I’m following along Poly, but I still remain confused a bit. That ‘instantaneous knowledge of God’ perception is something I can understand, or at least I can envision. But I still am not sure about the bit concerning the either/or between God and precognition. Understandably, we all have things we simply cannot post about for personal reasons, and if elaboration crosses into that territory, I can understand that. I’m not trying to pry anything too sensitive out of you that you’ll regret posting. Nevertheless, your either or post is intriguing.
I was a bit rushed in composing that marathon post before a meeting. What it fails to convey is this:
(1) It is entirely plausible that my subconscious mind, rapidly composing gestalts, could have recognized the value to my eventual fulfilled self-image of moving me in certain ways at some of the cusp events above.
(2) However, it is not within reason to assume that it had any way of knowing that such things as taking in the two boys would lead to the other events that occurred later that were instrumental in changing my personality.
(3) I note that one vitally important event, the renewal of emotional intimacy between my wife and myself, and her emergence, with my help, from the equally barriered shell into a self-confident and caring woman, managed not to manifest itself in that summary.
(4) The sense of willed inexorability – that the things which happened, happened for a reason and were both in accord with a Plan and completely welcomed and to some extent willed by myself – is missing from that rather bald summary of events.
(5) Further, the idea that those three boys and I were all in need of a father/son relationship and found it in each other is not clear. That doesn’t go to prove anything except that either (a) you find what you’re looking for, (b) God is merciful in giving you what you need, or © both (a) and (b) are true and worked together. But it’s emotionally important to the theme I’m painting.
(6) Self-centeredly, I’ve focused on my own needs being fulfilled in this and to a lesser extent those of my wife and of the third boy, the one who became the closest to me, and whom I still consider as “son.” But both the other two ended up benefitting from the deal – the first boy finding lasting happiness married to the younger cousin of the third boy, and the second boy, the cousin, meeting the woman he ended up with through the auspices of the man the third boy got him a job with, as a result of my having loaned him the money to run his own taxicab – it gets even more complex. But you see my point. Nobody weaves a fictional plot quite as complex and so positively resolved for all concerned as this story ends up being.
Does any of this saga go to prove anything except that I believe in God for subjective reasons and that events in my life transformed me into a much happier and more likeable person? Nope. To quote the Noah story, “God said, ‘C’mon, you know I don’t work that way’” But is it enough evidence for me? Absolutely. And insofar as I am concerned, one must cut deeply with Occam’s Razor to eliminate any trace of the supernatural from it.
The key point in my emotional evolution was in meeting the third kid, and the relationship (partaking of best friends, brothers, and father/son) that we built from it was something that nobody, least of all the cousin – who, although he knew both of us, was even more surprised than either of us at the “love at first sight” interaction and its eventual results in rebuilding both our psyches – could have ever expected.
And so I hyperbolically claim that either God destined all this to happen (with our cooperations, to be sure) or somehow my subconscious knew to expect results I was not yet at all consciously wanting or expecting from improbable sources – reaching out to a teenage petty criminal is hardly what might be expected to turn into a life-changing event.
Yeah, the laws of probability not only permit coincidences, but insist on them. But whatever your definition of causality, a sequence of events with beneficial results that could not be reasonably expected to happen with any sensible allocation of even unusual foresight leads one to wonder what might have caused them.
In my case, believing in a merciful God who finds ways to work through people as they are, I know the answer to why it all happened. However, I am unlikely to convince anyone who doesn’t believe on the basis of that story.
Poly - Interesting. It sounds like stuff that would not convince me personally but I can understand that it might be enough for others.
I have personally have had moments when I somehow KNEW that God existed. I have also had moments where I KNEW he didn’t.
It sounds to me like you are a wonderful person and I don’t give a hoot what your beliefs are as long as you continue to help out your fellow man.
As far as miracles go, I didn’t notice any in your story, nor precog. You made some judgements you felt were right and you were later vindicated. I would say that this story shows that you are a good person who was able to show the people around you the merits of integrity and honesty. You weren’t 100% effective, thus your friend was arrested after you had already become an influence in his life. However, in the long run, you have positively influenced several people in a very big way. I applaud you.
“Then the Bible is also mistaken.”
This is where logic fails with the atheist, arrogance makes one assume that one has the correct interpretation, which allows the ability to disbelieve in something. The bible never claims omniscience, just omnipotence. (and a even slightly limited omnipotence at that)
For me there have never been moments where I KNEW beyond proof. For me it was simply I saw the good that god had done to some christans lives and took a leap of faith and was similarly helped and even given proof that would stand up scientifically. You know wether or not someone is good by the fruits of their labor and god helped me tremendously.
Also “No, the universe is objective. It’s your perception of it that is subjective. Big difference.”
We cannot say that the universe is objective because our preception is subjective.
I guess you could assume that it is objective, but you could only assume.
First of all, I agree with VileOrb’s most recent post. I was, quite frankly, underwhelmed by Polycarp’s brief autobiography. I simply could not, at first, see how he came to believe there is a God based on that story. Getting an instant rapport with someone isn’t much proof, IMHO. Being cured of heart disease by human surgeons ain’t much proof either. (Why don’t the doctors deserve any credit?) Now, if you had prayed that your heart be freed of disease and the disease miraculously went away without you ever once going to a doctor, I’d be more inclined to believe it was Divine Intervention that healed you. But you said it was doctors who healed you, then said, in effect, “It was really God who did it.” (And even non-believers and non-Christians feel a renewed sense of purpose after a life-saving event.)
What I’m saying is, if it had happened to me, I might have come to the same conclusions as you. But there’s no way to know for sure.
If it’s arrogant to think you have interpreted the Bible correctly, then one could conclude that you are arrogant based on this statement:
(This could be a whole 'nother thread, but the notion of a God that is all-powerful but NOT all-knowing is terrifying. An entity that has all the power in creation but not knowing exactly what to do with it would be capable of (and would therefore commit) the greatest evils we can imagine and also those we could not imagine.)
[quote]
For me it was simply I saw the good that god had done to some christans lives and took a leap of faith and was similarly helped and even given proof that would stand up scientifically. You know wether or not someone is good by the fruits of their labor and god helped me tremendously.
[quote]
And what of the good done by non-Christians? Is it all somehow LESS good?
Baloney. If we test the universe in some way and get the same response each and every time (allowing for errors, of course), we can therefore say the universe is objective and our perception is subjective.
How could it be anything else?
What if we only subjectively percieve that the universe is objective?
“And what of the good done by non-Christians? Is it all somehow LESS good?”
not done by, done to
“(This could be a whole 'nother thread, but the notion of a God that is all-powerful but NOT all-knowing is terrifying. An entity that has all the power in creation but not knowing exactly what to do with it would be capable of (and would therefore commit) the greatest evils we can imagine and also those we could not imagine.)”
Ok what if he is perfect but not all-knowing? What if all-knowing is just like god creating a rock he cannot lift. Also, since humans are capable of murder why havent all humans commited murder?
“If it’s arrogant to think you have interpreted the Bible correctly, then one could conclude that you are arrogant based on this statement”
Ok let me ask you this, if a christan suddenly told you how athiesm works and says your wrong would you think he is arrogant?
I have avoided posting to this thread for a long time. There seem to be few people calmly stating their views and presenting evidence they believe supports their viewpoint, and many who are frustrated that others can’t or won’t accept the evidence they do present. Some are barely able to contain their amazement (and in some cases, anger) that others are not convinced by the arguments in favor of their views. I applaud those who have presented their evidence without demanding it be accepted as divine revelation (or perhaps “self-evident” is a more appropriate term, in the case of atheists).
If the facts don’t agree with your theory:[list=1][li]there is either something wrong with your theory, or[/li][li]your facts are not correct, or[/li][li]your interpretation of the facts are incorrect, or[/li][li]your understanding of your theory is flawed, or[/li][li]all of the above.[/list=1]It is also possible that even though the facts agree with your theory, it is not because your theory is correct, but that the facts you know are fewer than the facts that exist.[/li]
While I believe in G-d, I also understand my belief is based on faith. For the sake of this argument, atheism is, in my opinion, based on faith as much as any form of theism, and thus counts as a “religion”. Any belief system based on faith, even if supported by “facts”, is still based on faith. Nothing is self-evident since we interpret the world we percieve through the filter of our senses.
Attempting to persuade someone that their personal belief system (to include atheism, theism, or anything not already covered by those two) is false by presenting evidence they can’t believe in or don’t trust is foolish. Declaring them idiots or fools (or worse) because they do not agree with you is even more so. It makes you look like an ass in their eyes, and makes them look like a fool in yours.
All personal beliefs are based on a subjective interpretation of the world around us. No-one intentionally chooses a belief system that does not seem to make sense to him/herself. I can ask G-d to provide acceptable proof to anyone who honestly seeks the truth, but I am not so foolish as to expect G-d to do my bidding, and even if G-d himself appeared to me in a vision, I believe I would ask for some I.D. I’d advise you to do the same.
I’ve said it before: it’s more important to understand than it is to agree.
~~Baloo
This makes no sense.
And how could He be both perfect and NOT all-knowing?
Only the ones who can’t write worth a damn.
And how could He be both perfect and NOT all-knowing
what does perfect mean
jab1 – Look, God knows that you’re hiding. God knows why you are hiding. To say there is something there he doesn’t know is overassuming that we’re even working with a valid analogy.
Perhaps a better more modern analogy would make it more clear. If God were calling you on the phone and you were sitting there with your fingers in your ears not answering, is there really some lack of knowledge on God’s part? He knows you are there. He knows you aren’t answering. He knows why you aren’t answering.
The only real point of contention you might have with this is you were born into a world where most everyone has their fingers in their ears so you put your fingers in there before you could even comprehend the phone is ringing. That’s a problem – and it isn’t exactly entirely your fault. You were just following the example of your elders, who followed their elders, who followed theirs, going way on back until, presumably, someone screwed up in the way back when. That is what the parable of Adam and Eve is about. The official name the Catholics give this problem is “Original Sin,” a nomenclature which causes a great deal of confusion – I just prefer to say we live in a fallen world.
JAB and Ptahlis, I do understand your objection (I think).
You’re looking for some objective demonstrative evidence of the reality of God in my story – some “the preacher laid his hands on me, and then I was healed of my coronary artery disease” sort of phenomenon.
Remember that my theory of the world calls for God to work through the laws of nature, with occasional phase-change phenomena that constitute “miracles” as commonly understood – changing water into wine, walking on the water, blasting the fig tree, etc. And at least some of the things credulous believers see as “miracles” in this sense are legendary misinterpretations of events.
My story does not contain a single “miracle” in that sense. Rather it simply outlines a change from a self-loathing introvert with major guilt and inferiority issues to a self-assured, “dynamically content” individual that posts stuff like this, and attributes this to the work of the persona that I perceive as having revealed himself to me in my teens and again in 1982, and whom I perceived as the God of Abraham, Moses, and Christ. (“Dynamically content” is a personal phrase that means “dissatisfied with the present state but happy to exist as one so dissatisfied and willing to await and to instigate changes, as appropriate, to make one more satisfied.”)
If my argument founded on my “brief autobiography” has any objective validity whatsoever – and I’ll allow as to how it may not – it is not in any categorical proof or disproof that may be drawn from it, but in probabilistic terms.
Granted that everything that happened is quite simply explainable on a mundane, non-spiritual level – and I will not be terribly offended by the idea that those two apparitions and the sensations of guidance since are self-delusive in origin – my question is simply this: given an individual with the characteristics described at the beginning of my biography, how likely is it that he would choose the sequence of events that have brought me to where I am today? I maintain that either there was some teleological phenomenon at work (my own answer, and defined for myself as the Providence of a loving God), or else either my subconscious was able to identify a train of events that would make me a happier person – even though I had no clue that such a state of affairs was possible for me, or else the sequence of events happened as it did through blind chance and coincidentally led to the very positive results for almost all concerned that it did. The last is the Occam’s Razor explanation, but it fails, as far as I am concerned, for improbability reasons. While it’s possible, so is dealing ten sequential natural royal flushes from unstacked decks. And it smacks of the same sort of “highly improbable by chance” flavor that would have you take a good hard look at what the dealer in that poker game is up to. Me, I think the Dealer “stacked the deck” in my favor, out of love.
Poly - I see a lot of unlikely events happen. I think you could argue that ALL events are highly unlikely. Do you think that all the bad stuff that happened to you was the result of God allowing Satan to reshuffle the deck because you were not worshiping him properly? Was it some sort of punishment?
My life seems pretty good. Is God stacking the deck for me because I live a good life? If so, then why should I change?
The eternal problem with your argument, Poly, is that there’s little way to tell what your life would have been like if events had occured differently. Perhaps it would be worse. Perhaps it would be even better. I am content with my life as it is now; I can easily point to any decision I have made–say, my decision to become a web designer–and argue that if I had chosen otherwise my life would not be as it is now and as I am happy now, well everything must be for the best, right? Yet, if I had not chosen that, perhaps I would be a well-known painter, and could point to my rejection of web-design as the catalyst for that favorable end result. Our lives can pretty much always be better or worse, and we’re always changing. Whatever happens in your life, so long as you can find some good in it, you can claim it is manifestly the work of God, yet I don’t see a concomitant explanation for the times when “bad things” do not seem to lead to good. I can’t really find any good coming out of my father’s death; it was not an earth-shattering disaster, but I cannot say it made me, or anyone else, a better person, and I think we would have been better off with him around a bit longer. Did God let him die and bring no good from it because I do not believe in Him and so do not get the bennies believers do? Or do you believe some overarching good will come from my father’s death some time later?
The arguments for God’s providence sometimes seem quite strained…I remember one person saying their pastor was praying for more time to do his work, and then he injured his leg so badly he could never play basketball again, which freed up some extra time. Well, this person was praing God’s wisdom an’ all, and yet mentioned in an offhand way that the pastor had absolutely loved playing basketball. All I could think was, “damn, that sucks! If he had truly wanted the extra time more than he wanted to play basketball, he could have quite it himself, but no, God takes away a thing he loves and you praise Him for it?” Yes, you pretty much can find good in everything if you look hard, but you can find evil in everything if you look hard too. Choosing to find the good in every situation can be a quite admirable ability, but I don’t see the necessity of a Divine for what often seems solely a matter of perspective and assuming that things could only have turned out worse.
Reminds me of a story my mother tells me: The was once a father who had two sons; one who was always optimistic and one who was always pessimistic. The father didn’t think it was healthy for them to be so extreme in either direction, so he thought he’d even their temperments out a bit. So he takes the pessimistic son and puts him in a room filled with the newest, most wonderful toys ever invented. Then he takes the optimistic son and puts him in a room filled six foot deep with horseshit. He goes away whistling, thinking “well, that can’t help but give the two of them a little more realistic view of the world.”
He checks back on the pessimistic son six hours later. The kid’s sitting in the middle of all those wonderful toys, angry and miserable. “So, son, how’s life?” asks the father. “These toys are all going to break, and why aren’t there more, anyway? This sucks,” whines the child. “Geez,” thinks the father, and goes to check on the optimistic son.
He opens the door, and the kid is singing away, merrily shoveling the horseshit. “Um…why aren’t you unhappy?” blurts out the bewildered father.
His son responds, “well, with all this horseshit, there’s got to be a pony around somewhere!”
You see the hand you’re dealt as a royal flush; that may well be, but I see it as a random set of cards (and I suspect a number of circumstances could have led to your life either being better or worse), and indeed I would point to the numbers of people who get an “unfair” number of aces’n’eights or jack-highs as an argument against a benevolent dealer. You may have gotten a lucky hand; hell, I think mine’s rather lucky as well. But there are people who are/were quite as devout as you who don’t seem to do as well, and those who believe in no god or other Gods who are dealt better hands.
You also, uh, sometimes seem to waffle between declaring that “if God does not exist, then I am clearly amazingly precognitive and you atheists better explain my phenomenal powers” and “I am unlikely to convince anyone.” Perhaps a more restrained claim about your purportive psychic powers would prevent you from being leapt on by us godless sorts. 
I like and respect you and I hate to take potshots at your cherished beliefs, but when you repeatedly claim God is manifestly obvious I feel I must bring up the laser sights. <g>
**
But I haven’t objected… yet! But, since I’m here, I may as well oblige. (Here’s more evidence of your precog ability Poly ;))
**
I already knew what your take on miracles was, Poly, which is exactly why my ears pricked up when you posted an “either miracles or precognition.” FWIW, I wasn’t looking for any kind of proof, but was just wondering what evidence helped you along the road to your own beliefs.
While I understand your argument, I don’t find it persuasive insofar as providing an indication of outside influence goes. (Big surprise, eh?) Basically, it sounds very much like the Anthropic Principle. By looking at the place you are already at, you find it incomprehensible that you could have arrived there unguided. Since I know you’re familiar with all the rebuttals of that argument from other threads, I won’t belabor you with them here other than to say I think they could easily apply here as well. That, however, does nothing to disprove your interpretation of these events either of course, and you are welcome to it as far as I am concerned. In any case, I appreciate your elaborating them here under the spotlight of public scrutiny for the edification of us unbelievers!
Except that isn’t what “Original Sin” means at all. It means we are imperfect and it isn’t our fault. We did not ever decide to be imperfect, flawed creatures; we didn’t ever have the opportunity to decide, for that matter.
What really pisses me off is that the mythology says we are faced with condemnation even though we are not responsible for our being flawed. We are condemned for a mistake we did not make. It’s as though we are to be punished for Lincoln’s assassination.
We never fell. We were never up there. We have always been down here. It also may be as high as we will ever be.
Had you lived in a different culture and/or time, you might have attributed it to Zeus or Odin or The Force…
So people have gone from “God is responsible for unexplained phenomena” to “God is responsible for unlikely phenomena.” I don’t see much difference there.
This is the answer I believe. We are not always aware of what we can and cannot do. If you’ve never surprised yourself, then you haven’t dared very much.
No… that is not how Original Sin is taught by the Catholics, though I understand some Protestant sects have different beliefs.
To bypass the hyperbole:
Well, at some point, if you truly want to avoid death, you need to grow up, take the fingers out of your ears, and answer the phone. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, as the Romans used to say. But probably, if you are smart enough to separate yourself from God, you are smart enough to know better. As J.C. said: How is it you can not judge yourself what is right?
That is, perhaps, a valid assertion. That doesn’t seem like a good reason in and of itself not to live.
Gaudere:
Ah, we fall back on “mysterious ways” again? I don’t have an answer to what you raise. Let me recount my first experience with death. My grandfather was a very active man who retired from the railroad to a very full retirement serving on a wide range of committees for church, Masons, and so on, as an elected county legislator, and ran a newsstand at the Masonic Temple about 25 hours a week apparently mostly to keep active. He died suddenly of a massive heart attack, completely unexpectedly – came home from a typical “retired” full day, sat down on the couch, complained of chest pain, and immediately died. Interestingly, an autopsy showed metastatic abdominal cancer that no one knew was there – he had never complained of pains or anything, and there were no external signs of it. His quick death from the heart attack saved him from an extended bout with painful, disabling cancer (this was the late 1950s), and was, so my aunt and grandmother told me, God’s mercy – that he not suffer and be restricted from his active life from the cancer.
On the other hand, my mother worked hard (quality control at a thermometer factory) all her adult life. She looked forward to doing things during retirement she’d wanted to do since my parents married, but never had both time and money to do. Less than a year after retirement, she showed the symptoms of interstitial fibrosis, which ultimately killed her. (Technically she died of a lung aneurysm, although the fibrosis was the cause of it.) If what happened to my grandfather was God’s mercy, then where is the justice in what happened to my mother?
I don’t have answers to these or all the related questions. It would be a callous person indeed who explained to you how your father’s untimely death fitted into his conception of God’s Plan. And I’m not about to. Nor do I feel that “you need to accept God’s will” – according to the “original sin” doctrine that jmullaney finds appropriate for this thread, death was never originally a part of His Plan, and just “fits into the cracks” so to speak.
Well, as an optimist and a Democrat, that was my observation regarding the Republican campaign just ended.
JAB:
…and I would not have been wrong. The philosophia perennis is a hijack this thread emphatically does not need, but in quick summary, it suggests that (a) there is one God (b) whom Jews and Christians know the most about, but which (c) is responsible for the moral imperatives of all the polytheistic, orthotheistic, and non-theistic faiths and (d) their insistence on a single deity who is “in charge,” good, etc., although they may have various subordinate gods, just as in a mature Santaism such as I held at age seven, the Polarite credo statement had become complex, with subordinate Clauses. No thoughtful Christian believes that a devout Zoroastrian or Buddhist is completely at sea, just that they have one small piece of the truth embedded in a bunch of goofball doctrines – and, of course, they return the favor. (And any skeptic would feel the same about any religious belief – and should realize that he too is in the same trap, since chaos theory is not self-supporting: there is nothing to make it be valid, on its own assumptions.)
Ptahlis, thanks for the kind words. It was not my intent (except as a long-shot hope) to convince anybody through my story, simply to set forth the train of events that persuaded me, in partial explanation of how a reasonably rational person can accept an active theistic faith.
In general, I’d welcome a bit of analysis on the question of probability as regards my story. I’m quite well aware that there are a lot of “what might have beens” that might have altered events, and that it does not objectively prove anything. As I noted, a sensible skeptic could refute the events in it on grounds of coincidence or subconscious motivation (though, while I have a reasonable amount of conceit, I refuse to give my subconscious that much capability for long-shot hunch playing). But having a thoroughgoing skeptic look at it from the point of view of house-of-cards coincidence-heaps and their probability as against other explanations, would help me better deal with the question. I’m sure other things could have happened and led to other results; I’m well aware that there is no proof in my account. But it does seem to me that some hand-at-work structure (not necessarily a intervention-of-a-god, but mere teleology, possibly human-engendered) has a slight edge over chance in explaining it probabilistically. And I’m too close to it, and too committed to a theistic explanation, to look at that question dispassionately.
I’d like to note in passing that in the course of taking in the boys and playing father to them, combined with post-cardiac bills, I lost about 95% of my possessions in a good cause, therefore fulfilling Joel’s injunction in a somewhat skewed way. And I did receive, not a surfeit of worldly goods – my cup runneth about half-full, as things stand – but enough to sustain me, and I have certainly laid up for myself treasures where my heart is. The real estate and inheritances I lost could never buy one grin from the three little ones who see me in a grandfatherly role, or the moment when the radio was playing the Scorpions’ “Winds of Change” and at the line “Who’d have thought that we could be so close, like brothers?” the youngest of the three boys – the instant friendship one – laid his hand on my shoulder and acknowledged with a warm smile that the song was true for us, despite disparate pasts.
Well Poly, you are basically asking a question only an omnipotent being could answer! There is just no way to assess the kinds of probablility you are talking about. The only way you got to be where you are is by making choices, so the only answer I can give you is that you and everyone else involved would have had to make exactly the same choices. But regardless of the answer you arrive at, the same holds true for everyone. So while the “what might have beens” prove nothing, neither do the “this is” situations. It’s an inherently unquantifiable question, and the only thing we have to go on is our subjective impressions of the situation. It’s that whole “hidden God” thing all over again.
But why is considered-to-be-unlikely-good-thing evidence of a Good God’s work for you, yet considered-to-be-unlikely-bad-thing is no evidence against His Goodness? I think this is the crux of your faith, and one reason why I cannot accept it…I cannot credit God with the Good and discount the Bad and be fair to my own perceptions. Like the two boys, I can I could just as easily use faith to color my perceptions and thus make belief in an evil God just as easy as belief in a good one, and as such I cannot see your evidence for a good God as convincing; even if we accept your improbability argument, the automatic discounting of bad “improbable events” from the evidence base biases the argument irrevocably towards belief in a good God. Given the evidence of both good and bad things occurring, and that not all apparent good things turn out bad and not all apparent bad things turn out good, the hypothesis of “chance” (which would make a random mix of good and bad the most likely result) seems more likely to me than the hypothesis of “omnipotent omnibenevolent being guiding events to the best end,” or, for that matter, “omnipotent omnimalevolent being guiding events to the worst end.” (“Omnipotent indifferent being guiding events to an arbitrary end” is another theory, but it discounted in my estimation by other arguments.)