All this argument that this “God” fellow is so incomprehensible to us puny humans, and yet there is this huge book chock full of descriptions of what he wants and expects from humans.
Why would it have to be either/or? What prevents this upwelling of faith and love and warmth and stuff if God would decide to provide actual physical evidence of his existence? He can’t do both? Are we back to him creating the rock he can’t lift?
Well, like I said to Grumman, this might just mark a basic value difference. I suspect that because when trying to defend the claim, I find it difficult to say anything other than “Isn’t it obvious?”
But I did then offer a kind of practical argument. Someone who values doing good just for its own sake (i.e., values it as basic) is more likely to go on doing good things than someone who values doing good just for the reward it brings or the punishment it avoids or whatever. The latter person’s dogooding is predicated on contingent facts about punishment and reward taht the former person’s dogooding is not predicated on.
Yes and yes, except I would strike the word “revealed”.
When I referred to “God” in my post I meant to be using the idea of God we get from most of the religions we’re familiar with in the west–a God who punishes and rewards. I do think, like you, that it’s not a necessary component of the concept of God.
I certainly have no objection to the rock he cannot lift. Sounds like a black hole to me.
But more seriously, don't think that knowledge and faith refute each other. I simply don't think that one is a path to the other. I don't want to cross a bridge built by someone who relied on faith that it would stand. I prefer engineers who use knowledge of materials, and structure, and good architecture. I doubt almost entirely those who wish to show me the physical evidence of God that they have. That evidence might well have given them faith. It cannot give me faith in God, only faith in the person who has the object. Idolatry.
[QUOTE=garygnu]
All this argument that this “God” fellow is so incomprehensible to us puny humans, and yet there is this huge book chock full of descriptions of what he wants and expects from humans.
[/QUOTE]
Well, speaking for myself, the Bible is, to me, not a book about God, but a book about people who sought to know God. Fellowship, not Bibliolatry.
Tris
Well it may not be the way you choose to define “religious faith” (belief without evidence), but it’s what is usually meant, and what this discussion is all about. If you want to have a discussion about your own definition, that maybe should be another thread.
Take these following posts as examples:
What these folks are saying is that belief without evidence is somehow seen as a good thing by religions. Not just that it’s OK to go ahead and believe even though there’s no evidence, but that the act of believing something in spite of its having no evidence is a virtue. I don’t get that.
And back to this…
I cannot wrap my atheist mind around what you’re saying here. If something doesn’t manifest in the physical world, then in what sense is it real? None that I can think of. A non-manifesting God is indistinguishable from a non-existent God.
It’s perfectly possible to lift a black hole (or at least, move it). That’s just a question of mass and distance. You could do it on your own, given a sufficiently small black hole.
I can more or less see what you’re saying, but I still don’t see why faith (in a god concept) is such a good idea, and on the other hand, while I completely understand your mistrust of people who claim to have physical evidence of god, I don’t see why you would choose “blind faith” over “solid evidence”, given the chance.
Responding to the OP, the demand for evidence is virtually always a response to a God that is asserted to interfere with the world in some way. One that does miracles, imparts knowledge, causes blessings to happen. The demand hilights the fact that the persons who claim their God does these things are, basically, lying. They are asserting things as happening that simply aren’t.
Gods that are not asserted as interacting with the world are pretty rare. The typical response to them is “Why should we care about it, again?”, or some other attack based on some other aspect of the described diety or theology.
Meh. I understand what you’re saying, and it’s why I always think “What candidate would you like to have a beer with?” is a stupid question. But (the late) Stephen Hawking can distill some of science’s most complicated topics down to something a yutz like me can digest. Doesn’t make me respect him any less. The opposite, in fact. You’d think anything worthy of the title “God” could figure that out.
You don’t have to fully comprehend something to simply know it exists. The human mind can’t fully encompass the universe – we can’t even really comprehend the the single speck of dust we live on – but we know it exists. I’m not asking to fully comprehend God, just asking to see proof that he exists at all.
Forget full comprehension - the theistic theories that are defended by “God works in mysterious ways” or “Your atheist brain is too tiny to appreciate God’s bigness” are typically outright nonsensical. As in, they self-contradict, include overt logic failures, and usually require you not to attempt to understand the big picture, because the dots simply don’t connect. It’s not a matter of “the details are too complex” - it’s a matter of “it’s already broken before we get into the complexities”.
Because of this, the claim that we’re too dumb to understand God comes across as quite hollow - even a complex plan can be summarized and still not become complete gibberish. Instead of that we have poorly-constructed theories that were clearly assembled from sound bites and platitudes and were never part of anything that made comprehensive sense. But we are still expected to swallow them, even if we have to become completely uncritical and unthinking to pull that off.
Damn, those NHS death panels act fast! Maybe it’s because he spoke up?
“Lying” is perhaps a bit strong – “incorrect”, “misinformed”, etc are reasonable alternatives. But yes, in general that’s my take on it too.
Well yes, because frankly it staggers the imagination and stretches suspension of disbelief beyond all possibility to postulate a hands-off watchmaker god, who on the one hand put a entire universal system in place billions of years ago that lead inexorably here without any further intervention, and yet on the other hand cares whether my clothes are made out of mixed fibres or who I sleep with.
And since this is really about some people trying to control what other people do, then espousing a hands off god undermine their attempts at social control.
This argument could only be true if indeed there was proof that the words were anything except the thoughts or words of an other human.
We know that humans decided what God said or did. One can believe it or not, but is no proof of anything. One could ask: Did Jesus return in His glory with his angels as he is quoted saying He would in Matthew 16, or did some one make it up, or was Jesus wrong? If He did say this would happen, where are the 2000+ people living today?
One can only use the Gospels etc. if they are trying to convince believers. What is the proof that the Bible is the word of God?
Yes. Jesus acknowledged the man who saw him alive after the resurrection and therefore believed, but he praised the man who believed without seeing.
Well, now that this debate is resolved, who here would like to hear the wonderful story of Dianetics?
To be honest, when it comes to defining what existence and non-existence really mean is such a bucket of philosophical worms I would not even begin to attempt to define them, much less argue on behalf of either.
Faith is a part of my life. I have a fairly atypical religious outlook, though. I don’t think arguing or convincing are spiritually desirable. Does art exist, or only the plastic representations of reality? Can aesthetics really describe anything real? I have no interest in the concept of God. It is the person of God in which I have faith. And yes, I believe that such a person exists. I believe that Jesus existed, in the more prosaic sense with which you are familiar. But neither of those beliefs are essential to my faith.
God loves you. It isn’t policy, it’s personal. You have to want it to happen to experience it, and you have to love. Love cannot be proven. It is not a part of physical reality. Demanding proof of God’s existence may well be philosophically significant, but it doesn’t . . . well, it doesn’t matter.
My faith affects my life. God affects my life. He has not given me a message, or appointed me to any authority beyond affirming that He loves you. I can’t prove that.
I know how frustrating that “argument” is in philosophical debate. Long ago, in this same forum I found out that what I say is utter foolishness, from the point of logical and rational understanding of the real world. I am untroubled by that. From the rationalist point of view, I should be dismissed without further consideration. To those of strong faith, I speak a warning. You cannot prove God’s existence, and your failure to do so might well lead someone away from His love. Beware.
Tris
Why not Buddha? Buddhists feel the same way, perhaps more so even. (Perhaps not so, hence the need to test it and every other religion.)
The only thing that separates you from them is that they were raised to believe in Buddha while you were raised to believe in God, looking at sheer statistics.
Given that it can fairly well be shown that you’re basking in the glow of the placebo effect, there seems to be little difference between believing in God and simply convincing yourself to hold an optimistic outlook on life. Same end result, and you don’t have to worry about whether or not you’re going to Hell for using fiat money or not stoning homosexuals to death as you were told to.
Sage Rat
My faith does not separate me from Buddhists. In fact, it does not even separate me from The Moral Majority, or the most didactic bible thumping burn in hell zealots of Christian religions. My faith joins me to them.
And, as an aside, the Placebo effect has a demonstrable, measurable, repeatable existence, verified to the satisfaction of even hard core scientific review. It has nothing to do with my faith, though. 
Tris
[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
God loves you. It isn’t policy, it’s personal. You have to want it to happen to experience it, and you have to love. Love cannot be proven. It is not a part of physical reality.
[/QUOTE]
I’m willing to acknowledge the possibility that I’m “doing it wrong”, but for me, love requires context. I’ve never been in a position to honestly love something intangible.
If you told me there was a guy named Steve somewhere that can’t or won’t (we can’t be sure, Steve is mysterious) interact with anyone anywhere and that he really loves me… I don’t think I’d have it in me to love him back no matter how much I might want to.
Could you really love someone you’d never met? The same way you’d love a family member?
As for love being “proven”, I’m not sure why it requires “proof.” Love is a profound affinity. I can’t prove that I love my wife any more than I can prove I like brown ales. All I can do is describe my subjective enjoyment of the people and things that I have directly experienced.
I can’t experience God in any way and so, have no context in which to love Him and so, cannot love Him. Even if I want to. God has created a universe in which I quite literally cannot reciprocate no matter how much He loves me.
Well said recessiveMeme; that very clearly and succinctly captures the way I too feel.
And the kicker: if we assume an omnipotent deity who has engineered the universe in its present form, and all of us within it, then my (and your) being wired to be unable to subjectively experience God and reciprocate love is all part of some plan, isn’t it?