This has come up for me in some recent discussions with people knocking on my door on weekend mornings.
It seems extremely obvious to me that if God exists in a form anything like he’s presented in the Bible, (omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent is how it’s been explained to me), then it must be perfectly ok with him that I don’t believe, because he’s completely aware that I am not capable of it. He can see inside my mind and he understands that my brain is simply not wired to believe in him any more than it is wired to believe in leprechauns, and that the most I could ever acheive would be to pretend that I believed. Which would be both a lie and pointless, since he would know it was a lie, not to mention the fact that pretending such a thing would have no benefit for me, seeing as how I don’t believe and all.
So this insistence that I just have faith makes absolutely no sense.
And I offer it here in case anyone can or wants to try and make it make sense.
God loves you very much and feels your confusion. He wishes you could join him in the light, to partake in his wonderful gifts. That’s why you must burn in a lake of fire, forever.
I’m highly skeptical about someone who says they’re “physically incapable” of doing something that doesn’t violate the laws of physics. Given how many people have performed feats - both religious and nonreligious - that most would consider impossible, I’m more inclined to think that you simply don’t want to enough. So might a kid complain that it’s physically impossible to finish his homework, or I (sound of body though slightly out of shape) protest that I could never possibly climb Mt. Everest.
I am alone in my office right now. Is it your contention, that if I wished to, I could, by main force of will, believe that there is a person standing behind me? Not pretend to believe, not act as if I believe, not tell you I believe, but actually believe.
Such a thing is, as far as I can tell, not possible. I have tried for several minutes to believe that Jessica Alba just asked me for my wife’s phone number with a salacious expression, and it’s not working. I’d surely like to believe that. Why don’t I?
God being all powerful, it is truly not for me to question why some people have the gift of faith and others do not. Therefore, I don’t question it. It is one of life’s mysteries.
I don’t think, though, that you can use this mystery as some kind of proof that God does not exist, or that you aren’t equipped for faith yourself. I don’t see it working that way at all.
It seems like it would be possible. People’s beliefs about things do change, and we know that people are capable of believing in things that are not factually true. So, I don’t think it would be impossible.
Sounds a little harsh to me. The God I believe in doesn’t care whether you do or don’t beleive in him/her. Being happy with yourself is good enough because if you at peace with yourself you are at peace with God. I don’t think God is the jealous attention craving egomaniac that he’s been made out to be. Besides, what good is giving free will without being able to choose your own path?
If a dude with a white beard calling himself “God” appeared out of nothing in front of you, engendred an emotional reaction that filled you with oneness, total peace, and love, and turned water into a nice Châteauneuf du Pape, then led you to meet his family, Mary, Jeez with the holes in his hand, and the Holy Ghost (“the Spook” as they all call him), all with incorporeal glowing halos above their heads, could you then believe?
You may not see how you could believe in Him at this point of your life, but wouldn’t you think that the Creator of the universe, who planed you before it’s creation would have left a way for you to believe?
Of course I’d be skeptical at first if I had such a religious experience.
I know plenty of people who claim to have had religious experiences, and most of them seem to sincerely believe in the reality of those religious experiences. But while I believe that these people have experienced SOMETHING, I don’t believe they’ve really experienced Jesus, Allah, Zeus, Krishna, Xenu, or Nyarlathotep. For one thing, they don’t all agree with each other. So if I experienced such visions, I’d doubt the reality of such visions because I know that the human mind is capable of going off the rails in spectacular fashion. I’d suspect I was becoming schizophrenic, or was surreptitiously given LSD, or aliens were probing my brain for laughs, or whatever.
Now if those visions kept occuring I suppose eventually I’d begin to take them at face value, especially if they were consistent. I couldn’t rule out the notion that I was going crazy, but eventually you’re going to crack and start accepting the hallucination. I mean, if someone strapped you into a full-immersion World of Warcraft virtual reality tank, and you couldn’t escape, and you were trapped there for years for the rest of your life, and none of the other players ever broke character, at some point it doesn’t matter much whether you acknowledge that what you see and experience isn’t “real”, you’re going to eventually treat it as real because you have no other choice.
Thing is, the 3-Os God rather obviously contradicts the flawed nature of both humanity and the world. It’s simply logically impossible for such a god to exist. So, in the highly implausible situation that a god exists, it’s not that kind of god.
As for other kinds, an evil or psychotic or stupid god wouldn’t have an problem setting you up for eternal damnation or whatever and setting the blame on you. And an uncaring or inaccessable god either wouldn’t care what you felt , or wouldn’t be able to do anything.
Believing in free will makes it more satisfying for God and his followers to blame you for not doing the impossible or stupid, like believing in him, or following his demented supposed commands. Now I don’t believe in free will, nor do I think it possible for even a god to give you one, because the concept itself is incoherent.
I’d think I was hallucinating, or visited by aliens playing a joke, or being drugged or scammed somehow. The Christian mythology God is so utterly silly that any of those things is far, far, far more likely to be true.
Perhaps he just wants an excuse to burn people. Or he doesn’t care. Or he’s insane.
But there’s a catch-22 in this. Even if you can choose to believe in God (which is highly dubious; I strongly doubt that beliefs are under our voluntary control), if you don’t believe in God, then you will of course not believe that you have a reason to try to believe in God. That is, you can only know that you should put forth the effort to believe in God if you already believe in God. If you don’t believe in Him, you will think such effort a waste of time and an effort at forming a delusive belief.
If it happened, and I could really show that it was god and not something else, then I wouldn’t believe. I wouldn’t have to, I’d know. I don’t believe in this cup, I know it exists, even when I can’t see it. If I knew there was a god, there would be no need for belief. The fact that belief is required should be a clue.
Well, sure. I will be a little presumptuous and speak for the OP by saying that I sincerely doubt that she is saying that she is incapable of learning new things, or of developing new beliefs in response to evolving evidence. She’s just saying that she has been wired - by her Creator, if she had one, or by nothing at all, if not - to believe only that for which there is a certain amount of evidence.
I feel the same way. Belief is not something I can choose either way. Belief is a response. I believe that my calendar is on the wall because I can see it, and touch it. I believe that my wife loves me because I can perceive things that lead me to this belief. I do NOT believe that Jessica Alba is in my office right now because there is no reason for me to believe that, and I am programmed to believe only in response to some reason to believe.
And no matter how hard I try, I will never believe that Jessica is here. I can not choose to do so. Can you?
But that is not equivalent to what the OP claimed.
Stoid said that her brain was not “wired” to believe in God. Obviously, it would be ridiculous to say that your brain is not “wired” to believe that there is a person standing behind you, since that would mean that there is no external stimulus that would allow you to believe this, even if there WAS a man standing behind you.
Stoid’s claimed that her brain is not “wired” to believe in God is simply not true. Her brain’s not structured any differently from most other people. She simply has not received the sequence of external stimuli that would cause her to believe in God. Had she been subject to different stimuli she might have ended up a fervent believer. It is quite possible, however unlikely, that such a thing could still happen, even if it took a rather traumatic or life-changing event of some kind.
With all due respect, the last part of this statement is entirely wrong. God is completely aware that you are capable of believing. This is referred to as “free will”, and it is God’s greatest gift to humankind. The statement that “the most you could ever achieve” would be to pretend to believe flatly contradicts basic observations. Human beliefs can change over time; in fact, they cannot avoid doing so. And many people have switched from certainty in God’s non-existence to certainty in His existence, so there’s nothing particular about that belief that makes it particularly unchangeable.
There’s much, much more well-established problems with the tri-omni god (shit, even with just an omniscient one) that bringing logic into this debate is pretty well meaningless. Be content that there are already number of reasons that the Abrahamic god is fundamentally illogical.
