There is plenty of relevant evidence to establish Baha'u'llah as a Messenger of God.
Disagree. I've been told that that evidence is his life and his words. For either of those to be evidence of a superhuman entity, they need to contain superhuman words and deeds, something that human beings just can't do on their own. Nothing else would be evidence that this was not just a human being being human. And neither of those rise to that level. To say they do is a leap of faith based on the will that they be what the faith-based thinker wants them to be. And so he sees what he wants to see.
You're doing what the Christians do when they say that the words and deeds of Jesus prove divinity. Not to me. Once one removes the magic (virgin birth, walking on water, raising the dead, resurrection), this is a typical life for a fundamentalist religious zealot trying to return his people to orthodoxy. His words were also ordinary - love one another, love God, be not of the world, etc.. Yet they see this as unmistakable evidence of divinity.
Likewise with the Baha'i, who present a similar person living a similar life and call it evidence of the divine. No, it's evidence of humanity. This is what some human being do. They develop religious zeal and go about preaching. Only with faith can one say that this particular person is a representative of God, but not that one, who is doing roughly the same thing.
The critical thinker evaluates the evidence himself and decides what conclusions it supports by properly applying the rules of fallacy-free reasoning to that evidence to derive sound conclusions. If he cannot derive, "therefore God" from that evidence without taking a leap of faith, then he rejects the conclusion. The faith-based thinker, who cannot do that or is unwilling to, just accepts the judgment of others that these words and this life indicate a God. OK, he says. "If you say so. You look like you ought to know with those robes and sandals, saying thee and thou, and giving advice like . All those other believers can't be wrong." That's how one arrives at insufficiently evidenced and likely wrong beliefs. Critical thinking is the defense against that. It recognizes that this idea or that doesn't have the credentials to rise to belief, and does not admit it.
There is plenty of evidence to see that this Person is extraordinary, beyond that which the natural forces of the material world could produce.
Did he levitate? Did he reveal factual information that he could not have known without superhuman help? What's that you say? He could only walk like other human beings? He provided no ideas beyond advice and unfalsifiable claims? This is what human beings can do without the input of gods.
If He is not produced from this natural world, is that not evidence of God?
But he is produced of this natural world just like all of the rest of us. Is there any evidence that he was not born of a man and woman in the usual way, or that any other supernatural input was required or employed? No, so there is no evidence of a God there.
There should no divide between scientists and theists. All should seek the truth. I don't like dichotomizing the two.
Faith cannot generate truth. It has no means of evaluating its pronouncements about things unseen to confirm that they are correct, or that such things exist at all. I don't call anything arrived at by that method truth. For the word truth to have meaning, it needs to refer to something that actually exists, or has existed, or could be made to exist. All of these are confirmed empirically or they're not confirmed at all.
If one's version of truth isn't tethered in empiricism, then it's not a useful idea. Truth is the quality that facts and only facts possess, facts being declarative sentences that accurately map some aspect of reality in a way that can be confirmed and tested. Other ideas are not facts, and aren't truth by this understanding (correspondence theory of truth). Is it true that if I love Jesus, I'll go to heaven? Some say it is, but that doesn't meet the criterion for truth that I described.
Is it true that I live five blocks north and three blocks east of the pier? If walking five blocks south and three blocks west gets me to the pier, then yes. Otherwise no. The claim is falsifiable, if correct was derived from experience, and can be confirmed if correct. This is a very different kind of idea than so-called religious truth, which, judging by what I see offered as examples of religious truth, are ideas that can't accurately predict anything, and this, can't be used for anything the way that the direction to the pier can be.
So, because these things called religious truth and scientific truth are very different, and produce output of very different kinds with very different utility, they should be distinguished verbally, which is dichotomizing the two. It serves the faithful to present these as different but equal things. Gould's "Non-overlapping magisteria (NOMA)" gives credence of this idea that they are equals. Shouldn't they overlap if they are both valid methods of discerning what is true about the world?
Paleontology and genetics each purport to tell us the truth about reality, and they overlap in evolution theory. Why? Because the theory is correct, and the two means of demonstrating, both valid and empirical, point to the same truth. Faith gives us the Genesis creation story, and unsurprisingly, the a world's creation myths are all different. Why? Because none are true. The empirical account from science is the only one that approaches being correct, the only one drawn from science, from empiricism, and the only one with any predictive power.
No, only one of these two "magesteria" is tethered to reality and thus can generate useful generalizations. This is why faith, not tethered to reality, has yielded over 40,000 denominations of Christianity alone, and science, which is empirical and looks at the world and its patterns to extract truths (useful generalizations) has generated just one periodic table of the elements. If it were determined by faith, there'd probably be about 40,000 of them as well, and none useful like the one extracted from observation.
Scientists should consider whether what their science is building is ethical, and religion provides that.
No, that is not the purview of science. And the religions aren't a good source for moral guidance. Divine command theory is the worst way to decide what is right and wrong, good and bad. It defines them as the deeds and commandments of a deity according to words in a book or a priest's interpretation of them, however immoral they may seem to the conscience. We've seen the consequences of that kind of thought in this thread, where one theist said that when his conscience told him that his religion's teaching that God would send unbelievers to hell, the cognitive dissonance mad him doubt his faith and leave it for five years. He eventually returned, and explained that he reconciled the cognitive dissonance (not his words) by just accepting that if God did this, it must be just, and so, he accepted an immoral idea - that a god would prepare a place of eternal torture for the crime of not guessing the correct religion when there was no reason to believe that any were correct. He replaced natural morality with an unnatural one.
My tradition, secular humanism, rejects that kind of thinking, and substitutes rational ethics, in which an individual or society determine what it considers good and right according to its vision of what is desirable, and generates rules of personal and societal conduct intended to facilitate that vision of good and right, tweaking along the way when unintended consequences show that some of these ideas are actually harmful (think prohibition, which was intended to make society better, but led to organized crime, and had to be repealed).
This is the method that taught the West that slavery was immoral. It's holy books didn't do that. It's holy books taught the proper way to keep slaves. If no external influence had come along to modify that, slavery would likely be a morally acceptable way of treating people today.
So, no, secular humanists don't go to religions for moral guidance. What do religions tell us about democracy, or the moral status of refusing vaccination? Nothing. It tells of the divine right of kings and the need to submit to them as God's agents on earth. And it calls plagues the wrath of God. Secular humanism offers another understanding and different advice. It's ethics are different, and in my opinion, superior.
Here's the religious take on the pandemic from
an American cleric: "
An evangelical pastor is claiming the coronavirus is God’s “death angel” seeking justice for those “transgendering little children” and putting “filth” on TVs and movies. Christian Pastor Rick Wiles told his TruNews web show viewers to not “get into crazy, whacked-out theories” about what he warned could be a “global pandemic” that kills “hundreds of millions of people.” He then suggested the virus started in China because of the “godless communist government that persecutes Christians” and “forced abortions” — and said the “death angel” could have eyes on the US. “God is about to purge a lot of sin off of this planet,” Wiles told his viewers on Monday. “Look at the United States, look at the spiritual rebellion in this country — the hatred of God, the hatred of the Bible, the hatred of righteousness,” he raged."
We can do better than that with rational ethics.
