I think you’re playing semantic games there. Most “believers” know there is a god, regardless of the evidence - or lack of it - that drove them to that “knowledge”. It’s the same thing. (That’s why they’re impossible to argue with.)
ETA:
Does this apply to Vishnu as well?
From a bumpersticker I’ve seen recently:
“God made me an atheist. Who are YOU to say He was wrong?”
Which part? The part about God creating humankind obviously does not apply to Vishnu. The part about human beliefs being changeable obviously does apply to beliefs in Vishnu.
Belief has nothing to do with free will. Free will is about choosing and being able to choose; you can’t choose to believe in God. That decision is entirely out of your power. Human belief may certainly change over time, but it cannot as a result of me suddenly up and deciding that i’m going to change what I believe. Some outside event must occur in order for this to happen. Just as you say; they cannot avoid doing so. We have no choice in this matter.
The ability to believe is not a facet of free will. I’m sure that I would be able to believe, given the right circumstances. But I can’t choose to, just as you can’t choose not to.
That’s just it, they don’t know. They believe. It’s not the same thing. Regardless of what they think, it’s just a belief.
To say that belief cannot change change as a result of people deciding to change what they believe is flatly wrong, because it often does change exactly that way. For instance, just consider how many Republicans once believed that Saddam Hussein was a nice guy worthy of our support and rapdly switched to believing that he was an evil tyrant who must be overthrown. Now, surely this wasn’t because their brains were rewired or because something fundamental in Saddam’s nature changed, so it must be because they chose to change beliefs.
No, it musn’t be because of that at all.
You’re saying that neither their minds were physically altered and that reality didn’t change, and so they must have made a decision. Nope. Certainly those things are so. But reality doesn’t need to change; all that’s needed is our view of reality to change. For example, they might find out a particularly horrible thing he did. Or perhaps they heard that he was actually bad from a trusted source. This doesn’t actually change reality, but it does change our view of it. So no, they didn’t change their beliefs because they chose to. You can’t do that. They changed their minds because they gained extra information - an outside event occurred, as I said.
But feel free to prove me wrong. Pick something you believe in, and decide to change your beliefs to something else. Choose to believe that all fish are pink, for example. I think you’ll find that you don’t get to pick and choose what you believe.
Hmmm. It sounds to me like the slightly erroneous premise, “Ya gotta beleeeeeve!” underlies a lot of the discussion here. But both Scripture and the traditional teaching of the Church (as opposed to self-appointed evangelists and theologians) suggest that God saves by grace, i.e., a totally unsolicited unearned gift, done not because of who you are or anything you did, but because of who He is and what He did. To be sure, the way in which one receives this gift as a part of one’s own spiritual life is traditionally stated as “through faith,” i.e., through trust in Him. But that is, IMO, simply a statement of the most common means of becoming aware of His gift, not a condition placed on what is by definition an unconditional gift. And the faith talked about is not, or only secondarily, intellectual assent to a series of propositions regarding Him, His nature and His interactions with others, but pure and simple trust.
I have no doubt that God knows and loves Stoid, knows her better than she knows herself, is fully aware of her capabilities and limitations, and loves her unconditionally.
Der Trihs, are you at all familiar with John Shelby Spong’s thinking? I think you might find some of his writing very intriguing.
They “know” inasmuch as any of us “know” anything. To you or me, it’s merely “belief”, but to understand where they’re coming from requires empathy, IMO.
Not really. They “know” because they feel that because of some personal revelation this idea they cling to should override all logic and rational thinking that contradicts this cherished belief. The things I know are testable and defensible with evidence (and thus have a much higher likelihood of being true).
So, no. Belief in a god is not the same as belief in gravity. They aren’t even on the same playing ground.
Of course, this reasoning is both illogical and irrational, and bordering on juvenile.
Are the things you don’t know, and haven’t tested, by definition, untrue?
Did he say he had to do the testing, or simply that they are testable?
That personal revelation comes below testability is a value judgement in itself. What evidence is reasonable or unreasonable is again a matter of belief.
“Override all logic and rational thinking” is such hyperbole I don’t really want to touch it.
Good question.
Are there things that are considered “true” (i.e. testable) that at somepoint in the recent past were untestable?
In other words, is all that can be known as “truth”, already known? Are there things that we haven’t yet learned because we haven’t found a means of testing? Are there things that we have no concept of, let alone test, that we will yet learn?
Are you suggesting that, given enough time, someone will come up with empirical evidence for the Abrahamic God? How novel. What sort of apparatus do you suppose we’ll need? Microscopes of various sorts did wonders for biology and physics-- what’s a God detector look like?
He didn’t use the word “true,” either. Are you using his post a a starting point, or are your questions unrelated to it?
I’m unsure what you mean by “untestable.” I believe that all phenomena are physical, and therefore all phenomena are theoretically testable.
I would say “no” to this. I don’t see it as the same question at all.
I suspect the answer to this is “probably.”
Because of the fact that personal experience is barely one step above eye witness testimony from a blind man. Personal experience is so uniformly sloppy and disorganized that to accept it over rational, objective, third party oversight is ludicrous. Belief in evidence is not another form of fundamentalism, as many like to conclude, but a real necessity for surviving in the world, and claims of divine reality do not invalidate the need for real evidence.
Claims of logical inconsistency are repeatedly met with “we just aren’t meant to understand.” Where reason contradicts belief in a god, god always triumphs.
Oh, of course not. I didn’t say that.
But things that simply can not be tested should be shelved with other ideas that can not be tested. The existence of a personal god and a flying spaghetti monster are equally sound and defensible and should be treated as such.
Actually, I take that back–the spaghetti monster doesn’t have any claims of benevolence or omniscience, so doesn’t even brush up against the problem of evil. Spaghetti monster wins against the Abrahamic god in at least logical consistency.
Surely. But in the absense of evidence right now, the reasonable default position is doubt. You have had “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” slammed into your skull on this board, haven’t you? It’s a very useful maxim.
Let’s say that I slammed my car into yours, and said that an invisible being made me do it. This invisible being is to blame, not me, and you can go looking for him sometime, maybe, if we ever find out how to spot him. My hunch is that you would (rightly) call bullshit on me and demand I pay restitution, even though you have not disproved my invisible being.
This same strategy for information gathering should be applied uniformly, not just in cases where it is convenient.
One day I learned that the phrase “I know X” means “I have 100% certainty about X”, and has only an incidental relationship to the actual truth of X. Once I realized this, I stopped having a problem with people’s usage of the word, and was able to move on to other, more productive avanues of thought and discussion. (Though I still sigh over “I don’t believe, I know”; such people are merely proving that they too misunderstand the word “know”, like I once did.)
It’s still a totally subjective value. I value something a bit more testable and repeatable above a sole personal experience too, but that only makes me right within my own value judgment system. After all, in the end, all repeatability does is allow us a practical measure that what we do will be repeated. It doesn’t prove that something is so; that the same results come up again could just be down to chance. It is our belief that it is not, that what we’re getting is evidence. And we require belief that the test itself is a reasonable one. And we require belief that we’re accurately seeing the results. And we require belief that we’re able to understand those results.
Believers in a particular god tend to follow what that god says, or at the very least try. That seems logical. Certainly I would agree that many believers aren’t logical in specific cases, but to claim “all logic and rational thinking” is overriden is, as I said, hyperbole. We may disagree with their premises but their conclusions are quite often reasonable.
A subjective value that can nonetheless be measured by its objective results. A belief system which allows for ideas to be embraced without evidence is one ripe for manipulation and error, while one which requires reasoned argument and objective evidence is considerably less prone to error.
I mean logic in the classical sense, as in 2 + 2 = 4 logic. You seem like a smart fellow, I’m sure you’re well aware of the multiple iterations of the problem of evil, which pretty conclusively shows that certain statements about a god are fundamentally illogical.