Faith in what?
Some religion that will promise you a place to go when you die?
But only if you join them, because it is the only way to God.
They all have the same approch. God is love, and you can only
be in his pressence if you pray in a certain, special, manner. If
you pick the wrong door, and pray to the wrong God, or pray
the wrong way, you just blew eternity! You are like most people
in that you don’t like the idea of Nothingness after death. Appreciate the fact that this breaf moment in time is all that
RahRahMah will ever have, and that fact makes this even
more special. Religion is comfort food to the weak minded.
Should you be a Muslim, a Christian, a Hindu? Why would
God turn eternal life into a crapshoot? There is no such thing
as eternal life. You shall become one of the Greatful Dead.
Franko has a good point in response to this search for faith.
If you have not clearly defined what characteristics the object of your faith must have, you could easily be persuaded by a charismatic cult to have faith in pretty much anything. By your previous posts, RahRahMah, it seems that you want to have faith in a theory that is internally consistent, intellectually honest, and arrived at by examination of evidence. This kind of faith is not that of Christians like Kierkegaard, so asking Christians to describe how they maintain their faith will probably not help you in your search for faith. In fact, the properties I listed above are inconsistent with faith as described in the quote from Miracle on 34th Street, but can be found in abundance in the natural sciences, which you already trust to a great degree.
I guess it would help us answer your question if we knew specifically what you want to believe on faith, yet cannot in the face of adversity. Do you want to believe on faith that life has meaning, and is not merely a means by which the entropy of the universe increases? Do you want to believe on faith that objective concepts of good and evil are possible (without appeal to the wishes of a deity), despite the wide variety of moral codes observed among different cultures and across time periods?
Tell us the nature of the belief that you find difficult, and we’ll do our best to help. Remember that some level of doubt is necessary to keep one from self-delusions of the mind. And heed the advice gleaned from The Matrix: “It is the question that drives us.”
Amore, well done! It has been a long time since I have heard anyone speak of Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical. It was one of the things that influenced my thinking in the mid-1960’s and since.
That may give you a boost in one direction or another, but it doesn’t explain why so many people leave their original faiths to pursue the wisdom of another.
RahRahMah, I loved Jesus about the way that I loved Santa Claus until I was eight. That was when I had a vision or hallucination that was not quite the norm for little Protestant girls. Over the next few years, I became more and more interested in the Roman Catholic Church. This was in the rural 1950’s South. There were no Catholics or Jews or anything but Protestants and non-believers in our town.
When I was in high school, I ordered a book that I thought might give me some insight into Catholicism and what I had experienced as a child. Instead, it gave me an overview of the world’s major religions and I began to see how much they had in common.
I am still a Christian, but I came to believe that all of these major religions have pathways that seem to lead to one point.
Twenty years ago, I experienced for a few moments being in that point.. It is not something I can describe adequately enough to convey anything. Just remember that a point has no demensions. But there I was and there everything else was and it was all “one thing” and total unimaginable bliss.
I am a strong supporter of the scientific method of research and study. I believe in sound logic and reasoning.
At the same time, I believe in the significance to me of this glimpse into what seems to be another level of reality.
For these reasons, I believe that faith and science are not exclusive of each other. I just accept the fact that I cannot know most things. Science keeps me open-minded. Belief keeps me honest. (I used to think it would be the other way around.)
Now that’s what I believe.
As for having faith, it never occurred to me that there was an alternative to having it. The interplay of science, literature, the arts, nature, and the unknown keep breathing fresh life into it.
If you ask me (which I assume you have), I think its a credit to Christianity, Catholisism and Judaism (plus othes which I also cant spell) that they can take these findings on board withought dispatching suicide bombers to ‘blow-up’ science stuff - I am not giving anyone any ideas here and there were those nuts who blew up abortion clinics. Lets blame genetics for producing these people, not religion.
I tend to think that science, no matter how advanced, will find ‘the hand of God’ in any advancement. For now, perhaps, the ‘divine intervention’ lays in the Big-Bang (and the early historians just got the date wrong :). If you talk to any scientist about what happened before the big bang, then you may as well listem to Benny Hinn, you will get just as much fact.
Rah
You hold up a tattered suit, and ask who would wear such a garment, and wait for us to tell you why we would wear your tattered suit.
We don’t.
There are many people who deny science, and even some who deny science because of their faith. There are many people who deny faith, and even some who deny faith because of their perception of science.
But science does not deny faith. Science is a method for examining facts, and proposing models that account for all observed facts, and predict untested results which can then be experimentally verified. Faith has nothing to do with it. Science does not propose to explain God, or affirm or deny the existence of God. Science examines and describes the universe.
Faith does not involve affirming or denying that which is evident by observation. Faith concerns the realm of human thought that lies outside of physical examination. You don’t measure souls, or quantify the love of God for man. But the absence of measurement is not a measurement of an absence. The tools don’t fit the task. The tools for faith are love, hope, and humility. These tools are not effective in designing bridges, or electronic devices.
Your error is trying to apply a scientific argument to a matter that cannot be examined and measured or experimentally tested. That is bad science. There are many that make the reciprocal error, of assuming that faith is an adequate substitute for measuring and examining when describing all matters of the universe. That is bad science, and in the case of engineering, very dangerous.
I find creationism to be a special case. It doesn’t involve faith or science, but rather human greed, and lust for influence and approval. Creationism is bad science, pretending to be proof of faith. Since faith requires no proof, it is useless, and since science must stand without faith, it is dishonest. Personally I believe it is the active work of Satan, and his earthly minions.
Tris
Science or Creationism?
I have been asked what it is that I want faith in. People seem to think I’m searching for a religion. I started off with a simple curiosity as to what makes a Christian tick, and a lust for faith of my own. A faith in what? I wanted faith in a friend of mine, and faith in myself because I have a few tough decisions in my path. But I suppose the ultimate answer would be mankind. I want to maintain my belief that men are essentially good and noble and contain great potential for both beauty and destruction but ultimately awsome things. Instead all around me I see greed, ignorance, stupidity and apathy. Where is the love, where is the curiosity? Where is anything that sets men apart from the so called animals? All I see is trained beasts. Naked apes with tools given to them by ancient greats with capacity and wonder far beyod thier own. Gorillas speaking in sign language.
How can I believe in anyone or anything when all I see around me is depravity of the soul?
Fair
It was in a separate paragraph, specifically about creationism. Not all that vague a pronoun reference, really. And not an entire change of opinion from the rest of the post, either.
Tris
All of us, Theists, Deists, Agnostics, Atheists, believe in an Eternal Self-Starting Something- let’s just call it Energy. The difference is that the first two groups hold that this Eternal Energy is Sentient while the latter hold that it is not. I have little problem believing that Eternal Mindful Energy developed all this, rather than all this, including Mind, emerged from Mindlessness.
From there it’s a choice if that Mind is aloof or involved with us - and if involved, then how that involvement is manifest. To me, the historical & ethical indicators point to the Hebraic Revelation which is epitomized in Jesus & His Apostles.
The hows of Creation are not a major factor in my faith. While I lean to OldEarth Creationism, I can work Theistic Evolution into my faith, regarding Adam & Eve as historic persons who were the first humans to recognize the Parenthood of God, yet who reacted as distrustful children. This is the spiritual legacy of all humanity, with that trust restored by God getting down in the dirt with us as Jesus.
You want to know how to piss off creationists and evolutionists both? Don’t believe strictly in either theory. Trust me, it works.
I don’t find either theory to be entirely plausible, so I draw my beliefs from a mixture of the two. I figure Genesis is probably real, and maybe it did only happen a few thousand years ago (but not so few as 7,000!) but I don’t think it’s describing the creation of Earth. We know from the Noah’s ark story that God had no qualms about declaring a do-over until after promising Noah that he wouldn’t ever flood the entire Earth again (leaving himself a fat loophole to pick other ways of destroying it, if my memory isn’t faulty). So the way I figure it, he created the dinosaurs and so forth, perhaps some of the protohumans (I wonder if the Mayan creation myth Popul Vuh might actually be an explaination for various protohumans. Someone could probably get a dissertation out of that) then got pissed off and destroyed them. AFAIK there’s still no 100% concessus on how the dinosaurs died off, so thinking it was divine intervention works for me. The dinosaurs and so on had to exist, or there wouldn’t be any remains for us to find.
So Genesis is all about God recreating everything he destroyed. Adam and Eve were probably sapiens instead Neanderthals, since they were supposed to be able to talk, and there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of Neanderthals being capable of true speech.
And while I believe that creatures within a genus evolve, I don’t believe they evolve from one genus to another. Three-toed horses led to modern horses, sabertooth cats led to lions and tigers, and some protohuman (australopithecines or later most likely) lead to modern man, but I do not believe that one-celled organisms led to monkeys, or monkeys lead to men. And it’s not just a matter of arrogance, it’s the factor of leftovers. There aren’t any sabertooth cats or three-toed horses wandering the earth any more-they passed on their genes, which evolved to something else, and then they vanished. You can look at the ancestors of animal after animal and find the same thing: you end up with the final results with the others dying off along the way. But there are still one-celled organisms and monkeys, which to me, anyway, indicates that they’re the final product (at least so far) of what they are supposed to be, and evolved from some creation of God’s that existed entirely seperate from the things that became modern man and modern cats and horses. Needless to say, I seriously doubt they’ll ever find a “real” missing link, given I don’t think the link ever existed in the first place.
As for God vs The Big Bang, people begin their arguments a couple steps ahead of where they should. “God created the world” and " All the particles in the universe came together…" both fail the logic test for the same reason - neither can adequately account for the antecedent impossibility: something being created from nothing. Where did God come from? Where did the particles, or the universe for that matter, come from? There’s no way to explain either of these things. Since both are inherently impossible, I don’t think it matters which you believe in. I just happen to like the idea of a God I can’t explain suddenly appearing better than dust I can’t explain doing likewise.
So, that’s one way for a person to blend their faith and knowledge of science into a whole that makes sense to them… if not to anyone else. 
[sub](and a good way to piss off creationists and evolutionists equally)**
Triskadecamus, Granted.
I am a Christian (at least by my own definition, but not necessarily that of others) and I used to be a Young Earth Creationist; repeated challenging exposure to the scientific data has brought me to accept evolution as the most probable method by which diversity on this planet occurred, including the rise of humanity.
But this didn’t diminish my faith in God because, well, it’s easier to explain this way:
I had a series of (highly personal and subjective, but nevertheless utterly compelling) ‘religious experiences’ - this brought me to the personal acceptance that there is a God and that he was somehow interested in interaction with me (of course all the while I recognise that it could just be a strange delusion of my brain, but there’s no way for me to tell from the inside) - after these experiences, I joined a (semi)fundamentalist Christian Church, where layers of dogma were imposed upon the original foundation of belief.
This was largely fine while it lasted because the general thrust of the dogma was to accept the dogma - it was self-reinforcing.
And now we come full circle; repeated challenging exposure brought me to the uncomfortable realisation that some of this dogma was holding me away from the truth, so it had to go, but the foundation of faith (which was always based on the personal experiences) remains pretty much unscathed.
Just my story, I’m not claiming that it has ever been like this for anyone else.
Simply put, Faith is wishful thinking.
Can you please prove that accepting the theory of evolution and being Christian must be utterly and completely incompatible? Demonstrate your evidence according to tested scientific methods, of course. I await your proof.
I am Christian, of the oldest, stuffiest, and most conservative flavor (Orthodox Church). I also accept that evolution is the mechanism whereby God worked His creation of life.
To have faith in your friend, it is necessary that you have faith in yourself and in your ability to assess your friend’s good and bad traits. Having faith in oneself is not always an easy task, for our previous failures and false beliefs (as individuals and as a species) might lead us to conclude that anything we believe at the moment can be replaced at a later date by whatever the current trendy belief is. The modern feeling of uncertainty in belief is foreshadowed by Nietzsche’s encouragement that we overthrow our ancestors’ table of values and look toward the future coming of the Übermensch for hope, rather than seeking such hope in reflections on the great civilizations of antiquity, which are glorified and embellished by historicist sentimentality.
While this uncertainty in belief might at first seem disconcerting, it encourages the endeavor that for Socrates marked the distinction between the good life of aristocrats and the not-so-good life of commoners. This endeavor is the philosophical examination of life and its meaning, and thanks to technology made possible by science, this philosophical reflection is no longer exclusively the domain of aristocrats but is accessible to anyone with a thirst for enlightenment. The fact that you are asking these difficult questions, RahRahMah, indicates that you do have a thirst for enlightenment. Not many people, in this age or in ages past, share this passion for wisdom. Thus we regularly observe human behavior which causes us to wonder, as you do now and as Hobbes did centuries ago, whether we are all just trained beasts or naked apes, with nothing setting us apart from the so-called animals. This issue has come up in previous GD threads, and none of them has settled the matter definitively.
Teilhard de Chardin has written a treatise, The Phenomenon of Man, defending the view that mankind is distinct from other animals. While he has qualifications as a social scientist, his worldview is informed by his religion, which has given his work a bit of a stigma in the social science community. It’s still interesting reading, especially if you need some escape from the dismal picture painted by Hobbes of man in his natural state.
Tris
Well said.
RahRahMah
Your original post contains several false assumptions. Others have pointed out that not all Christians are Creationists. I’d like to point out that Christianity is not the only religion to include Genesis in its sacred texts. I can say for certain that Judaism does. I think Islam does as well.
Since I was about seven, I accepted Genesis as an allegory. I’d been to the National Museum Of Natural History. Those were some darn impressive fossils. The fossils meant that Genesis could not be factually true. Rabbi Klirs often included short stories in his sermons. He never pretended that those stories were true. But, they were instructive. Mom and Dad told me some stories for the same reason.
I believe in God. I feel His presence in my everyday life. I believe the universe was created in the Big Bang a few billion years ago. I believe that all life on this planet evolved from primordial soup. I do not believe that evolution is guided or directed. Living things reproduce. There is variation in the offspring. Those offspring that survive to reproduce pass on their variation.
Amore ac studio
I’ve always felt that Abraham trusted that God would stop him. He isn’t rushing up the mountain in his zeal to commit a human sacrifice. He’s rushing up the mountain because he trusts God to save Isaac. Are you familiar with a trust fall? It’s a common exercise in couples, family, or group therapy. You stand on a chair, count to three, and fall backwards. If you trust the people to catch you, the exercise is no problem. Abraham trusts God to save his son. He hurries to the mountain partly to show his faith. He doesn’t count slowly, ask for a lower chair, or look behind him to see that the group is ready to catch him.
No, that’s a gross caricature of what faith really should be.
Young-earth “God as a magic trick purveyor” creationism is not the foundation of Christianity. It’s only the “foundation” of one extremist portion of Christianity. The “literal truth” of Genesis was not an issue one way or the other for at least 1500 years.
Let us ask the question another way: If the literal truth of Scripture is mandatory belief, then why do those groups that scream the loudest for young earth Creationism also reject the literal truth of “This is my body, take and eat.”? They play paper dolls with their own Bible.
As many have said, having faith and “following” science are not mutually exclusive. I never thought the Bible was meant to be true recording of historic events. I think it was meant as a guide on how some people thousands of years ago thought people should behave. While some of those ideas are outdated and silly, not all are. Some ideas are as important today as they were when it was written.
I follow the evolutionary theory on how life came to be on this planet. But I take it a step further…I belive that Man did not find God, but that God found Man. I think we were here, but as primitive people without structure or any idea of right and wrong, i.e. moral codes. I think God found us, and “raised” us up to be more than we were, and gave us the oppurtunity to continue to be better.
I also think that after time God found that in order for us to truly reach our potential and be free, he couldnt keep interfering directly. So he left us with some stories and teachings and allowed us to grow, or destroy, on our own.
I know to any scientist all that sounds like new age mumbo jumbo, and I agree it does. I have nothing, nada, zip, zilch, evidence to back any of it up, except to say I feel it to be true. We are not alone, and we dont all end up as random energy leaving our bodies as we die.
I get a real kick out of the idea that creationism is the foundation of Christianity, myself.
I mean, let’s take a couple of the actual critical points of Christianity in hand an examine the evidence: this ‘God’ guy either embodies himself or sends his offspring (said to be a chip off the old block in any case) to Earth. The offspring in question spends his adult life attempting to teach people some of his ideas almost exclusively through use of allegory and parable, and when he dies is eventually identified with God.
With this stunning example of the way that particular god sees fit to express and explain His points, I am amazed that literalism has any popularity at all.