If God does exist totally outside our universe, then we can’t say anything interesting about him, can we? There are deists who feel that there must be a reason for all this, started by a god, but that this god does not interfere with us at all. Not something you can refute, and it makes them feel better, but is it really rational?
But 99% of religious people do not believe this. They believe that God has interacted with us - whether to talk to patriarchs or to impregnate Mary. Given this, any God can prove his existence at least as well as we can prove anything. That we have no such proof - and no good evidence of God’s existence, is enough to make us doubt it. Add to that the provably false things he has supposedly inspired knowledge of - like the Flood - and they hypothesis that God is just made up seems much more plausible.
Any God worth calling a God can easily prove his existence.
The problem of natural evil - like floods and earthquakes - is simple to explain. Shit happens. But many people don’t like that explanation, and would rather there be a reason, no matter how absurd. So there are valid explanations, just not ones which some people are willing to accept.
Miss Brain Problems, would you mind telling us what peaceful and non-interfering sect you belong to?
Understandable. Apologies if I came off as more aggressive than necessary, by the by.
Without relying on concrete physical, rational evidence? You’re correct, I didn’t rely on anything of the sort. It was a matter of a leap to faith.
I completely agree. I don’t believe that God regularly intervenes in a meaningful physical manner in human affairs at present - I reserve judgment as to whether or not such intervention happened thousands of years ago, though - and I believe that people who fast or self-flagellate or a hundred different things in an attempt to get God to intervene in their lives have a mistaken view of what God wants from us.
As for the stories of the Scripture: as I mentioned, I’m reluctant to completely dismiss, say, the story of the parting of the Red Sea as pure metaphor; I believe that God can intervene in mortal affairs, but does not intervene anymore in mortal affairs in our present day and time. At the same time, I do believe that people who attempt to extrapolate the “true” age of the world from the lives of Abraham et al. or who attempt to search for the Garden of Eden as a real, physical place on Earth are, once again, a bit silly and mistaken in their understanding of some of the earlier parts of the Scripture.
And, more to the point, I think that people are silly and mistaken when they believe that God parting the Red Sea for Moses and the Hebrews four thousand years ago means that God will makes sure they win that sports game or get that job or do that whatever through some act of miracle, especially over other people who are praying just as hard.
It’s a fine line, I suppose.
Thank you. 
Well, there’s this one. But I also would like to welcome the newcomers!
I think that we can say interesting things about God, even if God does not follow laws of physicality or rationality.
For example: God created the universe for the sake of companionship, to have autonomous, living, sapient creatures to love and to (hopefully) be loved by. Since God loves us and wants to be loved by us, God also wants us to love each other, so that God’s creations can be even happier.
Now, where does this assertion come from? Not physical or rational evidence, of course, but a leap to faith.
So, I guess maybe it’s not that interesting? Since it’s not something that can be reasonably discussed outside of “This is my belief, what’s yours?” except when it comes down to Augustinian discussions on the logical extrapolations from the axiom of faith.
I never said that I don’t believe that God has never interacted with us. I believe that God quite possibly has interacted with us in the past, but no longer does so one way or another. I don’t think that just because God exists outside of our universe and above its laws of physicality and rationality that this means that God can’t interact with us when-so-ever it seems valid to do so.
But I don’t think that God wants to prove the existence of anything to us as we are now. I believe that God has faith in us, at this point, to live our lives in the way that God would wish us to live our lives, and no longer feels the need to regularly intervene in mortal affairs.
It’d be like asking a writer to prove their existence to the characters in their story.
…bad metaphor, considering I believe in Free Will™ and all and fiction characters lack free will, and, uhh, I’ll just shut up now. :smack:
This seems like a loaded question, but I’ll deign to answer it either way.
I consider myself a Catholic not in communion with Rome, otherwise known as an “Old Catholic”; on the chance that such a thing seems odd to you, remember that Papal Infallibility is a relatively recent development (1870) and quite a lot of Catholics weren’t super hot on Papal Primacy turning into Papal Infallibility, so they willingly accepted the breakage of communion whilst still following standard Catholic theological doctrine.
I’m going to make an assumption here that you and others probably don’t consider Catholicism to be a “peaceful” and “non-interfering” set of beliefs, so allow me to pre-emptively address your concerns, is such is fine and well to do.
There tends to be a belief - and not always an incorrect one - that Catholicism is one of the denominations with the strictest rules and regulations and “laws” and adherence to scripture out of any the Christian denominations. That being said, offer the opinion that there is a significant difference between Catholic theology - such as the Nicene Creed, which is strictly followed and adhered to by either “Old” Catholics or “New” Catholics, and strict adherence to it being one of the very staples of being Catholic - and Catholic behaviorology. The latter are rules, regulations, and “laws” constructed by people based off of a personal interpretation of Scripture, thus quite subject to error and bias, and thus - in my opinion - not required to be strictly followed or even followed at all to be Catholic, especially when I reject the theological doctrine of Papal Infallibility, which would otherwise require me to follow Papal decrees as if they were divine theology instead of human-decided behavioral regulations.
Sorry. I hope that comes off understandable, at least?
Absolutely no worries; religion gets trashed here a lot, and emotions sometimes run high. (I didn’t perceive any problem at all in your post.)
And I’ve said many times: religion has its good bits too. It has inspired wonderful art, sculpture, music, and architecture, and, while I may think that it’s a silly waste of time singing hymns of praise to God…the music certainly can be very pretty!
Religion also offers solace and comfort to people in time of sorrow. I happen to believe the solace is founded on a falsehood…but if it gets a sad person through a night of woe, then it isn’t all bad.
I am not an enemy of the good that can exist within religion, only of the ugliness that has been so horribly prevalent, historically. The Holy Inquisition, the Thirty Years War, the fight against teaching evolution, and guys leaving bombs at abortion clinics…these have all soured me, and sometimes lead me to forget that not all of the faithful are evil.
But, oh God, so very many are!
I can’t deny that very many evil people use religion as an excuse or as a tool for their actions, and I can’t deny that very many other people are terribly misguided by their religious beliefs and thus commit evil actions where they otherwise might have not done so were they not motivated by violent religious zealotry.
I can only wish that such things were not the case, and attempt to prevent the use of religion for violence and hate where-so-ever I am able to do so.
The question was not “loaded”-It was an obvious followup to the your claim that those that believe as you do are not a threat. You seem to belong to a minor subset of the Roman Catholic faith of which I have no knowledge and have made no assumptions about(others may speak for themselves, of course).
Noting that your god is not a part of our physical and rational universe doesn’t exempt it from analysis. It’s really quite straightforward - we first painfully extract a list of properties and claims about your god from you, and then start drawing problematic conclusions from them.
Now, I have no particular interest in dismantling your specific faith, so I will speak in generalities, rather than grilling you for details about your beliefs.
As has been noted, it’s extremely common for people to claim that, despite existing outside the universe, their god hasn’t been completely hands-off. Some gods supposedly created people…directly from dirt and/or ribs. Some gods supposedly flooded the entire planet. Some gods supposedly stand on top of clouds and throw lightning bolts down at targets on earth. Gods that (supposedly) do things like this expose themselves to scientific analysis - though they normally live out of view, they step into view of the camera when they do their miracles and other acts. Gods like this can and often have been disproved - at least to the degree that the claims about their actions have been proven to be untrue.
Besides situations where their interactions with reality are described, the other aspects of a god’s identity can sometimes tell us a few things about it too. Is it powerful? Does it have the ability to interact with reality or humans? If so, what can it do? And why does it do what it does, and not do what it doesn’t do?
Many people seem to like to believe in a benevolent god. It’s comforting. People also seem to like the idea of a powerful god that can effect reality. It’s empowering. Of course the second you have a powerful god that can change reality and is supposedly benevolent, one immediately slams face first into the problem of evil and its variants. The observable world is not the creation of a competent steward who wants to prevent or limit human suffering. It just ain’t. And this is a problem for people who believe in an omnimax diety.
Do all theoretical deities get swatted down by an analysis of their claimed actions and properties? Of course not. However the ones that don’t pretty much all don’t matter. They are noninterventionist, impotent, ignorant, insane, or apathetic. And I honestly don’t see anybody claiming to believe in a deity like that. People believe in deities that can and will do things for them. (Or to them, I suppose, if they’re living in fear.)
Now, I don’t know if your god somehow dodges both these bullets. I suspect it doesn’t, because why would you bother believing in a do-nothing god that doesn’t care about anybody? But in any case any deity that manages to dodge both these bullets also by necessity fails to interact with us enough for us to have awareness of him. Which means that faith is like throwing darts at a board that’s a hundred miles away in pitch blackness. Even if the board exists, you’ll miss. Peope might enjoy believing in something, but whatever they believe in will be made up in their own heads - even if real extraphysical entities exist they don’t believe in them, because they don’t even know about them.
I think the issue here is that you start from the assumption that the only conclusions that can be drawn from an axiom of faith are “problematic” - you go into the interrogation with an already stated bias.
Ah, yes, the problem of evil. That great question that has been asked since humans first looked to their deities and wondered why the heckaroonies is their life still so hard?
Even if you said that you had no interest in dismantling my specific faith, I still feel the need to defend it, if such a thing will be allowed here.
If you had a poor childhood where your parental figures were either abusive or absent, then I apologize for using this metaphor, but it’s the one I always prefer to recourse to.
When you were young, around, say, five, or six, your parent helped you back up onto your feet when you fell down and scraped your knee, maybe kissed it to make it feel better, put a band-aid on it, etc.
And when you were that age, and you were about to do something dangerous, or bad, or that would hurt you, your parent, or others, your parent would punish you. They would make you sit in the corner, or send you to bed without dessert, or, if they were more for corporal punishment, would maybe give you a spanking or slap your hand away or whatever of the sort.
Parents, when their children are young, are interventionist, and regularly punish their children and do what they can to prevent or ease pain and suffering.
But at your present age - assuming that you are in your twenties or older - do your parents rush out from whatever they’re doing whenever you fall and scrape your knee you pick your now adult self up and kiss the boo-boo and put a band-aid on it for you? Do your parents drop everything to put you in time-out just because you did something that could have or did hurt you or others?
Parents, when their children have grown to a sufficient age and level of maturity, allow their children to pick themselves up off their feet, to brush themselves off, to learn from their mistakes, and to - mostly - take care of themselves, except when things take a catastrophic turn for the worst. When a child becomes an adult, the parent trusts in their child, that their child can take care of themselves and make their own decisions, that the way that the parent raised the child will ultimately result in the child making themselves and the people around them happy and fulfilled. If a parent continues to intervene in their child’s life even after the child has reached a sufficient age and level of maturity, then all that will do is stifle the child’s ability to achieve independence and self-sufficiency.
My belief is that we are, both as an entire, human community, and as our own, individual persons, God’s child and God’s children. God trusts that we, both collectively and individually, can pick ourselves up and brush ourselves off when we fall and scrape our knee, and God trusts that even as we continue to make mistakes and hurt ourselves and those around us, we will manage to learn from those errors and grow both as a society and as people.
Obviously, the scale is much different. A child scraping its knee is not the same as a massive hurricane displacing tens of thousands of people, and a child pushing another kid on the playground is not the same as someone murdering dozens of innocent people at a concert or at a church. Regardless, I hope that you can understand the metaphor I’m attempting to deliver.
tl;dr God is a parent that wants us to grow to be independent and self-sufficient “adults” and not require hand-holding and time-outs as “children”.
That’s partially the point, though. The leap to faith is accepting that you can’t know whether or not there’s a dart board there, and that even if it doesn’t exist, you don’t know which direction it lies in, how far away it is, what height it’s at, or any of those other important things, but still throwing the dart and having faith that you’ll hit the board regardless.
In what other aspects of life is blind faith a good thing?
Literally none. But there’s a significant difference between “God exists and loves us and wants us to be happy and love each other, too.” and “God will prevent this extremely venomous snake from biting me, and even if it does, God will save my life. Also, God will save my young daughter from cancer when I pray for assistance.”
One form of faith has significant impact on the way that you would conduct yourself in the physical, rational world. The other is just a faithful proclamation of something that exists outside of our physical, rational world.
The idea was less that and that non-problematic assumptions wouldn’t be considered interesting enough to worry about. Suppose for a moment that we can logically prove that some particular god 1) will give everyone a pony, and 2) doesn’t exist. The pony promise suddenly gets a lot less interesting.
Of course it is! Great Debates, baby! Speak out and let your position be heard! 
Yeah, I’ve heard this sort of thing before. Problem is it doesn’t really seem, to me, to hold together really well.
At the individual level, bad things clearly happen to children who have not reached a level of maturity where it’s reasonable to expect them to suck it up and deal with it. If god has decided this is no longer a problem because humanity’s been around a long time, then he’s grown calloused and apathetic. Bad things also happen to people way beyond where any reasonable person would expect them to suck it up. Once again the only reasonably interpretation is a calloused apathetic deity. Or perhaps a sadistic malicious (though still rather lazy) one, whichever.
Looking at it from the societal level you actually can make the argument that humanity is indeed advancing towards something vaguely approximating maturity - if you ignore huge chunks of world events. However this approach requires a callous disregard for individuals. Slavery is down by 6% this decade! Yay! Sucks to be the other 94%, but screw em! Humanity must be left to grow on its own!
I think at the societal level the best possible parenting metaphor here would be the “fuck it all, I’m going out drinking” parenting model. Presuming of course the parent in question threw in the towel sometime in the Precambrian - there’s precious little indication that early humanity was being carefully guided and censured by a moral parent. What with all the rampant unchecked war and slavery and all, I mean.
So yeah. I recognize that counterarguments to the Problem of Evil exist; I simply think that not a one of them has the logical coherence to actually refute the Problem.
And of course none of this changes the fact that faith is tossing darts in the dark. No actual extraphysical entities are at risk of being hit.
I suppose at this point it’s more a matter of what you believe to be good parenting practices and what level of maturity you think humanity as a whole has reached, and getting into that is a bit more tangential than I’m willing to go towards.
Good talk, either way.
It’s worse than throwing darts at a dartboard in the dark-Not only are we to have blind faith that we are throwing in the right direction, but we must also have blind faith that the dartboard exists in the first place. Most gods described fail this “Double-Blind Faith” test.
If you have blind faith in the former you might as well have blind faith in the latter-blind is blind.
I don’t really see how that logic follows.
“I believe in a being that exists outside of the physical and rational universe.” and “I believe that a being that exists outside of the physical and rational universe regularly intervenes in the physical and rational universe to protect me and improve my life in various ways.” are two incredibly different statements of faith.
“I cannot prove that X is Y, but I have faith that X is Y.”
“I cannot prove that X is Z, but I have faith that X is Z.”
“Having faith that X is Y is the same as having faith that X is Z. If you have faith that X is Y, then you must also have faith that X is Z.”
Would you be willing to expand on your statement, and explain why you believe that both statements of faith “might as well” be the same?
Persinger’s God Helmet experiments indicate that people’s visions of god are based on their religion/culture, but the jury is still out due to problems in his methodology and scant replication, not to mention intense pressure from hostile religios.
As it stands, the neuroscience of religion is a field that has barely been touched. Once more work is done in this field, I expect that the findings will be that whatever people believe in will be made up in their own heads out of what they have experienced in their own lives, leading to religiously/culturally derived visions.
Just ask yourself why it is that it is common for religious persons to have religious visions, but when a person has a religious vision, that vision almost always conforms with that person’s religion rather than some other religion.
One possibility (faith) is that the unfathomable is translated by one’s mind using what one already understands. Another possibility (abductive reasoning) is that God is just a brain fart trying to make sense of meaningless patterns.
I never said that I believe that both statements of blind faith “might as well” be the same-I said that both require the same amount of blind faith.
All these statements of “fact” require blind faith:
- Your god exists
- What this god can and/or will do
- There exists a place beyond the physical and rational universe for this god to reside in
- This god can effect our universe(the only universe we actually know of) from this “outside” we have no evidence for.
Now these are not all the same blind faith statements, but they require the same amount of blind faith to believe, in my opinion(although others may rank them differently than I.
Allow me to quote a previous post from you:
Please explain to me why you think that I “might as well” have blind faith that God will keep venomous snakes from biting me and that if I pray hard enough God will cure my cancer.