Serious question. It always seems that believers have some way (and rarely if ever an intellectually honest way) to answer the “problem of evil,” or explain away science that seems to contradict doctrine, or to rationalize any other objection that skepticism might raise.
Hypothetically speaking, what data or phenomena or events can you imagine that, if you observed or experienced them, would convince you, on a level as deep as any conversion or rebirth in your past, that God does not exist; or that God is not what you think he is; or that St. Paul was wrong and Mohammed was right or vice-versa; or that God does not care at all what you believe or how you worship or whether you worship; or that God is indifferent to your “sins” or the state of your “soul”; or anything else flatly incompatible with your faith and doctrine?
Religion is not science, of course, and falsifiability is not an essential element of validity. And I will readily concede that the average scientific materialist is no less prone to rationalize anything that might seem to contradict his world-view, up to and including a literal theophany, e.g., God speaking out of a burning bush. (It’s just a strange phenomenon that says it’s God – how do you know it’s God? It could be Satan trying to deceive you, or a puckish supernatural being from some non-Christian mythology, or an extraterrestrial, no more supernatural than you or I, with good special-effects technology and a mischievous sense of humor; or, more likely than any of those, a hallucination – we know hallucinations really happen and that their causes lie in the hallucinator’s own nervous system.)
Nevertheless, I submit that the question presented here is not a meaningless one, like asking a mathematician what would convince him that two and two make something other than four; nor, more importantly, is it an uninteresting question.
You don’t seem to be getting any replies, so let me ask you — what would it take to convince you that the God of the Christian Bible exists?
I considered myself an atheist for many years, but I’ve recently decided that I am actually an agnostic in the technical sense, i.e. I believe that the question of whether God exists is not decidable.
I can think of all kinds of things that would convince me that there are beings of inhuman power or intelligence, but I can’t think of anything that could convince me that the Bible is essentially true, i.e. that God created the universe, made man the pinnacle of his creation, takes a detailed interest in our lives, and punishes or rewards us in the afterlife.
I haven’t been to church in over 10 years but I still consider myself religious and I don’t think anything could convince me that my faith is false. Its not that I rock solid faith or that I don’t have doubts. I have had serious crises of faith but there has always been a part of me that believed in God and when the crisis passes, my faith returns.
In much the same way, there will always be a part of me that doubts.
These are not comparable, even if you ignore the burden of evidence.
Consider the question of whether there are six red balls in a box. To prove that it is false, you only need to prove there are not six objects or prove that they are not red or prove that they’re not balls. To prove that it is true, you need to prove there are six objects and prove that they are red and prove that they’re balls.
If God’s God-ness is dependent on a number of traits, you need to come to the conclusion that one is false or all are true.
So you have shown that is it more work to prove the positive assertion. IMO you have not shown that it’s not comparable.
Maybe I used bad terminology. I said “the God of the Christian Bible” because I didn’t want to deal with every conceivable supernatural entity, but I didn’t mean you had to prove that every event and conversation in the Bible took place. The very short list of major characteristics in my previous post would be enough for me.
But I really don’t see what would convince me of even that short list. And I’m not talking about something YOU could say to convince me, I mean any phenomena whatever.
For example, if I’m watching the SuperBowl, and at halftime, a 50-foot tall man in a glowing white toga suddenly appears on the 50-yard line, announces that he is God, and also announces that he has taken pity on us and will end all pain and suffering, and then DOES it in the next second — amputees are made whole, old people are made young, sick people are made well, all pollution disappears, all weapons disappear, the desert blooms with fruit tress, etc. — and everybody sees him and hears him, and everybody sees that they no longer have arthritis or cancer or ED or whatever — I would be convinced that there are beings who are powerful beyond our understanding, but I would not be convinced that he was the guy who created the universe, or that he would have any influence on my soul after my death.
I guess my question is, am I being willfully stubborn and stupid to say that that demonstration would not convince me?
The very essence of faith is that it requires one believe with no tangible proof whatsoever. As the verse goes “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”.
I am a horrible theologian (had to look that one up to get it right! :D), so I don’t have any hardcore Bible verses to tell you or anything like that, but despite my lack of good biblical arguments or education my faith is strong. Like many believers I’m not a member of any organized religion, I used to be a Baptist and I only recently started attending church again. I spent around 30 years not going on a very regular basis, for I believe in God, not religion or churches.
I think the only thing that would make me not believe, is to somehow be able to view life after death, and see for absolute certain that he didn’t exist. So I guess the answer is “pretty much nothing, I’ll take it to my grave”.
Not being religious… fascinated What [ intellectually honest ] way do atheists have of explaining the problem of evil ? Other than admitting it is subjective illusion in a wholly meaningless universe ?
Evil still exists no matter how one rationalizes causes and effects, and no matter what one’s belief-system explains away.
Several atheists on this board (not sure if BG is one) have said that there is nothing that would convince them. After all, any sensory input can be explained away.
You apparently do not understand what the phrase “Problem of Evil” means. To quote Wikipedia: “In the philosophy of religion and theology, the problem of evil is the question of how to explain evil if there exists a deity that is omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient (see theism).”
In other words: if God thinks X is bad, and he has the power to stop X at no cost to himself or anyone else, why doesn’t he?
The Problem of Evil does not exist to an atheist, because he does not propose the existence of a being willing and able to stop it.
[SIZE=2][SIZE=2][SIZE=2]Part of the problem with the OP, as I see it, is that both sides of the discussion, i.e., those who believe the Bible is the absolute, unvarnished word-for-word truth, and those who maintain it is complete, utter bullshit, and many who hold any of a wide spectrum of positions in between, are not actually talking about God. In the Bible, God created man:
As a practical matter, most discussions of which I am aware seem to start from Man creating God in his own image and likeness. Throughout history, mankind has proven to be petty, petulant and vain. Treaties made and broken, wars fought and populations slaughtered for a wide variety of reasons, many of them made up ad hoc to justify the greed of some petty tyrant.
Many arguments against God take the form: “How could an all-loving God allow Evil in the World?”
The explication relies heavily upon our interpretation of the arguments for and against Free Will v. Determinism. The majority of adherents of Abrahamic faiths believe there are a variety of agents(angels, seraphs, cherubs and whatnot) who continually do the bidding of God, unceasingly, for eternity, because that was the function for which they were created. Mankind, according to tradition, was created with free will, to have a choice to do good or evil. Free Will is meaningless unless the choice is valid. Suppose someone made an offer to you—they would hand you one million dollars, tax-free, or put out your eye with a sharp stick. Which would you choose? Of course, there really is no choice in that scenario. Likewise, unless there was a real, positive perception of advantage to be gained, nobody would “choose” to do evil.
While the Bible, mostly the Old Testament, relates episodes of God “smiting” those with whom He finds disfavor, in other passages and interpretaions it may well be likened to the admonition by your parents, “Don’t play in traffic, or you’ll get hurt!” Now, were your parents threatening you with bodily harm to “punish” you for disobeying them, or were they advising you of the untoward consequences of dangerous behavior? If you needed to traverse a dangerous landscape, say, a quagmire, and a reliable scout had preceded you through the area and clearly marked out a safe passage, and warned you of the negative consequences of straying from the path, would you castigate the scout for “punishing” you for “disobeying” him by striking out, on your own, away from the marked passage?
We could live a carefree, idyllic life, free from wars, disease, and want, in a land flowing with milk and honey, had God but made us automatons with no free will, our lives and fates completely determined beforehand. Would any here claim that a totally Deterministic Creation would be preferable to what we now “enjoy?” Some might, but I would choose to live freely, and accept that my actions in this world have consequences, both positive and negative.
It would be as though God is standing at the door to Paradise, holding it wide open, and calling all of humanity to enter and dwell within for all eternity. He could, if He chose to do so, force everyone to go inside, whether they wanted to or not. Or, He could clearly state that the door will be held open only until judgement day, then it would be closed forever, and any not within would be left outside for the rest of eternity. Is it really “punishment” to say that those who intentionally, of their own free will, chose to stay outside must, therefore, remain in the dark and gloomy netherworld forever? Had God physically forced everyone to enter Heaven’s Gate, where would free will be found?
God is not a man in flowing white robes, long white hair and beard, living in the sky. He has purposes and plans of which we have no inkling, and could not begin to fathom even if we knew. To attempt to fit God into the confines of what we would expect of our fellow humans is to disrespect both God and ourselves.
Likewise, many Bible-thumpers, who have read The Book from cover to cover, and can quote chapter and verse, have no clue what they are talking about. Most of the writings were targeted at an audience we can scarcely understand today. It was a simpler time, and the technological advances which we take for granted were, to them, still millenia away. To maintain that any part of the text has the credibility of a modern physics text is ludicrous. The words were never intended to be the be-all and end-all which some ostensibly “devout” will maintain as the final word on how the universe was put together.
There is no fundamental disconnect between a profound belief in God, and a healthy respect for modern science. The two address different aspects of our place in the universe, and how we perceive and interact with it. To say that, if it does not appear in the Bible, it does not exist, as many claim, is ridiculous on the face of it. Most “fundamentalist” objections to evolution, creation, and any of a host of modern debates are easily shown to be bunk. The problem for people like me is that, if a right-wing nutjob believes X about some topic, and I also belive X about that topic, therefore I also believe *every single lunatic theory *which the right-wing nutjob pontificates on.
Take evolution, for example. I happen to believe in a directed, intelligent creation by God. Whether by Intelligent Design or the product of the accumulation of millions or billions of random mutations, the fossil record would appear exacly the same. The Earth would still be about 4.5 billion years old, the different plants and animals would be in geologic strata comensurate with an age measured in hundreds of millions of years. The act of “Creation” in Genesis may very well have been setting out the physical constants of the universe. For many of these (the speed of light in a vacuum, the charge on an electron, the ratio of the mass of the electron to the proton, Plank’s constant and many, many more) there is no compelling, fundamental reason which science can determine why they should have the particular value they do, but the Universe, as we know it, depends on them having *that exact *value. How could an Old Testament writer have conveyed this viewpoint to his audience? We have only recently had the capability to even form the questions for which science has hinted at the answers, and there is much we still do not understand about how the Universe is constructed, on its most basic and fundamental level.
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It’s not a meaningless one, but it’s difficult to answer.
I fully expect to have at least some minor points of my faith that I’ll have to rethink or revise before the final curtain (i.e. I still have things to learn), but I couldn’t tell you now which they are or what’s going to come along to make me question them.
Evidence of various facts increases my credence/trust/belief in those facts.
I have seen insignificant evidence of the existence of Odin, Zeus, or the God of the Christian Bible, so I have insignificant belief that they exist.
What would it take to convince you that Zeus did indeed exist? Could you ever imagine that reading a bunch of old greek myths could possibly lead you to enough “faith” that you could buy it without any real evidence?
I’m not sure I *have *any faith, yet I have an active religious/spiritual life. I have that because it makes me feel better and makes my life work better to do so.
Are there gods? HeckifIknow. But I know that when I pray, I feel better. Are there elemental spirits? I dunno. But I know that when I call on them in a Circle, I feel little buzzy sparks up my spine and sometimes see flashes at my peripheral vision, as if there were someThings there. Are there angels, and if so, are they benevolent? Beats me. But if I pretend there are, I feel like my Circle is guarded and safe. Are there god/desses or spirits I can channel through my body and allow to speak with my voice? All I know is that when I try it, “I” have said things to people that *they *found very profound, insightful or useful, even if I don’t understand them or know what they are about. Maybe I’m just very intuitive, maybe it’s something that’s not me.
I’m so agnostic, I don’t even know the value of questioning these experiences any more. They may be all in my head. They may be external forces. They may be facets of my own personality, better explored as pieces than the whole. They may be facets of some Divine Being, better explored as pieces than the whole. They may be confirmation bias. They may be delusions.
So what would it take to convince me that my faith is false? If it stops working for me. I’m a fickle eclectic witch. I take what works, and when it doesn’t, it gets discarded. So far, some things have persisted because they work for me.
Atheism and agnosticism are not mutually exclusive. Agnosticism isn’t whether or not the question of whether God exists is decidable, it’s whether or not such knowledge is possible (“gnosis” means “knowledge"). You can be an agnostic atheist or an agnostic atheist. Based on what you’ve, said I’m guessing you are without belief that any gods exist, which would make you an atheist by the definition of most, IME.
If God/Jesus were to appear to me and say so, I probably would accept that if I could rule out hallucination. (In my case, based on occasional past experiences with hypnosis and . . . other things intended to induce it, I don’t think I’m capable of hallucination; missing circuit or something.)
I would accept it but I wouldn’t like it. Never have understood how any Christian can square his world-view with his conscience. But that’s another discussion. At least I have the advantage there of starting from the the materialist attitude, which is to accept the world as it is and not expect it to be anything you like. If Yahweh exists then the Universe is insane at its core. So what? Deal with it.
From one who has seen Jesus, (1st) Heaven and glimpses of Hell and outer darkness, demons and angels and has stared the devil in the eyes, nothing short of a act of God can undo that (So if it happens, it is a act of God, therefor God exists)
But changing how I view God has been a changing process and I expect it to evolve, so that is a ongoing process.
In many ways God has changed my view on God, and the proper place to place to put Paul’s teachings, along with a evolving view of science and medicine that is just starting.
