Do you see how silly this is?
I think there is evidence for my God, most notably the death and resurrection of Jesus. You may disagree with that evidence, but it is simply not true that there is no evidence. Therefore the picking of God is not arbitrary.
What reason do you have to say that my statement that the Christian God does not exist? Why am I wrong?
Yes, I think your re-wording is silly, but that has no bearing on my position.
For a start the claim that Jesus and Odin are somehow the same is not similar to anything that I am claiming all. You can’t substitute Odin for God and have the statement work. “God” is a generic term that I am investing with specific meaning by equating it to Jesus. Odin is, like Jesus, a specific and necessarily contradictory concept to Jesus. Therefore “Jesus is Odin” is contradictory in a way that “Jesus is God” is not.
Secondly, if one accepts that Odin does really exist then I think it is valid to rule out the deity of Jesus based on that fact. I would simply question the premise that Odin exists in the first place.
Calculon.
lol.
Calculon, others have pulled most of your comments apart and I have nothing to add to those but just to pull you up on this.
But that is not a necessary quality of being an atheist. I don’t claim that god doesn’t exist, merely that there is no satisfactory evidence for it. I don’t claim theism is incorrect how can I? That requires the disproving of an (already notoriously nebulously defined) entity. And one can’t prove that negative so I don’t even try. I leave the burden of proof where it belongs, with the theist making the positive claim.
I then get on with my life as if gods don’t exists…seems to work OK. come bakc when you have something interesting to say about deities and I’ll listen and judge it on it’s merits.
And I promise you, and I hope others will chip in, this is a very common approach with atheists.
Correct, I have nothing to say about god other than no-one has ever given a satisfactory reason to believe in one, the hypothesis is unnecessary. That is a million miles from claiming theism is “wrong”.
You seem to think that me not accepting the validity of your position is the same as me being certain you are wrong. That is not the case.
This statement highlights the core difference between my worldview and that of atheism.
I do have a satisfactory reason to believe. **Satisfactory to me, **though clearly not to others. The satisfactory reason for my belief is my own experiences. God, in the person of Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit, broke into my life, changed it and changed me, turning my world right side up. He continues to do this daily. It is an experience and a relationship. All the theology, all the physical evidence, bolsters and builds upon this. But without the satisfactory initial reason, it wouldn’t move me.
I can tell you about it, I can say ‘try it, you’ll like it,’ but I cannot prove to you that it tastes good. I can even accept that to you it tastes bitter. Because the same physical evidence & scriptural evidence that affirms belief to one pre-disposed to believe clearly looks incredibly foolish to someone who is determined not to believe. We can talk around in circles forever–evidence, no evidence. But this remains: I cannot impart to you my spiritual experience of power and joy; you cannot impart to me the self-worth you attain through skepticism.
To nitpick, atheism is not a worldview. Two people may be atheists and have very different worldviews…but anyway.
I don’t doubt your sincerity. However, your own words here suggest that a very personal experience triggered it and you then bolster that with evidence from external sources. Obviously that external evidence is unsatisfactory to me and without any personal experience of god I am unlikely to seek it out anyway.
I’d be interested though in what manner of personal experience took you from atheist to theist, and why you found it convincing?
There are people who have exactly this same kind of experience and certainty with Krishna, with the Earth Goddess and with talking animal spirits. Are their experiences valid too?
My experience of people who apply the label “atheist” to themselves, both in life and on theis board, is almost the exact opposite of what you suggest. Nearly all self described atheists I have met, when religion is discussed, can’t wait to tell you why religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is evil and wrong. It is also the position taken by nearly every “professional atheist” like Richard Dawkins, Dan Barker, ect. While I appreciate that your view is different, I think your view is far from common amoungst atheists generally. In would even suggest that the term agnostic is a better for for your position.
Anyway I think that this position seems rather, ummm, unstable to me. It seems like you are simply uncertain of the truth, and to a point don’t really seem to value knowing truth either. Because without any evidence or argument for the existence of God I can only conclude that your conclusion that God does not exist is merely arbitrary. If I was in your position I would try to actually develop arguements to distinguish the two views so that I could have at least some confidence that what I believed was at least more likely true than not.
While you say that atheism works for you, I don’t think it would work for me. One of the reasons that I rejected (and continue to reject) atheism is that I think that the type of naturalistic atheism that is popular is simply not consistent. I think that if one really wants to be a consistent atheist, then the only logical position is that of nihilism. I think without God our actions have no meaning, we can have no true knowledge and there is no possibility of people having any autonomy from the natural world.
The morality part has already been discussed in this thread enough. The knowledge part comes from the typical atheist view of the nature of man. If man is the product of an unguided evolutionary process (as opposed to a guided one), then evolution only selects for survivability, not for correct thinking. Therefore on atheism there is no reason to believe that our senses and our thinking does actually match with reality. The philosopher Alvin Plantiga has an interesting argument along these lines. He argues that evolution and naturalistic atheism are incompatable on these grounds. Of course if our creation was guided by God, then it is reasonable to think that we can know things truly because God has created us with the ability to know truly.
The autonomy from the natural world part has to do with the nature of the mind and of the self. Naturalistic atheism simply has no place for a free will to exist. If all that exists are physical things, and all physical things are directed by the laws of nature, then there is nothing that exists that is not guided by the laws of nature. That means that our minds, if they even exist, must be directed by the laws of nature. It removes the possibility of people having a true independent, autonomous mind and reduces people to mere autonomons at the mercy of the laws of nature. This is again different in Christianity, as Christians believe that non-physical things exist, namely God, and therefore there is a possiblity of non-physical entities like mindes existing.
This conclusion, that in the absense of God then the only consistent view is nihilism is one that has been reasched by lots of different philosophers, including many athesists. I would say that it was one of the driving conclusions of the existentialist movement. Existentialism seeks to find some sort of subjective meaning in the world because it is taken as given that there is no real objective meaning or understanding of the world. While I disagree with their solutions to the problem I agree with their insight into the meaninglessness of a Godless world.
So because I would be forced to conclude that the world was inherently meaningless, atheism simply does not work for me. I think you would find too that the more you think about and ultimately question what you believe the more it would unravel for you too.
On a different point, what would you say is something interesting about deities? What sort of things are you looking at in trying to understand whether or not God exists?
Calculon.
You always have to be careful when comparing things from different religons. Often different religions think in very different ways. What seems similar on the surface might be understood by two different religions in completely different ways.
So in what way are experiences with Krishna or Earth Goddesses or animal spirits the same as the experiences that as_you_wish is talking about? Can you actually give some concrete examples of some experiences and demonstrate why they are of the same kind as Christian experiences of God?
Calculon.
There are innumerable examples of people having literal experiences of seeing and talking to Hindu gods, to animals, etc.
In college, I once did an extensive research paper on a famous Bengali mystic named Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna saw and talked to multiple Hindu gods, including Kali and Rama and others. He was a priest at a Kali temple and he and another priest both claimed that the god Rama had come to them in the form of a baby, and that they had spent several weeks tending to him and taking care of him. They both believed this literally happened in a concrete way,and both saw the little blue baby.
Ramakrishna also saw Jesus and Muhammed.
We once had a poster here who claimed to have a close, personal relationship with a Norse fertility god named Freyr (which was also this poster’s user name)
You can see some of his posts here (this is just a search on his username with the keyword “freyr”).
I have done a lot of reading (especially in college when I did a a lot of independent study credist on mysticism) on various other shamanistc, Buddhist and other traditions which are filled with visionary experiences and revelationary experiences of other gods, with experiences of animal “spirit guides,” etc. These individuals are always just as convinced of the reality of their experiences as Christians are. What makes their experiences less real than yours?
I can’t speak for Calculon, but as a Christian myself, I would hesitate to insist that they are less real – just as I wouldn’t rule out AClockworkMelon’s invisible unicorn (if he were being serious). I’d probably interpret those experiences differently, but I certainly don’t dismiss them.
I appreciate your reasoned response, I haven’t got time to get too deeply into answering all of your points but I will say to this
Well we get into deep waters when trying to define truth. But I most certainly do value critical assessment (professionally I do precisely that!).
And yes, of course I’m uncertain of he truth. How can I be otherwise? My senses and knowledge create for me an imperfect model of an objective reality. I concern myself with what works. So far, perfectly ordinary (though sometimes incredible) natural explanations provide perfectly serviceable explanations for all that I experience. Introducing a god on top of that is an unnecessary complication. I do know that some people find it aesthetically pleasing or comforting. And there may be a case to make for it providing some evolutionary benefit for highly evolved social creatures.
Still sounds like over-complication to me. it explains nothing extra and yet presents further need for explanation itself.
That is correct, whatever helps us pass our genes on gets selected. And just think. If that were the case and an innate tendency to religious thinking were helpful for survival, then how can you, here and now, tell the difference between that helpful delusion and what you perceive as an objective truth?
But you are aware of emergent properties? No reason to suspect that consciousness and free will, if they are a product of biological processes, are not of that nature too. Sure if you can know the position of every atom then theoretically one could predict every decision you are likely to make. But quantum fluctuations suggest that is not possible theoretically and we can say with a fair degree of certainty that it is not possible practically.
I don’t think the universe has to have a meaning. I don’t find that scary or concerning in the least. In fact I find it liberating. I can create my own meaning.
I understand and appreciate that you feel differently.
I would be interested if someone could point me to something tangible that requires a deity or the supernatural as an explanation. So far…nada!
This has been a long thread! I described my experience back in post #55–and you ae 100% correct in how you characterize it. I’ve tried to be open about this in response to the OPs question about what moved a person raised atheist into theism–it was absolutely not a logical, reasoned out decision.
I would certainly not expect what I consider evidence to be necessarily convincing (or even relevant) to others–it would not have been convincing to me until I was predisposed to look for it.
Yes, of course their experiences are valid. How could one deny another’s experience? Only in certain extreme cases (schizophrenia, for example) do we as a society go so far as to label someone else’s reality as “unreal.”
From a Christian theological viewpoint, these experiences would be characterized as evil spirits deliberately deceiving humans in order to keep them from the truth. (I accept this viewpoint because it fits with the rest of my belief system.)
From a completely secular viewpoint, such experiences would probably be characterized as dreams or self-deception, as I speculate many atheists would characterize my own subjective description of my experiences.
It would be presumptuous of me to describe how profound and meaningful these experiences are to the devout Hindu, Wiccan or animist, don’t you think?
How can you tell the difference between a real experience and a hallucination?
How do you know YOU aren’t the one being deceived by evil spirits?
This is utterly ciruular nonsense. You believe because you believe it?
It’s not a “secular viewpoint,” just an objective analysis of reality. There is no reason to look for magical explanations where non-magical explanations will suffice.
We are discussing how they describe it themselves. They’tre just as certain and ecstatic in their experiences as you are. By what objective basis can yousay that your god exists, but theirs don’t? “I believe it because I believe it” is not an answer.
I don’t know how to answer your questions because we don’t appear to have common ground for dialog. If I am reading correctly, you seem to be building a case that I have not provided a reasonable logical explanation. You ask me to provide an objective basis for my beliefs. I think I’ve been quite clear all along that my beliefs are not based on objective logic, but rather on something quite subjective: an experience, an ongoing relationship, choices. I have tried to avoid the red-flag word “faith,” but that, also, is a component.
You define your worldview as the objective analysis of reality. Within that context, naturally my viewpoint must be subjective and biased, foolish and circular nonsense. I find it fascinating that this appears to disturb you so much.
The OP did not ask us to provide a reasoned defense–merely an explanation of what changed our minds. So I will repeat briefly what I said before: What changed my mind from atheism to becoming a Christ-follower was a life-changing encounter. It’s a delight to me that I share this joyful, empowering experience with many others. Some of them may be able to provide you with reasoned and logical answers–but not me. I’m just living it and it’s wonderful.
So you did,
I did do a quick scan but didn’t see your earlier post. (indeed it is a long thread)
correlation between atheism and communism in non-communist countries may be loose. but i’ve a feeling flip-flopping from one political ideology to another may be a factor. it was like that with some college activists i know who eventually shed their communist leanings and are now devout christians (not to mention worshipers of the almight buck.)
I was just asking you what convinces you that your faith is more justified than the faith of those who see Rama. They’re just as sure as you are.
Whay makes you think it disturbs me? Just because I ask you questions about it doesn’t mean it disturbs me.