Tom Facchine – How To Verify Religious Claims

			People they act like they only believe in empiricism and empiricism, we're talking about accepting
knowledge or producing knowledge is from the senses. So a lot of people get hung up about revelation
or about religion or about God or about the afterlife because well, I can't see it. I can't hear it.
I can't read it. I can't witness it, right. But people are being selectively skeptical, right?
Because they don't adhere to this strictly in their own lives. Right? You've you believe in Papua
New Guinea, you've never been there, you've never seen it. Right? But enough people have been there.
And I've seen it that you take it based off of fact, you're not actually going to track those people
		

			down and interview them. No, you're ready, you're prepared to accept that it exists, you know, the
writing of the Constitution, and you know, the whole story or, you know, you know, the Battle of
Concord, all these sorts of things that belong to history, vast majority of people, they're going to
accept them, as fact accept them as having really happened because other people were there, and
other people reported it, and other people did the work to verify, right? And so why don't we have
the same relationship towards faith or religious claims? Right, you've got religion, XY and Z, and
each of them claims to represent a divine communication. Okay, well, let's think about what sort of
		

			evidence would be required to determine whether that's a it's a divine communication or not, what
sort of things would we expect to see, we would expect to see a certain amount of coherence, right,
it wouldn't contradict itself, we would expect to see some sort of miraculous information in the
sense that something that human beings couldn't know whether it was historical, or whether it was
scientific, or something that was indicated, maybe predicted or maybe indicated that they had no
means of, of knowing at that time, right? These sorts of things we can talk about, it's an open
conversation. And then after that, you have to be able to actually look and go into it and see well,
		

			okay, this particular religious tradition or or document that claims to be genuine revelation from
from the Divine Will contradicts itself here, here and here. And then that involves actually getting
into a tradition and they're going there's going to be other people say, Well, no, that's not an
actual contradiction. You're misunderstanding it or, or etc, etc, and you have to do the work, you
have to put it in, it's really easy to just rely on our biases and our preconceived notions just
have our armchair critiques and just say, you know, all religions phony or all you know, because
here's what a lot of people do, because Christianity is false. A lot of people they, and especially
		

			in the Anglosphere, in the English speaking world, they have a negative relationship or history with
Christianity, they've come to see that Christianity is false that Christianity, the Bible
contradicts itself. And the Bible is not a preserved revelation from God. And so then from that,
they universalize that experience and they say, well, that must mean all religion is phony, and all
religion is false. You only go through one religion, right? You have to give other sort of claimants
a chance and be fair, and develop sort of criteria and be ready to accept it or deny it based on
that criteria, right? A lot of people, you know, you'll ask them, okay, what would you need to see
		

			if you can't answer this question? What would you need to see in order to believe in God? Or what
would you need to see in order to believe that a religion were true? Most people can't answer it,
because they've already made up their minds. And some people who are honest, will actually say, it
doesn't matter what you show me, well, then thank you, I just saved my breath. But there's a lot of
people who actually believe that they don't say it, or they don't admit it, they'll act like they're
very skeptical and act like you know, this, that the third is like, no, it's like, if you if you're
not ready to accept anything, you haven't even thought about what you would accept or what could
		

			possibly change your mind, then you're not being sincere. You're not being sincere. So everybody,
you know, as as intellectual people, as human beings who are here and have a short amount of time on
Earth and are trying to figure all this stuff out, you owe it to yourself to be sincere, right?
Because the consequences of being wrong are kind of big, right? It's kind of a big deal. Okay? And
I'm not, you know, fire and brimstone sort of preacher but like, let's just imagine that you're
wrong, right? eternal damnation is like kind of a big thing. Right? You would want to at least have
certainty or reasonable probable certainty, right to be able to say, You know what, I checked it out
		

			and whatever, I don't think it's for me or it doesn't make sense or whatever. A lot of people don't
get that far. They just dismiss it out of hand due to one bad experience due to one phony religion
or phony claimants and things like that. You owe it to yourself. You owe it to yourself to think
about the honest about it and to investigate