea how we would act in those situations b/c we’ve never been in it.

i have mentioned in the previous comments that i’m NOT a pacifist, because in those situations i would physically intervene to stop the attacker… but that scripture and the OT does not give me the right to physically harm the attacker let alone kill him. It also does not give me the right to go to war against the oppressors.

all i can say is that, when faced w/ those horrible situations, i hope to bring glory to God’s name and not shame.