Religion exists because it claims to have special access to God and what God wants. If they are unable to define God clearly, or give a logically consistent view of God, or give any reasons why their God is more true than the church down the street’s God, then it is all a crock, isn’t it? That doesn’t mean there isn’t a God out there, just that the real God isn’t at all like any of our views of him and worshiping a made-up deity is a waste of time - or no more useful in your moral development than going to Star Trek cons.
There is a big difference between random acts and caused acts. If the tree fell due to random natural forces, it is tragic but not evil. If the God who controls all gave it a push, it could be called evil. If God designed the world to make killing floods and storms inevitable, he is as liable as a company that designed a product which will inevitably electrocute its users. Maybe God has pointy hair?
That is Biblically inaccurate. Read the story of Moses and the rock. Moses was not allowed into the Promised Land because he disobeyed and struck the rock and had the water flow, not just pass his staff over it. What God wanted was an example of proof of his power, what Moses did allowed an alternate explanation, which meant more faith was required.
The argument that proof or evidence somehow lessens faith only came about when we got into real time, not legend, and God stubbornly refused to show up. Why did Jesus reappear if faith is so great? Why the miracles?
And logic, by the way, is not a function of natural law. It holds no matter what the value of c and h is. Give up logic, and then we get to ask about God making a taco too big to eat. It is easy to use language to name something as a square circle, but such a thing is inherently self-contradictory.
But you just said that this would destroy faith, didn’t you? And where is he?
It’s a bit off-topic now, but are you suggesting that God is deliberately opaque to allow the existence of faith or that God is unknowable simply because true “knowledge” of God lies beyond the reach of the natural world?
If the former, then we only really know one thing about God: That He is coy. We don’t even know why He values faith. We certainly don’t know His intentions or what He wants, assuming He wants anything at all. Additionally, God should really know that revealing Himself directly subverts His divine mystery and necessarily destroys the faith of people who experience Him, right? You can’t un-have a divine revelation, I wouldn’t think.
If the latter, you’re just opening a big can of worms unless you care to conjecture as regards ways the supernatural can interface with the natural or describe what it means, practically, to be outside of existence.
Seems to me that any system of belief proposing a set of standards must necessarily provide a counter-point to embody the absence of those standards. This doesn’t just apply to theism; you can see it pretty much everywhere.
We don’t even know if he values faith. If all the evidence for an uncaring God might be wrong, then some Iron Age books could very well be wrong, too. Lots of other ones are.
Well yeah. I mean, we might as well also consider the possibility that God is off doing other stuff and the Devil Himself has been masquerading as God for millennia on a lark.
That story is about Moses’ faith, not faith in general.
Jesus’ reappearance isn’t objective evidence for God. Nor are any miracles.
Logic is a property of this universe. The assumption that logic always holds is similar to the assumption the universe is causal, or that gravity works everywhere and all the time, or that every proton is the same once we account for a few properties. Those are testable hypotheses, and thus are not necessarily true.
Revelation is not objective evidence.
The latter.
You’re committing the fallacy of the excluded middle. That is, that an entity has a property when considered as a whole does not imply that every subset has that property. For example, matrix multiplication is not commutable; however, the subset of matrices that are order-1 is. Likewise, that God is unknowable as a whole does not imply that any particular attribute is unknowable.
And divine revelation is not objective evidence.
My conjecture: we, as a part of the universe, do have any means to objectively determine what is outside this universe or how anything outside could interact with what is within.
This is all well and good as regards the necessity of faith, but it seems to me tacit admission of the reality that we really don’t know (can’t know?) anything at all about who God is, what He thinks about anything, or if He’s even there.
In fairness to me, I’m not embracing the excluded middle so much as I’m saying that, in your own terms, the totality of God is unknowable.
It’s an interesting thought but it sounds like “mysterious ways” to me. Why posit that there is such a place as “outside this universe” at all? Simply to prop up theism?
And I think that’s not logically supportable. Whether it’s true or not is a different matter. You’re certainly welcome to make subjective statements about God (after all, that is what we Christians do), but you’ll need to accept that they’re not objective (which is what Christians should do).
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just as we can’t know what’s outside the universe, we can’t know that there’s not anything outside the universe. It’s unknowable.
Fair enough. Honestly, I’d love to for everyone- theist and atheist alike- to acknowledge that all statements about God are absolutely and irrevocably subjective nature if only because that’d make it really, really hard to justify imposing the conclusions of those subjective statements on anyone else.
Pope Urban: “We must reclaim the Holy Lands!!”
Peasant: “Wot? Says 'ho?”
Pope Urban: “The Almighty God demands it!”
Peasant: “Well that’s just your opinion then, 'iddn’t it?”
Pope Urban: “…”
It’s fun to dip my toes in this now and again. Thanks for indulging me.
You think God needed to test Moses’ faith at that time? Remember, Moses risked everything in Egypt. And, why would God care? The only answer is as a demonstration of his power to the assembled masses. Now to some extent they should be convinced also, but they weren’t, clearly in order for the priests who wrote the story to send a message to the doubters, just like in the last Narnia book.
But the argument isn’t that absolute evidence destroys faith, it is that any direct evidence destroys faith. And I thought that the risen Jesus was the absolute underpinning of Christianity.
What natural constant defines logic? All the stuff you talk about is based on evidence - incomplete evidence in the cause of causality, since when we look far enough we see that at the quantum level the universe does not exhibit causality.
Logic is not based on any of this. A & ~A being false is not determined from experimental evidence.
Revelation in the sense of God chatting with a prophet supposedly? Sure. Revelation in the sense that God talks to all people in a cloud in all languages at once? Maybe not proof, but it sure is evidence.
But Rod Serling, wrote, or edited, all the scripts. Given what happens to some people in those shows, if they saw Serling standing there they would be quite justified in punching him in the snoot.
Most writers would be much nicer to their characters if they were real.
You’re free to interpret the story as you like, but I don’t see any reason to interpret it your way.
I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’m making the distinction between subjective and objective evidence, not direct and indirect. Many Christians claim to have direct evidence of God, but it is subjective–not reproducible nor even useful to anyone else.
Then what is logic based on? Are you assuming it is as an axiom? How is that different than any other non-falsifiable statement, like the ones Christians make about God?
I do not think that assuming logic is non-falsifiable. We justify applying logic because we have objective evidence that it works. Every time someone checks that exactly one of A and not A are true, they’re doing an experiment testing that logic holds.
Why must that be the case? Suppose I know someone (call him Joe) who I believe to be sane, canny, and knowledgeable, and he informs me of his direct religious experience. To the extent that I believe Joe to be a trustworthy source, why is this not (possibly extremely mild) evidence of the truth of his religion? Why should this be useless?
Ehh. Without assuming the law of non-contradiction, how do you draw conclusions about your experimental results without begging the question? You can’t have falsifiability unless you’re willing to assume something about the deductive process.
If Joe tells you that he had a ham sandwich for lunch, would you find that believable? If he tells you that the sandwich was delivered to him by Billy Joel, would you find it equally believable, or just slightly less so? Now, if he tells you that Billy Joel delivered that sandwich by teleporting into his living room, where would you put that on your believability scale?
No matter how believable you find someone to be, if the claim defies reality it would serve you well to doubt your friend.
eh. i wouldn’t say a religion has to be 100% correct nor God absolutely real for there to be value in religion. there’s value in tertiary aspects. communion, fellowship, a sense of belonging. hope. a however incorrect sense of understanding of things. insight. etc.
i know some really religious people who are associated with brands of god i totally couldn’t ever buy into, yet they are better people not in spite of their religion, but because of it. there are a lot of problems with religion but i’m not going to say there’s no value. i know some Trekkies and nothing about their interest in sci-fi really contributes to their kindness, philanthropy or ethics.
you can argue both are as make believe as each other, but one really presses on the matter of crowd-control, group-think and suppression of all the unsavory sides of being a human. the other is just dressing up and pew-pewing with toy guns and shit.
I’d say more like 0% correct - as far as we can tell. Lots of social clubs give a sense of belonging. I’ve had no trouble with hope without god. And I’d rather work for a real understanding of things, based on evidence, than to try for a sense of it.
I’m sure I’ve read about sf conventions doing good works like blood drives. But for every person who gives to charity thanks to religion there is another giving to anti-SSM movements, My objection is to a religion’s sense of righteousness, the sense that whatever it teaches is correct because God said so in some invisible way. I’m as yet unaware of any wars between Star Trek fans and Star Wars fans, and I’m unaware of anyone introducing legislation to reduce the rights of the other side.
It is not clear to me that religion makes people more moral as a whole. There was on period when every other letter to Dear Abbey was from a woman who wrote that her husband/boyfriend was a Christian man - and you just knew he was a cheater, a drunk or an abuser - or all three.
Interpret it as you will, God seemed to have no problem making his presence very known, in a way which would convince most people today of his existence. He parted the Red Sea, he rode around in a cloud, he shat manna. What more would anyone want?
Lots more, which is the point of those stories, as I said.
Okay, I was fooled by absolute. Subjective evidence isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, though we’ve had Dopers who believed for this very reason.
That’s like saying that adding 2 and 2 and getting 4 is an experiment. It is more fundamental than that, and the basic rules of logic are true in all universes. We have to be careful what the rules really are - Aristotle is full of false rules, though not fundamental ones, and causality as a basic rule has been disproved.
(BTW I am quite familiar with the axiomatic definition of addition, and I’m not saying that it is a basic rule of logic - just something not prone to experimental verification or refutation.)
