I had a dream the other night that I could fly. Neither your dream or mine carries any weight when it comes to reality. Your argument is only valid if you admit that any personal experience you have with a god takes place within your mind, is totally personal and subjective, and has nothing to do with reality.
The post of mine you quoted was mainly about free will. I don’t agree with those claiming that an omnipotent and benevolent God would obviously make himself known if he truly loved his creations. Making people believe in him in a way that they must remain convinced that God truly is God {which seems to be what you’re implying} strikes me as taking away free will. When that happens the argument doesn’t seem consistent or useful to me.
You have presented any argument that shows those are the only choices.
One does not follow the other. We can have evidence(or even proof) of his existence, and still decide to go our own way. The Bible is full of people that talked directly to your god and still questioned him. Adam and Eve even disobeyed him! Then there was this dude called Satan…
Then give me another.
Where did this silly idea that evidence=loss of free will come from, anyway? I get as much information as I can before I decide on a Mayor, Governor or President. The more important the decision, the more information I try to gather. Do I not have free will when I make these decisions? When I choose which stores to shop at, I look at prices and selections and remember what kind of service I received the last time I was there. Do I not have free will when I make these decisions? I wouldn’t last very long in this world if I depended on blind faith for all of my decisions-have I not had free will all this time?
If God just showed up one day, it would have to be the end of the world just because of the absolute chaos that would follow. Many people would think they were going crazy seeing an impossible manifestation. Other people would become irate at the thing posing as God, dubbing it the devil and and trying to kill it and any of its followers. Some would run to it and throw themselves at God’s feet in utter devotion, expecting to become immortal or something. Others would think it was some kind of elaborate hoax concocted by a secret organization hellbent on taking over the world. How could God appear and have everyone know that what they were seeing was, in fact, the God? And then, how would God prevent the chaos that would follow, brough on by all these free-willers? The method of making a bearded face appear in a tree stump is finally starting to make sense…a little.
You’re ignoring the lines between the subjective and objective. It doesn’t further the conversation to point out that there is no objective evidence that a spirit exists. Yes I know.
The subjective experience is legitimate evidence to the individual. It cannot be used as proof to others but it can be shared on a subjective level with others. When people share a certain subjective emotional experience and/or belief it can be reinforced whether it is completely true, partly true, or completely false.
Believing things about your country that are demonstratively false because of some emotional level of patriotism would be blind faith.
Sorry no, people have blind faith in other people when they deny something about that person in spite of existing evidence. People have an emotional attachment to others and an emotional need that colors their belief system. The same is true for groups we might belong to or support.
The same type of emotional and physiological events going on within religion exist in other aspects of human existence. They occur within the atheist and the believer.
I’ve given you proper examples. You appear to have blind faith that I’m wrong.
Yes you can believe and still choose to go your own way. That’s the point. It’s a choice. Even those that had direct contact still got to choose. Those that saw miracles didn’t always maintain belief. Doesn’t that defeat the argument I’m hearing here that God should someone how make us all believe and keep believing?
I just don’t see how that becomes a strong argument against the existence of God.
Self-denial and blind faith are two entirely different things. If I ignore existing evidence, that is self-denial. In the case of your, or any, god there is no evidence to deny in the first place. In fact, if there were even a smidgen of evidence, we couldn’t even use the term blind faith at all.
Your examples, therefore, are not proper.
Nobody is saying that they want your god to make people believe in him and follow him. They are just asking for evidence that he even exists in the first place. As I’ve pointed out before, real blind faith is a sucker’s game-if you tried it in any other aspect of your life you’d end up on your ass. Go into a room that you’ve never been in before with your eyes closed and have blind faith that a chair will be there when you attempt to sit down. Go into the woods with no knowledge of what is edible and what is not and have blind faith that whatever you put into your mouth will be good for you. Step out into a busy intersection without looking and have blind faith that nothing will hurt you. You might think that these are silly examples, but this is precisely the method you use to decide:
- If there are any gods,
- Which god or gods to follow and,
- How to follow said god or gods.
This could be the most important decision of your life, and you want to use a method to decide that would let you down if you used it to make any other decision in the world.
Seeing the big picture and the divine matrix of creation and how it all fits together, cause and effect, maintaining free will, action and reaction, we may discover that although it isn’t always pleasant from our limited perspective, it is working as it should. We may discover that the universe and whatever it is we’ve been reaching for with terms like God, are interactive and the reason our little piece, earth and humanity, is the way it is is exactly because we are as we are. Want to change it and make it better? It is within our grasp. It’s a matter of what we truly value and how our choices reflect that.
But life is not fixed, it is moving and changing and new choices must be made for Mayor or where to shop, taking those changes into consideration. Also you have a limited amount of time and energy to put into gathering information for those choices. We constantly have to make decisions based on the best information we have right now, even though we are aware we don’t know it all.
Let me try to clear something up.** I am not saying that evidence =loss of free will**. People seem to be suggesting that if God were really omnipotent and benevolent he would provide evidence that convinced us and that would somehow make the world better. Since God doesn’t that is taken to be a logical and compelling argument that God does not exist. Is that close? Please clarify if I’m not getting it because I want to understand the argument.
I mentioned that some miracle or even direct contact. “Hi I’m Jehovah and I wanted to chat a while” would most likely fade with time, so others insisted that an omnipotent being could make the knowledge stick. That’s what struck me as violating free will. It’s maintaining free will , which seems to mean we have to have something to choose between, which makes this particular argument a lot less compelling and not so clearly logical to me. IMO whenever atheists try to tweak the argument they get closer and closer to eliminating free will. That strikes me as “I’m going to lock my kids in their room to make sure they are safe and don’t suffer” except that method of preserving their safety also stifles their experience of life and doesn’t strike me as benevolent or loving. To truly know the highs we have to risk the lows.
So let’s state the obvious and say an omnipotent and benevolent God could make everyone believe without violating free will. Obviously God hasn’t done that.
So what? You pointed out that believers have still chosen to go their own way. That being the case I don’t see how God making everyone a believer changes much and becomes any sort of compelling argument. Since most of the world are believers now and we see how they take such liberties with interpreting the rules then we can’t say that simple belief would make things better. There’s more to it than that.
So, while I understand the argument as a reason some reject god belief, I don’t find it any more compelling or logical than any believer saying." I look at the wonder of creation and conclude there must be a creator" which isn’t logical or compelling to you at all is it?
{Everybody dance, now!}
Dance, God, dance! Do the boogaloo! Get down!
Then we don’t agree on what constitutes blind faith. You are requiring objective evidence for a subjective experience and it isn’t a valid argument IMO.
If you say it’s blind faith that God an omnipotent and benevolent spiritual being exists, then pointing out the lack of *non spiritual *evidence seems pointless to me. Using blind faith in the way you are seems to be a subjective emotional thing to me which IMHO is what makes my examples relevant. I maintain that a similar emotional ,subjective process of a developing a belief system occurs in many areas of life and in the believer and the non believer. I reject that believers in particular eagerly embrace things without evidence while non believers don’t. IMHO and in my experience, on a personal subjective emotional level, which is where god belief, and our spirituality resides, both do.
I don’t agree. Once again you are using objective external examples about something that is personal and internal. It’s just not a valid example or argument.
If someone survived a week in the woods and said “God guided me and preserved me, led me to food and water” would you accept that as solid evidence that God existed. Of course not and you would be correct not to.
I repeat, every human makes important choices and decisions based , at least in part, on their subjective experience and emotional judgments. It’s an unavoidable aspect of the human condition. When non believers eagerly point this out about believers as if it’s some gaping charecter flaw it strikes me as an empty argument. It may make them feel good but ignores certain facts in order to gain that feeling. It’s ironic…the same fault they are pointing out is the one they’re missing in themselves.
Ask away. I think we’ve already established that evidence of that type wouldn’t really speak to the issues that plaque the world as long as free will remains.
No, we have not established that evidence of that type wouldn’t speak to the issues-for the convenience of your argument, you have assumed it.
The problem is that when people talk about “communicating with God” they’re using the word “communicate” incorrectly. Ya see, “communication” implies a transmission or exchange of information. I’m trying to think of any circumstance where the optimal method of communication is an indescribably abstract, nonverbal, nonvisual, mechanism which transmits data in such a way that it can only possibly have meaning in the context of individual subjective interpretation… and I’m not coming up with much.
Really, I don’t think willingness enters into it. Moreover, I don’t think it’s possible at all. But hey, it’d be relatively easy to prove me wrong. Say I tell you a number between 1 and 10, you relay the number to God in your own personal abstract way, and God relays the number to someone else. They tell me the right number a statistically significant percentage of the time and I’m convinced. Simple.
Kids who are “unwilling to listen” hear the message just fine and simply choose to ignore it. God isn’t in the next room asking you if you brushed your teeth. He’s in the next room silently waving semaphores to signal a message in a language you don’t even know exists. He’s also invisible and incorporeal. Oh, and you don’t actually know He’s in there or that He even wants to tell you something at the moment, for that matter.
It must be neat to actually understand why it’s Good for innocents to suffer and die horribly. I wonder if I’ll ever evolve enough to hear or appreciate the explanation. Can’t wait.
I think you should sit down and have some smelling salts ready. I am about to DEFEND belief in God.
I realize that argument by anaology is frowned upon by the rules of logic, but analogies can have some validity in giving us new views or approaches to a problem.
Some theists almost seem to be saying that God is unable to effectively make himself known NOT because he is not omnipotent but because our understanding is so limited compared to that of an omniscient being.
It has been pointed out that if God appeared in the sky or something, millions would still say that it was a trick, or the work of the devil, etc.
Even if God appeared right next to my computer this second, how would I know, in a world of Pixel animation and holograms, that it is really real?
This might also apply to the problem of suffering. The answer might be that there is an explanation, but WE are too limited in brain power to understand.
Consider this analogy. I am, (grant me this for the sake of argument 
) much more intelligent and knowledgeable than my cats. At least a couple of times a year, I grab them, put them in cages, and take them to a man in a white coat who probes them, sticks needles in them and does all manner of indignities to their feline person. And not only do I allow this to happen, but I hold them down while this horrible man, who smells of DOGS!, does this to them.
Now, try as I might, I will never be able to explain to my cats how vaccination and veterinary medicine work. In fact, they cannot even understand human language except for a few words like “Din-din!”.
I frequently leave them all alone in our condo and go off to work. They do not like to be left alone. But if I do not go off to work, I will not have the money to pay for the nice furniture they claw, the food I give them, etc. I must have money in my bank account to do this. Would anyone like to suggest a way I can explain this series of causes-and-effects to a feline mind?
So is it impossible to bridge the communications gap created by the differences in my intelligence and the intelligence of a cat? No, because there is one channel of communication. It is love. I love them and no matter what cynics say, I am convinced that they love me. Their desire to be in the same room, to get up and sleep on the end of my bed, their greeting me at the door, their desire to be touched, etc., is, I am convinced, a form of love.
Conclusion: It is possible that when two beings are separated by a large gap in intelligence, there may be cases where the superior being must do or allow things that appear pointlessly cruel, but that are in fact justified. It is simply that the being of inferior intelligence may not be able to understand the explanation.
But love, whatever it is, is a medium of communication that can still bridge the communications gap.
I am still an atheist, but if there is one theist argument that seems plausible, it is that one.